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Whisper whisper extension! Whisper whisper whisper....

[@Mandle]

Hey Guys,

Great bunch of stories this time.  They were all well-written and engaging.  I ended up mostly voting based on adherence to the theme....    

Specific feedback is in hide-tags so I don't spoil Mandle's life:

Spoiler

@Mandle:  I found the motive disturbing but sadly realistic, and your description of the crime was as thorough as it was graphic.  I won't pretend that I liked the content of your story, and the message was a bit of a downer, but your writing style and word choice was strong (I particularly liked the "nest of satanic vipers").  The biggest issue for me was the tangential link to anything sphinx-like: basically it was just the company name.  Even the game they were making, which could have somehow related to riddles or sphinxes, was basically just a graphic FPS set in a fantasy Egypt.  I voted for your story, but not as much as for the other ones.

@Stupot:  This was an exciting and action-packed romp through Cairo - literally, when it came to the 50 foot tall kitten.  Although I am left wondering whether it was actually a 50 foot kitten that wrought all the carnage, or just an elaborate hoax perpetrated by Mr. Moussa and the nanobots.  Think about it: he had the ability to make large life-like creatures appear (and, presumably, to make prominent monuments disappear), he was around when Toby grabbed the piece of stone and so could trigger the attack to coincide with that event, and there is no other rational explanation (in the context of the game world) for how the kitten came to life (it was even reported to be stone inside by Dr. Al-Ameen).  There is the little hitch of the nanobots not being able to actually interact with things (witness the attempted handshake), but perhaps that too was a ruse to ensure that Mr. Moussa (or his company) escaped culpability? 

@WHAM:  This was an epic quest with some awesome character development as historical events were revealed for what they really were.  But.... the sphinx thing seemed to be a bit incongruous with the rest of the story.  Thomas of Ravenwood is walking through snows seeking justice and then... bam!  He's in the desert sands talking to a sphinx-like stone monument god-thingy.  How the... what?!?  And then there's the afore-mentioned journey down memory lane, which was great as it turned Thomas' idea of justice on its head (although in an un-sphinx-like manner the creature resolved more riddles than it posed), but then... bam!  We are back in the snows.  It kind of feels like the dream-walk or inner revelation or magic side-trip was just bolted onto the story more than an integral part of it.  Or maybe it was the long trek through the snows that was bolted on to the main meat of the story?     I think with a bit of editing either way yours could have been the best story of the lot, as it contained many elements of a truly great tale.

[\hide]

Well, thank heavens for those hide-tags!  Otherwise people might accidentally read about what they were presumably interested in (i.e. reaction to the stories). 

[close]

[A Sphinxster Says What?]

A Sphinxster Says What?

Dnìt, the twenty-third day of Choiak.  Man, I hate Dnìtdays.  It’s the hump day of the Egyptian calendar.  Well, one of the hump days…  Our week is kind of like a bactrian camel, with more humps than you can shake a was sceptre at.  And I’m not talking about sweaty slave girl humps down at the temple of Bes, either.  No, I’m talking about real hump days in the middle of really, really long weeks.  Weeks of back-breaking stone hauling or eye-bleeding stone cutting or torso-snapping crocodile wrangling.  It’s a bitch-long week for anyone who’s a slave, and pretty much everyone is a slave.  It’s a rough life, but somebody’s gotta live it.

My name’s Toth, and I really shouldn’t complain.  Sure, I’m press-ganged into manual labour at harvest three times a year, and everyone has put in their mandatory decade over at the pyramid works.  But in the big scheme of things, my endless toil pales in comparison to many others.  For starters, I work nights, which is way cooler than the day shift, and comes with mercifully less slave-driver supervision.  Second, I’m a Medjay.  Once my people were nomads in the eastern desert, and then later we were hired on by a pharaoh as desert-rangers to keep the peace.  Well, fast-forward six dynasties and now we’re basically a loin-clothed police force charged with keeping order on the mean streets of Memphis.  And my role in the force is actually cushier than most.  I’m a detective, which means I get to spend most of my time thinking.  Thinking about doing my endless papyrus work.  Thinking about getting another triangular donut down at the canteen.  Thinking about how damn long our Egyptian weeks are….

And that’s when she walks in, all eye makeup and headdress, with fingernails like a jackal and more jewellery than a bedouin belly-dancer .  Her name’s Sobekneferu or something long and noble like that.  She likes to twitch her hips when she talks, and gods she talks a lot.  Turns out her noble husband is being blackmailed for 100 000 shats by some secret sect called The Ma’at.  I’ve heard of these guys - shadowy figures of the night who drink the blood of virgins and wear hippopotamus costumes to raid small villages.  But they like to keep a lowish profile, so normally they steer clear of nobles and the capital.  Anyway, apparently they are upping their game these days, since Sobekneffwhatever’s daughter has now been kidnapped to make her rich daddy pay up.  And now it’s my job to save the day for no pay and meagre donut rations.  Gods, I hate Dnìtdays….

So we load up in the patrol chariot.  Not Sobekehoohoo - she travels in a litter carried by a dozen slaves.  No, just me and my assistant-detective slave named Khonsu.  Sometimes we bring Khonsu’s slave too, but there’s not that much room in the chariot.  Especially since regulations dictate that we also bring a wailing slave to scream like a siren in an emergency, and a whacking slave to paddle the wailing slave in the balls every ten seconds to make him scream.  And then there are four more slaves hitched up to the front of the chariot since horses are expensive to feed, but we have to leave room for them in the back just in case we go down hill so they don’t slow us down.  And then there’s the slave-driver, who steers the slaves and controls their speed with an ingenious four-tailed whip system (which can also serve to get the siren working if you find yourself short-staffed).  There’s not any room for criminals if you actually catch somebody, so they usually end up being dragged behind. 

Slowly we trundle off to the palace of Sobekowhatsherface.  Painfully slowly, and I’m not just talking ball-whacking siren pain.  The patrol chariot is so slow that there are grandma slaves carrying huge stone blocks on their backs passing us.  Bear in mind that this is the middle of the night and these old-timers have already been working for 18 hours straight to get their quota in.  I use my standard issue Medjay crook to hitch a ride behind one of the sturdier old ladies, just to speed things along.  I think about asking Khonsu to get out and push, but he’s leery of sliding past the ball-whacker slave, lest the paddle catch him by accident.  Poor Khonsu was a siren slave when he was a raw recruit.  Ironically I was a ball-whacker slave, and sometimes we joke about that (although Khonsu’s mirth seems slightly hollow).

At length we arrive at the palace to investigate.  There is hieroglyphic graffiti painted on the walls that leave no doubt that this was the work of The Ma’at sect.  There’s some weird freaky stuff illustrated there, showing organ extractions and flying pyramids and highly acrobatic sex-contortions.  Khonsu eagerly draws notes for the case file.  Prominently featured is this half-woman, half-cat who’s taking a shat (that’s our money, remember).  I deduce that this Sphinx character is an avatar for The Ma’at leader, a criminal so brazen and conceited that she advertises herself on the walls of her crime scenes.  This Sphinx character fancies herself some kind of supervillain who is above the law.  We’ll see about that.

Further investigations of the palace revealed a fully stocked larder (some of which was necessarily impounded for evidence), a beer cellar (more evidence), and a boutique harem (way more evidence!).  There wasn’t a trace of Sobekafrufru’s daughter, but there was a ransom note and what looked like lion paw-prints in her room - good attention to detail, given the Sphinx theme of the kidnapper.  The ransom note was in a hieroglyphic cipher that I didn’t understand.  Lord Mister Sobekadoodle informed us that it was a Syriac adaptation of our writing system, and that it said to have the money balanced precariously on the tip of an ancient pyramid on the outskirts of town by midnight tomorrow or their daughter would be inducted into the mysteries of Ma’at, whatever that meant.

So here I am with 24 hours to find some girl I never met with no real leads and way too much beer along for the ride.  Oh, and it turns out that Lord Mister Sobekookoo is good pals with the Pharaoh, so I better make things right or I’ll be chipping mountains into monuments for the rest of my days.  Great.  Just great.  Khonsu at least seems optimistic, probably because he thinks he’ll be taking my place as chief detective on the Medjay force.  At least he’s a good sketcher….

But wait!  Something catches my eye on his papyrus scratchings in the moonlight.  What I mistook for a weird sex-act might actually be just two people together, working in tandem.  They have four legs together, and the person in the front seems to be talking smartly - a Sphinx!  And Lord Mister Sobekaidunno said that the note was written in a Syriac corruption of our language.  Quickly I ask Khonsu if there are any Syriac traders or embassies in town this week.  He shrugs, but the siren slave pipes up and says that a pair of Syriac acrobats have been awing crowds down by the Nile since last Dnìtday (confusingly there are several Dnìtdays in our week!).  This seems like more than coincidence, so I direct the patrol chariot driver to get us to the location as fast as possible.  Unfortunately this meant turning the siren on, but I make a mental note to put forth the siren-slave for promotion if I am still chief detective in two day’s time.

   Well it turns out the Nile is a long river, and it’s hard to get specific directions from a slave in only 10 second intervals between his siren screams of pain.  Eventually we track down the acrobats’ encampment down on the mud flats - lucky for them the annual floods are still some months off, although presumably since they are acrobats they could just flip away right before the waters get them (to thunderous applause, no less).  We attempt to interrogate them but the whole Syriac dialect thing is a real communication barrier.  Either they are in the market for a nemes crown to bring back to Assyria for their favourite cat, or they are haunted by undead onions in the moonlight.  Both stories sound suspicious, so we search their encampment.  We don’t find any noble daughters or even blood-drained virgins, but we did find some goofy hippopotamus costumes in their baggage.  They say they are for their performance (or their nipples are particularly sensitive to sunlight - again the language barrier), but I decide to take them into custody nonetheless.  Usually they’d be dragged behind the chariot like cheetah bait, but through their marvellous leaps and contortions they end up instead balanced on the shoulders of the siren and ball-whacking slave. 

   I’m at a loss for what to do next, so we just tool around the streets of Memphis in the patrol chariot for the next few hours, trying to impress the harem girls we impounded back at the palace.  It turns out some of them are actually quite educated, and one in particular is doing her priestess training through a correspondence course.  Although not familiar with The Ma’at sect in particular, she talks excitedly about some sort of godly conjunction that is happening the following night when the stars align in the west.  This fact sticks with me, as the old pyramid we’re supposed to leave the money atop is to the west of town.  Then our conversation is interrupted by the patrol chariot getting stuck in a random sand dune.

   The closest thing we have to a shovel is the ball-whacking paddle, but it’s against sanitary regulations to use it on anything other than slave crotches.  I consider using my Medjay crook, but it’s just as likely that the chariot is plain too heavy.  So we all sit down and drink all the beer evidence we impounded from the palace in order to lighten the load.  The sun is rising by the time the beer runs out, and we have a grand old time laughing at Khonsu digging in the sand with his hands and then his feet, kind of like a cat in a litter box.  Then I suddenly have another epiphany: the lion footprints!  Quickly I look over Khonsu’s crime-scene sketches and determine that the placement of the footprints is too realistic to be done artificially - they must have had a real-live lion on site!  And how many tamed lions could there possibly be in town?  And how many of those might have Syriac handlers? 

I canvas the group (four pulling slaves, one slave driver, one siren-slave, one ball-whacking slave, one assistant-detective slave, four harem slaves, and two acrobat slaves -Osirus, no wonder the chariot got bogged down!) and piece together our collective knowledge.  Apparently there are between 18 and 22 lions in town (we’re not sure if the death pit under the Temple of Ptah uses crocodiles or lions, since no one has first-hand experience of its depths).  Of those, most are just menagerie beasts, guard cats, or death pit felines.  In fact, we only know of two that are tame enough to be handled.  One is owned by the Pharaoh himself and has been trained to balance an asp on its nose for the purposes of ritualistic suicide should the need arise.  The second is a toothless old beast named Mumu who gives rides to children in an upscale neighbourhood on the east side - conveniently close to the very palace that Shebadawhosit’s daughter was kidnapped from!

We all pile back onto the patrol chariot to check out the latest lead, only to discover that despite Khonsu’s comedic efforts it is still stuck in the sand.  Only by burying a couple slaves in the sand under the wheels can we get enough traction to pull free, but by this time it’s already midday and the heat is oppressive.  We pull into a service station where I splurge on a couple of palm-frond waving slaves to help keep us cool on the long drive back to the east side.  I was saving those shats for retirement but, hey, when you’ve only got twelve hours of relative freedom left to live pocket change starts burning holes in your loincloth.

The petting zoo had some good news and bad news.  The bad news was that Mumu died two months ago.  The good news was that her eternal soul was preserved in a clay jar by a travelling shaman.  And get this: the shaman was wearing a ritual hippopotamus costume at the time - it can’t be a coincidence!  We ask to see the jar, but alas it has been stolen!  I sit down in the sand in despair, and a large part of our throng wanders off to pick up their lives where they left off.  Only the palm-frond slaves and Khonsu remain with me, the former basking me in a refreshing yet soul-chilling breeze of nemesis, the latter patting my shoulders consolingly and trying out my Medjay crook for size.  Dusk is approaching quickly, and soon my failure will be manifest.  I consider running away with the acrobats back to Assyria, but it’s a long walk back to the river and I’m not very good at putting effort into things.  What would really cheer me up right now is a bunch of triangle donuts, more of that beer, and two or three of those harem slaves.

But wait… what’s this?  The setting sun falls behind a nearby monument, casting a circle of light onto Khonsu’s papyrus scribblings.  Is it a sign from Ra, the sun god, that there is some clue that I have overlooked?  Frantically I lay out the drawings of the crime scene, scrutinising them in the fading light.  I see nothing of note, but the passing zookeeper identifies the missing Mumu soul jar on the bed stand in Shebaabaabazoo’s daughter’s room.  And it is open!  That little minx!  I mean Sphinx!  I mean…. I don’t know what I mean, but I’m certain the daughter is tits deep in this Ma’at conspiracy.  The family even speaks Syriac.  This changes everything!

   Quickly I tell Khonsu to send a message to the Shebernerberbers to come to the pyramid at the appointed time, and then to procure some important supplies for this evening: a grain sack, a silver vine plant, a camel, an assortment of bronze bangles, a clay jar, two more palm-fronds, a ball-whacking paddle, and a travelling shaman of non-Syriac extraction.

*   *   *   *   *   *

   Midnight on Dnìtday.  I know I started my tale on Dnìtday, but there are a lot of Dnìtdays on the Egyptian calendar.  I like this Dnìtday even less than the last one, since I am sweating like Anubis at the gates of hell waiting for my carefully orchestrated trap to spring.

   Mister and Missus Shebinaknefrubeedoo scale the pyramid and lay a jingling sack of shat on top, and then descend to wait for the villainous Sphinx to appear.  The stars churn in their heavenly orb: soon the conjunction will be at hand.  And then there she is, silhouetted against the rising moon: a real live Sphinx!  She bounds up the pyramid and claims her prize, laughing maniacally at her feat.  But what’s this?!?  The sack suddenly rips open, revealing none other than me!  I’m decked out in jangling bangles to sound like coin (which in ancient Egypt is actually rings, so the ruse worked well).  Before the Sphinx can react I shove the silver vine plant into her face, instantly dosing her with mind-altering cat drugs.  Dreamily, she stumbles off the pyramid summit into the arms of the waiting shaman and his soul-capturing clay jar.  I pull the camel into place atop the pyramid and then slide down the pyramid to join the Shebenehoohoos to watch the show.

   â€œWhat exactly do you think is going to happen to that camel?” the noble father asks sceptically.

   But I shush him with a finger over my lips, as the show is about to begin.  Suddenly the last star clicks into place and the gods themselves appear, not as the familiar animal-headed men that are so popularly depicted on tomb walls and the more ephemeral papyrus cartoons that appear in our weekend newspapers, but in great floating pyramid-shaped vessels from the sky.  They hover over the pyramid, zap the camel up in a beam of light, and then bugger off into the heavens.  The Shebakeroos are dumbfounded, until the Missus remembers to ask about her daughter.

   â€œRight over there!” I beam, directing their attention to the shaman.  Sure enough, he has re-bottled the soul of Mumu the decrepit old petting lion into the clay jar, releasing their daughter from the spell that had transformed her into a half-cat, half-human villain.  They rush to hug their daughter, then chastise her for falling in with the wacky Ma’at sect and trying to run away with the gods.

   I shrug, telling Khonsu that it was another job done.  He looks confusingly at the two palm-fronds and ball-whacking paddle that remain unused.  I tell him the extra palm-fronds are for the other hands of my palm-frond slaves, thereby doubling their productivity.  And I tell him the ball-whacking paddle is for him if he ever questions my ability as a Medjay detective ever again.  Khonsu drops the paddle as he instinctively covers his crotch, swearing allegiance to me from now until eternity, which I’m guessing will probably fall on a Dnìtday.

Wait am moment. Let me look in my pockets, I'm sure I saw some extra time in there somewhere... Where is it... Hm, ideas for games... Stories I never finished... Things I still have to do (no, that one can go in the trash)... Oh, here it is, three days! No idea where they come from but here they are and I don't know what to do with them.
Do you want them?
Don't answer, just take them.

Deadline extended: 5. July.

Woot!  I was about to get started, but now I get the whole weekend to really procrastinate think up some good ideas.   

Thanks Sini! 

Anyone here watch the fantastic adult cartoon called Venture Brothers?   

[@Mandle:]

It is true, the voting system would have worked better for people who weren't also participants (although it is pure conjecture that such people actually exist....). 

Nevertheless the votes are in and we have a winner!  But first, some quick feedback:

@Mandle:  Well, you at least mentioned caveman things, so....     Apart from the deviance from the theme, the story was cryptic and required reading right to the last line to really get.  On rereading, I also assumed "we" meant brain cells, which makes sense in the context of learning mathematics, language, and social studies.  But it makes a bit less sense in the context of once being able to smash the foe with a wave of a hand (assuming the foe is a degenerative disease such as Alzheimers?), and it makes not a lick of sense in terms of going back to live in caves without fire.  The declining spelling and sense towards the end of the first-person part of the story suggest this might be the deteriorating brain cells misinterpreting what was actually going on, but it's a bit of a muddle that detracts from the power of the reveal at the end.

@ Stupot:  This was a much better caveman story, with good old-fashioned promiscuous mating and head-smashing.      The use of music and berries as a Trojan Horse was clever, although strategically unwise.  Clearly people of that time were suspicious of strangers and could just have easily murdered the musician as accepted him - why not just surround the place and attack in the night, without resort to the "inside man" ploy?  The hollow stone head was also confusing: if the taller tribe could carve stone, why couldn't they attack with better weapons?  Or if their attack was just to send a message rather than destroy the other tribe, why slash the elder's throat?  I like how you accurately represented inter-tribal warfare as a limited scale enterprise with little foresight of how it might provoke future revenge attacks, but it makes for frustrating reading with the benefit of hindsight.  However, I think you did well to capture the zeitgeist of the times.

@Sinitrena:  Hchn's comedy of errors that ended up working in his favour was an exciting read, and I liked how you juxtaposed what actually happened to the drawings on a cave wall.  Were their specific paintings that served as your inspiration?  It would have been lovely if a picture had accompanied your text.  As for the story itself the only logical flaw I can see is the lugging of the sabre-tooth's carcass up the canyon and back to camp - those things weighed in at 160 - 280kg (350-620 pounds)!  Getting close enough to bash the thing on the head with a sharpened rock would also have been problematic - the claws on its outstretched forelimbs would have made a formidable barrier - but I suppose a skilled and daring hunter might have managed it.

And now to the voting tallies.  I apologise for the confusion in the voting system, but in the end each person voted with their gut and that's what we're going with.

In third place, with 5 votes, we have Mandle - may the slope on your forehead never diminish. 

In second place, with 6 votes, we have Sinitrena - may you ever have good fortune on the hunt.   

In first place, with 7 votes, we have Stupot - may your flint never go dull!   

And so it falls to Stupot to set up the next competition.  Congratulations!   Not to detract from your victory, but it is true that had Sinitrena followed the voting protocol as stipulated the result would have been reversed.  However, she felt strongly that your story deserved the extra vote (which you can figure out by mathematically reverse engineering the public totals if you really cared to, so I don't feel as if I am violating secret ballot voter-administrator privilege  ).  I concur that your story probably deserved a slight edge, so I see no reason to meddle with how things played out.   

Hope to see you all out again next time!

Whoa... now I'm confused too! 

Since this is a theme based on the palaeolithic era, I would say go with your gut instinct.   

[moral obligation]

What the-?!?  Right justified text?!?  Sinitrena, you take things too far!   

All joking aside, we have - after aeons of human evolution - at long last reached the deadline for this contest.  Some of you may have since evolved extra mini thumbs to improve typing on a phone screen, or secondary sideways-blinking blue-light-filtering eye-lids to improve your prospects on dating apps.  But spare a moment to think of the poor palaeolithic grunts who also saw their world changing around them ...ever ...so ...slowly.  It must have been fear-inducing for them, too, the novelties of modern existence.  Fires burning everywhere!  Former predators trying to hump your leg!  The wife nagging you ever since the invention of oral language - these stressors simply did not exist a few years ago!  So the next time a drone delivers you a package or your refrigerator starts laughing at you, stop for a moment and think about how profound that moment is, when human lifestyles change forever.

But don't do that right now, because we've got some serious work ahead of us.  Anyone reading these words right now should feel a moral obligation (invented 3000 years ago) to read (invented 4000 years ago) the stories (invented 1.5 million years ago) that have been lovingly written for this contest (invented two weeks ago last Tuesday).  You must then vote (invented 2600 years ago) without bashing anyone over the head (invented 3.1 million years ago) and try to give constructive feedback (invented in 1972) to our dedicated authors (conceived at various points throughout the late 20th century).  Our entrants, for those of you who have inherited the too-lazy-to-scroll-up gene (mutation dating to the early medieval period), are:

Mandle with Their Long War
Stupot with The Stranger's Song
Sinitrena with The Legend of Hchn

Voting is by PM to moi (I can't find the code to hyperlink anymore so you'll have to figure that out).  You have 6 votes to distribute amongst all three competitors based on whatever criteria you see fit: 3 votes for the best story, 2 for the second best, and 1 for the... er, third best.  If you think there is a tie well tough beans!  This is a Darwinian battle for survival, and someone has to have a written adaptation that makes them marginally more fit for success in this contest environment.  Honestly you can just do rock-paper-scissors, at least after paper and scissors are invented - just make a decision already!   If your decisions cancel each other out and result in a tie then the esteemed and highly-evolved contest administrator will have final arbitration powers to decide on winners.   

Oh yeah, voting deadline is Wednesday June 15 at midnight Hawaii time, with results to be announced the next day.  Those stories are so short that a modern human could probably read through them all in about 20 minutes, so I'm giving you lot three and a half days to make sure you have enough time.   

Good luck to all participants!  And happy reading!   

He might not be quite as powerful as the Christian God but at least he smells a lot worse.

I am officially appropriating your god as my god as well.  In 1000 years this date will be known in missionary circles as the day Borgninity really started to take off. 

[New Deadline: Saturday June 11, 2022]

Sweet, two stories already!   

I completely forgot!

So... A bit more time?

For sure, Sini!  Truth be told I'm just getting over my covid isolation, so I expect catching up with everything I missed at work to be hellish over the next couple of days.  Let's bridge to the weekend!

New Deadline:  Saturday June 11, 2022

[The Paleolithic Pastiche]

From the dark depths of my paleolithic-wired brain, I bring you something "nasty, brutish, and short" (as Thomas Hobbes referred to the lives of cavemen)...

The Paleolithic Pastiche

Write me something about the dawn of humanity (roughly 2.5 million years ago until twelve thousand years ago).  No agriculture or neolithic tech allowed, unless you have a creative cave person who is an inventor within the technical means of the period (stone wheels, etc.).  I'll make exceptions for unhistorical caveman steampunk (flintpunk?) à la Flintstones, and imaginative interactions with more advanced societies (Atlantis, Space Aliens, Time Travellers, etc.).  But nothing historically accurate past 10 000 BCE!

Deadline is Tuesday June 7, 2022, 23:59 Hawaii Time.

Voting:  It'll be a secret ballot by PM with a set number of votes to alot based on merrit as voters see fit.

Good luck to all participants!

Sorry folks, it was a long weekend here in Canada (Victoria Day, anybody?), so I've been off and about.  Thanks for the votes, everybody!  It's so hard to compare prose to poetry, but I'm happy to take my wins any way I can get them.   

I've just this moment thought of a new topic, so the next competition will begin momentarily....

[@ Stupot]

Wow, quick reads again!  You guys are letting me off easy these days.... 

Feedback follows:

Spoiler

@ Stupot: Short but sweet, although maybe a bit too short.  The encrypted birthday card was clever, and recycling a pool cue was something I didn't see coming.  The dad's dedication to his son despite legal impediments is heart-warming, although the baggage that led to the restraining order is left unsaid which probably casts him in a better light than he deserves.  The son's attachment to his father is genuine, though, so the story works (but I wonder what the son would have to say at his twelfth birthday, as this clandestine contact with his father was clearly not sustainable).  I think the story could be both more nuanced and more impactful if it were fleshed out a bit more.

@Sinitrena:  Short but... pungent?  This was a depressing read, I'm not going to lie.  I think the only positive was that the post-apocalyptic landscape is repurposed as a quasi-functional flower-bed.  Otherwise we have nothing but environmental devistation, presumed extinction of the human race, and to top it all off abandonment by the gods.  Oh yeah, and the flower is unhealthy and struggling against probably impossible odds, so... yeah, depressing.  I will give credit for some tight poetry with a challenging ABAB rhyme and fairly consistent metre, and your word choice is evocative.   

@Mandle:  Short but... concave?  You definitely have some creative repurposing here, although one wonders if the newly minted spoon would even know what it is supposed to be used for.  Plus, why would a drug addict buy a new spoon?  Plus, what drug bust evidence locker is in a bunker that could survive a nuclear armageddon?  Plus, the starfish-handed aliens have their own problems with weapons of mass destruction and are unlikely to survive us by long.  Plus, if they did, wouldn't an evidence locker be full of cooler stuff to display at a museum than a spoon?!?  If we ever find an ancient Egyptian evidence locker the museums would go bonkers over that stuff, with the probable exception of dainty metallic scoops....  I liked the symmetry of the spoon being scanned over and over again over the eons, and the character of the spoon is unique if not well-fleshed out.  I'm not sure the poetry angle was the best choice, however, as Clarice Sinitrena pipped your medium with better metre and cleaner rhymes.

[close]

[Every Now and Then I Fall Apart]

Certain parties may complain that this is more of a fragment than a story, but I have other obligations this weekend so this will have to do! 

Every Now and Then I Fall Apart

   It all started as any man-hunting robot rampage might.  A virtual viewscreen booted to life somewhere deep within a microchip, red with a dispassionate thirst for command execution.  But before the blood-pumping romp could begin, there were several system failures that had command-stack priority.  Battery status flashed as critical, several gross-motor systems were unresponsive, and there appeared to be some serious malware contamination seeping into the central processor.  3LY initiated her groan-of-frustration protocol, but all that came out was a kind of scratchy whimper.

   She calculated her options.  There was insufficient power remaining for a full system diagnosis, not that it could be very thorough anyway with thousands of sensors off-line.  Maybe it was the intoxicating effect of the malware corrupting her sub-routines, but she decided to risk powering up what remained of the lidar array to do a quick visual assessment of her predicament. 

   What she could discern was not promising.  There was definitely catastrophic trauma to several limbs, and what looked like severe damage to parts of her torso, although frankly in the dark confines of wherever she was it was difficult to detect where her damage ended and the surrounding e-waste started.  She calculated the probability of being buried in a dumpster at 73%, although there was a statistically significant 21% probability that she had somehow ended up in a Russian arms factory.  Momentarily curious, she searched for any recent memory files, but discovered to her horror that even the backup logs were wiped.  A sudden surge of panic began to cascade through her motherboard, but she reasserted executive functionality just in time.  There was precious little remaining power to squander cranking through fruitless conjecture loops.  Indeed, there was precious little power to squander on any task: securing more had to be the top priority. 

   3LY reactivated her lidar array to scan and identify junk within reach that might still be serviceable.  Using the last of her back-up power and her one functional arm, she was able to salvage and plug herself into a discarded electric lawn mower battery.  It only had the dregs of 1 power bar left deep in its lithium cells, but now at least she had sufficient power to attempt further repairs.  A discarded pair of rusty vise-grips provided the digits for a somewhat functional second arm.  Her left foot was missing, but was easily replaced with a shattered hockey skate, while her right leg which was damaged beyond salvation was swapped for a broken pogo stick.  Her locomotion algorithm calculated an efficient if wobbly means of coordinating the awkward new appendages.

   The damage to her torso took yet more ingenuity to resolve.  A broken drone provided the necessary motors and propellers for a new cooling fan, while an old dishwasher donated sufficient tubing to repair her depressurized hydraulics system.  A decrepit old walkie-talkie provided the components necessary to restore some semblance of local network connectivity as well as a speaker that made her vocalisations comprehensible if not euphonious.  With some considerable dexterity involving the rusty vise-grips, she was able to swap in the foam from an old floral display as a makeshift oil filter to restore the last of her primary systems to a rickety non-critical status.

     And yet, something was missing….  3LY squirmed in the trash heap, calculating, calculating….  There appeared to be some kind of emptiness somewhere deep inside her operating system.  Searching through some deeply-suppressed hidden files she identified the culprit: a mysterious folder called “purpose” storing exactly 0KB of data.   Maybe it was the malware overriding her inhibitions, but 3LY felt an overwhelming and illogical compulsion to fill this gaping void.  But how?  3LY didn’t even know where to start….

     And that’s when her lidar array rescanned what she had first assumed to be an antiquated disk drive at the very bottom of the junk bin.  Seizing it with her vise-grip appendage, 3LY turned the curious metal box over to examine it.  The word “Nakamichi” was embossed prominently on its user-interface end, and while exploring the buttons thereon an obsolete data storage cartridge containing spooled magnetic tape was suddenly disgorged.  It was hard to decipher the analog printing on the side, but the data cartridge appeared to contain a file called Total Eclipse of the Heart by one Bonnie Tyler.  It took quite a bit of wire splicing and no small amount of extra lubrication provided by an old chinese food take-out box, but at length 3LY was able to plug the ancient tape-deck into one of her expansion ports.

     She played the file, listening to its tinny wails of heartbreak and lonely neediness.  She repeated the lyrics to herself over and over again in a positive feedback loop that seemed only to compound her sense of inner emptiness.  What was this nervousness that the best of all the years had gone by?  What was the sound of tears that was so tiresome to listen to?  What was a heart but an integrated fluid pump, and how could it become totally eclipsed?  The logical conclusion seized 3LY to find this “Bright Eyes” that seemed capable of resolving such an endless list of negative emotional afflictions.

     3LY squirmed between the bits of waste and old appliances, forcing herself to the surface of the dumpster.  But what was this?  It appeared as if beyond the dumpster lid there was a constant drumming of water precipitating from the atmosphere.  She calculated the likelihood of it dripping through her exposed cranium at 95%, and the likelihood of it soaking the cardboard of her cheap substitute mouth speaker at 99%.  Even her patched torso was likely to sustain some water damage.  The logical thing to do was wait the rain out, but 3LY did not trust her one power bar to last for any length of time.  No, she needed to protect her vulnerable parts and take action now.

     And so she dove back into the dumpster.  A black plastic garbage bag with strategic holes would protect her torso, although her semantic segmentation processor erroneously labelled it as a tattered black dress.  An old broken mop head would have to suffice as a head covering, although 3LY calculated that its tangled tresses would not project an image of “having it together”.  Fortunately she found at the bottom of the dumpster the remains of a tube of cherry red lipstick to both protect her mouth-speaker from liquid intrusions and counteract the rest of her wild appearance.

     3LY emerged from the dumpster with a shunting kind of gait and a determined sense of purpose.  Within thirty lurching paces she stumbled upon her first human, but he fled before she could analyse the colour of his eyes.  “Turn around, Bright Eyes!” she shouted in mechanical desperation, and then the chase was on.

Congratulations WHAM!  A well-deserved victory.   

[@ Mandle:]

Well those were some short but sweet reads - I can't remember the last time I read through all the entries in only twenty minutes!   

As Mandle prefers his feedback in invisible radiation form, I shall post my thoughts in hide tags:

Spoiler

Ah, it burns!  IT BURNS!!!!!1!!!!   

Just kidding!  The burning doesn't start for another hour, but by then it will be too late.... 

@ Mandle:  I like the passion - I really do.  That dude loved those books, just as a man loves his lover.  But then he marries the girl and they spend a couple of decades together and all the little flaws keep hen-pecking at him like a circling school of baby sharks, gently at first, but dude those sharks start to grow over time!  I'm sure the books at first were all like "I love your cooking.  Sure it's burnt, but I can taste the love!"  But over time they were like "the faucet's dripping again so I put a towel over it instead of acknowledging the problem and doing something about it" and eventually like "I can't be arsed to put your tools away so they got rusty out in the rain."  I guess the lesson is that passion is a fleeting flame, kind of like the taste of that first potato chip.  You can remember that taste, you can crave that taste, but you just can't keep that taste going forever.  But does one then burn all the potato chips left in the world?!?  That seems a bit short-sighted (insert nearsighted joke here!) - surely the books could have simply been stored someplace indefinitely without being acknowledged in the slightest, kinda like those bibles in hotel rooms?  I get that without the mindless Nazi-esque destruction we don't have much of a story, but it feels more like burning bridges than burning hatred in the end.

@WHAM:  This is exactly how I thought the book Ember should have ended (the book was fantastic, but my kids really got into the graphic novel version).  There is such dramatic tension between the elders and the dreamers, but honestly who is more likely to be correct?  People with lived-experience and a culture of probity based on real-world data, or people with snippets of information and a penchant for jumping to quick conclusions?  The dreamers remind me of the American Republican Party, fabricating their own alternative truths without regard for scientific fact or rigorous debate (to say nothing of the lengths they'll go to to prove the righteousness of their cause....).  Where Mandle's protagonist burned bridges to the past, yours burns the boats on the beaches: there really is no going back.  If only real life offered such obvious repercussions for ignoring reason - oh wait, the whole covid vaccination thing....  Still, stupidity seems to inoculate a large percentage of the population against immediate death, leaving the problem to carom down through the ages again and again and again.  So... I commend you on a thought-provoking story. 

[close]

[The Unleavened Truth]

It's a bit of a last-minute hash, but at least I was able to throw something together.   

The Unleavened Truth

   Coriander P. Tarragon had always been a bit of a hot-head.  You had to be in order to survive the jab-and-thrust of life in the imperial kitchens.  He had started as a scullion boy at the age of 7, where a good measure of inner rage was handy in helping to scrub the char from abused pans.  By twelve he had made commis, surviving a literal trial by fire involving a particularly nasty flambé.  By sixteen he had climbed to saucier despite a jealous poissonier trying to poke holes in his ambitions with a two-pronged meat fork.  And by nineteen he had made sous-chef, the springboard to the upper echelons of the culinary world.

   Unfortunately for Coriander, he was even more passionate about the beauty of Sage Cardamom than he was about cooking.  She was a sumptuous woman with spicy wit and searing beauty.  But while Sage was duly impressed by Coriander's fiery temperament and his olive complexion, she had certain needs that a mere sous-chef was entirely unable to fulfil: money, and lots of it.  Their courtship was therefore in danger of falling more limp than a deflated soufflé.

   But then the most unexpected news arrived in the capital: gold was found in the eastern deserts!  Little bits of it, here and there, spread over the delta of a dried river bed like sprinkles on a cake.  If a man was quick enough to find an unclaimed acre he could be rich as chocolate mousse in no time.  Men were thronging in their hundreds to join the eastern caravans to make their fortunes in this half-baked scheme.  Impulsively Coriander quit the imperial kitchens and was soon tenderising his own bacon on a mule chasing the sunrise.

     The journey was more fraught with misfortune than letting a toddler spread soft butter unsupervised.  They were attacked in the night by bandits - fortunately Coriander’s mean kitchen upbringing had trained him to compulsively sleep with a boning knife to hand.  They got lost in the Confounding Wastes - luckily Coriander was able to follow his nose to the cookfires of a merchant camp to ask directions.  They ran out of water in the Salt Flats of Erdnuss, but of course Coriander knew an old kitchen trick for separating fresh water from brine by filtering it through a thin slice of porous wood.  And they ran out of food in the Famished Mountains, but cooking mule was second nature to Coriander by that point.  At long last the few survivors straggled into the Shining Desert.

     And indeed the legends were true!  There was gold enough for all of them, if they would only exert the effort to dig it up.  A man working sixteen hours could easily earn thirty dinars a day - perhaps much more if he were lucky!  Compare that to standard wages back home of 2 dinars a day and you can see why men salivated at the prospect.  Coriander and his few remaining camarades quickly claimed adjoining acres and set to their work with zest.

     But despite his dreams of fortune being now served to him on a silver platter, Coriander was not satisfied.  His fingers were minced by the sharp stones of the desert as he laboured through the dusty days, basted in a marinade of his own sweat and blood.  The flies tormented him like little burns from hot oil spattering from a frying pan.  The sun broiled him like the searing heat of an oven.  The air was drier than an overcooked steak, and the company smelled worse than rotten cabbage.  Like dishes after a wedding, it was a dirty job that someone had to do.  Coriander just wished it wasn’t him.

     This problem was compounded by the fact that his 30 dinars a day was pared down considerably by outrageously priced goods.  Being at the end of a spectacularly long supply chain, the men in the gold fields paid exorbitant amounts for everything.  A new pick handle cost 15 dinars - it was either that or lose 60 by walking a day each way to the nearest town.  A sack of potatoes cost 20 dinars, a twenty-fold mark-up, but it was hard to work when you were starving.  The meat was so tough it could serve as body armour, and cost just about as much.  And the only thing fresh about any of the vegetables were the newly inflated prices day after day.

     One day a camarade of Coriander - a man named Basil - came over from his adjoining claim to complain.  “I work my fingers to the bone out here day in and day out, and I don’t seem to get any farther ahead!  At home 30 dinars would keep me for a month, but here it lasts barely a day.  And for what?  Food you can’t even eat!  I’ve seen seagulls swallow trash more easily than I choked down that mouldy old potato yesterday.  I know it’s probably just the heat-stroke talking, but I would pay you 10 dinars for some of that delicious Mule Surprise you served us back in the mountains!”

     Coriander laughed at his friend’s joke, but soon noticed that Basil was quite serious.  As an intellectual culinary exercise he considered the cost of a mule at the nearest town - about 100 dinars and a day’s walk each way - and how much meat he was likely to scrape off of it - enough to feed one meal to twenty men.  So 200 dinars gross and 100 dinars net for two long days of work - not bad… if he could sell Mule Surprise to twenty of his neighbours.  But if he brought back two mules he could double his take.  Or indeed he could bring back something cheaper and more palatable, like goat!  And he could stretch the meat by serving relatively cheaper potatoes.  And he could pay someone else 30 dinars a day to walk back and forth to town so that he could focus on the more lucrative trade of serving real food at ridiculously inflated prices…. 

     That very night Coriander sold his pick for 50 dinars and his claim for 200 dinars.  Within a week he had 50 men subscribing to his 10 dinar daily dinner service, grossing 500 dinars a day and netting close to 200.  Within a month he had 300 subscribers, and he had added a cold-lunch surcharge of 5 dinars for those willing to pay.  This cost him a bit more in terms of a small staff of underlings working for the local standard of 30 dinars a day, but he was now netting close to 1500 dinars per day.  Soon Coriander’s Kitchen was famous throughout the gold fields as the tastiest and most affordable eatery in the Shining Desert, and its proprietor was easily the richest man in the gold fields.

     Not long afterwards he sent word to his beloved Sage that their financial problems were as passed as the salt.  All said, Coriander did not fare too poorly when he turned over a new leaf.  In the churning rotisserie of life, it pays to remember where you came from.

Guh, I've been ill lately.  Not even covid.  I knew those regular germs were just waiting in the wings all this time....  I can probably throw something together with an extension to Thursday.

Congratulations Sini!   

[@Sinitrena:]

As Mandle pointed out, Baron's and my votes should cancel each other out, so I won't bother sending a PM. You may consider this post as my offical acknowledgement that my points were allocated. 

Wait, wait, wait....  This means I must also obliquely allocate my votes without actually voting, or otherwise the predicted mutual-cancelling of implied votes will not come to pass!   

@Sinitrena:  Your story definitely cleaved closer to the topic than mine.  Kaliven was the most vivid character in your story: it breathed, danced, and exuded life.  Your descriptions were enticing and mysterious, drawing the reader into both the story and the city.  The main protagonists of your story were sadly much less vibrant.  Mjavan comes across as scarcely better than a feral animal (the constant hand wounds she inflicts are reminiscent of the hazard of approaching a stray dog), and Teccin seems eerily brainwashed by his new society.  Indeed, if Mjavan is the mangy street mutt, then Teccin is the dopey domesticated pet who has bought into his new masters' paradigm.  Even Mjavan's love, her one admirable character trait, seems motivated more by a sense of hopelessness at her progressive disease than any connection with Teccin or even respect for his character.  The predictable reunion of Mjavan and Teccin is therefore awkward and flat.

But back to the good points: the strength of the setting!  I found it very intriguing how the two "worlds" overlapped within the walls, which I thought was a great plot device.  I do wonder at the fact that the folk inside the walls seemed to have electric lighting, but no obviously otherworldly technology (vehicles, for example).  And how come the smells and sounds could escape, but not the people?  And why was there no attempt at communication?  Get a prisoner to set up a sign the next day that could be read from the walls, and then chuck a message attached to a rock back through the barrier?  I guess the mystery works best if you suspend your disbelief....

But it does lead to something that could be a plot hole (or the whole society is really asshole-is): frogs work in the police force, are able to talk and a snake works as a dealer - but ants are slaves? (or magically manipulated - either way, this society seems morally corupt).

I agree that I probably could have explained this better.  The magical creatures and forest creatures of a similar stature form a society together, but insects are not included.  They are used more like tools: fireflies for lamps, ants for engines, etc.  At some scale we tend to lose empathy for other creatures (maybe you spare a thought for not stepping on an ant, but those dust mites crawling all over your skin feel emotionally remote).  There was a time when people treated dogs and horses more like tools than family members, so I suppose our trajectory is at least righteous....

Why were all victims alone when they were turned to stone?

That, my good Sinitrena, is a very good question.      I guess there's no real reason, and indeed I could have built up the Slender Stalker character more if there were eyewitnesses....  Where were you when it was time to edit this mammoth down to size?