Challenge #00757 - B026: The Visitor

Part of a tiny story - Unfurl by IPostAtMidnight
She usually enjoyed unfurling a fresh sheet over her bed, swishing it out like they do in those detergent commercials. Tonight, however, as the sheet settled down onto the empty mattress, it outlined the contours of a body.

It wasn’t a pleasant silhouette, either. It was the doughy shape of a man who couldn’t be bothered with himself. And further, the sheet above the body immediately stuck to pools of what she hoped were sweat. Vigorous action around the crotch region indicated that the man was pleasuring himself.

“Hey babe,” said a familiar voice.

“Ugh,” whispered Bea. God, not Tony. Fucking Tony. “What the flying shit, Tony?”

“How’d you know it was me? You got no proof.”

“Given the number of times you’ve orchestrated an incident where I ‘accidentally’ walk in on you masturbating and you ask me if I like what I see? Plus I know your voice. Get out and take your skeezy habits with you. I already told you I never want to see you again.”

“I know,” said the invisible Tony. Still masturbating lazily under the sheet. “That’s why I went to extreme lengths for you. I know you want to get fucked by the invisible man.”

Bea glared at the space where his head should have been. “Which part of 'fuck off’ did you repeatedly fail to understand?”

“I heard 'fuck me’…” he purred in what he imagined to be a seductive tone.

“Get out. Get lost. Go find some other woman to annoy. I don’t even like you. You’re a disgusting example of a human being and I would prefer that you took up residence on the other side of the universe.”

“Aw c'mon, babe. I did all this for you. You should be grateful. Everything I’ve done, I did it so you would love me.”

“Obviously taking a shower wasn’t in your itinerary,” Bea observed.

“I know you want it dirty…”

“I would rather burn this house to the ground with me inside than have sex with you!”

“Third degree burns? Kinky. I think I could swing it. For you, babe.”

Bea had a better idea. “Close your eyes and no peeking.”

He evidently put her night mask on.

She set him on fire instead. Watching the invisible douchebro burn was hilarious. Besides, she never wanted to touch that bed or those sheets again, now that they’d been infected by Tony’s presence.

Unfortunately, he survived. Bawling all the way through hospital, court, and into prison that the fire hadn’t hurt him as much as her rejection.

And, strangely enough, Bea was grateful to him in the end. If it wasn’t for the court case, she’d have never met the love of her life, Andrea.

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Challenge #00756 - B025: That is Not a Solution

On the one hand, that is a legitimate problem.
On the other, I’m not sure I could come up with a worse solution to that problem, even if you gave me a research grant and several years.

South-Southwest Greater Deregulation.

The problem element milled around, five yards away from the electrified wiring. Just a few inches short of the raised wire that denoted the area where the guards in the tower would shoot.

They all stared at Monica in desperate hope. 

“Are you hiring?” some of the bolder ones asked. “Please, ma'am. My kids need to eat.”

Another spoke. “I need to work. I can’t afford m–*” cough cough cough cough, “My meds.”

“Brass-Balls” Bush grinned as he strolled beside her. “Isn’t it wonderful? The only crime they can commit is on each other! It’s self-policing. And they can’t get any drugs without passing a drug test and writing a two thousand word essay on why they need the drugs. And the hiring process is as simple as picking some of the willing up from the gate.”

“We need blankets,” complained one of the problem element. “Winter’s coming and we’re cold.”

“Sir…” said Monica. “I don’t think this is the solution to the problem that will get you votes.”

“Oh I don’t need to worry about that,” chortled Bush. “Anyone in the poor-sore ghetto is automatically a criminal! They’re not allowed to vote, any more. And the people who really care will be voting for me.”

Monica suppressed a shudder. “I am hiring,” she decided. “I need some housekeepers.” But what she really did was train them in covert infiltration and assassination techniques.

Something needed to be done about the status quo. Making sure that it wasn’t stable was all she could think of.

…which might not have been the best solution, either.

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Challenge #00755 - B024: It’s Just Politics

“It’s like a madhouse, designed by a succession of madmen, each with a deep hatred of their predecessors brand of madness. And it’s on fire.”

[AN: Never in my life have I been prompted to reply with a screenshot of Google asking “Did you mean ‘the Australian Government’?” But no. I am a writer. I make stories.]

Tradition is a very peculiar thing. Things begin with reason and rationality and end in farcical imitation, hundreds or thousands of years later. The story is told of a housewife who cuts her roasts a certain way, because that’s the way her mother did it. Research is undergone and traced back to the grandmother, who could not afford a larger roasting pan, like her more affluent daughters and granddaughters.

Traditions don’t always have to make sense…

Relwer had had enough of the carryings-on of her local politicians. She also had a kickstarter that explained her lofty goals.

Many of them, she was certain, backed her because she promised to get rid of annoying advertising.The rest of it, citizens’ rights, proper drug registration and rehabilitation, the elimination of the glass ceiling… everything that should have been unpopular opinions, basically… all that was overwhelmed by the possibility of reduced blood pressure by way of clever management of really annoying advertising.

She won by a landslide. Filled the houses with people who agreed with her.

It was the first time in history that the political houses were filled with the poor and disenfranchised. Alas, it was also the first time in history that the empowered staged a rebellion. Which was, for the first time in history, the only time that the empowered were successfully overwhelmed by the disempowered, simply because the disempowered actually had a taste of economic freedom under the new regime.

Of course, there were other rebellions, much later. Once an actual even playing field was established. The Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms lovers all teamed up to preserve the way of life they were used to. The people who loved two out of those three teamed up with the religious extremists to try and reassert a rule established by the parts they liked out of a religious book that was written more than a thousand years ago.

Which was quickly squashed by the invention of a community based solely and exclusively on all of the rules in that ancient book. Nobody liked living there. The freedoms they thought they had didn’t exist under Holy Writ.

But… also because of Relwer and her Sensible Revolution… The houses of government now all wear silly hats. Because she had a campaign to display how many politicians were overpaid. She relied on all she needed and nothing more, and wore a silly hat to display her open frugality. She declared to the public that politics was a circus anyway, and she was making all the other clowns stand out. And, to prevent falsification, the silly hat also came with a transparent personal budget.

To this day, the politicians of East Lesser Deregulation are the most humble, and the most ridiculous.

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Challenge #00753 - B022: Attempted Poisoning

Regarding Onions: The crazy food that turns our tears into sulphuric acid. Somewhere along the way some twit must have had the following thought process.

“AARGH MY EYES IT BURNS I wonder what it tastes like”.

Somewhere in the houses of the first cities…

Ari was sick of her husband. He was cruel and vile, and rough with her in their bedchamber. He expected a cooked meal when he came home, expected it hot, but never told her when to expect him.

And he never gave her enough oil for her lamps, forcing her to do most of her work by feel.

He would not let her eat until he had eaten, which made the longer nights insufferable.

Therefore, her only recourse was to poison him.

She’d been gathering them all day. The root of the tassel grass was well known for its eye-burning smell when cut. It served reason that it had to be poisonous.

She’d peeled them and chopped them carefully, and now they were bubbling in the stew while she ate the bread she’d made that day. Let him yell. Let him rave. Let him hit her. He would be dead, soon.

He was too drunk to notice any crumbs on her clothes. He just staggered in and slumped into his place. Thumping the table for his food instead of asking politely. Or asking anything at all.

She made certain he had plenty of the tassel grass root.

“What’s this muck?” he poked at it.

“Stew,” she answered. “It’s always stew. I went gathering them herbs all day. For your health, not that you care.”

He grumbled and growled, but was evidently too drunk to swing at her, so he fell on his food like a common pig.

She expected foam. Paroxysms of terror. The slow realisation that he was dying. She expected his face to change colour.

Nothing. He ate it, burped, and cheered, “That’s the best stew you’ve ever cooked, woman! What was that herb?”

“Uuuuhhhh… nyun,” she said in a fit of inspired desperation.

“Onion, eh? ’S good.” Another loud belch. “Use it more.”

She must have done something wrong. Ari, terrified of repercussions if she just made him sick on the morrow, dug through her stew for every fragment of the freshly-named Onion and crammed it all into her mouth.

It was delicious.

How?

And more importantly, what could she do now?

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Challenge #00752 - B021: Tea Solves Everything

Apparently there was an old prank tv show that faked an alien landing on an English lady’s front lawn. Her immediate reaction was to offer them tea.

Your prompt is the same scenario except it’s a real ship and a couple of extraterrestrials who had to make an emergency landing instead of a prank.

Somewhere east of Cricklewood…

There was no fire. Just a sad hissing of water vapour and the gentle ‘pink pink’ noise of cooling metal from the middle of her prize Begonias. Elsa tutted to herself and murmured, “Oh dear…” It couldn’t be helped, really. She could tell it was an accident. And the lizards inside were alarmed.

Lizard people. They had to be people. They were wearing clothes and shouting at each other in Lizardese. And there were some gestures that, it turned out, were truly universal and generally required most of an upraised fist.

Some of them were hurt.

Elsa scurried back inside for a moment and fetched all the medical supplies she had. And some clean rags. And hot water. And, since the kettle was going anyway, she made tea.

After a bad accident like that, they could probably use a cuppa.

*

The human encountered in our crash site was not the hostile beast we had been lead to believe they were. The creature intuited that we were in need of help and laid before us offerings of a medical nature.

How the creature knew that our battery acid was leaking is a miracle I can’t explain. Yet, after the repairs were finished, and we were puzzling how to restock the battery when the human offered us a cup full of the valuable fluid.

Engineer Zhonn was truly excited and made the human show its teeth. An alarming moment until we realised that the display was friendly. It was smiling.

The only disturbing part in the entire encounter was that the human drank her portion of battery acid in front of us. But, considering that we landed on a Class Four Deathworld and lived to tell the tale, I consider this incident to be minor.

It may be possible to train humans to be amenable to frailer species. It would take a long time and a significant effort, but a few examples show promise.

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Challenge #00751 - B020: When is a Troll Not a Troll?

*LOUD ANGRY-* Oh, I’m sorry. I’m so used to people getting it wrong it’s a reflex by now.

There are certain phrases that are bound to get a reaction from any fandom. Things like, “Star Trek… that’s the one with Doctor Spock, right?” or confusing Star Trek with Star Wars. Proclaiming the love for an almost universally-hated character is a good one. And for those who follow All My Daughters, the phrase, “Why aren’t there many men in this show?” is always good to get someone ranting about this new invention called ‘equality’.

The longer a fandom has been around, the more established the errors that people assume are factual, and the more tired the fandom is of hearing them. And for the human followers of the Consortium of Steam, it’s “Didn’t one of those girls used to be a guy?”

Shayde was so sick of hearing it that she began to dread checking their steam-powered merchandise site, because all the people who could decipher what she was doing through her eyescreen would inevitably say the wrong thing.

And she’d been a hardcore fan ever since she’d first seen them entertaining on a street corner near Walter Manor. Shortly before one of the Walter Workers broke it up and dragged them away because they had, once again, snuck out of the mansion and grounds to follow their programming.

She’d had lunch at that cafe, every day for a fortnight, just to see them do it again. She’d giggled at their ludicrous fake moustaches and adored their songs. She’d brought her guitar with her and very shyly asked for a jam.

The robots had been eighty-six years old, then. She was twelve. And she’d asked why Rabbit was done up like a boy instead of the girl she really was.

They’d come by the Galactic Alliance the long way. Down a wormhole to set up a new world, and through the years to the twenty-fifth century. Shayde had undergone a rather intense and painful shortcut through ten subjective years of being called a demon.

But still folks said it.

Someone was eyeing her off as she checked the forums for activity. “Can ye be helped?” she challenged.

“That’s the Consortium of Steam forum, right? One of the girl bots was misgendered as a guy for over a century, right?”

She took a deep breath for a full-out holler before her brain caught up with what the poor sod had said. As a result, her first three words were hostile. “Yeh ye can–” Damnit. “Sorry. I’m too used tae correcting people. Accidental rant mode. Would ye like tae know more about 'em?”

“I don’t know if I have the Time…” the young lady rummaged in her purse.

“Don’t ye fret. I consider this one a free service,” she offered a seat nearby. “I first met 'em in eighty-two when they were still callin’ themselves Colonel Walter’s Steam Man Band…”

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Sensible Economic Decision

“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.“ - Randall Munroe

[AN: I know I’ve done this twice before. Let’s see if the third is a stretch. Also, my laptop is still dead and all my progress on KFZ is in limbo. I’m using Beloved’s lappy and seriously praying I can at least recover what I’ve written in KFZ T_T]

(#00750 - B019)

They had made buildings to be almost indestructible. Yet the plants were still taking over. The animals were still moving in. Highly adaptable omnivores, all of them.

Tier hated finding graveworlds. There was an intense sense of coming there just a little too late. Even when the evidence indicated that they had arrived more or less a century too late. Whatever had happened here, the ecology had taken some significant time to reach the city hearts.

This planet’s answer to goats faced off in what was once a city square. Posturing and butting at each other.

There was no cogniscent life left on this world. They’d run all the possible scans. Even people regressed back to the stone age would have shown a sign of their existence.

Now it was up to Tier and her crew to unearth this planet’s cause of death.

Data centres, once revived by judicial jiggery-pokery, showed plethoras of information about environmental impact and how profits were more important than the planet’s wellbeing. Lots of arguments along the lines of, "When the last plant dies, we will realise that we can’t eat money.” But of course the profit-making organisations ignored the naysayers, cancelled all efforts to set up colonies elsewhere, and continued on their path to inevitable destruction.

Poorly-researched artificial foods also contributed, causing disease and metabolic failure in the surviving citizens. Monocultures were wiped out by one plague, and the people starved.

Cause of death: Combination trophic cascade disaster, climate change, and disease. Tier wanted to write: Corporate greed into her report… but the Galactic alliance frowned on that ever since they regulated how far bodies corporate could actually go.

They didn’t want the corporations who were doing it right to feel bad about themselves.

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Challenge #00749 - B018: Crazy Apes

http://imgur.com/gallery/IeLuO

something based on this lovely mini-story?

Understanding the entire concept took some time. Earth bombarded the Dracs with popular media. All the stories where someone made a noble sacrifice for the greater good.

How ingrained in us it was that one life for the betterment of others was the good thing to do. How selflessness was a virtue.

The Ambassadors were horrified. Perplexed. Confused. Bemused. And overall, plain confounded.

The Dracs studied us, of course. Examined Earth for the first time since they discovered us. They learned about the human ability to populate an area until overpopulation became a serious threat. About our ability to drain a resource to the point of scarcity and continue draining it whilst living in heavy denial. All whilst preventing the means with which to pursue alternate strategies.

They saw how our females risk their lives and health just to bring more humans into existence. They saw how our planet was a Class Four Deathworld. They saw how many species used the ‘populate or perish’ model for survival against the odds. And they saw us. A bumbling bunch of balding apes, struggling against the elements, a hostile environment, and each other to gain whatever it was we thought we wanted.

Then the most powerful species in the known universe offered terms of surrender.

Their surrender.

To us.

Decades after they filled the skies with their warships and declared the entire solar system to be a protectorate of the Dracaenin Empire, the Dracs surrendered to us. And many of us still didn’t understand what we did.

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Challenge #00748 - B017: Informed Decision

Keeping the groups that sing “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby” apart turns out not to be the hard part - the hard part is choosing which area to stay with. Do you want the eerie whispering, or the sudden heart attack?

[AN: For those wondering where this prompt came from, check out story #171 in One Leap Year of Instants, available for whatever you want on Smashwords. Please choose to pay a dollar value for this anthology]

Humans were strange creatures. Norix knew this. When using them as a labor force, one had to be supremely careful about which sort went on what missions. The primary test was to have them listen to a particular, rhythmic bass track, and note whether they screamed, “Pressure!” or whispered, “Ice, ice, baby.”

It was simply a matter of stopping fights before they started. Many pieces of Norix’s equipment wasn’t meant to withstand the slings and arrows of outraged deathworlders.

Which was why she had warning notes on the entrances to the human working areas. For the safety and sanity of her nonhuman employees.

One warning read: Humans make sudden loud noises within.

The other one, the one that was avoided most by both her and her employees, read: Humans whispering rhythmically within.

Loud noises could be dealt with. They could be anticipated. But the whispering… it reached down into the depths of eldritch terrors and grasped the fight-or-flight responses in an iron fist.

Norix held out for an entire Standard Year before she simply stopped hiring the ones that sang Ice Ice Baby.

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Challenge #00747 - B016: What a Voice

Following in from the last one, the musical shenanigans of Francoeur and Kurt.

Three weeks in…

Audiences loved the acrobatics. Carlotta could have done without the post-show bickering, especially now that Todd was picking up enough French to cuss in.

But this time, the froggy mutant slunk off into the depths of backstage, distancing himself from the slightly demonic Kurt.

Carlotta followed him. She didn’t understand much English and he didn’t understand much French, but she knew instinctively that he needed a mother. And it was backstage, between the flats, that she heard the voice of an angel.

The song was strange to her, but the sentiment was clear. Lonely and missing home.

“…and much have I seen. Dark distant mountains with valleys of green. Vast painted deserts the sun sets on fire. As it carries me back to the Mull of Kintire…”

He almost jumped out of his skin when Carlotta hugged him.

”[I wasn’t doin’ nuthin’,]“ said Todd, ineffectively struggling to get free. He wasn’t trying at all. Just making a show of wriggling loose for anyone who might be watching.

He wouldn’t understand her, but she could at least try to tell him. “Your voice is magic. Don’t hid your light under a bushel.”

*

Much, much later, when they were done with their cross-time adventures, Todd sidled up to Kurt and asked, “Yo. What’s ‘Votre voix est magique’ mean?”

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