Is it a spell book that smells like it was written in blood, not ink? Yes.
Does its cover feature what seems to be an actual face instead of a nice illustration, or the expected title & author’s name? Again, yes.
But to the question “Shouldn’t we put it back where we found it instead of reading from it during a thunderstorm in this abandoned farmhouse surrounded by farm equipment such as pickaxes and pitchforks, far from home, our cellphones dead?”
Well. I object to that question’s framing.
On a cliffside, the masked parents proudly hold their new child aloft next to the box-and-plunger.
“Thanks for coming to our gender reveal party!” they squawk through their talkboxes. The assembled politely applaud, the plunger is depressed, and the night sky lights up as the 2nd moon explodes, sending glittering rock plummeting through the atmosphere.
“Our child’s gender is… DESTROYER OF WORLDS!”
More polite applause and a race to the parking lot to “beat the rush.”
A yeti, captured by humans, escapes and goes to medical school. This fall: DOCTOR YETI.
NURSE: Doctor, this patient has a sprained wrist.
DOCTOR YETI: Pack them tightly in the snow and check on them in the spring.
NURSE: Oooo-kay.
DOCTOR YETI! His cultural frames of reference are all based on an animal-level existence in a snowy mountainous region! He was also really terrible at school. Tuesdays, 8 p.m.!
A circus strongman in the middle of a Big Top, surrounded by a spiral series of weights that increase in size, small in the center where the strongman starts and out by the tent’s edge, equal in height to the circus’s elephants.
The strongman lifts the first and sets down, moves over, lifts and sets down, moves over.
He follows the dumbbell trail out beyond the tent’s flaps to the parking lot where there awaits an enormous weight labeled THE HISTORICAL INJUSTICES FROM WHICH WE BENEFIT.
I’ve been learning a new tool that lets one build interactive scenarios for work… and I take work very seriously.
Please stop donating to the GoFundMe called “Pushing Michael Down a Well.”
For one thing, it doesn’t cost anything to push me down a well, and for another, I only just climbed out the well from the LAST time, and that was because someone made “pushing Michael down a well” a stretch goal on their Kickstarter.
Which FUNDED, by the way.
[PDF download] Personal archive of my biggest freelance journalism piece for SF Weekly from 1998.
The key to running a good dungeon is paying your skeletons 15 gp an hour, but knowing they’ll extract at least 20 gp and 8 sp per hour in preventing inventory loss, plus accumulated hero cruft left by those who flee at their shambling approach, which can all be resold in town to the next round of adventurers who have not yet learned fear.
Woobster was a rich man, but never a bright one, and so when Jeebs volunteered his services as a manservant, Woobster just said “Sure, whatever, here’s where I keep my money, so take a decent wage” and went back to hard-boiling eggs… well, actually, he was boiling half dozens of them, pulling the eggs out of the water at different times, and trying to see if he could catch one at the very moment it became hard-boiled with a well-timed shell-cracking ambush.
His fingers were prune-y from the water and the blisters, as the eggs came out quite hot.
—
Woobster had a dreadful fear of his Aunt Agnes and came to Jeebs with the problem: a visit was imminent. How could the social call be avoided?
“Not to worry,” said Jeebs, who took a clean spade out of the closet where it rested by the ironing board. He led Woobster out to a nearby park where, is it happened, he had already taken the liberty of digging a grave-sized hole and supplying a comfortable casket. “If you’ll please do me the kindness of reclining…”
Woobster lowered himself in, pushing his manicured fingers into the padded casket’s sides. “Quite well cushioned, Jeebs, well done. But I say… once you’ve shoveled the dirt on top of me, won’t there be— and I’m not trying to impugn your planning or expertise, you understand, and I’m quite grateful for this hiding place where Aunt Agnes is quite unlikely to find me, but— air quality will be an issue, won’t it?”
“I’ve already taken that into consideration,” said Jeebs, tossing an air freshener in the shape of a pine tree onto Woobster’s chest. It fluttered down, end over end, and Woobster had just enough time to remove its plastic sleeve and catch his first scent of chemical pine when Jeebs kicked shut the casket’s lid and the first skittering sounds of pitched dirt started clattering across its surface.
Woobster’s high score on the Drones’ Ms. Pacman machine is beaten. Jeebs addresses the issue by revealing he’s already kidnapped the offending video game winner and hands Woobster a pistol.
Jeebs finishes tying fishing line around Woobster’s wrists, then gives an efficient nod to the sailor pressing currency into his hand.
“Are you quite sure about this, Jeebs?” mutters Woobster, watching Jeebs thumb through his paper money for a quick count.
“It’s all accounted for, sir. There’s no way that you can be maneuvered into marriage while you’ve been impressed into service on a whaling vessel. You’ll be safe from the wiles of Ms. Beautina for at least 8 months until your return.”