Challenge #01515-D054: A Good Host’s Reward
There’s one advantage to being an early riser. Usually, it’s watching some kick-ass dawns as they happen. Today, it was meeting Brutus. He’s what most people call a gargoyle. I’d go into the difference between the _real_ gargoyles, which are decorative stone waterspouts, and what people _call_ ‘gargoyles’ but are actually called grotesques. _Those_ are decorative stone building features with no inherent function.
But I wouldn’t call Brutus ‘grotesque’. He’s kind'a pretty. Even with his stone skin on. But I’m getting ahead of myself. It all started in the pre-dawn twilight. I was doing some elementary yard work, basically picking out the weeds that didn’t look right from my rock garden. It’s Utah. I don’t believe in spending a fortune on a lawn I have no use for. Then something big glides into my field of view.
At first, I thought I might be one of the few who saw a Mothman, but this was no Mothman. For a start, Mothman has these big, red eyes and no discernable head. This looked more like a very buff human with huge bat wings. And a tail. I can tell you from personal experience that biological gargoyles are very impressive up close. And very formal.
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Challenge #01514-D053: One Miserable Evening in a Dragon’s Lair
http://toxixpumpkin.tumblr.com/post/100767877989
Pick one! – @callmegallifreya
Of all the experiences in the multiverse, there’s nothing like sprawling across the head of a friendly dragon. Alas, since _this_ dragon was fighting a bout of the ‘flu, it meant that Sam was doing the sprawling in a budgie-smuggler, and kept one hand on the fire extinguisher.
Dragons sneeze fire. And even though Bloodflight was comfy in his cave, there was still the risk of setting a few things on fire. It’s amazing what burns under a dragon’s flame. Sam had enough fire-resistance potions to keep him alive during the onslaught of plasma, but that didn’t mean he planned to push it.
“I hade this,” grumbled Bloodflight.
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Challenge #01511-D050: This House is Not Haunted
http://goddammitstacey.tumblr.com/post/155552788003
“I just turned to my housemate and said, “y’know, we’d never know if we were haunted” because we have four cats between us, so every clunk, bump, and crash gets entirely ignored
and now I want a movie about a ghost becoming increasingly desperate to haunt a family but they have cats and so the poor dear goes completely ignored” – @callmegallifreya
I was, once.
Nothing more than that. Simply that I was, once. As in, I was a single lady living alone. I was incredibly protective of my home and my things. I was alive. Not any more. I’m still in my house and I don’t like it when other people move in. I make… trouble.
Shifting things around. Throwing things off of their places. Moving things into odd places. All the usual poltergeist stuff. And it did work for years. I kept my house all to myself. And then they moved in. Two nice lesbians and their five cats. They say ghosts and cats don’t get along. They don’t know anything.
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Challenge #01508-D047: The Nature of Hell
http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/156684722295
“Due to a loophole in the system, people can escape hell and get to heaven after death. You go to hell and all you see is Satan, just sitting there playing the harmonica. Everyone left him and now he’s all alone.” – @callmegallifreya
Jean Paul Sartre said that hell is other people. He could not be more wrong. Though other people have their disadvantages, the true hell is loneliness. Hell was made to be vast, with room to every sinner in existence. It was made to be unpleasant. It has room to contain every nightmare.
But sinners are sinners for a reason. They lie, cheat, and steal. And all the other things. It’s no great stretch for a soul, once in hell, to immediately look for loophole. After all, what is sin without redemption? So all mortal sinners find their way out of hell. It takes time and effort, but time, at least, is meaningless in hell. Effort, however, is triple.
Nevertheless, eventually, all souls leave hell except one.
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Challenge #01501-D040: Dis-possessed
“There is no room for demons, when you’re already self-possessed” - Carrie Fisher – @recklessprudence
The demon Az'bar'bijol, once summoned, launched itself at the luckless human who was foolish enough to read its incantation out loud. And almost got the spiritual equivalent of a concussion when it was repelled by a possessing force already in residence, so to speak.
“Nice try,” said the human. “But you can’t do that with me. And… soon as I whip up a binding spell, you won’t be free to do mischief in the mortal realm either.”
“What?” said the demon Az'bar'bijol. “How?” It looked around. The human had made a perfect summoning circle and made certain that it could not exit through any crack. And it was ringed about with sea salt. “Why?”
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Challenge #01497-D036: Incautious Wishing
They go about their daily lives, unnoticed, but without them, things would soon fall apart. – Anon Guest
He’d got his wish. Those Types were gone from his country. They may even be gone from the world, but he didn’t really care about anything beyond the borders that didn’t make him money. This encapsulated quite an amount of uncaring for the world, had he cared about that, either.
He had exactly forty-eight hours to enjoy his newly-made paradise. No man remaining in his country was unemployed. In fact, businesses all over the country were scrabbling for employees. They even hired women into traditionally male arenas because there were just so few people in the country to work.
And there was nobody to clean up. Offices remained as filthy as they were left. The trash began to pile up. The laundry began to pile up. The housework, not done by the working wives, piled up. Weekends, usually a time of rest and relaxation, filled to the brim with drudgery and monotonous maintenance.
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Challenge #01496-D035: Signal of Doom
http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/156012408168/you-live-in-a-world-of-superheroes-and
“You live in a world of superheroes and supervillains. Each person gets three marks, one on their right hand to indicate their future arch nemesis, one on their left hand to indicate their side kick/partner, and one on their chest to indicate their powers and insignia. Today your marks show up and they’re… Shocking, to say the least.”
(same prompt but this time, all the symbols are identical. If you did that the first time, something else.) – @callmegallifreya
Not everyone gets to be Super. It’s only fair. If everyone was Super, then it would just be Normal. And we all know that Normal is boring. And we also know that Supers need someone to rescue. It kind-of works out that way, I guess. And -hey- we all want to be Super, one day.
I thought I’d missed out. Turns out I’m a Late Waker. Mine happened in the beginning of phys ed, changing for the lockers, and someone noticed that I had what looked like a photorealistic sun on my chest. This was the first and only time I got out of phys ed because of puberty fallout.
I was the first one to get that sigil, so they shoved me inside the Really Big Bunker so fast that I hardly had time to blink. I got to live in the Heavy Assessment Labs. Punching things, kicking things, screaming at things. It was great therapy, don’t get me wrong, but nothing was happening. And then, when I had reached my maximum frustration point, I blew up.
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Challenge #01495-D034: Super Signals
http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/156012408168/you-live-in-a-world-of-superheroes-and
“You live in a world of superheroes and supervillains. Each person gets three marks, one on their right hand to indicate their future arch nemesis, one on their left hand to indicate their side kick/partner, and one on their chest to indicate their powers and insignia. Today your marks show up and they’re… Shocking, to say the least.” – @callmegallifreya
Everyone gets their Wakening at a different time. The symbol on the chest happens first. Ignore all the rumours going around about how it “burns through” to your super-suit. No. That won’t happen. You have to get it copied by a professional.
And trust me, you need a professional. Loads of Supers start out by having their friend copy it, or doing it themselves. They always wind up with their sigil backwards or… hideously mutated. Girls like me get enough crap on the Super Scene. The last thing I need is a bad copy or worse, the hole in the shirt, to show the world who I am.
The chest symbol is a warning both for yourself and everyone around you. You and the authorities have two weeks to get any safety equipment into place. There’s even a program for the Supers who Waken while living in poor areas. Governments who don’t like funding that one get their own comeuppance. Trillions in property damage tends to really teach people, you know?
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Challenge #01487-D026: On the Other Side of the Fence
“I have at least 14 bad angles” - Carrie Fisher – @recklessprudence
Carl made a career out of being abnormal. As one of the rare few who could not be cured, he told the jokes than nobody else dared make. Like, “Hey did you hear about the dyslexic biker? He joined Hell’s Angles.” or, “Public transportation is a real pain. You just try catching the sub every day.”
And it worked. People laughed. He earned a living. He kept a home and had what passed for a life. But because his condition was so very rare… certain things just did not exist. Fonts, for instance, that ‘weighed’ the letters into their places and made it easier for him to read anything at all. Those were relics of a bygone era and far more expensive than they had to be.
Amazing how the system could force a person to pay more for something that allegedly nobody wanted. Now there was a joke. Supply and demand. They had the supply, so they could demand what they liked for it. Fonts, reader software, audio books… anything that could make his life a little more tolerable… it cost upwards of five figures. Because his condition was so rare.
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Challenge #01486-D025: Worth a Life
“unfortunately it hurts all 3 of my feelings” - Carrie Fisher – @recklessprudence
Oh crap. She’d tripped over a Faerie nest.
Of all the authors who featured the Fair Folk in their modern writings, A. A. Milne said it best: Their bodies were so tiny that they could only process one feeling at a time. What hardly anyone remembered about Faeries is this: immortality can drive cogniscent beings insane. Milne’s traditional cause of faerie death is not what these hyperactive creatures needed.
They needed to be hurled into the sun, in her opinion. But just try talking to NASA about that. In the meantime, there were only so many ways to apologise to a hive of angry Faeries. And one of them involved rum. Which Caeri didn’t have in her pack because this was meant to be a sober hike. The other method involved bloodletting.