rusteddreamsstories

[rusteddreamsstories]

Promotion on my books starting April 17 and running for a week! Visit my Amazon author profile.

Malarkey and Belinda (basic and deluxe editions) - the only difference is the illustrations - black and white ink or fully painted color. (Personally, I'd recommend the cheaper edition. I like my ink-work better). and A World of Rusted Dreams Both are fantasy genre. Profiles on the pages. Give 'em a look!

[rusteddreamsstories]

The Indifferent World

Summary: The tale of a person who falls into another world with an entirely different set of physics. A cosmic entity is soon to eat the sun and it is up to her to change the world's thinking by her very presence in time to change it's fabric and to save it. (Based on a dream I had, old work).

The Indifferent World Shadsie

“My universe doesn’t work this way.”

“How, pray tell, does it work?”

“It is mostly indifferent.” 

The man guiding Kris gave her a perplexed look, furrowing his brow even as he passed a viciously-pointed stave into her hands.  Explaining “home” had been hard enough so far in a world where the laws of physics as Kris had known them seemed to be at work only in selective intervals.  Certainly swords and poleaxes worked the same way here as they did at home, as did horses and wind and the general layout of architecture.  Gravity worked, for the most part, and the birds looked and worked like normal birds although the young woman had found some things to use as improbable gliders when trying to escape the ramparts of the castle where she was being held.  She’d have probably broken bones if that aspect hadn’t been at least a little bit as “cartoonish” as it was, although she was caught and brought back again, anyway. 

She was not treated poorly here, quite the opposite, but she wished to go home.  There had to be a way, she only had to find it and suspected it lay somewhere in the Eastern Woods, where she had first arrived.  There were no light portals or swirly things.  She suspected she was asleep because her arrival here seemed to coincide with her getting droopy-eyed while doing a painting.  Around-and-around her brush went over a circle of yellow-white paint representing a fading sun in a darkened sky – around-and-around until she’d felt as if she’d been drawn into the world of the painting, stepping out into a dappled wood. 

She vaguely remembered an old book series she’d read.  Yeah, the Pevensie children got into Narnia by staring at a painting in one of those Faerie stories.  Kris had been actually creating a painting. She was sure she was not high at the time: At least as not as long as fumes from the linseed oil and turpentine weren’t getting to her too much.  She always worked in well-ventilated areas. She was also pretty sure that this wasn’t Narnia.

Her captors called their world “Earth.”  It wasn’t home, though - it definitely wasn’t home. 

When she’d found herself fully upright rather than sitting at her easel and her boots were crunching the dried detritus of a forest floor, what she could see beyond the upper trees was blue.  It wasn’t the sky of her painting, although the trees were similar. When the soldiers had arrested her and taken her out into the fields surrounding Highwater Castle, the sky was as blue as any she’d seen, dotted with puffy clouds that seemed to mirror the numerous sheep grazing the lawns. 

The sky was rust-bloody red now and the sun was dim.  Pietro, the guardsman with her, regarded her seriously in the stormlight as he strapped plates of armor over her arms and shins.  “How is it different?” he asked, wondering if she had some kind of answer that would win the coming battle.   Perhaps he was trying to goad her, to get her mind to work the way the people here wanted it to.

“For one thing,” she answered, “our sun and the light that it gives us is not tied to the welfare of a maiden.”

“Even so, Outlander, if you continue to value your life,” the man said with a shiver, “you will assist in protecting Lady Umbra – even if you do not think she should exist.” 

Kris could not tell anyone entirely how she’d wound up at a Medieval-looking fortress in some alternate version of Earth and the Universe – or wherever she was.  She’d tried waking up several times.  Pain was real here and she could tell time and read books without the numbers and words jumbling together.  She pinched herself and water was cold and she was still here.  Most things worked by regular logic, save those few things that were very different, but differed in the way of a constructed world – like that of a book or a game or a film.  The “rules,” even the ones that did not make sense to her, were consistent.  One thing that she knew that was strangest of things about this place was that all the people here spoke and wrote in perfect English in the style of her era, so she had no problem communicating here. 

The other thing she knew was that the world was about to end.

She looked up at the wounded sky to the dying sun.  People were screaming behind her.  There were rally-shouts to defend the castle and its inmost sanctum where the ailing Sun Maiden was guarded.  The clouds moved like black smoke over the red face of the sky.  Kris could have sworn she saw the darkest of them form into a maw with fangs briefly over the sun before a wind blew them back into something paler and more amorphous.  The forces of Darkness had been winning most of the battles of late.  Smoke-Ghosts, eyeless beasts and human troops of surrounding kingdoms who were loyal to the End for their own mysterious reasons had taken the mountain fortresses and were quickly encroaching upon the Center of the World.  The war seemed nearly at an end, one that would see humankind and most animal and plant life defeated and eventually extinct. 

The Beast of Entropy was nearly upon the Kingdom of Light.  If the Beast swallowed up the Maiden or if she died from the bombardment of malevolent energies surrounding them all, the sun itself would die forever, flickering out like the flame of a spent candle. First would come the heat as the Beast would revel in his destruction, stirring up the fire-mountains with his great paws.  Of course, the people would scramble to build fires to keep themselves warm and lit for as long as possible from any consumable source, fighting the Night as living things do by mad instinct.  After that, the cold would come and then the bitter deep chill.  After that the silence would fall. 

The laughter of Entropy filled the air, although nothing was seen of any great creature.  Kris wondered at what the personification of a cosmic force was supposed to look like, anyway.  The myths she’d been told described this particular god as being both draconic and catlike, but that he could take the form of any fear.  It seemed kind of hokey to Kris.  Then again, just a few days ago she’d met a young woman close to her age whose fate was connected to the sun and whose life guaranteed its place in the sky. 

As soon as she’d arrived in this world, she’d been taken by soldiers to Highwater Castle where the local royalty were inexplicably quick to make friends with her.  Apparently, she was a part of some sort of prophecy.  They’d spoke of having “Outworlders” arrive before – typically from other planets with other suns that were guarded by Maidens.  Only a few came from places such as hers where the laws were different and it was only people who came from these places that had a chance, they believed, of “breaking the Cycle.”  

She was set to be one of the guardians of a woman named Lady Umbra.  She’d met Glace and Matilda, the girls’ other bodyguards and both natives of the land.  Glace experimented in something she called “science” that seemed much more to Kris like magic – mainly in developing technology to control her naturally-occurring ice-powers.  Matilda was a standard ax-wielding warrioress.  Their charge, the Lady Umbra, was a pale-skinned, dark-haired, dark eyed youth and was slated to succeed the previous Keeper of the Sun.  She was to become nothing less than a goddess – “Sol-53,” to be precise, after her powers fully manifested and after a ceremony.  “Sol-52,” her predecessor, had passed away recently from the Darkness-sickness before the girl could become a full-fledged replacement. 

The Beast of Entropy had sensed this weakness and had sped across the Void to begin his assault upon this Earth’s sun and its light. 

Lady Umbra had not been trained to her destiny specifically.  She was, however, since birth, heavily scrutinized along with many other girls as a member of a genetic line from which any member displaying certain attributes could be chosen.  Her mother and father had named her “Umbra” – a name denoting shadows – specifically to try to spare her the “blessing” of being chosen to become a goddess of the sun.  Unfortunately for her, she had the correct traits for it in the end and had been born in a world enslaved to Fate. 

“So you are the latest one they dragged in to try to break the chains of Fate?” Umbra asked as she poured Kris a dainty cup of tea from a delicate ceramic teapot painted with pink roses.  Kris took the cup, unsure of proper teatime etiquette.  She’d had plenty of tea in her time, but it was typically Southern iced sweet-tea or it was hot but taken in a huge coffee mug because even while Kris preferred tea to coffee, she was a less-than-polite American who liked all drinks that sat beside her while she worked to be nice and big for the sake of not having to take refills.   

“I guess so,” she replied.  “I just really want to go home, actually.  Even exploring this world outside these halls and towers would be nice, but it seems that I am a prisoner until I serve some kind of use.  I am confused by all of this.” 

“Everyone is,” Umbra said as she sipped her cup of spiced oolong. “The king and the priests just love when someone crosses over from a world where stars are not connected to people such as me and you said that you come from such a place, correct?”

“I do,” Kris answered.  “Where I come from, the sun is a mass of fire.”  She wasn’t entirely sure if this was the correct terminology – she was certain that it wasn’t and that it would make anyone she knew who had any kind of interest in even rudimentary astrophysics tear their hair out in frustration with her.  She thought it best to keep the conversation simple.  “What I learned in my childhood schooling, anyway, is my world’s sun is a ball of burning gases.  It sometimes flares up, causing problems in our… communication-magic. But… it’s not connected to anyone’s life.  Our lives depend upon it, but it doesn’t depend upon us at all.  It was there before we were and will spin on long after we are gone.  It’s set to die one day, but long in the future – likely after my people will meet extinction by natural causes or after our descendants have colonized other worlds and have transformed into different kinds of beings.” 

“Our priests pray for our world to become such an indifferent one.” Umbra stated. 

“What’s funny,” Kris replied, “Is that so many of my people get the existential shivers when they think of how indifferent our universe is to them.  The sun and the stars will spin on long after them.  Some of the distant stars they see in the sky are long dead, themselves, the light oblivious to their watching even if those stars were ever conscious to begin with.  Entropy exists, but not as a beast with a will to destroy.  It is indifferent, as well.”

“Does your world not have gods?”

“We have gods… sort of. There are many kinds of beliefs in my world, many gods, one, none… It’s nothing like what this world runs under.  No one seems to be sure of anything and people who act all cocksure that only they are right are the people I’m most suspicious of.  That’s just my personal view, though.”

“Hmmm.” 

“What I’m trying to say is that, no, we do not have Sun Maidens or Star Maidens.  If you’d been born in my world, the sun would give its light with or without you.  You wouldn’t have any powers over it.  You’d have to find some other thing to carry for people to count on you.” 

Kris said this last bit with a smile, a full believer in the concept of kindness carrying kindness and that no one was ever a hero or a villain on their own, but shaped by the circumstances and other people in their lives.  She’d wanted to find something to do to be helpful to the world.  So far, she was only an art student, having chosen that field over anything her parents thought was useful.  Her aunt who’d once been a graphic designer had actually tried to discourage her, telling her that the working world with that was a “plane full of predators” that would chew her up and spit her out.  It was true that she could have tried for something better suited to her world like becoming a doctor or joining the military – things most people thought “counted,” but she was drawn to the pencil and the paintbrush in a way that wouldn’t’ be denied.  She mused that she might be as much a prisoner to her “calling” as the Sun Maiden was to hers. 

The difference, of course, was that her curses were taken on by choice.  They had not been forced upon her. 

“So, in your world, I would be free…” Umbra said softly. 

“Probably not entirely,” Kris said, “because no one is.  Limits exist everywhere, even in my world, but, as much as any living creature can have freedom, I’m sure you would be free if you’d lived in my world.” 

“I never asked to become the sun,” Umbra said ruefully.  “I never asked to be its light in human form upon the Earth, to convey to it the needs of the people.  Those are the duties set before me once I become strong.  The sun will give its power to me to protect my people with divine Fire and Light, to protect my people from the Darkness.  I will be given higher regard than the king and the queen – but I never wanted it.  My parents are merchants.  Is it strange that I desired a peasant’s life?” 

“Not at all.” 

“I like chickens.  I wanted just to have a cottage somewhere and raise chickens.  I know all about different breeds and the different kinds of eggs they lay.  I’m not ashamed to clean a coop.”

“A simple life is as proud as any other.” 

“I also wanted to know what having sex might be like someday.” 

Kris snorted and spit out all of her tea. 

Umbra laughed.  “Too blunt?”

“A little.  You mean, you dreamed of marriage to some gallant young man and all that?” 

“Not necessarily.  As the Sun Keeper, I am slated to remain ‘pure.’  It’s said that when the sun chose young men that it was the same deal for them – the whole virginity thing.”

“I’ve never actually been much interested in losing it in a hurry, myself,” Kris said.  “I haven’t found the right person, I guess, but since I became an adult, I’ve at least had the choice in that.” 

Matilda entered the room without knocking.  “It is time your bed rest, M’Lady,” she told Umbra. 

“Yes, Ma’am,” the girl replied. 

“The Outworlder shall leave to her own quarters at once.” 

With a glare, Kris departed as asked, to be led by Glace, who was waiting at the door.  Neither of them trusted her completely, but they seemed to have an awareness that she could be the key to their world’s salvation – and the salvation of their beloved young mistress. 

Kris thought about it as she was taken back to her chambers.  She was a prisoner not because she was a threat, but because she was a commodity.  In her months here, she had learned all she could – or at least, all that her captors would tell her. 

People from worlds without celestial Keepers were said to potentially possess the power to undo the cosmic Fate simply by not believing in it.  There was some prophecy in the ancient archives that held that when the right Outworlder came along, one coming from a world in which the sun, the moon and the stars operated completely without tether to any mortal’s soul nor to any of the cities or kingdoms, their sheer disbelief in the world they now walked in could loose the sun and free its goddess to remain a mortal. 

In other words, it was Kris’ own logic, imagination and her very longing for her own world that could defeat the ages-old threat of the willful Beast of Entropy. 

As it was, the sun and the Light were vulnerable prey.  Even when any Sun Keeper came into her own as a physical goddess, there were things that could kill her – such as sicknesses with their origins in dark energies.  The blades of swords might bounce off her milk-soft skin when she came to that point, but the energies were always present and were always in danger of growing – particularly with their connections with the morality of the local people and their morale in general.  

As it was, Lady Umbra was still fully mortal.  She felt not only the bombardment of cruel energies, but could be slain by any means that would kill any other young girl. 

Kris tried for the sake of them all to imagine herself out of this quagmire.  She thought of home and let her sickness for it consume her hours in hopes that she would find it, but also that this world would become more like it.  This was an entire world full of desperate people.  She could not blame them for trying to use her.  It was also a fact that she liked Lady Umbra a great deal.  Her visits with the kind, intelligent and occasionally blunt young woman were the highlight of her days even as the girl was ill often and the skies grew ever darker. 

Kris tried to imagine the Beast away, but the more she tried, the more she saw his shadow on the moon and the more she saw him in the clouds.  The ancient scribes that had illustrated the ancient texts she was given to read did not help.  They’d drawn the damnable thing – as a dragon mixed with a cat, full of horns and hair and razor-spines jutting off its shoulders.  It was a big-eared whiskered demon. 

The artist imagined the creature taking the sun up as ball and batting it around like a cat does with a toy.  She immediately regretted it when she was sure she saw the noonday sun flicker outside her tower window.  No, the sun was still there and not being batted around like a ball. There was a cry from Lady Umbra’s chamber, as if the girl was having a nightmare. 

No… she couldn’t give him power.  She couldn’t give the ways of this world power.  She had to free it.  She was in a world that was unbelievable.  It was a world like a book, a game or a film.  “This cannot be a real world,” she told herself, “That is the only way I can change it – if I keep thinking of it as unreal.” 

She was escorted to the castle’s altar-area where the Kingdom of Light’s priests prayed for an indifferent world – not caring that such a world could make someone feel utterly alone.  Kris did wish she could go back to being insignificant again.  She preferred it to having a world set upon her shoulders.

When the Smoke-Ghosts and the Dark Alliance breached the Kingdom of Light’s mountain passes, they came upon Castle Highwater like a wave.  This is how Kris the Outworlder found herself in the broken armory with the old soldier named Pietro.   This was how she found herself trying to explain what she already had tried to convey to many others. 

She thanked the man and took spear he’d given her.  She ran back toward Umbra’s chambers over rubble and the ruin.  Her ears rang with cannon-fire as Hightower’s soldiers tried to combat the physical dimensions of the onslaught.  She looked above and saw the clouds form into lithe and dark cat-shapes to play and dance and hide in a disturbing manner.   

Kris tried to avoid the fighting, not being trained from youth in melee combat in the same manner as the men defending the fortress.  She was not a magical creature, either and felt like she was carrying the spear as a prop.  She decapitated a Smoke-Ghost and watched it dissipate into the ether.  Two formed from the shimmering air in its place. 

A roar shook the castle and a wall fell.  Instead of running from the disaster, she ran toward it because she spied Lady Umbra – carried in the arms of Glace, who was fighting off a group of eyeless lizards with the ice-channeling guns on her wrists. 

“I am trying as hard as I can to make sense of this!” Kris called as she ran toward the two. “I am so sorry!  My mind cannot seem to stop this!”

“Don’t worry, just fight!” Glace shouted. 

Kris held her spear out before her, certain that if this was a dream that it must be her death-dream, either that or she was going to awaken as soon as she died – that tended to happen to her whenever she dreamed of her own death, which was why she never believed in that whole “You die in your dream, you die in real life” malarkey.  At the same time, she did care – at least for Umbra – just a little and did not want to just vanish and leave the girl to her fate. 

That was when the smoke of hundreds of Smoke-Ghosts turned upon the wind and gathered into an enormous, beastly shape.  It roared and was blacker than black, deeper than night – Kris felt like she was staring into a black hole when she beheld its flowing fur which strangely shimmered in the outlines of its windblown locks.  It was a giant cat – though its muzzle was burly and wide, resembling the snout and mouth on certain kinds of dogs.  It had four long horns like those of a four-horned ram, two upright, two curved back and forward like hooks.  Its eyes glowed like a pale winter moon until they flashed “out” into a deeper black-hole void than its wild hair. 

It rounded upon the figures standing in the rubble of the castle, including Kris.  She trembled.  She found within herself a fiery will, a sudden surge of passion. 

“You aren’t supposed to exist!” she screamed.  “You are just a force! You shouldn’t have a will of your own! You are no breathing beast!” 

Before she knew what she was doing, she was running forward with her spear and thrust it right into the giant cat-nose of the Beast of Entropy.  It shook its great head in annoyance and shifted around her, opening its maw and showing its teeth. When she thought she hadn’t seen anything blacker, she beheld the Beast’s throat. 

The last thing she heard was a horrific crunch as Light went out.  ________________________________________________________

Kris and Pietro wandered around for neither of them knew how long – hours or days.  The last survivors of Highwater were scattered and they didn’t see another soul, even when they could find enough fuel for torches. 

The image of Lady Umbra and her guardian Glace at once being taken by Entropy haunted Kris’ memory. It was her last flash of daylight-sight before the Darkness had fallen like iron.  She did not know why the creature left her alone – perhaps it was because he had gotten what he’d came to this world for.  The sun had vanished in an instant, dying with the Maiden.  None could tell what was going on in the precious little light to see by the torches and fires raging on the castle grounds in this new deep night.  Entropy and his forces had vanished completely, leaving the world to die off. Presumably, he was off to other planets that hung in this universe, to other suns, to devour other Sun Maidens. 

Pietro, the soldier, didn’t even have the will to kill her.  She had failed to protect Lady Umbra, but all he could do was to walk with her and to rest at will, not that there was anywhere to go.  

Kris watched her companion lay down beyond the last embers of a dying campfire. The last bits of orange glow upon the hills had long gone out.  The heat of high summer was fading quickly, although Kris was surprised at how long it was lingering.  She’d failed in her duty – the role having been thrust upon her without much knowledge aside.   

She remembered the words that everyone had feared – “First the heat, then the cold, then the <i>deep chill</i> and then the silence.”  

At present, the night was cavernous.  The only light was from the pitiful campfire, losing the last of its fuel and of the distant stars.  Perhaps other worlds in this universe would have better luck with their own Sun Keepers – if that is the way it worked.  Kris wondered if any of those stars was the one connected to her Earth, shining into this universe somehow.  If she could not go home she could at least dream of it. 

It was strange, she thought, how so many of the people here had prayed for an indifferent world, a world like hers where the celestial bodies spun along without anyone’s life or death being involved and long after anyone’s lifespan.  She thought, ruefully, that they had gotten an indifferent world of a differing kind.  Entropy had his way – stalking in on cat-feet to pad away, leaving any survivors to an enduring darkness. The air was already growing cold enough for Kris to shiver beneath the wool blankets that she’d hastily grabbed along with the other early survivors, wondering when the shivering would fail to warm her body and wondering when she’d just go numb.  She was already so tired. 

“See you in the morning,” her companion said from behind the almost-dead fire.  Both of them knew that there would be no actual morning.  It was doubtful that either of them would get through the requisite sleeping hours. 

The last of the summer crickets chirped – just one playing his song to some mate that would not hear him in the deepening darkness.  Kris listened to the bright chirp-chirps until they grew more distant with a greater gap of time in between. 

The chirping stopped and the silence fell.    

[rusteddreamsstories]

A Gift From Santa

A response to a writing prompt from one of the writers’ prompt sites that I wrote up a while back for my old blog.   Prompt: You come home one night during the holidays to find Santa Claus in your living room.  He informs you that your child wanted one gift this year:  For him to talk with you.   Tumblr keeps borking up the Keep Reading tag, but now they have the post-shortner by default, so plain-post.   A Gift From Santa It was Christmas Eve Eve and David was very tired.  He’d gotten both the holiday-eve and the holiday off, but the night before, while his wealthier, office-work inclined neighbors who’d managed to score their week’s vacations were preparing to enjoy their Feast of the Seven Fishes or a night of caroling or going to the local Holiday Market Square, he’d had to unload a supply-truck of all of the clothing and doo-dads and various promotions to be set up the day after Christmas at the store.  The life of a manager was not all supervision, after all, it was sore backs and foot problems and every other old-man ailment he was getting far too young.  He’d planned to spend Christmas Eve in an armchair watching his son’s favorite Christmas-movies with him and moving his aching bones as little as possible until it came time to wrap the gifts from Santa to put under their small, artificial tree and to munch the cookies and the carrot left out for him and the reindeer. Little Gavin should be tucked into bed by now tonight and David thought that the shadow he saw sitting on the couch was the neighbor, Betty – and the shadow resembled her large, pleasant frame. She and her wife, Sarah, took turns babysitting Gavin as they were interested in adopting a child and looked to the job as a fine bit of practice.  David joked with them that they didn’t have to adopt “another kid” because they were practically raising Gavin in his stead with how much the store needed him.  They’d helped him with the gifts this year – most of the presents he could handle on his own, but the video game console and set of games that he knew would knock Gavin’s socks off (and keep him believing in Santa for at least another year) was made possible by their chipping in.   “Betty?”  David asked, “Why are you sitting in the dark?  You don’t even have the TV on.  Is something wrong?”   “I sent her home,” a deep masculine voice said. “Don’t scream.  Please don’t scream.  You will wake your son.”   David stiffened and did a mental check for anything he knew to be by the door that could be used as an improvised weapon. He fumbled in his pocket for his phone, wondering if he could dial 911 by touch.   “I mean no harm.  Turn on the light.”   David reached for the light switch.  What he beheld on the couch was a portly man dressed in red with white fur trim, big black boots and a big black belt with a golden buckle.  He had a long white beard.  The man was dressed exactly like the American-version of Santa Claus.  The beard was genuine, that much David could tell. The stranger looked like he’d walked right out of a Coca-Cola advertisement to sit on his couch.  It made him wonder if there was a be-scarfed polar bear shut up in the bathroom.   David startled, as can be expected.   “I know what you are thinking,” the stranger assessed, “but I am not off-duty from some mall.  I am as you see me.”   “I am as you see me…” David repeated.  “I don’t know who you are buddy,” he said with a stiffened stance, “but if you have hurt Gavin, I swear to God I’ll…” “Rip out your intestines and strangle you with them?” the man in red finished for him with a cocked eyebrow, “Quite the naughty thought, but I will not mark it against you.  It is the natural reaction from a loving father and trust me; I know that Gavin is your entire world.  He is the reason why you work so hard at a job that is killing your body and your soul.  It is because you cannot just pick up and ‘get a better one’ right now and it is because you cannot take the risk of losing the insurance-plan for either of you.” “Keeping us off the street…” David replied, thoroughly uncomfortable with how much this stranger apparently knew about him, much less with how he was effortlessly reading his thoughts.  A song popped into his head, unbidden.  “He knows when you are sleeping; he knows when you’re awake. He knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness’ sake!”  It melded with images of the Elf on the Shelf, a thing he had never gotten for Gavin as it was a Christmas tradition that he’d never grown up with nor needed himself and he frankly thought that an unblinking little spy-doll hanging around in one’s home for the entire season to be rather creepy. He’d always had some problems with the Santa-myth for similar reasons, but deemed Santa himself harmless enough in the end.  The man on the couch calmly held out one gloved hand and conjured a tiny blizzard within the palm. Snow floated and danced.  In an instant, David felt a gale of snow around him, and yet it did not wet or freeze anything in the apartment.  Wind whipped around him fresh and cool and the air smelled of cinnamon, apple and cloves.  “Do you need any more convincing?’ the man asked as he slammed his palm closed and the indoor-blizzard suddenly vanished, leaving no traces save a few sparkling flakes on David’s coat.  It had not been snowing outside – too warm, one of those Christmas-week warm-spells that were becoming far too common (not that he’d minded it too much, as he’d grown up in southern California).   “But…but!” David protested, “It is parents, older siblings, uncles, aunts and neighbors that get children their presents! I’ve never had you waltz on in here and drop presents for Gavin!  Also, this is an apartment – no chimney!”   Santa pulled a small card from his pocket and held it with a smile before putting it back.  “Didn’t you tell him that I have a special magical key-card for apartments?” he said with a rosy grin that bespoke secrets.   “My ways are many.  “And I think you misunderstand how I operate, young man.  I do not always provide the gifts themselves; instead, I imbue them with a special kind of magic.  I provide the magic for the memories to the gifts that the children will treasure all of their lives.  Call me a guardian of nostalgia, if you will.”   “Hmmm,” David murmured. “It seems like a lot of nothing, like well-wishes that don’t do anything physical.”   “Ah!  A humbug!” Santa laughed.  It was a laugh as deep as a winter’s night and as soft as falling snowflakes.  “I also foster generosity,” he said.  “Those little miracles among adults that make gifts happen for children.  I think that I may be more for adults than for children sometimes.  Do you remember the little bonus you got that you were not expecting?  Or the ten dollar bill on the sidewalk without an apparent owner that everyone else just walked on by that seemed to be there just for you when you needed it most?  Do you recall how your neighbors just knew exactly what you wanted to get for Gavin as his main present and how you were struggling to get it?” “That was because they know him,” David asserted.  “He’s been jabbering on about wanting it for months.”   Santa Claus winked, a sparkle appearing on his left cheek as he did so.  “Don’t be surprised if Gavin finds some games for it that neither you nor your neighbors remember buying for him.”   “As long as they’re the right format.”   “Don’t you think I know exactly what good children want?”  Santa asked. “And you have been a good boy this year, David, a very good boy.  The reason that I am here is because what your son really wants more than anything this year is something that cannot be wrapped and put under a tree.”   David was dumbfounded.  “I’m afraid that I don’t think that world peace is achievable,” he said flatly.     “Let us not get into something bordering on theodicy here,” Santa Claus intoned, reaching for a ginger-cookie on a plate on the lamp-table beside the couch.  Funny, David did not remember placing a plate of cookies there, nor the glass of milk beside it.  Those were things that Gavin wanted to set out tomorrow night.   Santa continued. “Even magical beings and guardians of nostalgia have their limits.  No, no, no.  Gavin merely wished for me to talk to you.”   David was taken aback.  He staggered until he found himself tripping into the living-room chair.  He flopped back into it and decided to stay there.  He curled over and put his elbows on his knees – his position for intense conversations with friends – well, when he had any. “Why would he ask this?” David wondered. “He is getting to an age where he is noticing more about his father,” Santa said with a small smile, laced with sadness. “He knows that you get lonely and sad this time of year.  He was too young to form lasting memories of his mother, but he knows that there is something missing.”   David sighed and grabbed his hair at his forehead.  “Marcie died in January.  I hate that month worse than December, but no, no, no, this is all wrong!  He knows that his mother is in Heaven, but he doesn’t know when it happened.  I’ve always wanted to keep the holidays – all of them, but Christmas especially, special to him.”   “In Heaven’ you say?” the figure in red said as he shifted his seat after finishing his cookie.  “You feel like that may be a little lie you tell the child – and yourself, too, much like tales of me.”  Santa sat back and took a little sip of milk from the glass that was next to the cookies.  He put it down and thought about his words carefully, scratching his beard. “I have watched your family.  You have always made the best effort to keep things merry and bright.  You stuff down your own nostalgia and grief because you want your son to know only joy and to develop positive memories.  You keep carefully matters of money and shield him from the sorrows of this world the best as you can.  You are a very good boy, David, a very good boy.”   Tears started forming in David’s eyes and streaming down his cheeks.  They were light – guarded manly tears -  but it was the most he’d cried in front of another person for a very long time.   “He’s seeing the cracks in the armor, isn’t he?”  David choked.   “Yes,” Santa replied.  He senses the sadness you try to cover this time of year. He knows that you struggle more than you let on.  He was worried.  He is almost eight years old, after all, and very smart.  He’s tried to talk to his “aunt” Betty and “aunt” Sarah about it, but they tell him not to worry.  Adults can be dreadfully dismissive of children at times.  It is well-meaning.  You want to protect them, but you need to take care of yourselves as you take care of them.   “It was long ago.  I had someone to talk to…back then… but therapy is something I have neither the time nor the money for.  I do Gavin a disservice, don’t I?”   “Please don’t worry about it,” Santa replied. “Scars of the heart fade with time, but they never go away.  If they did, you would not be the person you are and are becoming.”   “Marcie… do you know… where she is? If she is happy?”   “I cannot answer that question for you,” Santa said with a shake of his head.  He raised a finger.  “Ah, yes, it is one of the other magical entities that may have a chance of answering that, but you will have to wait until Halloween before they are on duty again. “But for now, I am here.  Gavin wanted you to have a friend, someone you could talk to – someone you could feel comfortable talking to.”   The bearded man smiled fondly.  “I was the first person he thought of.  He talked to Betty about getting in touch with me because he thinks all adults know me but didn’t want you to know about it. He even put a letter addressed to the North Pole in the mail – bless him. He wanted the video games, but he wanted you to be less lonely more.  If I did nothing else intangible for a child this year, I decided that I would at least try to do this – to help a boy’s father be a little less sad.”   Perhaps it was a magic he’d felt in the air that had him budging from his seat, but David was possessed with a sudden urge to lurch up from his chair.  He opened his arms and hugged Santa Claus.  He let his tears flow freely – built up over season after season of keeping himself from breaking for his son’s sake.  Somehow, Santa’s presence – perhaps it was a spell placed over him – allowed him to break.  Santa held the grown man as tenderly as a child and let him weep.   They talked long into the night until the guardian of children’s Christmases told him that he must leave to prepare for the following night.  By the time dawn broke, David was left drying his tears, wondering if he’d dreamed the entire thing.   The scents of cinnamon, apple and cloves lingered all over the small apartment.  

[rusteddreamsstories]

Love is Inevitable

A "Humanity Fuck Yeah!" "Humans are Space Orcs" type of story, except that instead of an alien species admiring us for our ability to endure physical hardships, they admire us for our ability to endure grief.

Love is Inevitable  In the ages since contact had been made with the Earth and the human species, the other rational races of the Pan-Galactic Alliance had their various reasons for either abhorring or admiring them. A great many of the peoples admired Humanity for their general physical endurance – the ability to recover quickly from wounds and to withstand conditions that would kill a great many beings.  However, the Mhrr’ah held them in awe for a very different kind of endurance.  First contact between the two species was a bit awkward because humans could not help but compare the Mhrr’ah to a certain kind of pet animal they kept.  “Kitty!”  - They resembled bipedal cats save for the small horns upon their heads, longer, boxier faces and notable biological differences such as reproduction through eggs.  In turn, the Mhrr’ah compared humans to the golb, a small, bald, purplish-colored animal they kept as friends, although they were arguably more pig-like or doggish. Their respective choice of pets, strangely, was what had started conversation which led to the Mhrr’ah thinking of humans as particularly tough.  The Mhrr’ah were rather appalled that humans kept companion animals that did not match their own lifespans.  They were even more confounded by the ability of human beings to pick up and keep working and living after the loss of kin.  The Mhrr’ah were highly emotional beings. As soon as they had grown, they tended to part ways with their parents, but stayed in touch with their clutch-mates.  They formed attachments with mates and friends of similar health-status and age (and they did live long, by the human reckoning) so as to maximize the likelihood of a life together.  Most forms of conflict on their planet were a distant memory of ancestral forms because of this peculiar type of empathy.  If one Mhrr’ah in a friend or family group died, the rest of their strong attachments was sure to follow.  It was almost unheard of for one to lose a life-mate and not to have their own body shut down in pure despair within months of the event.  Conversations with humans brought up widows, those who had lost brothers, best friends, parents and animal companions time and again.  Humans spoke to them of Stages of Grief and of the ways they’d sought out each other to support themselves through it.  They spoke of ghost stories and mythical lands of the dead where some hoped to be reunited someday with those they’d loved.  The Mhrr’ah, who did not understand how one could fall, but not the others in one’s chosen circle would bow their heads in salute to the resilient human explorers and tradesmen they’d met if they ever had a sad story.   And that is to say nothing of other tales the humans told them – the loss of homes, the loss of friends though things other than death, various mental breakdowns that they could recover from.  This, to them, was far more impressive than any physical endurance that humans ever had.  The Mhrr’ah were a people who were careful to keep to small circles and careful to keep themselves safe. They tried to distance themselves from forming friendships with humans even as they’d formed partnerships of mutual benefit simply because they knew that humans felt strong emotions, too, but were shorter lived than they were.  A human might keep a Mhrr’ah in their memory if they’d loved and lost a friend, but a Mhrr’ah would not be capable of it for long.  In the end, they’d even formed attachments with pets knowing that they would outlive them by many spans.  When asked, the humans said something that resonated with all Mhrr’ah.  “We really can’t help it.  Love is inevitable.” 

[rusteddreamsstories]

Bot accounts and Real people with accounts.

I’m pretty sure the tumblr community is well aware of this problem and probably loads of other people have already made posts about this, so I’ll keep it brief.

So recently blogs like this keep appearing in my followers list (these are recent ones)

Now when you get a spam blogs or p*rn bots you’re supposed to blog them. But some these blogs are actual people who are new on tumblr and have the default icon, so you’re supposed to check before who block them. But here’s the problem…

some of these blogs don’t have anything. No posts, No description, No title. So you’re gonna automatically assume that these are spam and block them.

Now I hate fact that some of these blogs belong to actual people and I’ve been blocking and reporting on blogs like these for the past few days, and that they’re probably wondering why there being blocked or reported. ( sorry to the people who own blogs like these that I blocked you)

So a couple of tips for new blogs on this site,

1.You could change the title (a catchphrase, a favorite quote, a random sentence etc.) or type small description, or whatever random stuff you like!

2. You could change the your avator or icon (it be a picture of you, a cartoon, again it’s your choice do whatever)

3.If you’re not planning to frequently post stuff and just sign in to check out other people’s stuff, just put a put a post something like this just to show you’re new here.(again u can write down anything)

if you’re reading this and new to this website I hope you found these suggestions useful and should stop you from getting blocked immediately. Happy posting.

[rusteddreamsstories]

“I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one’s own taste instead of reading other people’s! Homemade books must be so nice.”

— George Eliot

[rusteddreamsstories]

Awake Tiff’s hand shook and her grip slackened on the hilt of her sword.  It dropped to the ground with a dull thump in the dust and ashes.   The weapon was a simple arming-sword, easy to use for a novice from another world, although its edges glowed brilliant white when unsheathed and it was imbued with supernatural power. Supposedly, it could only be wielded by someone from another world – the Plane of the Creators.   When she’d arrived in this place, waking up groggy after being nearly hit by a truck when being a city-tourist with a couple of friends, Tiffany Prescott had been told that her work-boredom daydreams had a hand in fueling the ambient magic present all over Avaris.  In her day to day life, she was a grill-jockey at a burger joint, a soulless job that didn’t pay the bills, but was her best option after college for the time being as she sought better.  In Avaris, she had a place as the world’s Chosen Heroine.  She wasn’t some inanely-named random “Tiffany” here.  She was “Tiff of Shining Justice,” wielder of the ironically-named “Great Mercy” and of the sacred bow “The Light-Stag’s Heart.”   It was a good gig – like any number of video games she had played and books she’d read. She didn’t want to go back, even if a way was made for her.  She missed her family and friends, but as many an isekai anime went, she’d probably been hit by that errant truck and had been buried or burnt and scattered by now. (She’d never written up funeral plans, feeling that her family would do whatever comforted them the most).  This was her life now, or her afterlife, or whatever it was.  Not that she couldn’t die here, as well, and she did not know where she’d go if she did. But this world needed saving, so it was said, and after Myrna and the group had found her and gotten her healed up and oriented, the tales of the Litch Queen made her burn with a sense of justice. The powerful sorceress had been bringing plague upon plague upon the land, driving people from their homes and farms and murdering countless good beings with her armies of the undead. That was the Litch Queen’s goal – to make the living world into a death world, to destroy the color and the life and to render everything to reflect the darkness of her heart.  She wanted to create a world where only bones wandered. And so Tiff had seen.  Many of the places her group had taken back under the kind rule of Good King Rupert for the sake of resettlement had to be fully burned out to get rid of the zombies, skeletons and assorted amalgamations. Myrna assured Tiffany that their job was not only to create spaces for the living, but to put violated souls to rest. Tiff had been awash in the sheer beauty of Avaris – it was a world abundant in magic, in color and had such gentle people in it.  There was the funny little man in his little pony-drawn traveling wagon that she met every now and again who peddled potions and other arcane wares… There were the people in her party, Myrna, the healer, Lindis, the Knight, Orcus the elemental mage, Trapta who crafted armors and automata and hailed from a great technological city to the north.  Trapta was the only person unimpressed by Tiff’s tales of home.  The city of Gears had flying cars, after all.  Tiff’s Philadelphia did not have flying cars.   Tiff, as well as the Chosen Heroine, “Tiff of Shining Justice,” was also known as “Tiff the Human” here, or “Tiff the Man” until she’d corrected her companions to please, please address her as a woman.  They used “Man” as a catch-all term for human, with no differentiation between the genders, but it felt incredibly awkward.  Everyone else here was somewhat deer-like or goat-like – having long ears that ended in points and horns, usually small, but powerful mages like Orcus and Myrna sported some impressive headgear.  Orcus had branching antlers crowning a head that seemed too thin to carry them and Myrna had horns more like those of an ibex, long, swept back and ornamented with a white gem in the center.  They had long tails tipped in flags of hair – like old illustrations of unicorns.   Tiff was taller than them, too.  She made the perfect Warrior From Another World, mighty and strong.  Trapta had outfitted her and Lindis taught her how to handle weapons. She had taken to them as quickly as if she were a character in a video game.  She had no magic whatsoever and so had no aptitude for anything that Orcus knew and often – too often – partook in Myrna’s healing skills.   She’d been hurt badly the last time they’d liberated a town from the Litch Queen’s forces.  She’d felt funny after Myrna had healed her.  Her wounds were mended, even though they’d left marks, but something felt off.  In the back of her mind, Tiff hoped that she hadn’t contracted tetanus or some other grave infection from the rusty swords that the skeleton-marauders had wielded. She’d’ gotten stabbed through pretty good as well as some fierce slices and Myrna had taken a full day and a half to stave off her death.  Had she been clocked upside the head, too and did not remember it?  Something felt strange with her vision, as if the world was brighter – the difference between a summer day and a winter day.   The group returned to the village.  The orders from Good King Rupert were to make sure that all of the villages they had retaken recently had been fully cleared out.  The Litch Queen’s monsters were re-settling in some areas, making the return of the local populace impossible.   And that is where we find Tiff, shaking and dropping her sword.  The ground among the ruins was colored in drying blood.  A small person hugged their child and looked up at her. Wait.  A moment before, they were both monsters!  Their skull-faces kept shifting back and forth between undead warriors and people – just regular… the regular people of this world.   And these people scattered to the various buildings that were broken but still standing.  “The Man-Beast is back!  Arm yourselves or run!”   The mother held her young one close, curling her arms and her tail protectively around them.  She looked up at Tiff with watery eyes.  “Take my life, if you must, Just as you did my husband’s, but spare my child…”   “You’re…you’re not already dead!” Tiff of Shining Justice gasped. “Of course we aren’t!”  some impetuous young one shouted, stomping up the road. They put their hands on their hips and glared at Tiffany.  “Not yet, anyway!  You’re obviously here to finish the job!  We’ll give you an even harder fight than last time!  This is OUR land and the asshole that you work for cannot have it!”   “No…no…” Tiffany said, stepping back, leaving the “sacred sword” in the dust. She heard her party riding up behind her. “Dammit, Myrna!  I think you overworked the spell!” Lindis groused as he brought his horse to a stop and dismounted.  “When you were healing her head-wound you must have taken off the Cloud!” “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”  Myrna cried.   “Is there a way to go back?  I could always remove her brain and put it in a Machine-Knight,” Trapta suggested. “No going back,” Orcus groused.  “Good old propaganda might be in order?”   “Godsdammit,” Lindis growled.  “How are we going to drive out the natives now?”  

For the last year, you’ve been enjoying the life of adventure and heroism in a fantasy world that you’ve always dreamed of. That is, until the healer in your party accidentally removed a perception curse that’s been with you since the day of your summoning.

[rusteddreamsstories]

Wow.  Re-reading this makes me wistful.   This is one of my fiction-autobiographical pieces - like, literally imagining myself and my people in the situation.  Matthew referenced here is (was) a real person.  He had read this and approved of my shenanigans - deeming that I had written him in-character.  It is full of so many references to things we enjoyed together, such as the SCP Foundation.   Matthew died suddenly and unexpectedly in January 2023.   We were close.  I’ve been...dealing with it... but I look over my old posts like this, things of which he was a part and thoughts and the feelings of loss just come barreling back.  

“Well, it just doesn’t seem…ethical.” Your friend slowly says to you. “Ethical?” You yell back at him. “Who cares about morals when I have created a masterpiece! A book that learns what the reader likes and changes its script accordingly. Imagine that, the perfect book!”

[rusteddreamsstories]

For folks wondering about the tags on the last post of “forbidden fantasy titles” where I answered in the tags that one of my books has a title involving a word that is now heavily associated with Joe Biden?  I am not even kidding.   Yes, there is a reason for one of the main characters to have that name.  Yes, I do a double-take whenever I hear the President on television use the word.  Aw, my gryphon can’t help you build back better?  It’s like I started associating the word with my character and when Biden stared trying to bring it back into fashion, I almost forgot that it was an actual word.  

[rusteddreamsstories]

Fantasy authors are now banned from titling their books anything to do with crowns, thorns, precious metals, roses, blood or bones. You hauve to think of something else now.

[rusteddreamsstories]

A little blonde girl. She cannot be more than eight or nine years old.  She is desperately skinny.  She is wearing a pink “Barbie” themed backpack and is clutching a dirty plush of an Eevee.  

The world has ended. The Waffle House still stands. Describe a customer, wandering in from the wastelands, and I’ll tell you their story.

[rusteddreamsstories]

They were not pleased. The world was meant to be unchanging with the Twelve Breeds replicating each according to their Kind.  As it was, there was only one of the original Kind left and a few of them that were not at least mildly altered, at that.  (The Last of Original Kind was a brainless ocean-drifter to whom the Deity had gifted immortality because They thought it was funny. Certainly it was a type of being that would not be able to appreciate the gift, given it anyway, therein was the joke).  Even that Kind had birthed other Kinds, however, some of which had inexplicably developed central nervous systems and minds and might have appreciated the gift that only their still-living ancestors retained.   There were Terrestrial Flyers that had lost their wings and had become fully terrestrial!  Some were even quadrupeds now!  The Deity didn’t even know what to make of the Furry Water-Paddler that had developed venom! And, then, of course, were the Clever Ones. What were they DOING?  They were penning up other creatures?  Not only hunting them, but cutting them up and stuffing them into other creatures and mixing them up with plants and putting them to mild fire to make entirely new things before they ate them?  And they were RIDING other creatures! And wandering into environments the Deity had never meant their ancestors to occupy because they were sewing together skins and weaving plants to protect themselves and they were just… what were they DOING?   Were they trying to talk to Them, too? What was this?!  They were meant to be content beings dancing among the trees with simple minds and now they were all… angsty!  Even edgier than the Toothed Swimmers (which had diverged and changed little, but had done enough to be obnoxious, too)!   Twelve was a nice, even number.  Now there were millions and the Deity didn’t even know how to count them, much less what to make of this…warped creation.   And yet, They didn’t have the heart to wipe it all out and start again.  There was something charming in this…unforeseen mess.

Deity who's unacquainted with concept of evolution creating a world with, like, twelve different kinds of creatures, thinking "yes, that's a good number – nice and symmetrical", then going on vacation for a couple million years and being very upset at what's waiting for them when they get back.

[rusteddreamsstories]

The Dragon’s Destiny

[IMAGE ID: The front half of a robotic dragon in profile.  It has forelegs of bunched artificial muscles and circular machine-components over which there is gauntlet-armor.  It’s body is covered in many steel / chrome scales. Its underbelly has purple elements were machine-light is shining through.  It has horns made of polished amethyst.  It has a pair of wings made up of thin machine-fingers like bat-wings while the skin-type part is made up of purple hard-light with lines of electricity crackling through them.  Pen and ink and watercolor. / END IMAGE ID.]  In the same universe as Valley and Hunter.  It is not necessary to read those, as it is a loosely-connected universe.  It is my future-world where the world is divided into mortals and immortals who mind-surf into robotic forms and hunt mortals for sport.   ______________ The Dragon’s Destiny The mindlink was sharp.  It always felt that way, like a needle entering the skin. White light washed over him, a strange unconsciousness that lacked either dream or darkness.   When he came to, the first thing that Destin did was shake his neck.  The multitude of metal scales rattled and chimed.  He felt cool air in between the plates and the sound was like rain in the wind. He snapped them in place as he stretched; armor clamping tight over a serpentine form, shining shields over insulated wiring and artificial muscles.  He looked down at his forelimbs, flexing them in turn as he shifted weight to his haunches.  It always took him a few minutes to orient himself, even in a frequently-used machine. He favored the dragon over all else. Destin had been dogs, monkeys, cats, multi-limbed horses and even, at times, piloted an android that was not too different in appearance from his natural form.  Time and time again he came back to the dragon.   The young man-within-beast settled upon all four of his legs and dug his sizeable talons into the soft, muddy earth. Destin swung his massive tail and reveled in the rattle of the scales on it before they locked into place.  He deployed his wings: From a compartment on his back they unfurled, a steel-colored skeletal-frame. Electricity crackled between the rods forming the “bones.”  It solidified into a type of hard light, pale purple and like glass that caged lightning. He stretched and gave them an experimental flap.  The link was working well.  He could feel all six limbs and his tail without trouble.  It wasn’t quite like what he felt in his human body.  His forelegs felt roughly analogous to arms and his back legs felt like his legs and feet in an entirely different configuration.  It felt like the flats of his feet were elongated and that he was walking firmly upon his toes.  Most of the quadruped machines he piloted felt this way.   The wings were a new sensation relative to his natural form. They felt like an additional set of hands with stretched and splayed-out fingers.   Destin experienced basic perception and orientation but no pain.  He had systems that alerted him of damage if he took any, but they were merely a reminder – something akin to hearing a loud sound and receiving a text-message in his mind. If he lost a scale or ploughed his tail into a tree he was cognizant of it, but it did not hurt like an injury to the flesh and bone did.   Destin thought about making his disembodied mind situation permanent.  He spent most of his “downtime” in his city’s cloud among the network of other Immortals.  When not in a sleep state he traveled through the many constructed worlds available to his access.  He was still a young man and traversing the physical world in his organic body still had its pleasures.  He hesitated to call the physical world the “real world” like many did.  The constructs were just as real in terms of perception and sensation.  He’d been in and out of them since he was a child – his fifth birthday, to be exact. Children were assessed at age five or six years as to how well they would take to the mindlinks.  One went through various child-friendly simulations and kindergartens before learning to pilot simple toys.   In his adult life, lately, Destin was spending much more time in the dragon alone, let alone the network and the constructs than in his currently stasis-bound flesh.   He enjoyed the weight of his polished amethyst horns. Many aspects of the robotic-dragon existed for aesthetics alone. Destin’s dragon-eyes were pale-purple, without pupils and lit when he was inside the creature.  The beast had – in addition to its main eyes – which were situated on the sides of its face, two much smaller optics on the front that were partially-hidden and made to look like decorative features.  They would appear to eyes untrained in the upkeep of high-city mechanisms to be budding horns or glass scales.  They provided the binocular-vision of a predator while the main eyes gave Destin a panoramic view.  He could switch between views at will.  When he employed both views at once he often felt dizzy.   He marched in place – a final check of his systems – before thundering into a run, flapping his massive energy-wings and taking to the sky.   The firmament was like aquamarine. Destin could detect that the early afternoon air was “warm” even if it did not feel quite the same way as it did on skin or how it was registered in a constructed world.  Sensors picked up scents; the “green” smell of trees freshly in leaf and the soft, sweet aromas of flowers.  The cherry blossoms on the tall, wide trees below him were as subtle in scent as they were forthcoming in visual-display.  Destin dipped low, letting his fore-talons brush the top of the canopy, sending petals and twigs into the air.  He tucked his wings close and rolled through the pale pink and white storm. He flew over a still lake.  Its surface was like glass and his image shone in it brightly.  Destin beheld a shimmering silver beast with translucent horns and wings made of purple sheets of light and lightning. Lavender light glowed through any cracks in armor and scale, brilliant displays of power and otherness.  He was magnificent! Magnificent!  He released pent-up gas from the storage-tank deep within his chest.  (Perhaps it was too close to the mindlink-processor and the general processing-unit for the motor-skill controls, but he didn’t worry about it). Fumes pushed through his throat and he engaged the lighter at the back of his mouth.  Destin sent forth a jet of flame, announcing his presence to all creatures within sight of the forest-edge.   Perhaps that was why people were ready to meet him when he landed in a village at the far side of the Valley.  Some of the mortals scattered into their homes – as if it would do any good against the size and fire of a dragon.   Destin did not “hunt” often, but he had heard a rumor that this nest was getting to be quite populous.  There was also a rumor that the people of this town had been quite rude to some Immortals that had come to them in android-form, something about not wanting  to relinquish one of their more intelligent children to the city-school.  Immortals bestowed mercy upon the descendants of those they had left behind.  A few of them caught the attention of the Watchers every now and again and could become eligible for conversion.   Destin didn’t know much about that from a personal angle.  He was neither a Firstling nor an Elevated.  His parents and grandparents were Immortal.  He thought about his mother’s framed skin on the wall of the living-room of the family home.  She had chosen to uplink herself into the cloud and to robot-hop permanently quite recently.  Her natural body had borne a large tattoo of a phoenix on its back that she had liked, so she had a leatherworker preserve it.  Such ornamentation for homes was common, with some eternal network-rovers going so far as to have taxidermy made of their own heads, but Destin was unlikely to leave anything behind when he made the Leap.  A mounted radius and ulna, perhaps?  He’d always found limb-bones elegant.  He lacked the tattoos to display as actual art and didn’t care to obtain any.   At present, he decided upon a day of fun. He flexed his tail and his claws and issued a mighty roar.  People wobbled on their feet, their hearing and balance in a state of distortion. Destin could scarcely believe that these beings and he were the same species.  It was a mere technicality.  Unlike his kind, these bipedal beasts had brief lives.  Even the young men among them, trying to damage his optics with their firearms in a futile attempt to protect their town were “soon to die,” from his perspective, anyway.   What did such short lives mean, anyway?   There were debates among Immortals over what place the mortals occupied – if they retained a status as “people” or if they were more akin to animals.  Some held that they were at a livestock or even insect-level.  They would never gain the intelligence, knowledge or wisdom of the Immortals simply because their time was too limited. Destin swatted the gathered rabble as if he were swatting flies.  He felt a pike between his finger-plates. Someone had rammed a farming-hoe into him. It was not painful to his artificial body, but the pressure irritated him. The audacity irritated him even further. Bullets rattled off his back-scales.  He craned his neck and dove his massive head through the crowd.   He ploughed his jaws through the front windows of one of the houses. His teeth speared through a couch, which he shattered and shook free.   The little humans surrounded him. There were screams of terror and absolute rage when he began digging like a dog into the floor of the house he’d just destroyed.  The townsfolk knew he was trying to get into the basement where some of the most vulnerable people were hiding.   Destin did love toying with his prey.  He liked enlivening the survival-instincts and community-instincts within them.  It was delightful to behold.  In the end his jaws, talons and crushing force, he thought, were more merciful than the age, disease and starvation they would all inevitably die of, anyway.  The only tool at his disposal that he did not consider a greater mercy was his flamethrower, but even a death by that was a quick demise rather than a lingering one.   The smallfolk were growing a little too numerous in this area.  If left to their own devices they might start scavenging or stealing high-city resources. It was not Destin’s job to do culls, but it was a pleasure.   He’d done sport-hunting in smaller forms; wolves, big cats and the like for picking off a few trophies.  Nothing did a mass-cull as well as a dragon. Destin’s claws crunched through a basement. He dug the small family that was huddled inside out of it carelessly. A woman and two little boys were flung across the mud like tiny dolls along with broken wood and chunks of brick and concrete.   The dragon turned about and sent a jet of flame among the crowd as he heard another barrage of gunfire tinkering off his posterior.  People ducked and fled, but regrouped.  Roofs were set ablaze and immediately there were men and women grabbing whatever hollow objects they could, dipping them in the nearby river and trying to douse the fires before they completely devoured the homes. Destin could not help but to admire the tenacity of the little creatures.  They fought their fate with remarkable ferocity.  He relished the odor of blood.  His talons were coated in it by now.   He heard a loud noise and felt a pressure over his head.  A sparkling bit of purple stone fell to the earth.  One of the townspeople had damaged his left horn with a lucky gunshot. He roared and unleashed a torrent of fire so long and fierce that he depleted his gas-store.   The shotgun-spatter and tossed pitchforks and stones began to annoy him.  A brick pattered off his face, close to one of his optics.  One screaming woman had found a sword – an honest-to-goodness double-edged sword of all things, an item used only as ornament and for ceremonies in this age – and managed to bury it to the hilt in between a pair of his chest-plates.  The sword was stopped by his secondary-armor and the plastic coating over his artificial-muscles before it did any significant damage to him, but he felt fear for just a moment.  He could feel that the very tip of it had come too close to where his processors were located for him to remain nonchalant.   If the mindlink were to be damaged, he could be shunted back violently into the city-loud with a “whiplash” effect, leaving him disoriented or even in a sleep-state for days and that was the best-case scenario.  Likely events resulting from processor-compromise could leave his mind damaged due to a loss of data; a destruction of memories or processing capabilities.  At the apex of worst, all of his data – and therefore him – could have been completely destroyed.   He was already angry about the damage to his horn.  How could these little beasts have such little respect for one far more beautiful than they? Coming close to having his main processor ruined put him – perhaps for the first time – in fear for his life! Destin turned and ran.  With shouts and continued gunfire after him, as well as a steel sword still lodged in his chest, he unfurled his electric-wings and flew. He knew that the people would fail to chase him beyond the Valley-rim.  Many of their houses were on fire and they would inevitably find it more important to take care of their wounded and their dead.   Those that remained had won their lives this day.     Destin would eventually have his dragon fully-repaired, but a certain scar on the outer chest-plate would never buff out. He never returned to that particular town.  No constructed world freed his mind of the nightmares he’d occasionally have from getting a taste of the fear of death.   It was the justice of the powerless, one might suppose.    

[rusteddreamsstories]

Soup-er Power  Stella Campbell had been laughed out of her city’s League of Heroes’ Hall long ago when she’d attempted to join. She’d been interviewed by Ten-Ton Man (whose power was that he could lift anything and everything up to ten-tons in weight) and he’d suggested that she’d go work in a charity kitchen - that her power wasn’t impressive enough to become one of Metrovania’s stalwart protectors.   So, that’s what she did.  It was doing good, right?  After all, Metrovania still had impoverished people on its hands - people who hadn’t quite benefited from Truth, Justice and the American Way.  She suspected it was because most of the American Way involved Capitalism, which, in excess, always guaranteed freezing bodies coming in from the cold into the city’s soup-kitchens for a hot meal - provided that they were not too ashamed of their lot in life to do so.  It’s not like the kitchens didn’t serve more than soup, but it was the age-old claim to a name and Stella’s specialty, ever since she’d learned how to boil down a picked-over poultry-carcass into a fine broth by her mother.  Perhaps it was a superpower enough to know how to cook and to feed one’s family and friends, and because she was so community-minded, to apply her skills to a charity.  She’d thought of joining one of those mobile chefs’ organizations, the ones that went to war zones and disaster areas to provide hot meals.  She certainly had great skill in taking simple and inexpensive ingredients - a few potatoes and a little milk, perhaps, and making the “best soup I ever had!” according to people she’d fed.   Campbell had discovered early on that she’d had a genuine superpower, too - the kind that could be registered among “Emergent Anomalous Properties” as they were being called on a census-list.  It had happened when she was ten years old or so.  She’d been helping her mother make the family-recipe for stone soup.  Anyone who’s ever heard of it knows that it’s generally a vegetable stew made with just about anything one can find in one’s garden or pantry (an old country recipe) and that the special ingredient is a smooth, clean stone - preferably one from a river - to be cooked in the soup.  The idea of it is that the stone has some magic in it and will impart a special flavor.  (No one expected to eat the actual stone).  It was a way for a poor family to make a pot of soup look bigger, she supposed, or to give a child a special role in making dinner.   When little Stella had added the freshly-scrubbed stone into the pot of broth bubbling with carrots and turnips, an amazing thing happened:  The stone itself had melted and incorporated itself into the soup!   Both her mother and her father had screamed and shouted “Don’t eat it!” but she had already grabbed a large spoon to taste the results.  Instead of getting some kind of mineral-poisoning or broken teeth... the soup was good.  Really, really good!   Stella Campbell’s subsequent experiments with making little pots of stone soup yielded actual meals.  She could get anything out of the stones.  Sometimes they turned into beef meatballs when thrown into the pot.  Sometimes they’d turned into a hearty grain, such as rice or a pasta.  Her parents arranged for her powers to be tested.  Anything she threw into a pot with a little water - scraps of wood, rusty nails, bits of plastic... it all turned into food - actual, real food - usually a protein of some kind, meat or beans.   Her tire-chunks and broken glass chili was to die for.   It wasn’t entirely predictable what bits and bobs would turn into, but it was always, always delicious.  And it always seemed to turn into whatever soup someone wanted.  She could feed vegetarians and omnivores alike out of the same kinds of trash thrown into different pots!  Her family was never hungry, although they did get rather bored of soup.   As she grew into a young woman, instead of seeking college, she thought that she might just join the League right away.  After all, didn’t she have a power that could solve world hunger?  It turns out that they valued the flashier powers - things that were more marketable.  Ten-Ton Man had marketing deals for a cleaning-products company and frequented commercials where the carpet-shampoo and dishwashing detergent were “as strong as he was” and “as tough on dirt as he was on the bad guys.”  Monsoon Mike always provided good shots for the local news when he streaked across the sky. He movie and fashion deals.  The same with Rocketeer, although she didn’t even actually have any natural superpowers!  She was just a wealthy engineer who made a lot of flashy inventions!   Making soup out of trash was just...unglamorous, she supposed, but Campbell grew to enjoy her charity-work.   And then the reports of the Meteor came.  It was, supposedly, a world-ender, like the Dinosaur-Killer. It was headed straight for the central park of Metrovania! The DART-project had detected it too late to deflect it.  The League had been called in to deal with it, but none of their powers would suffice.  Ten-Ton Man was too weak, ironically - the meteor was estimated to weigh in-excess of ten tons.  None of Rocketeer’s rockets, including the jet packs she flew around on had enough thrust to get rid of it.  Monsson Mike could only electrocute the thing with his lightning, which would have done nothing at all.  Everyone else assessed their powers and all came up short.   Until Stella Campbell stood alone in the estimated Ground Zero of impact, an enormous cookpot full of fresh water carried in both her hands. Bags of pasta, beans and spices were at her feet.   The only thing she saw was a nice, spicy meatball, perfect for a pasta soup!   The entire city of Metrovania was going to love it! 

You are constantly mocked for having such a weird superpower by all the other heroes. “The power to make anything into perfectly cooked soup”… One day, a massive meteor is barreling towards earth. As all the other heroes are panicking, you wait perfectly calm, at the impact zone, bowl in hand.

[rusteddreamsstories]

But Have You Thought About...  Here was Matthew trying to harsh my buzz.  I knew that I was going to have a best-seller on my hands.   “We. Will. Finally. Have. Money.”  I iterated to him. “Me, your uncle, you... we’ll have so much fuck-off-money that we will not have to worry about our health care or bill collectors or unexpected expenses ever again!  We can get the food you want all the time!  I’ll be famous!  Not that I care about the fame, I just... want us to not have to WORRY about things anymore!  And with a bestseller... Oh, Matt, it’s going to be the ULTIMATE best-seller!”   I danced around, throwing out my arms. “It’s for us, too!  Have you ever read a book with a disappointing ending?  Or one where a character you loved died and it made no friggin’ sense?”   “Don’t you torture and kill your characters all the time?” Matt contended, “You brag about it!”   “Enough about me and my dark writer’s tastes and my love of drinking up salty reader-tears!” I shouted.  I’d pinned a towel to the shoulders of my tee-shirt like a superhero cape - or a villain-cape.  I felt like I needed a cape for this moment for some reason, and since capes were not exactly fashionable, a towel would have to do.  “Anyway... I kill off characters when it makes sense!   But, you know what? I’ll concede this.  Some readers may not think it makes sense.  They won’t have to say goodbye to their favorite characters anymore!  It’s perfect for everyone!”   “Do you know how much porn you just created?”   “I live on the Internet, of course I do.  This shores up one of my weaknesses!  You know my asexual, sex-repulsed ass cannot write good porn!  And I know from being in fanfiction circles that it’s what soooo many people want!  This book will read their thoughts and if they want it, they get it!  And I do not have to worry about my lack of skill!”   “Uh... you do remember that toy-commercial we just saw on Nostalgia Critic about the dancing unicorn-toddlers singing about poop, right?  You’re just going to unleash more of THAT into the world!”   I sighed.  “As long as it keeps people in their weird little corners. If a reader wants that, it will happen in their heads.  The book is not universal.”   “YOU JUST CREATED AN SCP!!!!”   “Um... It’s not designed to literally suck anyone into the story and give them a life that they never want to come back from.  The Story that Writes Itself will remain words on the page.”   “IT’S STILL AN SCP!”   “The SCP Foundation is not real.”   Matt sat down heavily in the gamer-chair in the living-room.  “What happens when someone wants to make a movie out of your book, Shads?  No one will agree on what movie to make!”   “I told you about tumblr and ‘Goncharav,” right?  It’ll be like that! It’ll be fun!”   “People will fight about it!  You’ve been in fandom!  You’ve been cyberbullied in fandom!  You know what fandom is like!  It’s crazy!”   I briefly contemplated the concept of “Misery.”  I’d never seen the film in whole, nor had I read the book, but I knew of the concept.  I mean, my book would be absolutely made to prevent such happenings by crazy fans because what happens to the characters are exactly what they want to happen, and perhaps, for a few readers, the story would be neverending.  You know, not like that movie I loved from my childhood that actually frickin’ ended and had the most horrific, low-budget sequels imaginable.  False advertising and the eventual ending of the franchise was a mercy.  Crazy-evil ladies with sledgehammers would be safely ensconced in reading my book, with no need to come after me or to engage in the crazy fandom behavior that characterizes most fandoms when they disagree on interpretations of characters and plots.   But Matt was right... A book that was different for every reader WOULD cause untold arguments and fandom-fights.   “What if people are so interested in reading it that they stop working?”   “Work sucks,” I said.  “You know I’m a socialist at heart.  Maybe my book will worm its way into the hearts of people who secretly feel the same way as i do and inspire them to overthrow the ruling class and create a more equitable society.”   “You’re crazy, Shads... well, crazier than usual.  Also, what if it doesn’t go that way?  If people read what they want? What if the book is about Donald Trump being a superhero for some of them?”  Oh shit.  Oh shit, oh, shit, oh shit!   I had been following a Let’s Read on Youtube in which the reader was subjecting himself to a book someone had written arguing that Donald Trump was the true Messiah.   Oh, no, no, no....  My book... indeed would belong in the halls of the SCP, if it existed.  I would inspire its fandom to tear each other apart!  It would keep people reading, reading, reading to the point where they’d forget to feed themselves!  They’d be trapped in their own ideas instead of being exposed to the fresh ideas of fresh authors!  It might deify horrible, horrible people because, let’s face it, many people in the world are horrible...  I couldn’t publish this book.  At least...not until I’d worked out the kinks!  

"Well, it just doesn't seem…ethical." Your friend slowly says to you. "Ethical?" You yell back at him. "Who cares about morals when I have created a masterpiece! A book that learns what the reader likes and changes its script accordingly. Imagine that, the perfect book!"

[rusteddreamsstories]

Encouragment for writers that I know seems discouraging at first but I promise it’s motivational-

• Those emotioal scenes you’ve planned will never be as good on page as they are in your head. To YOU. Your audience, however, is eating it up. Just because you can’t articulate the emotion of a scene to your satisfaction doesn’t mean it’s not impacting the reader. 

• Sometimes a sentence, a paragraph, or even a whole scene will not be salvagable. Either it wasn’t necessary to the story to begin with, or you can put it to the side and re-write it later, but for now it’s gotta go. It doesn’t make you a bad writer to have to trim, it makes you a good writer to know to trim.

• There are several stories just like yours. And that’s okay, there’s no story in existence of completely original concepts. What makes your story “original” is that it’s yours. No one else can write your story the way you can.

• You have writing weaknesses. Everyone does. But don’t accept your writing weaknesses as unchanging facts about yourself. Don’t be content with being crap at description, dialogue, world building, etc. Writers that are comfortable being crap at things won’t improve, and that’s not you. It’s going to burn, but work that muscle. I promise you’ll like the outcome.

[rusteddreamsstories]

Raw Bone

Short story  Post-apocalyptic  Triggers / Warnings - Not nice people doing not nice things. Violence. Harsh language.  General post-apocalyptic-ness.   Summary:  After a series of unspecified apocalyptic events, a pair of former members of a billionaire’s security detail share conversation and a meal around a fire.  Enter a world where small towns are built out of former suburban American stores, where tough people name their dogs out of 1980s cartoon villains and where people who probably should regret their life-choices are saved by clever acts of defiance.   _________________________   Raw Bone    Game meat was getting scarce to find, but Mickey and Dan had enough to share between them.  They’d chuck the bone they were scraping with their big combat-knives over to Tor when they’d gotten enough flesh off of it. The dog already had an abundance of bones to gnaw on.  Alex should be back with Meg shortly.  If his latest hacking attempt had worked, they’d get more than some nasty, stringy meat from a hastily-slaughtered elderly animal.  If they all were really lucky, the liver that they’d cut up and used as bait for traps would net them some tastier game.   All in all, it was a lot of work for little return, but folks had to make do when the land had been blighted and feeding themselves became difficult.  The kill had given the pair at the fire great satisfaction.   “Suppose he’ll crack it soon?” Mickey asked before she brought a skewer of campfire-roasted meat to her mouth and tore off a tough chunk.  She arranged a few raw bits onto another bit of metal as she chewed.  She coughed.  A trash fire wasn’t optimal for flavor or health, but it was better than nothing.  She wasn’t about to eat this any other way than well-cooked.   “Any day now, maybe any hour,” Dan muttered. “Either that or the blow-torch has got to work, provided we can find enough fuel.” “I suppose we ‘knew what we signed on for,” Mickey groused as she set up the fresh, drippy skewer by the flames.   Dan took the femur they’d been stripping, now just a raw bone and stood up gripping it in one meaty hand.   “Tor!” he called out into the open, “Pah-wheep!” he whistled.  “Skeletor! Come here!” A large German Shepherd with fur that was grizzled at the outer edges loped up from inspecting the dry weeds that had overgrown the broken parking lot.  Camping on a median – that was what their little group had been reduced to.  They could go inside the Tower for shade, but carpeted hallways were poor grounds for a fire.  And who knew?  One of the old cars might just have enough gas to run for a few miles if they could get the battery working.  They hadn’t checked them all.   Dan tossed the bone to the ground and Tor’s teeth fell upon it gratefully.  If the little group was lucky, perhaps he and Meg could breed some pups at some point, something that Mickey, Dan, Alex and the others they were with could either train up for protection and hunting, trade for the same or have as food when it came down to it.  Neither Dan nor Mickey wanted to think of their dogs as livestock, so the last option was only a final resort. “Tor” was short for “Skeletor.”  “Meg” was a bitch, not fitting her masculine full name, which was “Megatron.”  It had become a joke in their unit to name all of their dogs after villains from 1980s cartoons.  There were, and had been more.  Poor Texhex had gotten shot by a scavenger.  Starscream had run off to God knows where.  Hordak was keeping their sniper, Benny, company guarding the Tower. Dr. Claw was out with Sarah and Rodger hunting for squirrels.   Mickey had taught Dan how to crack roasted squirrel-skulls for the brains – a ‘hillbilly delicacy’ as she had put it, something she’d learned from her parents where she’d grown up and had been doing since she learned to hunt and cook as a kid in a place that used to have many trees.  Dan had taught her how to shelter down during a dust storm – a frequent feature of the place he’d grown up in even before their former boss and others like him had wrecked the world, hoarding wealth by selling resources, lives, bodies and minds to one another.  The man and the woman looked out on the horizon and a cloud of brown.  It was in the distance and appeared to be moving away from them, but they knew that the wind could turn in a second.  Most likely, they would have time to finish eating and to smoke some meat and so they decided not to take shelter yet.   “Could always go to Giant,” Dan mumbled between cramming bites between his jagged teeth.  “Actual settlements are better than this.  Hopin’ for a storage and hydroponics farm put up behind walls to be cracked open when the food will probably just rot before we get to it? It’s takin’ too goddamed long!” “We can’t go to Giant,” Mickey said with a stern glare at him, “because the last time we met those people we were shooting at them!”  She plunged a stake of meat down by the fire hard.  “We were on orders to fire into the crowd!  There were children there!” “Teenagers,” Dan huffed, “hardly little children.  Teenagers scare the shit outta me.” “We can’t go to Giant.  I’m sure they’ll recognize our faces… the guards, someone will.” The two were speaking of a small town just up the road, walled in cinderblock all around.  It was centered on a former grocery store, actually.  People had turned it into a settlement, living within the store and in old housing and other vacant stores around it.  It was quite genius.  While the apocalypse was a slow-burn, when every institution was in its final collapse, the local survivors had banded together.  Instead of simply raiding the store, they chose to make use of it – rationing out its goods and actually planting some of the fertile produce.  Now, many of the goods found in a store during the late-stage capitalism of the twenty-first century were not, in fact, fertile, even if one thought they should be. Seedless watermelons, corn bred to produce a single crop and otherwise be sterile - but many goods escaped this fate. Some plants could not be engineered or husbanded for consumer or corporate preferences completely away from nature.  The budding town had been saved by gardening hobbyists who knew how to grow things from cuttings and to tease out seeds.   Another successful town nearby, a trading partner and a potential merger in the near future was Hompot.  It had been built around and within an old construction materials and hardware store.  Mickey and Dan were not likely welcome there, either.   Mickey took a stick of roasted meat off the fire and tore into it.  It was tough, stringy and flavored by the smoke of scrap-wood and old cardboard. She winced and gulped down what she could not properly chew.  “What I’d give for a fresh tomato,” she sighed.   “The numbers don’t favor us on a raid right now,” Dan said. “They’ve got themselves armed up good, too.  Beggin’s our only option if we approach the towns and hopin’ they don’t recognize us.” “As I said, I don’t think we’re forgiven for following the boss’s orders.” “It was months ago, maybe a year?  That last push they made had to have been at least that long.”   “People don’t change their minds that quick, even with a good story – when folk were hurt and dead.  Hold tight.  Alex should have the vault cracked soon.”   “Glad we got the collars off, at least.” Mickey rubbed the back of her neck.  It was not long ago that their former boss had an almost total control over them.  The group of former mercenaries that gathered in and around the Tower was free now, and procuring their liberty had been surprisingly easy.   The boss had been incredibly wealthy – one of the richest men on the planet, although his name was not a household word. He was able to secure his privacy. He had inherited his fortune from his father and had grown the business, all while perpetuating the myth that he was a “self-made man” as all such wealthy bratlings do.  His work had been involved in the buying and selling of profitable poisons, which had been the key cause of making the world what it was today.  Most of what the man knew was how to hire people to do things.  In everything other than marketing, he had been dreadfully uncreative, himself.   The team of mercenaries, when hired, came into the boss’s employ for a variety of reasons.  Mostly, it was good pay and lodging – the kind of pay where one could have anything one wanted – the best of meals, the best of booze, the best of sex, and to indulge in more generalized hobbies – Benny with his cars, Mickey with her hunting trips, Sarah with her interest in keeping and breeding horses – a hobby less tenable now since they had to become food after the Series of Events. Very few of them had families, but those who did could care for them in comfort.  It was a good deal.  Dan enjoyed the access to high-powered weaponry – a hobby of his, entertainment on the target-range as well as the opportunity for violence if the need arose.  He also liked having a home with a swimming pool and a private theater.  The boss had paid them well when things were relatively peaceful.   The “loyalty insurance” was a necessary part of their contracts.  It had been two-fold.  The boss had tight control of the pay-schedule, which, at first, was money, and then was food when imaginary numbers started losing their value.  The other part of it was thin collars affixed around the necks of each member of the security detail – even around the dogs. There was an apparatus within each collar that could deploy tiny needles releasing a powerful neurotoxin stored within a chamber – a very small amount, but enough to stop a 300 lb man in his tracks, a near-instantaneous death.  The boss held the codes to each collar.   Too bad for him that he didn’t actually know how the technology worked, having relied upon supposedly loyal engineers – from a firm that had designed these things for multiple billionaires.  Dan and Mickey did not know if there had been a legitimate flaw in their design, something that the designers did not know about, or if it had been put there on purpose.  Mickey, for her part, believed that the engineers of the devices, when confronted with the ghastly prospect, were likely overworked and underpaid enough to just say “fuck it” and to give their fellow minions a simple out.   Alex and Sarah had figured out that if one wedged a penny beneath a component of the collar, the injection-mechanism shorted out and was completely disabled.   “Ah, yeah, those things,” Mickey reminisced. “It was like those shopping carts at grocery stores that you’d take from the caddy with a quarter!”   “Alex said that a quarter wouldn’t work, needed the copper.”   “Still as easy as taking a cart from a chain! I honestly couldn’t believe it was THAT dumb.”   “Boss never checked, wouldn’t have known how!” They both laughed.   Of course, they’d worn their collars as a “fashion statement” when shit had really hit the fan and they were demanding their rations for the final time.  The mercs didn’t exactly “choose their own leader” – not specifically. Each of them led in different expertise, wherever they’d had specific talent and experiences.  This is why some of them were great at hunting, Dan was good at defense and heavy guns, and their “nerds” were at work cracking things that their boss managed to not flub up in terms of keeping locked and keeping secret codes for only in his head.   Not that anything was in his head anymore. The man had been pretty surprised when his small army of hungry, angry security detail had apparently grown tired of picking off the masses who’d just been trying to survive by getting into his stuff were demanding said stuff themselves and had gotten into the penthouse. Dan had a huge grin on his face. “Remember how hard he was pressing that collar trigger of his for my set and how low his jaw hung when it didn’t work?” “Alex was downright SMARMY when he explained the design-flaw!”   “He was right when he said ‘But you don’t have the garden-vault codes!’  Thought the idiot would have them right on his desktop, but no…” “I guess you have to have some smarts to become a near-trillionaire, even if you trust too many people to just do things for money too much.”   “I feel like an idiot.  Can’t get codes from splattered brains.  I was too quick on the trigger.  Should have held him, drawn it out of him.”   “Meh,” Mickey assured him, “He serves.”   She bit into her meat-skewer.   “That he does,” Dan agreed, “Though I wish he hadn’t been so old, or exercised as much.  Damn meat’s stringy!”   A scrawny blond figure came running out of the tower and over to the broken parking lot and its median to the two figures by the fire. He was followed by a white dog – the same breed as Tor, though not the same color.  “Guys! I got it!” Dan and Mickey looked up at him. “No foolin’?”  Dan asked.   “No foolin’!  Tons of stuff ready to harvest!  You wouldn’t believe what’s in there!  There are even some pigs and a sheep-pen in there!  Robotic rationing system for their feed so they’re all still alive and plump! The pigs haven’t even started eating each other yet!”   “Tomatoes?”  Mickey asked hopefully.   Alex fisted his hands and put them on his hips and stood up tall with a smug, happy look on his face.  “Tomatoes,” he said, “And lots of them.” He sniffed the smoky air.  “You can probably stop eating the rich now.”   Mickey dramatically finished the skewer in her hand, tearing the last chunk of rough-cooked meat off with a tug.  “Nah, I like the feeling of it.”   Tor happily chewed on the red raw leg-bone behind them.