Challenge #01649-D188: What a God Wants
I was destined to be the priestess of a mad God. What they didn’t tell me was that instead of slaughtering people I’d be making Him a nice cup of tea and telling him it would be all right. – @knitnan
I’d always wondered why the High Holies of the Mad God Zhyruq selected the kind and sympathetic to be their acolytes. Every year, they chose amongst their number the trainee they found to be the kindest, most generous, and most sympathetic. And, until it was my turn, I’d wondered why.
I was terrified, of course. Those who were chosen to be the Mad God’s intermediary were rarely seen again. And those that did return to the public were… hollow. Empty of their ability to care for anyone else beyond a set of simple remedies. They were prone to weeping and crying out, “I don’t know! I don’t know any more!” I had to fret about what could possibly do that to a gentle and kind human being.
I was shaking as I entered the Sacred Door. To the here-and-not-here realm between mortal soil and that which could bear the tread of a God. With a title like Mad God, I expected a skull and blood motif with human skin throw rugs. I expected an altar upon which I had to sacrifice myself. But when I opened my eyes…
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Challenge #01643-D182: High-level Negotiations
Do you ever get the feeling that (God/the Gods) (has/have) a plan? And you’re the only one who can stop it? – @recklessprudence
Of all the forces of the multiverse, none is more terrifying than a being with the Gods on their side. They are unstoppable, indomitable, and irrevocable. And of all the beings in the multiverse, none are more pitiable than the ones the Gods merely use as a tool.
And when one comes against the other…
Shayde faced the Archdivine of Q'kexx'l across the remains of the battlefield. Thanks to the alleged gods who were using her, she was an equal to him in power and strength. He could call down lightning, she could absorb it and turn it against him. After an hour of lightning ping-pong, the shot went wild and blasted some poor peasant’s crops into an inferno.
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Challenge #01629-D168: Unfortunate For Some
Hell, as they say is other people. Especially when you are a school bus driver. – @knitnan
The chant had started from the back of the bus. “We wanna, we wanna, we wanna wee! If you do not stop for us/ we’ll do it on the bus![1]” The otherwise well-behaved kid in the front seat was singing X-1 Bottles of Beer on the Wall. The crowd of kids sharing music were singing both off key and out of sync. The people in the seat three rows from any given exit were having a screaming row about a pencil case.
All things considered, the heart attack was a welcome respite. Gary still did his duty, though. He pulled into the nearest emergency stopping bay and opened the doors before darkness claimed him and the pain floated away.
GARY FRANCIS BAKER, said a voice like a sepulchure. YOUR TIME HAS ENDED.
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Challenge #01608-D147: Repent Now…
[Name] sighed and turned back to their paperwork. In the scant few minutes they’d been talking with the other person, the paper seemed to have multiplied. It was breeding. There was a giant paperwork orgy going on right on their desk, and it was all they could do to fill out forms faster than they were produced. – @recklessprudence
They say paperwork is hell. They don’t have the half of it. Imagine the largest offices in the world. Floor after floor of endless, uniform, windowless cubicles. Floor after floor of grey monotony. Floor after floor of filling out and shuffling paperwork from an inbox into the relevant outbox. And no potty or coffee breaks.
They have no time to look up from their work. They dare not take even a second from one paper to the other. They dare not stretch. There is no time to sigh. Their only hope is to fill in the paperwork before the next page enters their inbox. If they do not, the paper in their inbox doubles.
There is a clever device that takes the page from the bottom of the heap and juts it out to where it can be seized so that the worker can fill it out. It is not that clever, and often jams. Those in the cubicles hit the red button and grab a page from the top. They cannot afford to wait. They cannot afford to stop. They barely have time to suckle from the coffee dribbler or nibble a bite from the treats dispenser. They sit, bare-bottomed, on a hybrid of a toilet and an office chair. There is no rest.
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Challenge #01541-D080: Soured Gift
Wings are the symbol of mages, a manifestation of their powers. But magic isn’t something easily accepted. People will do anything to be normal. – @yizukikhons
They appear with the first use of magic, which can happen at any time following the day that a child first recognises that their own actions have consequences beyond themselves. Some say that their size indicates the mage’s power. They are made of light, and it is not their size, which is illusory, but the luminosity of them that counts.
When Taerl, aged five, became annoyed at the sudden light in the theatre where she was trying to enjoy the performers, she had no idea the light was her own. Not until a fellow young patron asked her to turn her wings down. It hurt to look at them, they were so bright. She could move them if she thought hard about where they were, and made them stay inside her capelet, where they illuminated the floor underneath.
She’d just wanted to keep her chestnuts warm, and now _this_ had to happen. Stopping the soft flow of force into her chestnuts did nothing to dim her wings. Focussing on them made them shine brighter. Trying to ignore them didn’t do much to dim them.
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Challenge #01538-D077: A Stay in a Haunted House
Just because something is supernatural doesn’t mean it won’t follow a learnable set of rules. It just means the “why” of those rules isn’t bound to make logical sense. – @recklessprudence
It was an old house. Of course it came with a ghost. It had been a farm in the ancient days of yore, before urbanisation subdivided the land again and yet again, and it became the last house along a new street that had once been its driveway, and, simultaneously, the oldest house on the street. The buildings around it were only slightly older than the sixties, and were all squat, blocky bricks compared to this ancient Gothic heap.
It was also, according to the kids of the neighbourhood, cursed. Joaquin paid curses no mind. His Abuela had taught him how to remove curses from old houses, and he had a box full of saint’s candles for just such an emergency. The house came furnished and, as it became evident on his entry, supplied with an abundance of hoarded objects. He would have to call his landlord about those. Soon. There was barely enough room to move his stuff inside.
The ghost greeted him with, “Vous etes n'est pas Maman. Ou est Maman?”
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Challenge #01536-D075: Dire Times at the Dog and Duck
It was one of those places that people went to, to drink as much as possible in the shortest time. There were tiles well above head height, the floor was tiled and covered in sawdust, at shift change staff hosed it out and put down fresh sawdust. – Anon Guest
There wasn’t a menu. There weren’t interesting bottles on the back shelf. There was barely a back shelf, which held a bottle of suspicious pickled eggs, which also held a pickled vermin animal. The shelf also held the large, club-like object that was usually hidden under the bar.
It was that kind of pub.
People didn’t go here to socialise. People didn’t go here for a good time. They came here to get drunk and temporarily escape the miseries of their lives. Which was exactly the kind of pub you got in a place that existed because nobody could get out. The miasma in this place was full of misery, hopelessness, and stale urine. As well as the vinegary mess they excused as beer in this place.
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Challenge #01534-D073: Wyrd Customs
“How normal is this occurrence that there’s automated vocal procedures to talk about the demonic presence?” – @recklessprudence
This lot of magicians had graduated through technology and out the other side, never once stopping in at Global Pollution Station for a long debate about how dangerous pollution was, when you really got down to it. Shayde was impressed. Not many worlds actually noticed the long-term effects of certain technologies and decided to look at other ways to do things while the water was still potable and the outside air still healthy[1].
This particular example, a tower with an impressively crystalline doorway and no door, was some form of scanning and capturing device. Once through the door, the building would either offer stairs to the larger bulk of the city, or pull away a drop to an oubliette where the officials could deal with an offender at a later date. Shayde had no fear of it, not even when their team wizard insisted that one among the party was evil. This… was just another test in a long string of tests that kept revealing that she was no more demon than -say- a rock.
She was the fourth of the party to stride in and take the stairs. And it was only slightly alarming that this lot had invented escalators without first inventing conveyor belts. The stones of the tower had a limited sort of life to them, and moved under her feet, transporting her safely to the exit platform.
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Challenge #01532-D071: Unseen Flaws
“What? What is it?” “Give me a minute. I’ve been an idiot and I’m trying to compensate.” – @recklessprudence
“No, no, no, no, no!” Paper snowed from its fountaining upwards. Judging by the look of things, inspiration had been going in entirely in the wrong direction. “It’s all shit! It’s nonsense! Rubbish! Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish…” And then Maester Kadfel fell to sobbing at her desk.
Thaldrik fielded as many pages as he could catch, and laboriously rounded up the others. Months of work, obviously. He had been fetching the Maester’s tea and meals for the duration. And now it had come to… rubbish.
He lined up some of the pages in the order he remembered. The Maester’s work was always beautiful, even when it did turn to bad conclusions.
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Challenge #01528-D067: World-threatening
What do they eat, anyway?
::snort:: **Anything**. They don’t care. They’re roaming, poisonous, armoured, Dark Magic-spawned garbage disposals. – @recklessprudence
“Dark Magic is extinct. It’s been extinct for thousands of years,” objected Thaldrik.
“And they’ve been around that long,” said Maester Kadfel. “Possibly longer. It was their creation that lead to the uprising against Dark Magic and its subsequent elimination.” She tapped the illustration. “For now, they seem content to remain in the calderas of Mount Seethe, and eat… whatever they find there. Alas, Dark Magic made them nigh indestructible. They’ve been living there and eating everything for some significant time.”
Thaldrik considered this. “Isn’t this a cautionary tale to make certain everyone stays clear of Mount Seethe? What proof is there that these…” he had another go at pronouncing the name, “Rav-in-ger-i… exist?”