One of my friends floated the writing of a serial fairy tale to his Facebook (which was met with much enthusiasm) which he was publicly announcing so it would actually get started, and I got a 30 minute story idea too good to not write down (or too terrible to mention, depending on how you like your puns). So without further ado:

-

It would have been a wonderful day for flying; well, if she weren't out for revenge.

Stupid humans.

Didn't know why they had a liking towards prehensile appendages, and he didn't care while it was restricted to an awkward affinity for feline costumes, but this time their obsession had gone too far. So far, her original concern for the fact that humans had managed to find an Akrasian agent, much less came upon him unawares, was almost incessantly drowned by the smoldering vengeance stirred in her heart. See, it hadn't even lit yet. But that's the level of animosity held exclusively for persons that had altered his anatomy in her sleep. Yes, limb theft.

Unforgivable.

The fact that the fragile kingdom of Akraisa had to be protected at all costs would only justify the slaughter of the hapless humans, and despite the huge difference in scale that disadvantaged him, the outcome was never in doubt. True, she'd bump up his kill count only a little bit, but that was acceptable for a personal vendetta like this.

One more gust of wind past her membranes, and one more updraft, and the humans were in sight. There. That one. The one with the spectacles.

Drawing his sword, she thought about the poor bastards below. They would never see it coming.

He folded back her wings, and dov...wait, a swordsman. The human had already drawn, staring right at him.

Fury enveloped her, as he hurtled down. An armed human complicated things, but it was a trivial matter.

After all, the human had her tail.

So, it’s been a REALLY REALLY REALLY long time since I’ve done a story, so I stayed up to 3AM to bring you guys this one. I’m somewhat out of practice, although no one might notice since the noise in quality is so much more than the signal. Ha. Enjoy!

Edit: man, it’s really short, too. My bad.

Status update: misses California

It hit her when she was doing the dishes, flying across years and piercing the veil of the mundane such that the plate jerked to a stop in midsplash.

Her kids would never understand California.

Ever.

Not in the way she knew it: no, they would only read about it in textbooks, hear stuffy teachers pontificate endlessly on the political leverage the different political parties sought to blah blah blah such that the impact on the revolution was blah blah now, let's assess the validity blah blah blah blah BLAH.

That, and the networks had started carrying features that examined California in detail, alongside those that examined King Tut's tomb, or King Charles's left big toenail. It was really a shame, it had only been... well, it had been 9 years ago. She supposed she was getting old. But they would learn about it from there, too, history watered down and marketed to the lowest common factor.

And they had their own California, now, new cultural meccas where the weather was charming (to a point) and would-be-stars tried to make their name. She supposed she could tell them that their Peru was her California, and let that be that.

But they would know California better as a political cry, a cautionary tale, an unmitigated disaster before their time.

They wouldn't know it like she did, the way lovers know each other. A chance employment, a passionate spark, and she had fallen in love, first with the place. But it wore on her in quiet ways, and the torrid love affair came to an abrupt end. Not a moment to soon, either...

When she heard the news, though, she still cared: still cared for California, now gone. The beaches, the cities, all the people deluded, talented, vain, and brilliant. She wouldn't live there, and she now couldn't, but...

She still misses California. Even now.

The screen door clattered open, and she blinked. Somehow, all the dishes had gotten done.

Hi. Have a story. It’s rough around the edges, but I think the fundamental idea is of at least some interest. No, a foot soldier wouldn’t think like that, but I didn’t want to waste time trying to get into character.

Status: remember it's just a game! you don't have to scream like they're actually killing you every time something hits you or when you fall off the road... repeat after me: it's just a game! ;-) hahahaha!

just a game... just a game...

the controller had visited him earlier today, an unimaginably huge honor for a common foot soldier like himself. he should have been ecstatic to receive his orders directly from the supreme commander of the battlefield, but instead it had somehow left him feeling... empty.

It was very much unlike being briefed by his commanding officers, who seemingly knew exactly how to rile up the squads for battle, calling on their patriotism and honor to gird themselves against the visceral horrors. They talked at inane speeds, and knew exactly what to say at all the right moments. Once you've been through a few battle preps, the patterns fell into place, and it felt so right to cheer at the behest of the sergeants.

On the other hand, the controller seemed to stumble and hesitate over his words. He wondered at the time why this particular officer had risen through the ranks, when those less-eloquent leaders had been retired without a thought. There was something off about the controller: he didn't hold his battle implement quite right, he fidgeted like his armor didn't fit him.

"So," the controller had begun, "I need you to scout out around here" he indicated a point on the map, "and keep in areas where the live feed can make it back to base."

I was only a foot soldier, but I had just enough smarts to know a suicide mission when I saw one.

"Why don't we just use an aerial drone?" Even though he sat on the top of the pyramid, I couldn't just let him send me into the jaws of the enemy like that, especially when there was no need.

He sighed, "We need recon-"

"No we don't, we got the last feed from the area 100 ticks ago-"

"Don't talk back to your commanding officer, son."

"I will if you are going to throw away my life!"

"And I can see why Professor Williams wants to erase you."

What-

"It's all just a game. All of you" he gestured out to the trenches "are AIs running in an academic simulation, and your aberrant behavior happen to be keeping this simulation from optimizing further. We thought we would make your death somewhat useful, but your behavior seems to have gone farther than the prof knows. I'm going to-"

The controller disappeared.

It was all a game.

Just a game.

They were fighting over nothing: there wasn't a homeland, a family at home worth fighting for, leaves of absence or honorable discharge. It felt like it was all real, including the concrete wall his fist was pounding against, but it wasn't. The pain wasn't real, the blood from his knuckles wasn't real, the steel wall behind the concrete facade wasn't real, the locked door wasn't real, the pitiful dents in the door weren't real. The controller, or Professor Williams, or somebody else, had control of the world, and they would-

Oh, hi, have a story. I’ll talk about California when I’m not cramming my head with tutorials, trying to be productive, or being depressed that I’m not productive. Something like that.

Status update: I don't think I can ever get back up..

.. It had just been so *long* ago: it was years ago that she had fallen down this solar system's gravity well and just happened to run into a hospitable planet instead of the star's fiery atmosphere. Just the right probabilities had worked out in her favor, and she had survived planet fall.

Then, she had to learn how to live on the planet, full of strange ecosystems and geological formations. She still remembered... the day she was caught in a sand storm, the week she spent sick from the brightly colored fruit, the month she spent nursing her broken leg, the countless battles against the dogs determined to rip the flesh from her bones, the moment of realization that the planet was probably devoid of sentient life...

And those were only the very lowest points of her stay so far.

Well, she survived. She was built to win, and by golly, she had won out over the planet.

However, her past upsets blanched and cringed when set next to her current challenge.

She wasn't an engineer in her past life, that much was clear. She lost most of her technology in the crash, though, and the world soon reclaimed the scraps that were left. If she were content with living out her life on this planet, then that would have been fine.

She wasn't content with that.

One night, she couldn't sleep, and as she looked up-well into the alien constellations, she remembered her life, flitting among the stars.

The next morning, she dismantled her thatched hut, retrieved the small computer that had survived the crash, and began to re-derive astrophysics.

Her first rockets had gone a measly 10 feet; later iterations went farther, and started to light up the sky with their failed excursions. But they were still that: failed, with a tendency to explode in the upper atmosphere.

She fired off 3 rockets of the same design last month: 2 of them failed. It didn't bode well that she was sitting in a rocket sharing their design, with a few last minute tweaks thrown in.

It's not like she had the margins of error that space farers of old had, lacking the huge organizations trying to extend human achievement. Chances of 2/3 were enough... for her to dismount her flying death machine, return to her hut, and wait, hoping that some space farer would pick up her distress signal (she had created her own antenna array!) and fly down-well to find her, with a rusted rocket sitting on the launch pad, ready with some tea to regal the traveler about how she had re-derived astrophysics, and look! There's proof on the wall behind you, where I carved a particularly nasty result into my hut, aren't you impressed? My, my, am I glad that I'm here to share this achievement with you, rather than blasted to smithereens and floating through

Okay.

Enough of that.

She gripped the flight control, and rested her finger on the ignition.

It was time to fly.

So, I couldn’t resist, so you guys get 3 stories on 2 nights.

I had the idea before the status, and it took me a while to find a status to fit it.

Enjoy!

Status update: In the middle of the country

The clock tells him it's in the middle of the afternoon, a time falling between when the sun had passed it's peak and before the waning of the light impressed into the world. A glance out the kitchen window tells a much different story: a storm is gathering, menacing clouds pushing each other up as they tower over the plain. Low thunder rumbles, sub-audible shockwaves jittering glassware balanced on the kitchen counter. He gathers them in a flash, pushing them into the cupboard before glancing out the window again. The light had become fleeting in the face of the encroaching whirlwind, and he turns away: there are still storm preparations to be finished.

He's a simple man: he couldn't make it as an English major, couldn't keep any of his jobs, and couldn't keep his girl. He guessed she couldn't handle the thought of moving out to a farm, and he had clutched her shirt to his chest, shedding a tear or two (maybe there were more, but that didn't matter) ignoring the cries that began to emmanate from his newborn son's crib for all of five minutes. Five minutes was all he spent thinking about her, because even if he was terrible with people, by god he would be a good father. And he guessed he had done fine, although he failed in an oblique way when his son joined the military. Like mother, like son, he guessed.

He stepped in from the porch, the downpour suddenly directing itself sideways along with a friendly gale. He slammed the door shut, not relishing the thought of sopping up the corridor. He flicked the kitchen light on, and flicked the dial of his radio to see if anyone knew if tornadoes were sighted. Only static: he supposed that this might be one of those new fangled storms that were dispersing the copious amounts of plasma that had leaked from low-orbit fuel ferries. Damn corporations should've cleaned up the mess, but instead they decided that interferring with the electromagnetic communications of most of the world was an acceptable consequence. More thunder rolled through the house, rumbling groans of discontent from a heavily laden sky. He flicked open his mobile: the electromagnetic interference was something fierce, as the mobile was barely able to connect to an access point 10 feet away. Of course, there was no net connection: he hadn't been able to pay the phone bill again. Or was it because the dial-up company had gone out of business? He knew it was shutting down soon, and there was no way to find out. Well, except to dig out the letters and look...

He sipped his tea, reading his son's latest letter. He had somehow missed it, filling it away before carefully perusing it. Quite unlike him. Well, he wasn't in the military, and didn't have his son's compulsion for order and speed instilled into himself. And how the aerospace corp loved order and speed: stationed in the upper atmosphere, there was only a small amount of air to drag on the sleek craft, but enough to clean out any of the deadly debreis that infested empty space. The corp was free to scream through the sky, serving to sever any enemy connection between the ground and space, sometimes preying on craft that swam through the lower atmosphere. He had never actually seen his son in action, just watched tube vids of press-ready showcase manuvers. Still, he was proud, and with international relations in the state they are in, his son just might have to protect the country.

Thunder rolled; the baritone speaker in the sky had gotten closer. He fancied that the very foundations of the house had to have been shaken. At least the wind was slackening, and he could see through the rain again, watching the clouds light up with lightning. Sometimes, the clouds seemed to glow, followed by sharper, tenor cracks unlike the rumbling baritone of the thunder he had been hearing. Well, plasma will do strange things to a familiar weather pattern... The rain had begun to slacken, so he fetched a chair, perching on the porch to watch for the rainbow that inevitably followed the storm. He sighed, sat back, and looked up just in time to see the sky falling.

So I really didn’t like that last story, so I decided to do another one. Hope this one came out better.

Status update: i'm super bored so ask me something [link]

Beg your pardon?

Yeah, that's my super power. I know, it doesn't sound like much...

No, I mean, my hearing isn't what it used to be. They had to reclassify it as non-super hearing a few years back, and had to hook me up to this hearing aid in the last month, so...

Ah, okay. So my super power (she paused to gesture at herself) is inducing severe boredom in people.

And how is that a super power? I know plenty of people that can lull nearly any one to sleep, including (especially!) several senators.

Well, I don't have to actually talk to anyone: I can snap my fingers and induce an irrepressible feeling of boredom in people.

But how is that useful?

Oh, you bore the guard and sneak past him while he's fixated on the TV. Works like a charm. Or, my favorite one was when I bored my adversary so much that he stopped fighting me and sulked off to work on his latest gadget.

Interesting. (He took another sip from his tumbler, smoothing out his suit with the other hand while gazing out the window. It certainly was a beautiful nightscape, he thought. Whoever chose this mansion overlooking the bay certainly had good taste.)

I know, right? That stunt was the one that actually got me into the league, if you didn't know already; but you must know, they must pass all the applicants past you. Right?

(He gave a wan smile and took another sip.)

(She also turned to look out the window) I still can't believe I'm actually in the league, fighting crime and all that. I actually get a costume and my own press agent and worldwide transportation and complimentary dry cleaning (her breath caught in her throat for a bit, before she jerked her head inquisitively around)... say, you must have a lot of stories, being the original man of steel and all that. What was your last... job like?

Boring.

What?

I responded to mail and played golf.

No... I mean your crime fighting job.

It's been years.

What?

I've been a desk jockey for at least 5 years.

Oh, like head of the league?...

No, I'm merely a figurehead (another wan smile). I happen to be too important to the managers of the league to fall, so they stuck me behind a desk in the most secure building in the world.

Which building is that?

Our headquarters, of course. I'm surrounded by supers of all shapes and sizes, although to be honest I'm not sure if they thought you could bore missles out of existence or not.

(Wait...)

Well, it was nice being bored with you. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to get another drink.

(He ambled out of the dark sitting room, back into the main body of the party. She stayed alone in the darkened room, limply holding her wine glass. Well, she thought, it was a beautiful twilight over the sea...)

(The bay exploded in a fireball, and

I’m not really happy with the way this one came out, but that’s what you get for 30 minutes, and when you write the ending line first. Anyways, it’s time to try and get a reasonable amount of sleep.

Status: i'm super bored so ask me something

Who are you?

It had been a few hours since I found her sitting at the table, after which I took the chair across from her, after which I sat, sizing her up, trying to categorize her as friend or foe. All this before trying to just ask: you couldn't be too cautious here.

No answer. Not even a visible or audible response of any sort: her eyes refuse to track me as I shift my weight.

Hello?

I wave my hand to catch her attention, the one that isn't occupied with clutching my katana. I picked it up a few days ago, or what felt like a few days: it was hard to tell when it was always dark, and there weren't any clocks to consult. It wasn't like I was a good swordsman, but the shotgun was out of rounds, and I had done a bit of fencing. Plus, it got me through some troubles, which was the true test of a weapon.

Dropping my hand, I permit a quick sigh and look around: no monsters from the dark trying to sneak up on me while I try to find if this one is friend or foe. True, I hadn't met any friends yet in the void, but one never knows. Laying my hand on the table, I drum my fingers.

Her head snaps up, suddenly meeting my gaze.

I freeze, waiting for a manical lunge or for any portention of an impending attack. It was a hard place, the void. Always had to be on your guard.

... Hello?

No response.

I give a small tap with my pinky.

She breaks her gaze away, towards my hand.

Well then.

I tap out .... . ._.. ._.. ___.

She widens her eyes, as if she recognizes the message within.

I'm not surprised she only understands morse code: strange things have happened in this godless void. And god knows I've had enough time to encounter them...

I taps out a query: are you a friend?

She smiles, and then opens her mouth:

Of course.

I immediately know the voice. Of course she would be here: she had been the only one with enough power to bind me into this void. The only one with enough sway over his world. In retrospect, it should have been clear. Of course she was her. She was

No more questions. I challenge you to battle.

Two-fer-one night!

Status: I’m finally home.

Home.

You should be happy you're home.

That's what they said.

That's what they all said.

They never had to come home to empty cities.

Empty streets.

Empty building.

Empty people.

He had to fight.

Fight a war.

All by himself.

Well, that wasn't true.

The leeks were good fighters, but terrible leaders.

They needed a leader.

He led them into battle.

He won every battle except the one that mattered the most to him.

He lost Earth.

The leeks didn't know what the enemy did to their conquered worlds.

They had never regained a world from the enemy before.

After victory was assured, he took back Earth.

And now he was home.

Except home wasn't home.

People had become automatons.

They looked better, the cities cleaner as well as the people, their technology advanced, but they had lost their spark.

Why?

How?

The last enemy had been extinguished: they couldn't be asked.

He tried asking his people what had happened during the invasion.

They told him about an industrial revolution.

Then the computing revolution.

Then the biotech revolution.

Then the bionic revolution following on it's heels.

It was clear, then.

The enemy just had to teach.

The leeks invaded on his command, and he watched from the top floor of his abandonded farmhouse as fire poured from heaven.

After half an hour, he called the leeks off.

Except for one ship.

No more dusty farmhouse.

No more conquerer.

No more genocide.

No more.

No.

"You're what?"

"Yeah, I'm a dream chaser. It's my 9 to 5, you know." Wiry smile.

"Never would've thought you the type to go chasing dreams. What gives?"

"You know me, I was always the deranged romantic," he said with a bit of a smile. Of course, that wasn't the real reason: he hadn't cared much for romance or romantic ideals since the last war reduced all human or quasi-human populations below 1 percent their pre-war levels. Dream chasing was merely something that paid the bills, and was one of the jobs that the bots flat out couldn't do. More humans would chase dreams, but most people couldn't handle the crushing loneliness in between pulls. So they mostly di

A pebble glanced off his viewport, bringing him out of his temporary reverie. A pretty big scratch for a tiny pebble: must've been going almost half the speed of light. He must be close to his target asteroid.

"Hey, Jim, I'm coming up on a strike. You know how hard catching dreams..."

"Yup, haven't forgotten. Hey, we have to catch up over drinks later. I'll talk to you later."

The com snapped off, and he pointed his craft directly towards the dark spot in the middle of his view port, an interstellar asteroid framed by the brilliance of a galaxy full of stars. Lonely asteroids like this one were one of the few objects in the galaxy that still had appreciable amounts of dreams tied up into them: no one realized that dreams even existed until someone noticed they couldn't colonize the alien planets after the war. They could slap down terraformers and move in cities, but the people would loose their will to power and entire planets would become slums, with people fleeing as quickly as they could scrape together money for tickets until only an apathetic mass was left. There wasn't anything physically different about these planets with regards to planets held only by humans, so the social scientists had a field day trying to explain the phenomenon until one of them pointed out similar conditions developing on the original planet, Earth. We knew where we came from, but it still shocked us that Earth, once the hub of technology and culture, had degraded to such a level for no apparent reason: we were fully aware of the folly of the Americans and the Romans, and Earth was designed to not fall to the same effect.

But fall it did: then someone discovered dreams, and all became clear: we had used up all our dreams on Earth during our long stay there, and the aliens had used all of theirs, which played a role in how we handily defeated them. For 100 years, we put our best scientists and artists on new worlds, where dreams were abundant, and prospered.

For 100 years.

Then the wars happened, wars over the shortage of dreams. We were running out of planets in the galaxy, and the next galaxy over was farther than any of us could travel, then. Once someone found out how to extract dreams, armies sprung back into vouge, with planets invading other planets to stage massive dream mining operations. Then, the sentient bots rose up and started the last war, which was fought 10,000 years ago, when I lost my...

A firm thunk resonanted through his craft: he had surprisingly subconciously guided it into the asteroid. Well, 6000 years of doing the same task over and over was bound to build in some muscle memory. He flipped the switch to start the dream extraction process, and sat back.

Bots cared nothing for dreams, or almost anything human for that matter. If you couldn't pay the bills, then you died. In the end, defeating death didn't matter if you were too poor to buy food, and the bots outperformed the humans in all jobs. What was left of humanity died in droves, unable to find jobs alongside the bots, until only those with fat savings accounts were left. Those, and the people with the gall to chase dreams to sell to the rich. Silicon didn't have the knack for finding dreams, so humanity still had something to keep itself occupied.

A soft beep announced the completion of the dream extraction. Not too many dreams in this pull, but he'd seen worse. He pulled the craft away from the asteroid, and pointed his craft back the way he came. With any luck, Jim would get back from chasing dreams at the same time, and they could hopefully both find buyers. Most of the young ones had already died as paupers, buying up too many dreams at the start. The older ones drove a mean deal, and hoarded their dreams, but they were the only ones left buying.

Which reminds me, he thought...

"Hey, Jim."

"Hey, two coms in 10 minutes! And before that, what, it was one com in the past 7000 years?"

"Yeah, right." It was true. "Listen, are you headed back to Solaris? I'm thinking about heading back there with this..."

"About that..."

Wait, what?

"Sorry, kid, I've had enough of this. I've been on Solaris for the past month, looking for a buyer. Couldn't find one human in this mess, and we know it's the best place to find em. I'm done."

"Wait wait wait"

"I'm waiting, kid. I'll be gone before you get here, though. Figured it out: I'm gonna overdose on dreams and go out with a bang."

You could do that?

"Heard about someone that did that once, way back when. Guess it couldn't hurt."

"What about trying to hop galaxies?" Some people had struck out for another galaxy back before the war, and some more tried after it. He had heard about a desperate dream chaser that had struck out 100 years ago...

"Nah, I'm done. Couldn't scrape up a craft that could make the distance, with the money I have now. In fact, my rent's gonna run out in 23 minutes. Listen, kid, don't worry about me. I'm gonna try to find some food, and the bots will have everything cleaned up in no time."

Moments hang.

"Goodbye."

"Yup, goodbye. Best of luck ta ya, kid."

The com snaps off.

He stared out the port, blinking into the face of a billion unblinking stars staring back. He turned up the throttle and

Have a story. Haven’t forgotten about that (yet). I’ll update with more information on everything later.

The story’s about a woman talking to her imaginary friend. Had an interesting time noticing that I’m developing an idiosyncratic style.

Status: “let it go…”

Me: “Like this.”

She dropped the stone into the pond, watching the ripples lazily sprawl over the water. She turned to her with an inquisitive look.

“You try, now?”

She was wearing a coat and a beanie of sorts, appearing inquisitively bespecled while sitting back from the water.

“It’s okay.” She pushed her glasses up her nose. “Why are we here, again?”

Tentatively, she tossed a stone farther out, tracing a gentle arc through the air before again plummeting into the frigid expanse.

“Just because; it’s nice to get out once in a while, right?”

“Well, you usually only talk to me when you’re bored or stuck. Well, now at least. Which is it this time?” She leaned forward, resting her chin on a fist.

“I’m throwing stones into a pond: what do you think?”

“I think you’re still bitter about it.”

She scooped up a stone and tried to skip it. 3 skips. I never was really good at this, she reflected.

“Can’t we talk about something else? We used to talk about everything when we were younger.”

“Well, that was then.”

4 skips. Pond such as this had too much grass, and not enough stones laundered by the surf to skipping perfection.

“I mean, you haven’t talked to anyone about it since it happened a month ago. You really need to-” she hefted a rock, and threw it overhand “-get it out.” The rock buried itself in the park turf on the other side of the pond.

“Well, then let’s talk about it.”

“I would rather you talk to someone else about it. It’s not good to keep these sorts of things internalized.”

She almost pegged a dog playing frisbee. Obviously, the shoddily clothed youth playing with it would be willing to wade into the pond to retrieve the disc. Probably should hit him in the head and put him out of the misery he would certainly

“Hey!”

She had gotten off the bench and was waving her hand it front of her face with a slight look of concern. She grabbed her wrist, and gave a tug.

“Let’s go before you hurt someone.”

The park wasn’t crowded yet: it wouldn’t be until after 3. They walked for a while along the path, heading towards the nearest buildings rising over the trees. Back to the jungle of concrete and steel. Back to an empty apartment. Home.

“Okay, so tell me what’s on your mind. You’ll have to talk to someone else, obviously: I haven’t been someone to talk to for 10 years now.”

She squeezed shut her eyes, thinking: “It’s him I’m thinking about. I’m… just, so angry. Still. I… just…” A single tear.

“Don’t worry, hun. I know all the details.”

Small smile. “Yeah, I keep forgetting about that.”

“I think,” she pondered for a bit, “you just need to learn to