"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."
The body didn't move.
"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."
And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.
Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.
The dead body sat up.
Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"
Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.
Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.
"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."
The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.
"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."
The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.
It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.
The whole fic on ao3
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*cough* rain world anime when *cough cough*
thinking about if the ancients gave their iterators new looks during wartime
rough design under the cut!
assuming they did or even *could* go to war with each other when they lived on the iterators, and if they were willing to embrace the first urge... hm.......
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Honesty hours: I've been working a summer job at a bookstore for almost two months now. Here are the books I will discreetly shake my head at customers for buying. My literary red flags, if you will.
Anything tarot
Particular romance and romantasy novels that I've been told are basically just soft erotica (ACOTAR being the most popular)
Harlequins, which apparently still exist
Colleen Hoover
The Colleen Hoover merch we sell for some godforsaken reason
Heaven is For Real, When God Winks at You, and other theologically sketchy but inexplicably popular books. I'm always internally thinking, "oh honey, no!"
Giant stack of self help books combined with books from the business section. This suggests a very particular type of person. This type of person scares me.
Especially that one book we have about how to become a "superior man" (??)
More than one book by James Patterson. One book is forgivable; multiple suggests you follow him as an author
More than one book by Danielle Steel (same reason)
Parents buying their kids books that are just "Adult Thing: For Kids!" Like we have a picture book that's called "A Day at Dunder Mifflin" or the one adapted from the Dumb and Dumber movies and I'm like. Don't you think your kid would prefer something that's actually for them??
That guy who bought the collected writings of Lenin, the poetic writings of Mao, and a giant, thousand-page biography of Che Guevara all in one go. You okay there buddy?
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physeng(write, file, "tco_physeng_breakdown.png");
to:compiler {file}
to:compiler {txt: "Internet and Outernet are full of StickFigures with similar body plans, so there are optimizations for rendering vector strokes specifically. it's way more efficient to use those optimizations than keep calculating perfect spheres for no aesthetic benefit."}
{txt: "btw why haven't heat issues been patched yet"}
{txt: "i fixed this years ago for the latest model. remember."}
from:compiler {txt: "Thank you. The avast! nodes will appreciate the credits. TheChosenOne.exe has been unreachable for some time."}
to:compiler {txt: "you mean OuternetPhysEng still won't update their programs"}
from:compiler {txt: "Yes."}
to:compiler {txt: "and still won't provide a specific location?"}
from:compiler {txt: "Do not allow them to bring up the moral argument again."}
to:compiler {txt: "OK. fine. yes. i will spare both of us"}
to:compiler {txt: "abridged or full docs?"}
from:compiler {txt: "Abridged. Please describe the acronyms."}
to:compiler {txt: "ofc"}
{txt: "
sel.per.filter: standard StickFigure component (src)*****. invisible membrane with special collision properties. protects mouthparts.
H2O scoop: avast! code. implements water retrieval from ambient air.
EIS: avast! code. destroys ingested materials identified as, "dangerous" before they reach internal systems.
SOS: avast! code. they only said this one was, "used for control."
ECL: avast! code. recycles some forms of contact energy.
THROUGHLINE: base code, initialization data, and processing space for vitals. found in some form in all StickFigure-type worms. following unique sectors noted: Black Hole Monitoring System, Basic Intake Threat Enum, Fly By Wire.
smaller points list other vital and peripheral systems.
"}
from:compiler {txt: "Thank you. That's enough."}
end(physeng());
@compressedrage as per my previous email /silly
related: pliable stick figure biotech
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