A general storms into a computer-filled room at the Pentagon, klaxons blaring, red alert lights spinning everywhere.
GENERAL: What’s going on, soldier?
A soldier taps at his unresponsive keyboard and every key causes his computer to make a “darn!” sound. “darn! darn-darn-darn!”
SOLDIER: I’m afraid… we’ve been hecked, General. Someone hecked our system.
“darn!”
An alien race with cognition tied to ballistics. Many eyes, many limbs. They communicate by tossing objects at each other, the details in the graceful arcs of falling objects, the spin, the drop, the object shape. They juggle their language. Their poets throw talking blocks out into air geysers to bend meaning as the words are blown off-course.
They meet humans who think it’s a game of catch. Who insult by dropping. Who don’t know what they’re saying at all as they chuck a word block back.
There are certain character traits that’ll ensure that you stop getting invited to parties. Aggressive behavior. An inability to keep secrets. The unnerving ability to point to where memories exist, your finger pointing beyond time’s arrow in a direction our eyes can’t register, time flowing around you as if you were a stone in a river, directly at the past, wherever it went yet still is.
Keep doing that and your party invites are going to get “lost in the mail”… a lot.
It’s Sunday and we all know what that means! Everyone in the village has gathered to compete in our weekly debate: What does the miasma that drifts in on damp tendrils smell like THIS week?
Suggestions include (so far):
) Candle smoke from a forgotten dim library
) Grandfathers and grandmothers and unwanted candy
) Flowers sewn into burlap and forgotten in an animal’s pen, used as bedding for beasts
) Just regular bog rot… Why does everyone pretend it’s anything else?
Noses high, everybody! It’s a weekly mystery waiting to be solved!
A human figure with its head on fire judges the souls of a gaggle of school children.
A dark wolf-shape made of smoke and fear stalks a fleeing minivan.
A bird-faced creature with many arms emerges from behind a gate, which swings open, its lock damaged.
A thumping soundtrack with no visible source frantically asks (to a late-90s beat): Whooo let the gods out? ♫ Who? Who? ♫
HOW MANY FROGS CAN I SPIT UP?
BROOM and BOGLIN ARE FRIENDS
HOW TO SUMMON THE CUTENESS FROM BEYOND THE STARS (using only household items and with parental supervision)
Just got this month’s Mr Guns subscription box: Three men’s adventure novels every month!
This month includes:
The Meat Master: Spies of the Kremlin (vol. 8 of The BBQ Files) – The Meat Master meats(!) his match in Moscow’s grilling underground!
Jake Stevens: SPY COLLECTOR! vol. 23 – Jake parachutes into Afghanistan to locate a Czech spy… mint on card!
The Demolitioner: Fists Over Tokyo – It’s Slab vs Kenichi, fists versus feet, crime vs even more crime!
It’s pretty terrible knowing there’s a creature in our woods, knocking over ancient trees, snatching away our fellow villagers in the night, etc. etc. No one’s denying that. It’s awful.
I’m just saying… there’s credible reports the thing has a saddle on it. THAT’S the part I’m saying is hilarious. Someone got a saddle on that dark beast! What skill! What hubris! What a monument to dreams!
I hope they managed to ride it, at least once, before the end.
Happy New Year! According to our interpretation of the order in which the bog reclaimed the runes we scratched in the mud, it is now officially the following:
The Year of the Slowly Sinking
The Year of the Many Legged
The Year of the Miasma and the Closing Throat
If any of these are your sign: You have a prosperous year ahead for as long as you don’t think about it too much!
For everyone else: Better luck next year! We’ll see you back here among the tangled roots of the few trees that refuse to die here!