More Futurisitic Fun Than You Really Wanted, part I of V

[LMNO]

Posted.  It takes up 39 pages of a file with a page break at the end of each entry, and it's over 11,000 words.  WHEN AND HOW DID THAT HAPPEN!?

Tell me about it. The 30 Days of Eris thing started as a joke, and ended up at 31,000 words.


Incidentally Roger, I might have time to give you a call tonight about that.

[Eater of Clowns]

He sat on a little hill with his back against a poplar and tried to smell the ash on the breeze.  For once, in his many visits here, he hoped not to catch the scent.  Before he might have convinced himself that it was her, still on the wind and in a way with him.  This time, though, it would mean something else.  It would mean his country was burning.

So he sat on the grass in the patched sunlight and tried to think about what to think about.  There were the times he came here with her but he found them faded.  Gray, somehow, and not whole.  And he could not focus on a single memory.  All of them were tied together in the proper little image of his wife, zoning out his motor mouth and shrugging off his cynicism.  A bit of feeling came and he tried to seize it and let it wash over him but it escaped, so ethereal, taken by even the day's gentle wind like the fine ash years before.

The meager brightness proved too much through his sunglasses.  Adjustment to the overwhelming natural light of the world above was taking a long, painful time.  England, it seemed, was too sunny.  He closed his eyes to shield them and to force the memories to dance upon the lids.  He squeezed them tighter as though it would help and he slumped against the knobs and rough bark of the tree in frustration.

A memory, just one here, just a single day that wasn't presided over by the fragile, cold light of the hospital.  Even the bickering or the anger, the days when he swore it was over and hated himself for his inability to reconcile.  He'd feel that again if it meant he could feel anything.

Finally, one came.  He and his fiancé and a friend of theirs with whom he'd long since lost contact, strolling about and laughing about nothing in particular.  And there was even a song with it.  It was sung by a voice at once mocking and hateful and triumphant and sorrowful, conducted in the darkness of the Southampton sewers.

He rose, now, from his rest against the tree.  Walking away he did not take even a moment to look over the view from the hill or back at the spot itself.  Because he found what he was looking for, that memory, and even that had become tainted by the other woman.  His new love and reason for existence that consumes his past in his own mind just as it consumes his life in the present.

Her name is Nessie.

[LMNO]

EoC, you just blew my fucking mind. 

I'm serious... I know it's a trope, but it works so fucking well.  And your prose really kicked into high gear.


Damn.  I have been so impressed by this entire story.

[Luna]

Damn, man.

Your first beer's on me, tomorrow.

[Adios]

EoC, you just blew my fucking mind. 

I'm serious... I know it's a trope, but it works so fucking well.  And your prose really kicked into high gear.


Damn.  I have been so impressed by this entire story.

I am too ashamed to write any further.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

EoC, you just blew my fucking mind. 

I'm serious... I know it's a trope, but it works so fucking well.  And your prose really kicked into high gear.


Damn.  I have been so impressed by this entire story.

I am too ashamed to write any further.

Charley, man, don't be like that. Your writing is awesome, too. You have done some really great stuff in this thread. Not to mention how you rocked your own thread with those stories about your life. There is more than one amazing talent at PD.com.

[Luna]

EoC, you just blew my fucking mind.  

I'm serious... I know it's a trope, but it works so fucking well.  And your prose really kicked into high gear.


Damn.  I have been so impressed by this entire story.

I am too ashamed to write any further.

Whyfor?  I love your stuff, Charley!

Honestly, I don't think ANY of this (well, except Roger's original post) would be as awesome as it is without us all bouncing stuff off each other.

[Cardinal Pizza Deliverance.]

First bit of Khara's story, takes place before the training camp story.


She sat on the damp, sticky sewer floor. The manhole cover, and the street it was set into, seemed as far away from her as the sky was from the street. Light trickled through the gaps between cover and street, putting her in a halo of wavering light. A bad spot, she knew. It ruined her vision for the dark and kept her from seeing what else was down here.

But she didn't want to leave the light, couldn't bear to part with this last piece of 'normal' life. This was a nightmare.

After helping her neighbors pack up their belongings, making sure everyone had at least a week of food, and bundling children too small to walk into stolen shopping carts - all so the other occupants of her neighborhood could move out quickly when the soldiers came and quarantined everything . . . she'd been abandoned.

Oh the rest of her family, even her pets, had gotten out. But when she'd gone back to fetch the family Bible for the little old lady in the flat above hers, they'd left her behind. She'd gotten to the exit point, breathless and sore, just in time to hear another neighbor tell the soldiers waiting impatiently that everyone was out. Everyone.

They'd filed out. Closed the gate. And then cut all the power to her part of the city.

She'd expected England to be different from America, maybe that was the problem. All the bullshit and heartache she'd left behind when she'd crossed the pond with her family had been replaced with a glowing sense of optimism and hope. She'd spent years being as helpful and cheerful as she could, giving whatever she had to give to help those around her - because she knew all about rough spots and hard knocks, didn't she?

And here was a particularly hard knock pounding right on her god damn front teeth with all the subtly of a jumbo jet.

She'd raced up to the gate, and slapped it, trying to get someone's attention. She'd screamed, or tried to, when the electrified fence had shocked her so hard it knocked her backwards and then unconscious.

Now she lived in a nightmare.

When she'd come to, she'd heard gunfire and rough laughter only a few feet away. A homeless man she'd known and helped keep fed and clothed begged for his life. But he was shot. One of the soldiers said it was a mercy. For England having one less mouth to feed and the old man for not having to feed the Nessies. She'd been next.

But an eerie drone rose up all round her, seeming to seep upwards from the ground until pebbles rattled across the street and all the abandoned buildings rumbled.

The soldiers had fled and she had lay there crying the street until dawn, too scared to move.

But the sun had risen. And the soldiers would come back to kill her. So she was hiding where they wouldn't go, where the noise had to have come from, whatever it was.

She was in limbo, she thought. Stuck, unable to move between a world that didn't want her and one that terrified her. Again.

[Adios]

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

Damn.....   

[Eater of Clowns]

Alec Hayes looked into the glass he held.  It was smudged with fingerprints and ringed with head, and at the bottom waited one last swallow.  This was the point where things became contemplative.  It was always at the end of that second pint where the mundane became complex and his usual unnatural focus widened considerably.  He upended the glass and drank with the lazy slowness of a man who just wants to pass the time.

The pub was emptier these days.  It changed hands a few times during his stay in the cozy Inn of the Screeching Servo.  Follow the money.  That's what he'd told Sams way back, follow the money and you'll find out what the Paynites have for an angle.

The Paynites aren't the problem anymore though, are they?  Exactly what he knew would come to pass had come to pass.  They were losing steadily.  They were losing, actually, precisely slowly enough to not know they were losing and that they needed help.  It wasn't a matter of being overwhelmed.  Being overwhelmed once would be enough to spur even the most stubborn of the chaplains into taking action.  It was the case of the novice chess player.  He couldn't grasp the grander strategy employed, and so when he eliminated the odd rook that bishop waiting in the back became a lot more real than it had previously been.

Worse than that, they couldn't be blamed.  In fact, they were even doing well.  The servoheads called the Nessies monsters, aliens, demons and mutants.  Whatever they were, their mind was too foreign to comprehend.  Humanity, in comparison, was predictable.

As he sighed deeply and set the glass down, a call came from somewhere else in the pub, "The volume!  Hit the volume!"

Accordingly the noise in the little place shifted.  Quiet chatter gave way to the excited and professional voice of the reporter.

"We are unaware at this time of the names of the young man and woman who brought us here -" her sentence was cut off by a series of ear splitting clangs.

This was his cue.  Hayes set down a few notes for the drinks and rose to leave.  He couldn't think in this kind of racket.  With his hand on the door handle, he froze at what came next.

His blood froze and beer nearly came back up.  He felt naked and vulnerable in the presence of that sound, a hundred Nessies wailing, without his team or the protection of the powered armor.  The other patrons were unblinking with mouths agape.  It was not the fear they felt, but the mind shattering realization beyond even modern skepticism that this was something new and terrible.

There was yelling and frantic movement.  The cameraman and reporter were running, panting, through corridors.  The screen was blurs and rushed footsteps, several dozen pairs of them, all seeming to be journalists.  It changed from concrete to tile, from tile to gravel, and from gravel to grass where it stopped.  The camera refocused, finally, and steadied following the frantic escape, to focus on a school, almost serene in the darkness.

The reporter was speechless for a while.  Her well tailored appearance all that of a crazy woman now, hair wild and eyes wilder.

In the pub there was silence.  Hayes still stood with one hand on the door, breathing with the deliberate pace of someone who might forget to do it if they don't focus.  Hands on glasses were stiff and white knuckled and claw like and shaking.

The ensuing few minutes were like hours, even to them in their safe little corner drinking hole.  The reporter tried, haltingly, to say a few words, to explain the scene before her but she failed and she gave up and she looked around uncertainly at her colleagues, some rivals, and she never turned her gaze far from the dark, still school.  It was nearly serene.  Like a bomb awaiting some silent inner mechanism before becoming fire and agony.

Suddenly, echoes mingled as they escaped from the empty hallways.  A lone figure ran forth from the building, the devil on its heels.  The camera followed him and zoomed.

The pub saw a young man who would likely die.  Hayes saw a young man who already had.

"Sams!" he shouted.  The first sound in the place since they started watching.  He opened the door and left.  Behind him, a horde of the creatures he'd come to know as Nessie swept outward from a decimated building and threw themselves in their elated fury at the gathered crowd, and the camera died.

[Luna]

Damn...

[Adios]

Damn...

[P3nT4gR4m]

I just got wood. Serious wood! I drove a nail into it. Didn't feel a thing. Took 3 of us and a claw hammer to get it back out. It was THAT kind of wood! 

[The Good Reverend Roger]

RUN, SAMS, RUN!