Challenge #02521-F331: Fear Us
Gone are the days of monsters holding a village in fear, secure in their lairs, the biggest worry the occasional angry peasant mob rising up to pester them with torches and cries of being “abominations to God’s creation”.
The industrial revolution and electricity made humans far more dangerous and less fearful than they’d ever been. Inept mobs were replaced with trained police. Investigating detectives passed knowledge of weaknesses on to new generations of monster hunters…
There are not many monsters left in the world. Most people don’t even believe in us at all! They think Hollywood just made us up to sell horror schlock films or… ugh… gaudy teen romance in some cases. Pitiful. – Anon Guest
Once upon a time, we were monsters. We were the shadows in the night, we were the dark places where few feared to tread. We had names like werewolf, or vampyr, or troll. We were the reason why children went missing in the woods. You called us Fae, you called us will o'the wisp, you called us huldre. We were the creaking of old houses, the inexplicable rapping in the night. You called us ghosts, spirits, or poltergeist.
We call ourselves… fearlings. We live on the fears you create. We become that which you are afraid of. In more recent days, we have been cryptids, and slender men, and the poisoners of sweets for children. We have been the long-legged beasties crawling between the unobserved spaces. We have been the errant shadows in the corner of your eye late at night.
We do no harm. We wish to make that clear. We fearlings only feed on fear. There is no need to hurt or harm. You humans are very well versed in doing such things to and for yourselves. We have been unidentified flying objects, men in black, and yet the best yield we have ever had is from rustling in corn fields. We have never been the rapists at the bar, the stalkers in the night, nor the terrorists in the shadows. Humans are far too good at doing those things already. After all, we are the things that do not truly exist.
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Challenge #02313-F123: Paradise Cracked
Our Utopia is the Dystopia of the Future.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cDeMzg31T2I – Anon Guest
There is no such thing as a perfect world. We try to imagine them, but our present shapes the future we envision. The writer of the first such utopian fiction couldn’t imagine a perfect world without slavery. Others in later eras and other cultures could only imagine rugged individualism as saving the day, instead of steadily ruining the country.
Some didn’t get much further past, No hunger, no greed, and all the children know how to read.
For every perfect world, there is a downside. For every one with their head in the clouds, ten labour with their feet in the mud. Resources have to come from somewhere and there is always something that cleverly-engineered machines can not do. Even if it is fixing the cleverly-engineered machines.
[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 steemit (dot) com (slash at) internutter for the stories at their freshest]
Challenge #02136-E307: Sententiam Dei — Steemit
Call me Combat. Since the first RNA chains struggled to combine in the first primordial ooze, I have been. I have not been engaged in activity, I just… existed. Divinities do not say, I think, therefore I am. They say, I am that I am.
I am. I am fight. I am battle. I am… War.
For countless millennia, I watched and fed myself from the small creatures that struggled against the environment, that struggled against predators. That struggled against each other for more, for better, for another hour… I watched as creatures grew, competed, fought to eat. Fought to live. I watched cataclysm after cataclysm wipe the slate clean.
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Challenge #02088-E264: Visual Aids — Steemit
The most astonishing fact that the Scollarids learned about Humans was this: Humans can’t see their own glow. These Deathworlders were on par with them when it came to surviving strategies. They did more with less, did less with more, and got into further territories than any other species known to intelligent life. It seemed like they could - as a species - accomplish anything.
But they could not see how their colours wavered and intermixed with their moods. They couldn’t perceive the soft, warm tones of their own body heat, or the subtle patterns of their inner radiations as they went through their days. The Scollarids said, Humans are beautiful in the dark, and the Humans didn’t understand it as a compliment.
Humans glow. Their soft illumination has soothed many an infant Scollarid in the middle of the night. Their mood-lamp patterns of infra-red, ultra-violet, and electron blue have calmed hundreds in times of stress. It’s such a pity that they can’t see themselves with Scollarid eyes.
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Challenge #01544-D083: Il Pleut
They can make it rain, some perform Arcane rituals, some pray. But of course there is the old tried and true methods. – @knitnan
There’s a reason why the Affiliate College of Rainmakers is on a boat. And why the uniform contains rain coats and wellingtons. You don’t collect so many Rainmakers in one place without taking precautions. It’s only by the third year of attempting control that many students actually achieve it.
Though it is hard to tell without field trips.
Some need specific circumstances to make the rain fall. Some… can’t make it _stop_. The school gets far more of the latter than the former. And one of those was an unlucky soul called Kem. They were in their fourth year at the Affiliate College of Rainmakers, and the rain still fell on them.
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Challenge #01469-D008: Judge Alike
“I heard someone say once that many of us only seem able to find heaven by backing away from hell. And while the place that I’ve arrived at in my life may not precisely be everyone’s idea of heavenly, I could swear sometimes—if I am quiet enough—I can hear the angels sing.” —Carrie Fisher, Wishful Drinking (2008) – @recklessprudence
Hell, like Heaven, is relative. One being’s paradise is another’s torture. And for Til, life was that torture. Another day to live was another day fighting her own demons. Resisting the voice in her head that told her to do harm. Struggling to breathe. Struggling to move. Struggling, in general, to live another day as close to the accepted normal as possible.
Struggling, especially, not to kill the acceptably normal people for the things she heard them say. Every. Single. Day.
Of all of them, the politicians on the news were the worst. Their sound bites became the memes in the mouths of the everyday people. People like Til were lazy, unhealthy, diseased. People like Til should be locked up at their own expense for the good of everyone else. People like Til only deserved a life as unpaid test subjects for the good of science, and the rest of the real people.
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Challenge #01413-C318: The Otherworldly Ones
http://phantomrose96.tumblr.com/post/152590950362/airyairyquitecontrary-aprillikesthings
Humans are Fae for urban animals – @callmegallifreya
“They live in a cave,” the corvid insisted. “Caves all over the cliffs. Caves in the grasslands. They’re all so confusing that it’s difficult to find your way out again. The sky turns into a wall. But if you find a nice one, they will take you to the wall that is open and let you be free.”
“They leave food,” said the possum. “Some even give it when it’s fresh. Most leave it in the cans of plenty in the grasslands.”
“They saved my babies,” said a duck. “They are gentle and kind.”