Challenge #03075-H167: Fighting to Survive
‘Hoverboard’ on YouTube, actually large drone with person riding. What if the drone was used to carry essential items in times of need and trouble. – Anon Guest
[AN: I’ve seen videos of these things. They are cool, but also loud as HECK. More annoying than the average dirt bike and three times as dangerous. And yes, Drones carried goods before they carried people]
Tal could trust the ones that made noise. Ze had learned to hide in the granite tubes until ze could hear the good drones coming in. Those who had scopes or binocs said that both kinds of drones had the same markings. Tal would never understand why the enemy would treat with one hand and torture with another. Yet the ones that gave never lured anyone out so the ones that killed could do their dirty work.
Tal had given up on watching the news, like so many others had done. Not only was there a supreme absence of working screens or speakers now, but they often said different things about the same events. The carpet bombing of the last surface funeral was apparently quelling a riot over food, while the supply delivery was urgent humanitarian aid for the children suffering in the conflict of the war-torn area.
They said they were quelling sadistic overlords, but Tal had never heard of any such person here in the wastelands. There had been troops, once, searching the area for some kind of leader, but all that was left were kids like Tal, scrabbling for their own keep. Some kids were having kids whether they wanted them or not. Some kids, like Tal, were more or less raised by the clusters of those older than them.
[Check the source to see the full story]
(Source: peakd.com)
You’re the most recognised and internationally praised superhero, but you don’t fight any crime. Instead, you use your powers over stone and metal to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic fights other heroes get into.
They didn’t call you a superhero when you started. You didn’t claim to be one, either.
You didn’t have a costume or a sponsor or training or anything like that. You were just a kid who had just seen your entire world knocked down. So, in a moment of childish determination and belief, you thought you could fix it all.
The first emergence of your powers wasn’t a huge triumphal moment. Moving stone and earth and steel doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about how to stack things up so they don’t fall back over again.
Your first attempts crashed right back down again. That was your first lesson.
—
Even when you got good at what you did, they didn’t call you a superhero.
You still didn’t have a costume, but you’d gotten your hands on every architectural diagram you could and done plenty of practice. Then you started to show up to the aftermath of battles and put them quietly together again.
But it still wasn’t right. You couldn’t do much if you didn’t have the diagrams for the buildings demolished–if the city planners didn’t let you have them.
So you stitched together a costume, something bright and colorful that would grab the attention of the cameras on the scene afterward as you tried to work.
“Look! Someone’s putting those houses back together!”
The effect was instantaneous. The moment you’d grabbed public attention, there were requests for interviews, think pieces–each giving you a platform to ask for the help you needed.
This was your second lesson.
–
You didn’t call yourself a superhero, or come up with the name yourself. You were never really good about all of those things. But once the attention was on you, you got offers from managers and sponsors. One, a blonde with perfect hair who introduced herself as “just Sandy”
“I don’t have any money.”
“That’s alright,” she said, her grin showing spectacularly white teeth. “All I need is for you to take on some gigs and give me a cut.”
Sandy set you up. She got you the costume people would know you for, gave you the name, managed all of the PR and set up interviews. Your fame skyrocketed, and soon you were seeing yourself on billboards.
Soon you had access to hundreds of city plans and blueprints. After enough attacks happened, you learned them well enough to hardly need to reference them. After a few years, you could rebuild a tower in a matter of minutes, and cities in a matter of days.
Your powers evolved as your understanding did. Soon, you could read the entire layout of a building just from touching. Then, just from touching the ruins. You no longer need blueprints, then–just your own hands on the metal.
The gigs were simple, too–just fixing up hero bases after they’d gotten wrecked in attacks. Feel good work that paid well.
With the help of many people, you do more. That’s the third lesson.
—
The problems started with the homeless thing.
You were in between projects and itching to use your skills more. Creating homes for the homeless seemed like the perfect, feel good project to flex on.
It was, for the first few weeks. Then came the backlash. City dwellers crying foul, saying they hadn’t agreed to an enormous den of undesirables in their backyards. There were protests, white suburban moms holding up signs about drug dealers and rapists and criminals.
It wasn’t your choice in the end. Eventually the city mandated that you deconstruct your shelter, or they would do it the hard way.
Regretfully, you took it down. You did not look in the eyes of the people that had sheltered there as they had to go on their way.
It was the same story in every area you tried to build shelters in afterwards.
—
“Can we just buy the land to build them houses?” you asked Sandy.
She clicked her perfect teeth. “Sorry, there are laws against building new things in the city. You need mayoral approval to start a new construction project.”
“Why?”
“Well, there are already too many empty houses,” she said matter of factly.
You stared. “What? Then let’s just buy those and put people in them!”
“You don’t have that much money,” she pointed out. “Not when you’ve been giving it away every year. Also, it wouldn’t do as much good as you think. Just think of the effect on the market–”
This is not why you fired Sandy. But it was the first time you thought of it.
—
Opinion started to turn against you when you began using your interviews and platform to talk about this problem, to demand permission to build or otherwise help. Exasperation turned to hostility when you started to reshape the landscape to be softer to the unhoused, anyway–when you created caves in parks where people could easily shelter, or made every bench large and soft so that anyone could have a place to sleep.
Laws and ordinances passed, all regulating the amount of alterations one was allowed to make to public property. About how many changes you were allowed to make as you were reconstructing a city. The fines for altering things started to heap up.
Firing Sandy didn’t help. Your good reputation was always as much her work as yours, but after what she said about—you couldn’t.
You couldn’t.
You learned not to read the scathing opinion pieces on you. That was the hardest lesson yet.
—
Of course, shit really hit the fan when you were contracted to rebuild another base.
It was a simple enough decision for you. You found out they had been building drones and firing them on civilians. That at this base Techno has been building surveillance technology that would be able to monitor every single person in the country at every moment, and be able to fire upon them with impunity the moment suspicious activity was detected.
It made you rethink every base you had built in the past.
“No,” you told them.
“You already signed your contract–”
Instead of dignifying that with an answer, you transmuted the entire area into the rockiest, most impossible terrain you could. Every trick you had learned to make land easier to build on–you reversed it, turning what had once been the base into a precarious canyon of jagged, diamond-hard steel, nearly impossible to remove or build on.
“I said no.”
—
Stopping the construction of the stadium was the next kicker.
“You’re insane!” said the heroes who came to remove you.
“They evicted a hundred families for this!” you spat. “Those were people’s homes. It’s disgusting that it’s allowed for the government to do that–much less to do it for-for a stadium? For entertainment?”
And so you stood there for the next 48 hours, deconstructing every single thing they tried to put on their ill-gotten land.
Then, they sent the heroes to stop you. You were never the best at fighting, so they knocked you out quickly.
—
They don’t call you a superhero now. Behind bars, you glance over every thinkpiece and profile about the world’s most beloved hero fell. You read speculation about evil, greed, madness. All things you’ve heard about “villains” who came before you.
It makes you wonder about those people. If maybe you had misjudged them, too.
But that’s alright, you realize after the sting of it fades away. That was the second lesson, after all–more than anything, you need people to be talking. And for all the bitterness in these words, you realize grimly that people will never stop talking.
Once you’ve thought things through, you decide you’re ready. The steel of your cell melts away. After all, there is no prison that can contain you. No earth or stone or metal can withstand your will.
Your legacy as the world’s greatest supervillain begins with a left turn down the hallway, right to where the other villains are kept.
Ooooh, this. So much this.
(via opalhonors)
Challenge #03008-H085: Thing in the Mirror
Ok, you left this one on a cliff hanger. Please, PLEASE let Ardin see a mirror, or still pond, or SOMETHING that forces him to see himself as everyone else is seeing him? Pretty, pretty please with sugar on top?? PLEASE??
https://peakd.com/fiction/@internutter/challenge-02949-h026-when-you-assume – DaniAndShali
[AN: You are petty and vicious and I love it]
Ardin had spent a solid minute scouring his body free of the offal he had seen himself as wearing. To his eyes and ears, it splattered messily on the floor. His hands were stained with rotting blood. His clothing was similarly besmirched, but more so with the ichor of evil. Now, more than ever, he had an overwhelming desire to find his reflection.
He had dropped his sword, which seemed nothing more than rotten intestines, mixed with putrid effluvium. His armour was covered with pieces of rotted flesh where it was not sprayed with anything else disgusting. Ardin wanted to strip nude and bathe, scrubbing himself raw… but he noticed his hands. They were no longer human hands, but a demon’s claws…
The Clerics of Lathander shone gloriously inside an aura of blessed flames. They were as close to angels as mortal flesh could reach. The Elven wizard Wraithvine was unchanged, though the sense of their years weighed heavily in the air. The monster Wraithvine had with them was a monster no more, but a young individual of a small race. He couldn’t quite tell if they were Gnome or Halfling… yet he swore it had been a Kobold mere moments ago.
[Check the source to see the full story]
(Source: peakd.com)
Challenge #02959-H036: Gods or Heroes
I’ve heard legends of that person
How he traveled the breadth of the land
Reducing all he touched to rubble
Revered by many I, too, revere him
Feared by many I, too, fear him
Now that person stands at my side
Now my friends are with me – Anon Guest
[AN: Nonny - are you trying to get me into trouble? These are lyrics (translated) from Super Smash Brothers Brawl. A line or two is fine but the entire song? Please don’t. I’ve trimmed a lot of the original prompt to try and keep things safer for all.]
They called him Varg the Destroyer. It wasn’t precisely his fault. His mother, according to legend, had made a lot of promises and one mistake in counting and the contest over her child had resulted in a concatenation of curses. Which resulted in him leaving a trail a mile wide in his lifelong quest to at least end some of them.
Heroics had been pure happenstance on the way. Armies of evil and cities of wickedness had no defences against the combined forces of demonic, angelic, and faerie curses. It might have been easy for Varg to become a power for evil, but such was not the case. Evidently, having the ability to cause great harm from a young age also creates a tremendously light and gentle touch in the holder.
He slept on a bed of granite, which he carried with him. He ate out of a special bowl made from starmetal, and even that was dented with use. He had, through a series of deeds, actually toned things down to the point where he could interact with the mortal world without being an automatic menace. Nevertheless, there were still a few interesting valleys that used to be mountains along his path to get there.
[Check the source to see the full story]
(Source: peakd.com)
Challenge #02884-G327: Narrativium Foil
“Take it from someone who has batted for both teams…” The villainess purred in deliberate innuendo just to enjoy getting the defiant heroine’s face to turn that lovely shade of embarrassed pink. “…deep down, regardless of whatever bull they might try and sell the world and themselves, heroes and villains are exactly the same.”
She regarded her cocktail a moment, draining it then tossing the glass carelessly aside, leaving her seat and beginning to approach.
“We all do it for that high we get from facing incredible danger. That rush that can only be felt when you are a whisker away from victory or defeat and you know that even the slightest mistake will cost you everything. Ultimately, we’re two sides of the same coin.”
As the heroine sputtered for a retort, she continued, with the same level tone of a schoolteacher reprimanding a stubborn student.
“If we didn’t have you, we’d rule the world and be bored stiff from not being able to break any rules, and if you didn’t have us, you’d be at exactly the same level of apathetic doldrums as you would have no rulebreakers to fight.”
She grinned viciously, getting right in the face of her young nemesis, savoring the look in her foe’s eyes as the girl pondered this notion.
“We’re both adrenaline junkies, cupcake, we just habitually lie to ourselves about the reasons for doing what we do so we don’t have to admit it…” – Anon Guest
Villainess expected a speech. It was almost written in the universal script. Something about the kindness of the human heart and what the choice to be a hero was all about. Blah blah bla.
Instead, the brightly-costumed hero said, “Well, you’re not wrong.”
This was not in the script. So much so that Villainess said, “Of course you’d say–” before her brain caught up with current events. “Wait. What?”
“You’re not wrong. I was into parkour before my powers kicked in, and being a queer in a strictly right-wing area comes with its own adrenaline rush. Try walking home late after Pride with half your glam still on, sometime. It’s in my origin story.”
[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit peakd (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]
Challenge #02847-G290: Worthy of Story and Song
Hey, have you heard? Ymir, the crimson adventurer? Dead! I know! Now his brother is on a rampage across Brakvob looking for the killer, swearing that once he finds him he’ll- oh shit that was you guys… - Anon Guest
Ymir saved so many. Ymir did so much. Ymir, like most Adventurers, laid a path of wreckage around him in the process. The grand quest looked spectacularly optimistic when viewed from the winning side, but… There are always victims, even to the actions of heroes.
A village of cultists of an evil sect is never completely populated by the cultists. There’s always children, or people to busy to even bother with the cult, or others who just want to get through their day with a minimum of bother from [REDACTED] the Flesh-Eating Skull Lord of Yl'thwyggyr. Heroes of story and song don’t always bother with the “taking names” part.
The Rogue spoke first. “My mother wasn’t even a barbarian Orc. She made bread. She was the village baker, for gods’ sake. The people who rampaged weren’t even from the village of Naast. They just traded there. Mom never asked where they got the meat… it was just… meat. Five kids to feed was never easy, even when they’re half Orcs and he just…” The pain of the memory made her fall silent. “If I wasn’t out chasing down one of the milking goats, there’d have been nobody to remember Naast was even there. He even killed the babies in their cradles… What had they done to anyone?”
[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit peakd (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]
Challenge #02789-G232: Take This Sinking Ship
If you believe that Vigilantism can help a dying world, while also helping the underworld. You’re just another problem that’s need to be removed. If you truly believe that you can change your destiny, alter your fate. You better be ready to face the consequences. I’m not doing this for you, in doing this for the innocent lives you destroyed. – Anon Guest
“Which ones were innocent?” said the vigilante. Their costume was a patchwork of police, special forces, and army equipment[1]. Practical in all ways except for the fact that parts had been altered to mimic the common brown rat. Clearly, they were not entirely sane, but that was not going to stop Jon Law.
When all other tactics failed, when tear gas, explosives, armed tactical strikes, or ‘spray and pray’ could not stop crime, they sent in Jon Law. He was the morningstar of justice, so that all proper citizens could sleep soundly in their beds. The fact that he had actually stopped to debate with a genuine whacko was something of a minor miracle, all things considered. Nevertheless, Jon Law would stop this vigilante. And their friends. And their family. And their family’s friends…
“Which ones?” said Jon. “You just killed Elie Bandervandt. She was sixteen.” If anything could be said about the young up-and-comer with such a promising future, it was that her end was quick and painless. She never knew it was coming. Nevertheless, her still body was cooling between them, and only the need to preserve the scene stopped an epic battle in the making.
[Be sure to visit internutter (dot) org for a link to the rest of this story, and details on how to support this artist. Or visit peakd (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]