(#00175)
“So… this is happening,” said the police chief. “WHY is it happening?“
"I don’t know, sir,” said her immediate underling. “I just know it’s continuing to happen…" The swirling patterns of ink on his skin became the repeated word TRUTH.
Many a near-riot had begun because of the quasi-cogniscent ink that had spread like a virus over the skins of all citizens of Bayville. Many men were very upset to find themselves indelibly branded with words like MISOGYNIST, RACIST, RAPIST or ASSHAT. Or, when they attempted to deny the ink, being branded with the word LIAR.
And they were impossible to conceal.
Also in the mix was what the CDC and the media alike were calling the Empathy Virus. Any man who thought that shaving once a day was worse than menstruation found himself not only feeling the uterine pangs of any woman within a fifty-foot radius… but uncontrollably bleeding from his genitals.
Racists who would not shut up found their skin turning a vibrant, eye-hurting green.
Pro-life men found themselves doubled over in unstoppable Braxton Hicks contractions. Pro-life women found their homes invaded by hordes of unwanted children who insisted on calling them ‘mom’.
And through the middle of Bayville, a thin, elongated being with a weird backpack was flying above the streets with a bullhorn, shouting, “Red Bull does NOT give you wings! Science does!“
Various costumed weirdoes were attempting to catch them and failing all over the landscape.
"What else could go wrong?” asked the rookie with the coffee.
As if in answer, it started raining marshmallows.
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(#00174)
“I know it’s cheap to eat here, but god damn… who wants to eat this crap?”
“Koreans, maybe?” said Todd. “Look, jus’ try a few things a’ight? Koreans eat it an’ live.“
"I don’t eat anything I can’t identify,” said Pietro.
“I stopped listening at ‘all you can eat’,” said Freddy. He was already taking a sampler.
“Heywow… How’d they get all the little lines on this popcorn thing?” asked Todd.
Lance looked at one. “Uh. That ‘popcorn thing’ has legs, Todd…"
“Be… on… deggy…” Toad read. “I like ‘em.“
Lance almost told him, and then decided not to. What the hell. Todd ate bugs on a regular basis, anyway.
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Challenge #00171: Ideosyncratic Biology
Prompt: Kurt and/or Sara, or another of the interesting-reactions-to-medications group, meet the infamous Dr. House. (Optional: Dr. McCoy and House in the same room)
It was a discrete, free clinic for mutants. So discrete that you had to know it was there to find it. And that was mostly because of the anti-mutant vitriol regularly flooding the organization’s inbox.
It had been a set of flats in a previous life, but now it held a surgery, two small patient wards, a mutant daycare facility, a tiny examination room, crowded with equipment, and an equally tiny interview/examination room.
The waiting room was a combination of the hallway and the stairs up.
It was always busy.
It was always crowded.
And it was never boring.
Greg was in his element. In rare, free moments, he caught up on every medical journal there was on mutants and their extreme diversity and medical needs. Of course, everyone here knew him by a different name.
“Doctor Mykopf,” said the green thing who was the closest they could get to a second doctor. Sara. “You’re break’s getting cut short again, I’m sorry. We have a rash in Two that I need a consult on.”
“How bad is this rash?”
“It includes purple mucous.”
Greg smiled. “Hot damn!” and left his paperwork in the claustrophobic break room. He did, however, take his coffee. This place ran on coffee, chocolate, and lots of sugar.
The little girl with the afro puffs was what the clinic was quickly nicknaming ‘amphibi-esque’. There were also mammalian, avian and lizardine mutations. Piscine was plausible, but still hadn’t been spotted.
“Oooh,” Greg winced. “Someone has the big ow’s…” He lowered himself to look into the kid’s teary eyes. “Do they burn?”
“…they ache,” said the kid.
“Cleaning has proved anti-efficacious,” said Sara. “Even with saline.”
And saline washes were the medical norm, here.
Gloves on, Greg gathered the purple mucous and tried gently spreading it on a rash patch. “Does this make it better?”
Nod nod nod. A grin so big it nearly paid for everything. She even let go of her Teddy so she could spread it all over herself.
Mom was making a face. “Oh, that’s just nasty. How’m I supposed to keep her clean with that muck on her?”
“Child services?” prompted Sara.
Mom’s face said it all. It said that the over-reaching arm of the government was far too over-reaching in her general direction.
“Child services.” Greg shook his head. “We’ll do an epidermal scan to be certain, but it looks like we need this 'muck’ for a healthy skin.”
“Would you like me to explain the details, or would you prefer it from Homer?” offered Sara.
Loser got to break out the Macroscope from storage. This time, the loser was Sara.
Greg kept to the G-rated areas of Little Thelize’s skin. “Mutants react to our environment in different ways. In this case, we have a skin that creates a healing goo that counter-acts all the toxins in the environment. I’m guessing you live in one of the Projects?”
“Cheap-ass flat in a fallin’-down building that ain’t had a renovation since it was built,” said Mom.
“We’re going to give you a free asbestos test kit. Along with the usual water-borne antagonists. Once we’ve cleared or outed the usual suspects, you might have to pay for a full-spectrum kit, but we have multiple payment plans if money’s a problem.”
“But that ain’t clean,” protested Mom.
Thelize sighed with relief. “It doesn’t burn, Mama.”
“We can write a note explaining Thelize’s mutant reaction to environmental factors beyond your control. And we have a lawyer willing to support your case.”
“Serious?”
“Pro Bono,” said Greg.
Sara came back, “Macroscope’s up in room five,” she said. She also had a paper. “This is the standard blather for special circumstances kids, all full legalese for the red tape crew. It’ll do the job in the interim if the case worker shows up before we can do the rest of the tests.”
“All right,” said Greg. “Let’s go take a look at your skin.”
The rash was fading as she moved. Social views on cleanliness versus this kid’s reactive skin was going to cause… friction.
“Gonna sell Xavier’s to them?” he murmured to Sara.
“Of course I am. 'Homer Mykopf’.” Which meant she knew. Of course she knew. Sara had ways.
It was why he was so happy, now. Mutants were always interesting. Even their mundane problems were interesting.
[Muse food remaining: 5 (fic war prompts, 0). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
Don’t bottle things up - bottles can break so easily.
Passive-aggressiveness, biting your tongue to avoid snarky retorts, saying nothing when you should say everything, quiet resentment at others’ criticisms… being hidden behind a mask can only last so long… even the most peaceful and calm spirits among us have a breaking point.
So who is it that’s ready to blow? Push them over the edge, by either words or deeds. Have ‘em let it all out… rage, scream, bellow, yell accusations and obscenities until the windows rattle… or just break down into on-their-knees tears and sobs that rack the body as everything pent-up floods out into incoherent wails and howls of no single specific emotion. But no punching, slapping, or otherwise harming others.
Would prefer to leave Sara out of this challenge - that girl’s got enough deepseated psychological issues already without having her be ground-zero of a mental volcano going off.
(#00170)
[AN: Sara’s already had one meltdown, and that was a bit of a strain on me… so I will do something rare and tell a version of the truth. How I know why it is unwise to victimize.]
Society is, by and large, a reflection and an emphasis of the media surrounding it. The instant Television took over from Radio, appearances became more important than voice. The myth of the poor nobody becoming somebody because of their talent and skill became a lost cause forever.
Hierarchy, however, has lasting power. The only difference is what gets one to the top, and how others keep those at the bottom. But let’s just say 'fear’ and move on.
In an era just barely into adequate contraception, there are still unplanned children. Sometimes, they are happy accidents. Sometimes, they are unexpected burdens that turn a double-income household into a single-income family just barely scraping by. Fear becomes an atmosphere, then.
Keep the child healthy. Keep the child fed. Keep the child away from any threat, real or imaginary, because the instant you fail at one thing, the Government will come and take it. And the loss of a child instantly leads to the loss of a marriage. And won’t They just love it? The old gossips and crones who would laugh and sneer behind your back, call you 'poor dear’ to your face, and glory in the schadenfreude that you, too, are a failure. Just as they always said.
But that’s not the real story.
In that family, just scraping by, is the child. Living and breathing in fear and unaware of it. Just knowing that there are places not to go and things not to do. A clumsy little thing. Myopic and asthmatic. Dressed perpetually in hand-me-downs and homemade attempts of clothing from a mother who battles with anything that requires an 'on’ switch.
A child who encounters, at school, a society based on image and television in colour (We can’t afford that! The one we have is still working fine) and glossy magazines that cost too much, and especially, having good clothes.
In such a society, to be a true individual is to soon be a pariah.
The true friends are the friends who stay. The ones who may also be pariahs because of an accent, or a wonky eye, or because, just maybe, a kid their age with an imagination that spans a cosmos or three just might be more entertaining than Days of Our Lives.
Whatever the reason, those friendships last. Even in a time of utter desolation and loss. When the best Grandfather in the whole world, a friendly giant in blue overalls and magic… dies in a freak accident. The time of tears passes, but the time of mourning is not over.
And when the friends gather for aimless chatter, two of the shallow Others come skipping. They are a great distance away, confident that the weedy, asthmatic child can not catch up to them even if she tried. And they sing. A taunting little tune, usually used for 'nerny nerny ner ner’ and other such childish taunts. But these two have come up with new words that will make the weedy child cry.
It’s something of a daily pastime. Make that child cry.
These two, out of willful ignorance, sing, “Cathy’s grandfather’s de-ad! Cathy’s grandfather’s de-ad!”
A lifetime’s worth of bad feelings, formerly caged in propriety and rules, comes out as red-hot rage. There is a scream. The desire for blood.
And darkness.
When the child returns to herself, there is no sign of the ignorant boys. There is a weight on both her arms. Her feet still want to run. Claw, still, at the soil hardened by a thousand feet and cheap cooch grass.
When she looks back, she discovers that two friends, each, had grabbed an arm and held her back.
She had dragged them all an entire meter.
Four times her weight and then some. At least.
If her friends had not been there. If she had been a true pariah…
Those boys -or just one of them- would have died.
Ignorant, unthinking, most definitely unknowing children -possibly popular children- had had their lives saved that day.
From a pariah.
By pariahs.
There are no words for the terror of herself that settled into her stomach, that day. How every attempt by her contemporaries to goad her into an outburst, thereafter, were coloured by that fear. By the knowledge that, given enough rage, she could kill with her bare hands and not know it until she woke up with their blood in her mouth.
And the certainty that they were too stupid to know that they were throwing sticks at a wolf.
That’s a lot to heap onto a child.
[Muse food remaining: 6 (fic war prompts, 1). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
(#00169)
She should have known, because it was too quiet. Zeetha had become too used to the sounds of battle to listen for them in the midst of conjugal bliss.
And in the morning, Mechanicsburg was lost.
Not fallen. Not burned. Not destroyed.
Gone.
As if it had never been there.
Many of the armies had fled. A few lost clanks littered the field of former battle and one lone Wolfenbach monitor ship patrolled amongst the clouds.
“…no…” Zeetha breathed. Her heart fought to sink into the core of the planet and leap out of her mouth at the same time. It couldn’t be happening. Not again.
Not again!
Those few humans still on the field leaped in terror as a new howl rang over the plains below where Mechanicsburg used to be.
“ZUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIILL!!”
Axel Higgs, roused from the depths of the clank they had shared, looked out over the empty battlefield and the vast expanse of mountain range where Mechanicsburg wasn’t.
“Huh,” he said. “It’s never done that, before.”
Rage overtook her. Such epic fury had leveled a pirate fortress, but Higgs held her off until her body failed her and she collapsed in a fit of tears.
“…not again… not again… lost all over again… [I was beginning to think I had gone mad…]”
“[You are not mad. Skifander is real,]” soothed Higgs. “[And Agatha is alive. We must live with these two faiths, Princess.]”
“You… speak Skiff?”
“I’ve been around,” he said with a half-smile. “That’s not important, right now. Right now, you and I need to find out what happened to Agatha, and maybe even Mechanicsburg, and set things right.”
“How can I possibly—?”
“Let’s start by rounding up a few remaining witnesses, eh?”
Fighting! That, she could focus on! Zeetha grabbed a sword and prepared to leap out and do battle.
“But you might want to get dressed, first?” Higgs suggested.
Zeetha looked down at his shirt on her body and blushed.
*
That had been two years ago. A chain of vigorous interrogation lead her and Higgs to *this* snow-swept, hidden mountain range. Where a secret, hidden lair of the Knights of Jove may just be keeping a time travel device.
The problem with that was, that snow-swept, hidden mountain ranges were just *teeming* with secret, hidden lairs. All owned by different Sparky nutjobs with differing agendas and associated secret societies.
Some days, Zeetha felt like she was going through them in alphabetical order.
She shook one of the surviving, robed adepts until he woke. “Where are the Knights of Jove?”
“…dunno…” he squeaked. “We’re the Shrouded Cavalcade of Eee…”
Another day, another smoking ruin of a formerly secret, hidden lair.
“I’m coming, my Zumil,” she said to the whipping wind. “I’m coming. Remember all I taught you. Rememb—” She fought the sting in her eyes.
She had a promise to keep.
[Muse food remaining: 7 (fic war prompts, 2). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
(#00168)
“Kurt, what are you doing?”
“Who? Me?” he quickly hid his hands behind his back. “Nothing much.”
“Isn’t that Todd’s locker?”
Kurt gained a sick and desperate grin. “Why would I be doing something to Todd Tolenski’s locker? It certainly has nothing to do with any interesting kind of prank war.”
Jean glared at him. “You do know you are trying to lie to a telepath…”
“It’s okay. I saw Onkel Wolf do this, once…”
After the smoke cleared, it was clear that it was not, as Kurt put it, okay.
*
“So how are we going to get out of this, smartyfuzz?” demanded Scott. They were both trapped by the robotic tentacle-guards in this particular simulation.
“I saw Onkel Wolf do this once…” he began squirming in some pretty peculiar ways. “I can get out…”
He also managed to leave his uniform behind.
*
“Elf…” Logan warned.
“I saw Onkel Wolf do this once,” he said, a bunch of herbs in each hand. “One of these makes a nice tea. Uh. The other one… um. How good is your healing power, Herr Logan?”
Logan glared at him. “That does it, kid. You’re banned from doing anything you saw your Onkel Wolf do…”
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(#00167)
“I’munna do it!” the camera dodges through a dark interior, into the bright, snow-filled landscape.
“Don’t fucking do it!” This speaker is the owner of a greasy mullet and wears shirtsleeves and a vest even in the middle of winter. “I swear to God, Toad…“
“I’munna DO it!” the camera pans up to find a skinny boy in a toboggan perched precariously on the roof of a three-storey house.
“How did he even get up there?” ponders a deep voice off-screen.
“Whocares?” says the voice of the cam operator. “I’mputtingitallonYouTube.”
“DON’T FUCKING DO IT!” bellows greasy-mullet.
“Do a flip!” taunts the cam-holder.
“I’m doin’ it!” yells the kid on the roof. He moves violently, as if to set the toboggan off.
Giggling as it becomes evident that the toboggan is stuck.
“For fuck’s sake, Todd!” yells greasy-mullet. “If that ain’t a sign from above…”
Todd gets off, wiggles the toboggan and seats it an apparently significant inch to the left. “Roofing nail,” he yells. “This time fo’ sure, yo!”
“Goddamn it, don’t you fucking dare—!”
“Omigod!” shrieks the bass voice off camera as the toboggan moves.
“WWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAWWWW!” Todd yawps as the toboggan slides down the roof, off an awning, and into a deep drift of snow.
“Oh my fucking god, he’s killed himself,” mutters greasy-mullet.
“Man, thatwaspoetic…” the cam follows greasy-mullet to a pair of legs hanging out of the snow pile and observes him dragging Todd out by his feet.
“That was sick, yo!” says the skinny kid. “C’mon, lets build this pile up so’s I can do that again!”
“Dudeyou’rebleeding,” says the cam-holder.
“Aw man. Busted my nose again.”
*
“How many thousand views?”
“Wrong question, yo. It’s how many million views?” said Todd. He was currently wrapped up in half the blankets and Freddy’s very motion-inhibiting arm. The bleeding had finally slowed. “And I think its up to twelve.”
“When the hell’d we have time to upload it?” Lance demanded. “I remember seven hours in the ER.”
“Quickie did it,” said Toad. “Dude’s been suspiciously absent since yo’ called 911.”
“Did he put you up to this? We all know how you get when it’s cold.”
“Uh… Don’t remember.”
“I’munna do it! I’m gonna fuckin’ kill ‘im…”
[Muse food remaining: 8 (fic war prompts, 3). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
(#00166)
“Hi,” said the slightly horsey androgene on the screen. “I’m Sara, but most know me online as TheTallest. I work with the indie film studio Thylacine Films. You might know us from such things as this—”
The dance of the dead hallucination scene from _Gopocalypse, Go, Go!_
“And this—”
The town destruction scene from _It Came From The Other Side_.
“And this—”
Everyone’s favourite scene from _All My Zombies_.
“I’m used to working under the red line, but for this project, Working Title, _Spreading Terra_,” a gesture pointing to above her own head. “I want to go all out. Distant locations, a cast who is not also the crew, decent special effects… the whole deal. A one hundred dollar donation will get you a test merch swag bag. Five hundred gets you the opportunity to be a background character. One thousand buys you a line. Five thousand gets you five lines. The rest is in the list to the right. I do have animated storyboards, which you can unlock with a donation as low as one dollar. Have fun, and thanks for becoming part of Thylacine Films.”
*
“HOLY SHIT!”
It was not often that Sara swore, let alone screamed while doing so. Thus, she gained a crowd.
“Two hours! They gave me everything that I asked for and then some! And they’re not stopping… I owe five hundred people a copy of my script…”
Jean, looking over her shoulder, whistled backwards. “You’re going to have to come up with some bonuses…”
“Two hours… two hours…”
[Muse food remaining: 9 (fic war prompts, 4). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
(#00165)
It’s hard to judge reality when Mom’s a cop, Dad’s a triage nurse, and you’re aspergic. Sure, I got along with the Nypicals (that’s a shortened form of ‘neurotypical folks’) with a combination of rehearsal and elementary anthropology, but there are just some things you don’t know until you get there.
Until I got a sleepover at Bobby Dryland’s house, I thought all families chatted casually about Grousome Murders and Tales From the Idiot Ward. You can imagine my stunned amazement when the Drylands calmly discussed accounting, economics, politics and plans for next Sunday. Mr Dryland did desk work at some firm and his stories were about numbers. I could deal with that.
Numbers are pretty cool.
Mrs Dryland stayed at home to keep the house orderly and filled the family in on the news they missed while they’d been out. That bothered me a little. All politics was was rich white people telling the dwindling middle class that everything was the fault of the poor people whilst simultaneously begging for more money from both. And most of the news was about what happened when folks realized that this wasn’t going to work.
Light dawned. These people needed something interesting to talk about.
“Didja see the crash on the corner of Fifth and Main, today?” I blurted. “One of them was a Sedan, so that means at least one passenger. I’m willing to bet there were two broken fibs and multiple lacs!”
The Drylands stared as if I’d grown another head that spoke a different language.
“Edie…” Mrs Dryland said carefully, “that’s not what polite people talk about at dinner.”
“But Mr Dryland was talking about his work…”
“I got this one,” said Bobby. It took two hours of him trying to explain and me trying to understand, but blood and guts and all the interesting stuff actually puts a lot of Nypicals off their food.
Weird.
[Muse food remaining: 8 (fic war prompts, 3). Submit a prompt! Ask a question! Buy my stories!]
(#00164)
There is a rule in classrooms all over the world. When it’s Show and Tell day, beware the kid with the cardboard box. Or the self-motive brown paper bag.
This time, it was Kurt ‘that weirdo’ Wagner with the cardboard box and the optimistic grin.
His record said he used to work in a circus, and you could believe it, the way he oversold all his presentations with carney-level breathless superlatives.
“Ladies and Gentlemen—”
“Let’s skip the preamble, Wagner.”
“Aaaww…” he sighed. “I humbly submit mein amazing discovery…” He opened the box and yelped.
The box had a hole in the bottom. A gnawed hole. A suspiciously large gnawed hole.
“Ah… heh. Um.” He quickly looked towards all the corners and under all the desks. “Has everyone had their shots?”
The class jock, Ray Billertyne, screamed like a little girl. It began a chain reaction of screaming and panic and a large hairy blur scurrying all through the class.
And Wagner trying to catch it bare-handed.
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