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[Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol]

What's with those lyrics of yore?  Why come they make some little sense?      Or maybe they do....  Are round yon virgins actually plump?  Do nautical explorers repeat the sounding joy?  If one were to ring a ling would water drip out?  Perhaps verily some of our authors might toil along the climbing way as we...

Troll the Ancient Yuletide Carol


Did you know that in Iceland Christmas trolls (above) eat naughty children??!?  Kinda puts the old lump o' coal to shame....

The theme in a roasting chestnut shell:  Reinterpret a seasonal song/story/trope, in a good or bad way as you see fit.  In a footnote after your story please include a 1-2 sentence indication of what you were trolling, as not all seasonal songs/stories/tropes are universally well-known.  The seasonal element that you remix could be as short as a line from a song or a poem, in which case just citing the lyric/line would suffice.  Tangents, expanded universes, and collateral damage are of course all welcomed and encouraged so long as they keep their hands to themselves under that infernal mistletoe.

Deadline:  I'm thinking we can try to have our stories in by Thursday December 30 to avoid any conflicts with the Gregorian calendar.  So, let nothing you dismay and may the rude wind's wild lament not refer to any of the works submitted herein.    Good luck!

ALL YOUR VOTES IS NOW BELONGS TO ME!!!1!!!!!   

I mean, uh, thanks for all the votes folks!  I think it would have been a closer contest if Sinitrena hadn't had her votes split over two stories, but I am happy to take my victories however I can get them.     I will try to come up with a seasonally appropriate theme for the next contest.  Stay tuned!

Spoiler

How was this glossed over? The fence is litarelly right between them as they "dance", they have to embrace like humans because it's between them and they sway from "side to side" not forwards or backwards. It's a deciding factor in how they dance.

Ah!  There it is!  I think if it were mentioned between them it would have painted a clearer picture.  You say in the last line that they danced "above the fence", which made me think they had somehow trampled it to the ground.  It's just a small detail, though. 

How did Hal die? (If he actualy died - "gone" could, technically, also mean that he left)

Detective work often meant being one step behind the scumbags and one step ahead of burnout, as her old partner used to say.  Of course that was before he stuck a gun in his mouth and stopped quipping pithy phrases.

So, yeah, not entirely black and white, but by strong implication he committed suicide.   

I struggled with the revelation at the end.  I didn't like the name on the keys as a device (why indeed would she not know her own name, unless in some kind of daze of amnesia?), but considered that it wasn't clear enough that she was actually working the case of her own death over in her mind without the name to prove that she was herself the victim.  So I guess her identity as Detective Brenner overshadowed her previous life to the point that she began to forget who she really was?  Still not a crisp, clean and clear ending though.... 

Regarding Detective Brenner's actual demise, it's a subtle detail at the end, but the keys and the gun fall out of her right pocket - Detective Brenner is thus right-handed - and the blood splattered flower petals are to her left: the implication is that she has in fact shot herself.  While most readers can hopefully guess this, I left the clues subtle in the tradition of a proper murder mystery.  Alas, in an attempt to get that impactful ending I was after, there was no time for proper explanation of the clues. 

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[@ Sinitrena]

It's all love and death this time around - no small plot drivers!  I include my feedback below in hide tags so that Mandle isn't tempted to read it before voting.   

Spoiler

@ Sinitrena: Both of your stories were basically the same, in that same-sex lovers overcome an obstacle to be together (and seem to savour their love all the more for it).    But there the similarities end.  I'm sorry but I found your first piece a bit flat, I think due to a combination of factors.  Foremost, I think by announcing right off the cuff that the cops were probably going to let Alex and Steve go, there was no real problem to overcome (unless surmounting the horrible advertising jingles was the real obstacle to their love....  ).  But I think Alex's shifting character also makes it hard to root for him: he swings from sceptical to "all-in" so quickly it's hard to feel as if I know him, while Theodore Crain and Steve are just flat caricatures of a crazy boss and a reluctant side-kick respectively.  Your second story was much better written, in my opinion.  Your word-choice in this story painted more vivid pictures in the mind, while the unanticipated union of the mare and the cow keep the reader enthralled right to the end.  I think it was an especially good touch to have the rider hit his head, making the surreal dance of the animals seem as if it might have all been the imaginings of a dazed brain (although the "pretty stars danced in front of his eyes" seemed a bit cartoonish for an otherwise serious atmosphere).  A bit of proofreading would have made this piece even stronger ("rains" should be "reins", and I chuckled at the "errand stone" that should have been errant), especially as the problem of the fence between the beasts was glossed over entirely, but overall this was my favourite story.

@ Mandle: This story had more twists than a spaghetti junction!  I liked the writing style (especially when the main character was describing his death wound).  The story was definitely entertaining, but (as you caveat in an addendum post) it feels rushed with more than a few loose ends.  Clearly your Mr. Character is impulsive, but assaulting an avatar of god on the extremely long-shot chance of helping his brother to avoid his pre-determined fate by learning to harness and control incomprehensible cosmic powers in a matter of a few crucial minutes seems a half-baked plan at best.  I mean, the downside is pretty much infinite....  Even the comparatively benign ending you leave us with is really a categorical failure: he's stuck in a different time period with no corporal essence to work with except for his voice and his goofy shoes.  But despite having a hard time empathising with Mr. Character's plight, I did find the piece entertaining and was sure to reflect that in my votes.

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Technically the last several dozen writing comps have been Ponch free editions....  

[Partners in Crime]

Partners in Crime

   Detective Brenner shook her head to clear the fog.  She rarely slept much these days as the horrific details of her caseload crashed through her mind at all hours.  Detective work often meant being one step behind the scumbags and one step ahead of burnout, as her old partner used to say.  Of course that was before he stuck a gun in his mouth and stopped quipping pithy phrases.

   Detective Brenner scrunched her eyes closed to stem the up-welling of emotions within her.  Hers was a tough job, wading through the wreckage of human misery to try to bring some order to the chaos.  A stabbed lover here, a strangled child there; what was another pile of shit along the road of human error?  The good thing about her job was that, although pain and self-loathing were part of the job description, there was mercifully little free time to actually indulge in them.

   And so she opened her eyes to survey her surroundings again.  A meadow in late June, the sun shining clemently as the daisies churned with butterflies and bumblebees.  It was a peaceful place, or would have been if people hadn't tracked their problems through with them.  Now this idyllic field was scarred with clues of violence and betrayal, and it was her job to unearth them.

   She stepped over the police tape lines to examine the green shoes, the white laces loosely tied so that they could casually be kicked off at a whim.  It would have made a cute picture, except it was the last known action of one Yulia Kosovich, missing person.  Detective Brenner carefully examined the vegetation surrounding the shoes, but could see no sign of footsteps or broken stalks.  Of course the flowers and grasses would right themselves as the hours passed; otherwise there would be no such thing as a picturesque meadow, just mangy tramped-over messes.  She therefore estimated the shoes to have been in their present location for at least a day.

   Carefully she stooped to turn a shoe over.  She recognized the brand â€" probably owned a pair, at one point - flat soles, pretty to look at, but not very practical for long hikes.  Slight scuffing and grass stains along the edges, to be expected in such a location, but no obvious signs of foreign material that could indicate the path that led here.  Maybe the lab boys could find an incriminating spec lodged in the tread when they arrived, but for her the only other clue she could discern was the direction they were pointing.

   And so she set off through the gently rolling field that seemed to dance with carefree happiness, a merry chorus of birdsong scoring the scene.  Here a bunny bounding through the clover, there a groundhog peeking above the petals.  Grasshoppers popped and fluttered, a toad hopped cautiously out from under foot.  Detective Brenner's mind was trained to note such details carefully, but she couldn't help but feel that their meaning was somehow lost on her hardened soul.

   She began to study the ground more carefully.  Here a severed insect wing, there a mouse bone, and now a spider waiting patiently for a victim to fall into her snare.  This was the grim reality beneath the superficial peace: life was actually a gruesome affair.  Even the gentle daisies would wither to dust without roots that gorged on the pâté of death that makes up the soil.  All of it, all of us, are just living a precarious existence built on a foundation of past and future violence, she realised.

   And then she felt a chill as the sun passed behind a cloud.  Maybe that's what Hal, her old partner, had come to understand.  Beauty is just a veneer for the truth, peace just the calm between the storms.  Sure, you could enjoy the brief moments of sunshine, be happy for a time.  But to anyone with half a brain it was obvious that there is trouble lurking in the shadows just down the path.  Even the squirrel hopping through the summer branches kept half an eye on winter â€" there was no peace but for the stupid and the soon to be dead.

   But... her mind cranked more quickly, the thoughts churning in relentless as water cascading down a gorge.  But awareness of the dangers brought nothing but misery, and inevitably the same result.  There were no ten year old squirrels, no matter how vigilant.  So what was the point of it all?

     Detective Brenner closed her eyes again, trying to focus.  Which mystery was she trying to solve here, anyway?  Hal was gone, but she might be able to help Yulia, although something in her gut told her she was deluding herself.  Metaphorically or literally they had both walked through this field.  They had both walked along the knife-edge of peace between the chasms of death, and they had both tumbled off into oblivion.  Detective Brenner smiled despite herself at a faint glimmer of consolation: at least they could keep each other company.

   And then she felt a gentle touch of light on her neck and she opened her eyes once more.  A shaft of sunlight was piercing down between the clouds, casting just her corner of the meadow in a hopeful glow against the shadowy world beyond.  A ray of hope, she supposed, marvelling at the simple comfort of human connection.  A tear dripped down her cheek, for she finally admitted to herself how wretchedly alone she felt now that Hal was gone.

   And then a glint caught her eye, and she stooped to find a shell casing nestled between the flower stalks.  Hmmm...  17mm, she noted.  It was probably just coincidence that that was standard police issue.  She reached for a baggie in her right jacket pocket in which to put the evidence, but her service revolver and car keys fell out with a gentle clank in the attempt.  Careless, she muttered to herself, as she stooped once more.

   But as her hand was about to pick them up she stopped, suddenly noticing three things at once, the meaning of which was disturbingly very clear.  Flecks of dried blood coated the flower petals to her left.  The tag on the keys from her pocket read Yulia K. Brenner.  And her feet were bare in the warm meadow grass.

[Mandle]

Well, it just hit me that I didn't even name our participants in my voting post.  I know, I know, it's a bit of a slap in the face....  Allow me to strike a note of contrition by listing our authors and their works now:

Mandle has written How I Beat You Mother
Sinitrena composed Christmas Tree
Stupot wrote and presumably scored A Fistful of Punch

I thought all of our participants did an excellent job of cleaving to the theme this time around.  Nobody held their punches, so to speak.  In fact, more than once I was thinking "Fewer punches!  We need fewer punches here!"  Which is a good thing, in reverse logic, since it means that your works were punchier than I expected.     It's just, you know, the stories hit me hard in my soft pudgy underbelly of humanity.  Next time I think I will set a Somewhat Punchy theme and see if that restores the universe to balance.   

But, we all work with what we are given, so here's my feedback.  No hide tags, since the competition is over:

@ Mandle  Ah, the exasperated dad that never developed parenting skills because, hey, the game is on and someone else can deal with the little monsters.  Basically he's everyone's favourite punching bag, but, y'know, in his own way he's trying to do right by his kids in the few moments left to him.  I think relaying a few more critical survival tips might have been a good idea (like letting the kids know exactly how the condition is spread and how long they have once bitten?), but as previously critiqued I get that he's not in his best frame of mind.  The writing was superb and disturbingly realistic: keeping kids' attention is like herding ants.  Oh, and there was all that punchy gory stuff too.     Great job!

@ Sinitrena  Ooh, flashback trauma!  I felt like this wasn't an uncommon occurrence for Mary and Joseph, which makes me wonder why they weren't a bit more proactive, but maybe I misread the degree of Mary's instability.  I liked Mandle's idea of her being a little old lady, but I didn't get that impression myself (did I miss a clue?).  Yours was definitely the punchiest in terms of writing.  Thoughts were.  Very.  Abrupt.  It took rereading to put together exactly what was happening, but this was part of the challenge so kudos to you for slugging away at it.  Nice story!

@ Stupot  Well, I thought it was a funny joke.    Honestly, they are bored in the car and you want to show the simmering antagonism beneath the surface and the story would be too short if you just had the set up and the ending so... yeah, they have to talk about something.  Maybe the joke wasn't the best option, but at least it revealed a discord between characters.  Maybe discussing the last job would be more rewarding as it would slowly reveal how each character felt about it?  But then we run into the danger of bogging down what was meant to be a short, punchy story.  I thought the bowl gag was great, although true criminals could surely find a less expensive way to set poor Mint up (I mean, they already went through all the work of stealing the thing....).  I critique the loose ends because I liked the garment - good work!

And now to the results.  A punchy drum roll would be appropriate at this point:

In third place we have Mandle with 10 points.
Also in third place we have Sinitrena with 10 points.
Finally, we have Stupot in third place with 10 points.

I don't think we've ever all shown up to write, and all we got was a draw.   

So it falls to me as contest administrator to choose a winner.  All the works are very meritorious, each with their own slight flaws, and thus they appear to measure up almost... equally.  Oh dear.  Well, I, hrmmm.....   OK, I vote Stupot by the thinnest of margins, mostly because he has not won the competition lately, but also ever so slightly due to his story being a punch above the others.  Congratulations Stupot!  We all look forward to the next writing theme and the new administrative regime which should prove more timely and effective than the last.    

Thanks for looking out for me, folks!      I assure you that any reports of my premature demise are shamelessly exaggerated.  The sad truth is I've been spending most of my spare moments after work at various hockey arenas and shuttling kids between them.   

So, on to the voting phase of this comp.  Votes can be sent to me via PM, or hidden in hide tags in this thread, or punched out in Morse code using the hanging chad voting machine out in the AGS lobby (no, it's not a slot machine  ), or handwritten in reverse alphabet code and attached to the leg of a homing pigeon (or perhaps an arena pigeon, since I seem to be rarely at home....  ).   As I'm a bit late I'm sure everyone has already read the stories, so voting will end firmly on Saturday November 20. 

Voting procedure is that you have 10 votes to distribute in whole integers between the participants as you see fit based on how meritorious you believe each submission to be.  As always, feedback in the thread is appreciated by the authors as it help us hone our craft.

Good luck to all entrants!  I'm looking forward to some good reads!   

Bam!  Inspiration strikes!   

Three days left for the rest of you to take a shot at this contest.   

That smacks of hubris.   

Touché.  Hit us with another one, why don't ya?   

Aw man, good ideas that don't pan out are always a shot to the gut!   

Did Stupot happen to mention any good titles for my next submission? 

[Something Punchy!]

Well, as promised I've come up with something punchy for this fortnight's theme.  But it's not official until it's in a big, bold font, right?  So our next theme is....

Something Punchy!



Allow me to digress into English semantics for a moment.  Something punchy usually refers to a short, impactful piece of writing.  While this can be as short as a headline, I'd prefer to get more bang for my buck by having even punchier submissions of up to 600 words.  Remember, punchy writing often uses short, direct sentences, but I'm not against you beating up a bit of purple language for literary effect.  But wait, there's more!   Something punchy can literally refer to something with lots of punches, so feel free to knock yourself out in that regard.  In fact, there's no reason that it couldn't refer to actual fruit punch, in which case some sort of soirée or juice factory might be à propo.  Indeed, punchy can refer to someone who has imbibed too much alcohol and is therefore punch drunk in the sense that they are completely inebriated.  Of course there are mean drunks and happy drunks, but it is possible to be pleased as punch about something, so I leave you to draw your own conclusions on that one.  Confusingly, punchy in cowboy slang can refer to a perfectly sober tough guy, so you could always take the broody loner approach over the Pecos and up the dusty trail.  And finally, I'm not altogether against something pun-chy, in that your work makes perfectly horrible use of intra-word puns for comedic effect. 

So, in a nutshell, write a short punchy piece that somehow includes a figurative or literal interpretation of something punchy.

The deadline for this contest is set at midnight Hawaiian time on Sunday November 14, with voting to commence the following day.

Good luck to all participants!

Wow!  A victory so crushing it broke the forums for three days....   

Thanks everyone for the votes.  I myself had mixed feelings about the piece, as for me the plot seemed to fade behind the copious technical details of how the world worked (however creatively dressed up), but I'm glad my careful readership could see past all that.     As I did not expect to win, I haven't given a shred of thought to our next topic, so you'll have to be a bit patient until I come up with something punchy.

[@Mandle]

Nice creepy stories all around.  Here's my feedback:

@Mandle

Spoiler

Aw man, the glint of hope is surely the worst means of torture when all is lost!  This was an awesome premise, although it fell apart a bit for me in the execution.  The walking-talking Grant zombie was never adequately explained, nor was the alien-vampire fetish for paramedics, and there were a few overly complicated descriptions that made me furrow my brow ("Gerald let his right hand slip away.... and dropped it to the opposite elbow that he had that arm already cupped under?!?").  The punchy, short paragraphs were somewhat overshadowed by this sort of overlong sentence, causing the reader to lose the thread of the story sometimes in the complicated prose.  On balance I'll give the work a B overall.

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@EjectedStar

Spoiler

This was an awesome story.  I loved you creepy descriptions of Winston's awakening, and then his utter confusion at the changes wrought by modernity.  I felt a little let down that it was never completely explained why Winston's "magics" wouldn't work on the young females of child-bearing age anymore, but this is a minor grievance.  The twist at the end, with Winston sacrificing his happiness in order to survive this cultural hellscape we call 2021, was both hilarious and depressing in an eerily familiar way.  Overall, I give the work an A-.

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@Stupot

Spoiler

The writing and build-up were top-notch, and the premise has some serious potential.  The big problem is that the story ends before it's half-told.  What about Dinah?  What about Ray?  Does Simon find out more about the Annex?  Is Victor sick or enslaved or...?  Damn you Arn, you mysterious villain!  I get that sometimes you want the reader to put the pieces together themselves, but the workload in this case is too much to be reasonable.  Thus your mark is B-.

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[The 13th Day]

The 13th Day

   Did I ever tell you about the time I almost died?

   I know what you are thinking.  Here goes Radu the Eternal, whining on about almost dying.  It is a relative problem, I agree.  It comes down to a matter of perspective.  But as we have a bit of time on our hands, why not share our perspectives?  You of all people should hear the whole story.

   Imagine your life is an hourglass, and the days remaining to you are grains of sand slipping away into oblivion.  When the glass is full one can ignore the barely perceptible depletion of the sands; time seems almost not to pass at all in a kind of blissful stasis of youth.  But there comes a point for everyone when there is a realization that the sands are not as plentiful as they once were.  No matter how consistent the trickle, the precious grains seem to race away all the more quickly as they dwindle.  As you near the end of your allotted supply your inventory of dusty particles becomes an obsession.  Cleverer men than I have vainly spent those last precious grains struggling to stem the ebbing tide or tip the glass to reverse the process.  But these endeavours merely reveal an ignorance of a basic premise of nature: by the laws of entropy all beings are doomed to decay over time.  In layman's terms, the grains of sand will always fall.  Life happens at the hourglass's neck: without the falling of the sand, there is no life.

   Now, once you have grasped this essence of the riddle of life, it is possible to intuit a solution.  Don't you see?  Many billions of hourglasses crammed together, each with its sand grains trickling away, each flow unstoppable, each supply of grains finite.  But what if the sands of one hourglass could be transferred to another?  In theory there could be an hourglass that never runs out of sand, admittedly at the expense of its neighbours.  The trick, as you are so obviously aware, is to be the vessel that gains from these transactions.

     Of course, another immutable law of nature is the inherent motivation to defend one's precious horde of life-grains.  One might reasonably expect the nearby hourglasses to band together and fight the parasite in their midst, and indeed this was a real problem for me when I first came into my power.  The terms murderer, monster, and warlock were bandied about with a careless disdain for proper semantics, to say nothing of violent hunts for my person.  But as I grew proficient in the theft of life-days, it became possible to spread the losses over an ever larger community.  A few weeks here, a few months there, significant for me but almost imperceptible to each donor.  Especially for the young and hale, those precious days would not be missed for a long time yet.  Thus I was able to become anonymous, like the tax clerk in a distant office that bleeds the community by pinpricks just a bit at a time.  Unlikable and unsavoury, yes, but a sufficiently minor nuisance as not to merit hunting down.

   Yet even this analogy does not do justice to the complexity of my position.  For just as each life-day is a grain of sand, so each grain holds within it a degree of the essence of its owner.  Thus, by absorbing a month of life from a great beauty I can become a fraction more beautiful, and by absorbing a year of life from a great academic I can become 1% smarter.  The effect fades over time, both as the new life-grains fall inevitably into oblivion, but also as they slowly take on the character of their new owner, thereby preserving the essence of me, the host.

   And there are of course the regular hazards of existence to further complicate matters.  Like any other hourglass, mine was but a thin sheath of fragile glass in a world of mortal dangers.  Age and disease I can offset with the judicious addition of vigorous new life-sands, but external trauma is as dangerous to me as it is to any other being.  In addition I face more nuanced dangers: as I absorb a part of the skills and talents of my benefactors, so too I absorb their ailments.  If these be static conditions such as allergies or autism it is a fairly simple matter for me to isolate the problem (as I can move the life essence of others into myself, so can I expunge the unwanted essence within, at least before it becomes widely absorbed).  The rub is in the progressive diseases: cancers and dementia principally, but there are a litany of others, some so obscure as to not have been properly identified by even the greatest medical experts of the ages. 

   There is something admirable in diseases, especially the viral variety.  They can be almost entirely annihilated â€" indeed they are so often the authors of their own destruction in killing off their hosts - and yet the smallest trace left behind or spread to a new host can cause the disease to rise again phoenix-like from the ashes.  I've made a study of such things, over the ages, as a means of self-preservation.  It has been a.... painful subject of study.

   Oh the years I've spent in suffering with these lingering afflictions, trying to drain the sink of the dirty water so that I could at the last moment refill it again with pure life-essence, only to discover the taint still lingered, growing insidiously in the dark corners of my being.  It was a long time before I stumbled upon - nay stooped to - the obvious solution.  Think now, child.  Which vessel has the vibrancy and plasticity to heal itself?  You do not need to be overly smart to divine the answer, but you do need to be ruthless to contemplate it.  When my back is against the wall and I need to reset my health, it is an infant child that I must drain of its life-days.

   Now with careful living and constant study, I am proud to admit that I have resorted to outright baby draining on only twenty-two occasions.  Oh put away your self-righteous judgements â€" they would all have died anyway, after all.  Most of them would have lived a wretched existence on the lowest margins of society â€" for it is only there that the strongest and most robust beings can survive (to say nothing of the collective shrug at the loss of another poor mouth to feed).  And in a matter of speaking there are parts of their souls that have survived far longer than even the longest lived human, as a part of my eternal being.  Theirs has indeed been a charmed existence, as we have lived quite well off of my accumulated wealth over the ages.  From an objective perspective, then, you could almost say I did them a favour.

   From the way that you quiver I can see you feel differently....   Alas society has evolved in a distressing direction recently, not just with lip-service to human rights but with a worrisome predisposition to believing in them.  Every being has an inalienable right to life, liberty, and happiness!  Of course this defies a rational evaluation of the future prospects of the vast majority of humanity.  If you live long enough you can see these moral proclivities for the fads they are, a luxury of idled affluence.  The only transcendent truths are Darwinian. 

   This at least you understand.  Of course, the law of the jungle is easier to swallow when you are the lion.  I'm sure you can imagine such a predator, crouched in the shadows, spotting what might be its prey through the chaotic undergrowth.  In this case she is a rare occultist thoroughly steeped in the arcana of the ages, and yet critically thoughtful enough to see through the fluff and nonsense.  I don't even know her name, but let's call her Morgan after the aspirational Arthurian enchantress.

   How many years it took to draw together the disparate puzzle pieces I can not imagine, all while the life-sands were pouring relentlessly away.  Perhaps these things go more quickly with these fact-sifting boxes that men set so much store in these days....  No matter how it came to pass, credit must be given to the result.  Morgan noticed a pattern of the missing or desiccated infants over the years, and put the pieces together.  Of course the other details were only half-guessed at, but Morgan knew enough to anticipate where and when the perpetrator would strike again.  Indeed, her research allowed her to set out the perfect bait.  One wonders where she even found the mewling thing, for she was clearly too old for it to be her own.  She at least was not one of the new age's bleeding hearts.

   And then there I was, desperately afflicted by the latest modern plague, on the prowl for a reset, and the perfect infant practically served up to me on a silver platter.  Oh how a fish must feel, after eating so many worms over the years, only to discover the shocking presence of a hook in its latest meal!  Barely had I touched fang to chubby-cheek but the world was inverted and I was snared tightly in rope as if by a jungle constrictor.  I dangled there, gobsmacked, mouth agape like a Carpathian mountain peasant, a half-consumed infant stuck between my teeth, whining wretchedly at the loss of its final forty years.  It vomited while hanging there against my face, adding insult to my injured pride.

   But the greatest indignity was facing that woman.  How triumphant she looked, that jumped-up fortune teller, that merchant of myth, that Morgan!  To my eyes she was little more than an infant herself, her intellect but a fraction of my own.  And yet she had me at her mercy, her eyes greedily calculating the powers she intended to extract.  My shame was only eclipsed by my fear at how many ways this amateur surgeon might botch her intended operation.  And as it turned out, my fears were fell-founded.

   For although Morgan was a first-class paranormal sleuth, she was sadly only a third-rate scientist.  In all her scheming and plotting never had she given any serious consideration as to exactly what to do with me when I was caught.  For a while she merely played with me, like a kitten who had surprised itself in catching a mouse.  There followed of course a battery of bloody extractions and tortures as she crudely grasped towards understanding, but I am proud to confide that my cryptic half-truths only confounded her further.  By the twelfth day she had convinced herself that she had indeed determined the secret to eternal life, putting my decades of studying viral pathology to shame.  The ignorance of youth would be amusing were it not so tragic.

   And so then, as the sun set on the twelfth day, she drained me of my life-days.  Of course the outcome was inevitable from the moment I was snared in her trap, but the foolish creature took twelve days vacillating between uncertainty and mania before finally succumbing to the obvious.  And thus I died.

   But the story continues.  Obviously.....

   Time is a funny thing.  Just as living beings slowly decay, so do truths only slowly come into focus.  The fly might think it is only a little stuck when it first alights upon the spider's web, but as it pulls gently and tugs carefully it works its way ever further into the clutches of the patient arachnid.  At which point it realizes the inevitable is hard to determine, for a fly is a creature of cunning instinct but sadly very little intelligence.  But know the truth it must, sooner or later....

   And now, as time brings the end of my tale into greater focus, you must ask yourself the most critical of questions:  between you â€" Morgan the National Enquirer Subscriber â€" and I â€" Radu the Eternal â€" which one of us is the spider, and which one of us is the fly?

   You see exactly what is happening now, but it is too late to stop the inevitable.  Your consciousness squirms in terror and anguish and... is that morbid curiosity I detect?  Did I not mention that I was intensely curious about the survival strategies of the humble virus for reasons of self-preservation?  The assimilation of the essence of the victim was already a part of the natural process.  It just took several decades of tinkering to hijack the process for a viral takeover.  I'm sure you of all people can appreciate the allure of an esoteric hobby? 

Ooo!  The ultimate parasites! 

[@ Sinitrena]

Well, sorry it took so long to vote.  What can I say?  I work to deadlines.   

@ Sinitrena:

Spoiler

Yours was a brilliant story concept.  The hook at the beginning (the future king's story) was engrossing, your descriptions just thorough enough with well-chosen words, and the revelation of what the shop is and how it works from Pete's perspective was both intriguing and well-paced.  The relationship between Pete and Aethildbriaith was... complicated.  Firstly, as the dynamic between them makes up the crux of the story, it is an ambitious attempt at a coming-of-age moment where a younger person gets a taste of what it's like to walk in an older person's shoes.  On another level, Pete seems to be suffering from a degree of Stockholm syndrome, abused and captive as he is (to say nothing of disagreeing with the revenge methodology employed at times), and yet he is emotionally invested in the health and well-being of his Master.  I understand that Pete understands that he is being punished for his sins, but to like the agent of his punishment seems depressing, especially at the final moment when he learns that Aethildbriaith was no better than him (and very possibly a great deal worse).  It's a little depressing that Pete seems perfectly content to perpetuate the cycle....

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@ Mandle:

Spoiler

Another good outing, Mandle my man.  This story has everything, from imaginative scenarios to great humour, and from intricate diabolical details to great plot turns (I way did not see Darren/Daring dying the first time).  One thing it kinda is missing is the whole Shopkeeper element, which was a bit important due to the theme.  I mean, yeah, the Devil poses briefly as a shopkeeper, but that's kind of incidental to the rest of the story.  I've read other critiques about the length of your story, but it didn't feel long to me.  I think it was important to have the last accident, as the medical miracle of stitching Darren/Daring back together from shark poo surpasses absurdity (and it affords Meat-Pete a chance to become increasingly more doubtful about the reality they are sharing, and to share his own backstory that implicates him as an agent of hell), thus foreshadowing the final plot twist.  My only critical recommendation would be to make subsequent accidents more succinct, once the pattern is established (i.e. edit out the fluff so that each repeat gets quite a bit shorter).

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@ Baron:

Spoiler

I think critical reception of my story is accurate, and has helped me to discern a bit of a writing rut that I've fallen into.  Certain readers have noticed over the years that my stories often start out quite a bit differently than they end.  I usually write my stories over two evenings, often quite close to the deadline.  The first evening I do my "set-up", describing the setting and building characters and worlds.  It is a time of imagination and dreaming, which is my favourite part about the writing process.  The second evening (which is usually the night of the deadline) I think, "oh shit!  We gotta wrap this up!" and then things get silly.  Now don't get me wrong, silly is fun to write too, but it appears to often be an incongruous appendage to the first part of the story.  (Of course sometimes I don't start until the very last minute, and then write a silly story all in one go.....  ).  I think, moving forward, I should A) plan out my story at the beginning more thoroughly so that there actually is a story from the start, and B) leave myself more time to actually do the idea justice. 

[close]

Both of my competitors wrote fantastic stories which deserve to win.  I gave only a very slight edge in terms of voting to Sinitrena because her story was more on topic, but judged on the merits of the stories themselves I would call it a draw.  Great writing everyone! 

For the record, I assume I have until next September 3 to get my votes in....