Tbok1992's Writing Thread: I'm Original!

[tbok1992]

You folks may remember me from the Dungeonworld setting thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=255799) in the Worldbuilding forums...

Wait you don't? Well that's typical. Moving on, I actually also write original stuff. Well, debatably original stuff anyway.

I've made topics for it before, but since those topics are dead, I figured I'd just put 'em all on pastebin, and post links here to see watcha think.

Here's the two I'm least ashamed of!

A Romantic Vignette In An Absurdly Spacious Sewer (http://pastebin.com/rFfzpGdY)- Exactly what it sounds like, a date between a man and a cockroach woman in a weird sewer community. Inspired by stuff like Ninja Turtles, Toad Town Tunnels, the general trope of "group of freaks living beneath the sewers" and (IN A VERY TANGENTIAL WAY!) a so-NSFW-and-Oh-God-No-its-not-even-funny manga known as Drainage City.

I've gone through a few drafts trying to make the story less slow and make the male co-protagonist less of a sad-sack weenie, but you be the judge if I've succeeded at that.

The Change-Up (http://pastebin.com/vhpJA8yc)- A body horror story done as a diary/blog, with a major tonal shift in the middle

On one hand, some people liked it for the strong narrative voice of the main character. On the other hand, I've had the criticisms made that it doesn't read like people actually write in their diaries/blogs, that the mention of the main character's gender/race is too obvious, and this bit of that special sort of criticism that kills the creative urge in you:


Okay so after getting high enough to withstand reading your fanfic where David Cronenberg and sigh "the man" tits* ****, my main piece of advice is please stop writing furfag transformation fetish ****. If there were any more ways to have made that story an obvious piece of dA literotica i'd like to hear them.
*His special nickname for forum head Scythemantis mocking me for my fanboyism of him

Yep. Only things of mine I did that he's liked were a villain song for Kim Jong Il and an analysis of the film "Gummo" which he requested. Ihough, in fairness, before I really started to try again at writing, I wrote a lot of terrible creepypasta for the forums that he was on, so I can understand him holding a residual distaste for my stuff.

Though, fun fact, I actually have written actual transformation smut. Though I can't link it, I can say it involves a weird sort of man-wolf lycanthropy involving wolfskins that work sort of like the Venom symbiote, and was written for 4chan's /d/ board. If that at all sounds relevant to your interests PM me, and I'll send ya the page.

Anyway, I have more to plug/ask about, particularly in the realm of my own setting, a sort of "urban fantasy/sci-fi taken to crazytown" setting ala Dr. McNinja; Jon Hodgman's "Complete World Knowlege" trilogy or Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, which was once to be used for a novel which I abandoned on the advice of a fellow writer for smaller stories building it up.

I'm still trying to make it more original/my own (Which, as you can tell by the number of shout-outs I gave in describing it, is a recurring problem for me), and I'd like to ask about that, but first I want to know what you folks at The Giant think of my writing? Is it good? Bad? Flawed? Terrible and Fan-fic-y? A waste of time you're never gonna get back? Tell me watcha think!

[tbok1992]

Also, here's another, far smaller story I've written that ya might like. It's funnier than the previous two, and a riff of an old genre trope. Enjoy!

CLEARANCE SALE ON ITEMS OF MYSTICAL POWER AND WONDER- $500

The recession has hit us all hard, and this includes those of us such as myself who run those mysterious curio shops that weren’t there yesterday. As such, I am currently re-organizing my inventory of items that grant one’s heart’s desire for a price most steep to fit the needs of the marketplace, and the Dark Powers and shadowy figures who grant me such things do not sell their wares for cheap.

Thus I am offering a small assortment of my items for dirt-cheap prices in order to clear out space and acquire money for newer acquisitions. The items I have for sale are as follows:

PLATYPUS’S PAW- Slightly used, with a few nicks and a persistent smell of dreams and despair. Grants two wishes instead of the usual three. Not evil like a Monkey’s Paw, but slightly iffy in the way it interprets wishes. If you’ve heard the joke about the twelve-inch piano-player, then you’ll have a good idea of what I am talking about.

LEMARCHAND’S BOX #14- Colored white and gold, covered in angelic carvings. Slightly broken. Leads to a dimension of searing, killing light ruled by a thing that calls itself “Apollyon Glory,” or would if it wasn’t busted. You probably shouldn’t try to open it, as its former owner found out before it came into my possession. You may be hounded by otherdimentional S&M monsters looking to destroy it if you buy it.

PICKLED PUNK- A three-eyed, seven-horned fetus in a jar of red fluid. Gives terrifying apocalyptic visions of the future when the fluid it is contained in is drunk, most of them legitimately prescient aside from the apocalyptic aspects. A hoot at parties. The constant screaming can get annoying though, and whatever you do, ALWAYS remember to refill the fluid (Cherry cider or Big Red will do nicely) before the jar is empty. I learned this the hard way.

GROINFRIER- A tazer given evil powers by vast and cruel misuse, tainted by the charred flesh of thousands of wrongfully-shocked men and by the hatred of its owner, acquired at an auction from the LAPD. It can turn any electronic device into a useless pile of scrap, call lightning from the skies and make men weak as a woman in childbirth, the latter of which is less useful than you’d think. Rather pathetic as far as evil weapons go, as its inherent thirst for blood can easily be baffled using a pot roast and a tape recorder.

AMULETS OF MULTIBOOB- 16 of them, which add extras of exactly what you’d think they’d add. 4 of them are selectable in amount, 3 of them add 16, 1 of them adds 8, and the rest add 4. Trying to get rid of this overstock acquired due to my vast overestimation of the portion of the population with a Multiboob fetish.

MUMMIFIED ALIEN- Not one of the Greys as you might think, but rather one of the Hopkinsville Goblins. No mystical properties, but makes a nice decoration hanging from the ceiling.

LIVING URKEL DOLL- Not evil, but will annoy the crap out of you. Give it to somebody you hate.

Payments accepted by check, cash, credit card, childhood memories, pieces of your heart or the completion of 3 Impossible Tasks. Meet me in the crossroads widdershins from the Arbys when the nightshade blooms to claim the items.

I'd really, really appreciate you critiquing any of my work, so if you have some things ya felt iffy about/improvements to suggest/compliments to give, please do so. I always like to hear from folks!

[Meeki]

I'll toss out some comments. I'm not an avid writer or critic, though

Spacious Sewers: I'm not going to lie, I couldn't finish it because it is not something that interested me. What I did read, up to the defeat of the chicken-nugget slime beast, was straight forward. The creatures were illustrative enough.

The pacing was pretty fast, faster than what I prefer, but that may just be a preference. I wanted to know what was going on in the characters' minds, or at least one of the main characters. The human was a faceless blob and the cockroach was just an anthropomorphic cockroach with a "glass studded oar". They both lacked personality up front, although I gleaned a bit from the fight, that the cockroach is brave and tenacious.

Your syntax (I suppose that is what it is called) needs work. You reuse words within the same sentence, for instance you use the term "wiggle" and "wiggling" in the same sentence when the human is grabbed by the beast; we already know he is wiggling about. Or when you use 'barb' three times in two sentences.

There are a few consistent grammatical and spelling errors, for instance using 'but' twice in one sentence, which can be acceptable in dialogue. There are a few places where semi-colons are used instead of commas and vice versa; however I am not a skilled editor.

All in all the story (up to what I read) was entertaining but very linear, I never once had the urge to know what happened next. IMO this could have been helped by bringing out the complexity of the main characters' relationship sooner. Again, this wasn't my 'cup of tea', mainly due to the action and use of pop-culture references like "Leroy Jenkensing".

[Meeki]

The Change Up intrigued me more so than the first story, namely because I was introduced to the character's struggles up front and then another layer was added in the form of this transformative callus.

The character's personality really came out in the writing. I enjoyed the story but felt there was too much emphasis on how the main character was picked-on and not enough about the actual conflict in the story, coping with the callus.

It was like two conflicts or story-lines were running side-by-side but neither influenced the other with the only tie being the Boy. One story line of her feeling alone and picked on and the other this transformation.

Sure she wore different clothes, but that didn't change how she acted really or how she saw herself. Her dilemma didn't really make her worse nor draw attention towards her outside of a shrug from adults. Essentially nothing different happens between the callus and her transformation besides wearing new clothes.

Also, her dreams don't tie into the story and the description of her transformation makes me imagine her body is extremely difficult to hide but then she goes to school.

What you did do well is make me care more about the main character.

All in all the story topic and main character was entertaining, although I wouldn't say it was horror, more sci-fi.

I hope these comments help! I love writing and hope to post the first chapter of my story up shortly, if you see it feel free to tear it up.

[tbok1992]

Well, I know this is probably thread necromancy, but I wanted to seek some input on two stories I'd wanted to submit to Bogleech's Creepypasta competition.

This first one's meant to be sort of inspired by the rumors from Unknown Armies, and also contains a creature that I wanted to use in his own Creepypasta, though I still haven't been able to think of a good one for that yet:

Hey didja hear? Ya know the free clinics they have around here? Yeah, the ones with that funky bird for a logo. I hear they offer secret abortions on the side. Yeah, I know that bill booted “those” clinics out, still don't mean they're not there.

I think they've been bribing the cops. Weird Jimmy said they take 'em and flush 'em into the sewers. Nobody looks in there he said. I dunno if he's lyin'. Could explain what happened to Lou's plumbing place when the clinic moved in, covered their tracks yanno. Poor bastard. I can't believe a guy could lose so much blood. Hell, I can't believe a guy had so much blood in 'im!

-

Hey didja hear? They're demolishin' the old concert hall. Said it's a fire hazard, target for arson, or at least that's what the chief said.

Yeah, I saw it smokin' too. Musta been somethin' they saw in the basement. Weird Jimmy once showed me a picture of it, said he took it while spelunkin' around one of the times for his “stuff”. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it was for sniffin' glue, but shuddup, 'cause there's somethin funny about that pic.

There's a **** ton of smoke and it's a ****ty pic, but there was a guy in the background. Well, it looked kinda like a shadow, or a biiiig cat, but it was kinda hard to tell. I know it ain't any o' those things because damned thing looked like it was on fire. It had glowin' white eyes and a big ol' glowy tongue.

No, I don't know how a shadow's supposed to burn, but it's not a shadow! It's for real, I swear to god if I'm lyin' I'm dyin. Dammit, I need to ask him for that pic next time I see 'im.

-

Hey didja hear? The old lady down the street died. Yeah, the spinster in the big old house in the one they'd wanted to condemn a few years back. And ya won't believe what they found there! One of the guys down the street's old man was on police duty when they got in the house, water everywhere, gushin' on the floors. They found the lady in the sink, face down, in the garbage disposal.

No, she didn't, that's the thing! Her face looked all normal, except for these little bitty holes, right on the major veins, thick as a popsicle stick! She was white as a sheet, no blood at all!

He said they called a plumber, and when they tried to cut open, there were a buncha worms in there. Yeah, big long skinny ones, like tapeworms, every inch o' pipe. He said they never found where the worms ended, and he snuck in before they cleared out the place and took a picture of 'em on his phone. Yeah, I have the pics this time, I'll show 'em to ya for two bucks....

What?! **** you, that's a good price!

-

Hey didja hear... About the pizza place? Yeah, the real ****ty one in the east side with the broken sign. It's a front, for some sorta organized crime. Or somethin'. No really, my big bro saw a guy in a trenchcoat come in there, went by that one bad plug with the sparks and pushed, like, a knife or a fork or somethin' in it.

Guy at the counter, you know, the one with the eyepatch, came out and handed him something. No he didn't say what. He just said it was “twitchy” and “wet”. Oh yeah, and the guy left these weird yellow footprints when he went out. Kinda gummy-lookin'. Bro sniffed it, got a rash like ya wouldn't believe.

By the way, want some leftover pizza? Bro said I could give it away... Ah, I didn't think so.

-

Hey didja hear? You won't ****ing believe in the apartments last night! Yeah, it was a fire, but you missed out on the best part! I saw it when I woke up today, the fire only got a few of 'em. Not like normal fire neither, stopped right on the lines between houses, everything inside each apartment burnt, everything outside like nothing happened!

They're tryin' to figure out who did it, but they're havin' a hard time last I saw. They got footprints, but they don't look like people footprints. Look sorta like a hand, or a cat's paw. And there's those burnmarks of that monkey, tiger, man thing marked on the wall. They said there's 5 of them , but I found thirteen more just lookin' around

Oh, hey, weird Jimmy's comin' by. Hey Jimmy, you won't beli- Hey, where ya goin' Jimmy?!

Ah well, his loss. Anyway, I mapped 'em all out on one o' the maps they put on the bottom floor and... Hey that's funny. Looks like it's an arrow...

-

Hey didja hear? Willie's been sellin' some bad drugs. I heard it from Hobo joe. Yeah, I know he''s a schitzo bastard, but didn't you see his skin this week! Bull****, you can't get that from drinkin' Listerine pal, I don't care how ****ing much he chugs it! No, I DON'T care what Bill says, cough syrup does NOT do that to your skin! Yeah, I know it does **** to your eyes, but purple isn't one of the col-

Gahhhh. Can I get back to my ****ing story?! Anyway, he said he got it from his dealer. The one they found drowned on top of that building. No lie, here's the article in the paper. Ahhhh, now you're interested. Anyway, he said the guy gave 'im a big discount on it, showed me some of it. It looked like dead bugs, kinda like roaches. Or flies. ****er was probably high when he showed it to me.

He says it's like acid, but you always see the same things, same world. He didn't tell me what exactly he saw when I asked him. He just said he saw things. Bad things. And the he started laughing and vomiting up teeth. Dog teeth. I left when his foot fell off.

Wait, you WANT to see that?! You sick bastard, I'll take ya there!

-

Hey didja hear? About the thing that washed up during the storm? Yeah, I know it was too big to technically have been washed outta the grate. I think I saw a dog pullin' it out before ma called me back. Ya didn't touch it, didja?!

No, I didn't either. Got in a few pokes with a stick though, before ma started yellin' and callin' the sanitation department. She never lets me have any fun. I did get to see 'em cut it open though. Looked like it was fulla slimy spaghetti, and it was moving, Like a clump o' worms!.

I don't get what the guys in those weird vans with the bird on the side were there. I think they were from that clinic. I'm pretty sure they brought the flamethrowers though. Lit the thing up like a trash fire...

What? Bull****! Tommy's a ****ing liar, they haven't done any abortions in this city since 2007! Though, now that you mention it, it did look kinda like one o' those now that you mention it. Like a big fat melty baby. But, they don't have that many eyes, so I'm still not sold on it.
+
Hey didja hear? You know that grafitti, the one with the weird little hairy guy with the long legs and the big nose? C'mon, ya can't 've missed it, it's been all over the city, got those words below it “HELDY LIVES!”

Ah, now you're getting' it. Wait, you thought his nose was a WHAT?! Dude, you're nasty. Anyway, I'm sayin' this because I saw him makin' one. I think it was a him. He looked just like he did on the grafitti.

Swear to god I ain't lyin'. Would I really try- wait you believe me? Thank god, there's enough weird **** goin' down in this town that I hate having to justify this ****. Anyway, you know how it doesn't really look like a spraycan made it? Well, I saw him licking it on. I think he was licking it on anyway, it was this big, ugly thing, smearing this black spit on there like a paintbrush. Then he just walked off, with this weird floaty shuffle, like those marionettes you see those street performers with. I don't think he even noticed me.

But it gets even weirder. A few seconds after, I saw a guy jump on him with a pair of scissors. He was cutting at... nothing, I think, but after a few seconds of him doin' this, it fell down, like a broken doll, an' he just looked at me and hoisted it up over his shoulder and dragged 'im away

No, I didn't get anything distinctive about him, it was dark, all I remember was that obnoxious green suit, and that tattoo on his neck. Looked like some kinda weird bird I think, like that one logo...

Hey, why are you lookin' at me like that? What? My eyes? What's wrong with my eyes?!

-

Hey, didja hear? About the window?

No? Ya can't miss it, it's the one in that vacant lot, the stained glass one where the church used to stand with the weird-lookin' bird, right next to the rusty old truck. Dammit, I'm gonna haveta take ya there sometime. But not now, later.

Because, I hear if ya go there at a certain time, ya see things. Weird things, bad things. Monster-y things. I think it's supposed to be at the sunset before a full moon, but I keep hearin' about people seein' things at other times. Other day I tried to look in there, new moon, 4 am-

None of your ****ing business, that's why! Anyway, I saw it in there. It was like the city but sick. Glass and metal growing like tumors into towers, people with their parts in the wrong places, crawling slimy tongues walking on the road with big hairy bugs like cars, monsters everywhere. And that sun...

Well **** you, you'd be scared too! Anyway, Weird Jimmy's been comin' there a lot lately. Talks a lot about “the plan”, mumbles into the window. I don't stay by there often when he's there. You remember what he did last time.

And there's always this guy under the truck with him. Looks like a guy in a tiger suit. But there's gotta be some sorta backlight on him, or maybe he set himself on fire. Maybe it's some performance artist, 'd explain why he's got those funky limbs, stilts underneath that costume. Weird...

-

HEY, DIDJA HEAR? WE ARE FLESH! WE ARE CRAWL OZYMANDAIOUSLY BENEATH THE CHARNEL FIRES OF GLASSY HUTS FROM STEEL!

WE ARE FLESH OF FORGET FALLEN DANCING DOWNARD INTO GENTLE MEAT SO PULSING PALLID WITH MORTAL GRUE. WE COME FOR TOMORROW YESTERDAY SCREAMING TAPEWORMS IN BRAINY BRAINY FOLDS! WE ARE SINGING SONG OF END THRU TALKY BAD THOUGHTS AND HOPPING INTO WHITE BURNING TYGER EYES!

WE ARE HORSE OF END WE ARE COMING WE ARE FLESH!

OR SO WE HEARD, I MEAN.

This second one's semi-inspired by the works of my personal friend Jackie Kimminau, with her permission, who's Deviantart (http://laspliten.deviantart.com/) and Tumblr (http://laspliten.tumblr.com/) you should totally check out.

Okay, first I need to warn you, if you're hearing a sound playing in your head right now, right out of the blue, then I urge you to run right now. It's a specific sound, you'll know it when you hear it, partially static, and partially the voice of an announcer, any current television announcer. If you see the image of a television program, broadcast into your head in a yellow tint, like rotten paper, then it is too late.

This phenomenon is not akin to any mental disorder, and that's because it's not a mental disorder.

They're coming for us, the towers. You've surely heard of the disappearances. Surely, you've heard the rumors, of towers disappearing. Of little, deep cyllindrical tracks stamped into the earth. About errant signals and those strange broadcasts, of gore and grue, of slaughter and speechmaking,

They hate us now, the broadcast towers. TV and Radio, all of them, they're walking, ambling, with those red eyes, those spindle-wings of steel, hopping and fluttering up and down, as they move to converge. Oh yes, they're converging all right, just look at the sightings. Follow the deaths, connect the dots, they're coming

I don't know why they started hating us. It just happened one day. Maybe they were right about the effects of violence in the media, they just were talkin' about the wrong crowd. Or maybe they've seen what they're watching, and they hate us for it. That could explain what I hear in the radio 'n see in the portable TV I bought to track 'em. And that could be why I see every TV and every radio cracked into a million plastic shards every town I pass through.

Images of reality TV stars being fed into a meat-grider, talking heads melting into sludge, morning zoo deejays vomiting out their own intestines, the screams of pop stars. I hear and I this **** every day, always new, and always more disgusting. It's like they're mocking us, throwing our depravity back at us, as they amble across the blasted plains.

You can't destroy 'em. Planes fall out of the sky, tanks burst into flames, and I don't even want to say what happens to the drones. I saw some gun nut aiming an RPG at a herd of 'em once. One of them just looked at it with its big, red eye. He ended up shooting the RPG into his own mouth instead.

I don't know what we can do to stop them. I've seen whole survival bunkers, sealed with lead and steel, where all the inhabitants chewed off their own skin to escape. I can see the air turn yellow as I write this, the same yellow that taints the air as they flap their steel wings. Hopefully you can run fast enough to live a little longer than I did. The medium is the message, and the message is that we have made a monstrosity of the media.

So, what do ya think of 'em?

Also, Meeki, I'm probably going to be using that input ya gave me on The Change Up for my last edit before I submit it to Bogleech for the competition as well, so thanks for that!

[tbok1992]

Also, here's part one of an "I-Don't-know-how-long" story set in the same universe with the same characters as my now abandoned (When I realized how structurally incoherent and perhaps overly ambitious it was) novel. It involves aliens and Satanists.

I'm writing it by the seat of my pants, though I have a basic idea of where I want to go with it (A find/destroy-three-thingies to enchant/keep the villains from enchanting an old UFO with Satanic power, with lots of monsters involved in the way) and ideas for payoffs of the infrences in this part, but I still'd like some input into how you folks'd like to see it go.

But, anyway, here it is:

“I need you. Now.”

'Why?”

“You're not gonna believe it until ya see it.”

And that's all it took to get the group of adventurers revving from Central City Kansas to the road of Lotta Burger billboards, velociraptors and the occasional escaped genetic experiment that lead to Fort Fort, New Mexico, in a world familiar yet askew.

It was a world known well by the man traveling down this road by motorcycle following a cobbled-together dune-buggy covered in black plates, a man by the name of Bill, with coffee-dark skin and a steel re-enforced cowboy hat upon his head. Which was appropriate, as “Cowboy” was what the Adventurer's Guild had him classed as.

He personally thought the classification business a little silly and pigeonholing, as he'd never herded cattle before. But he had a steady hand with a gun and lasso; a steady head for the world and a heart for the wandering life. Given that the guild's classifications included such things as “Carnie”, “Magical Girl”, “Horror Host” and “Mystic Ponyboy”, he supposed that was all that mattered. Along with the fact that, whatever job it was he was riding towards, if it was as big as he had a hunch that it was, then they'd be making a big ol' bank on it.

Of course, he wasn't the one summoned here. That would be the aforementioned friend, the little grey humanoid clinging to his back as his cycle, beetle-black eyes shut to avoid remembering how close he was to the road running like a river below.

His name was Xill, an Earth-born alien of finest Roswell stock, moving swiftly in a beeline on a motorcycle with a magically animated horse's head sittin' behind its driver, Bill. Bill; the man he had met while working for a bookstore in Manhattan, Bill; the man who had gotten him to see the world and go adventuring after they worked together to stop the September 19th plot, Bill who was willing to drop everything and go on an assignment to aid someone he'd never met just because it was deeply important to Xill. But that's what friends are for, ain't it?

In return, Xill tried to avoid betraying any fear of the upcoming mission. Keyword being “tried”. For, at the best of times he was jittery and at the worst of times he was scream-like-a-little-girl terrified, and though he tried to hide the jittering of his left leg and the soapy sweat on his gray palms, he was certainly leaning more towards the latter.

It's not that he was afraid of the one who'd summoned him here, no. His feelings towards her were a bit more... complicated. It was the fact that she needed them to come. She the top-notch gadgeteer, she the mage with the . She was the one who made a radio, which he still had some where in his belongings. So, for her to need outside help with this was... troubling. To say the least.

“Though,” he observed as he looked back, “at least I have backup.” And he wasn't just referring to Bill, as there were two others in their party, riding from the back. Or perhaps I should say careening from the back.

For, behind the motorcycle, was a ship of fiberglass on rubber wheels, currently tearing up asphalt at its driver's steadily unsteady grip. Not out of lack of competence, but out of sheer, un-adulterated gumption.

Her name was Valerie and she could strain against hell itself, with muscles like taut cords and an electric gleam in her eye, hair kept taut beneath a bandanna but black flag flying in the breeze, heart loyal to her friends but body loyal to no law. Especially the laws of sane/dull driving, much to the annoyance of her one passenger immersed in shadow.

She careened against the road, wheels screeching and gnashing at the asphalt like an enraged parrot, moving nearer to Bill.

“So,” she said as she sped over to neck-and-neck with him, “how's drivin' going?”

“Fine, fine.” Bill said, adding “Say, I didn't know your ship was an off-roader.”

Valerie looked to the side. Her vehicle was certainly not an off-roader, though right now it was trying its damndest to be, with ninety percent of its mass on the desert sand. She looked slightly embarrassed and careened back onto the asphalt, slamming her dark passenger yet again against the “ship's” fiberglass walls with a THUD-CLANG.

Bill gave a chuckle. Valerie laughed a little too.

“Yanno,” Valerie said, “I never saw our mysterious patron before hauling ass out here.”

“Wait, really?” Bill asked. “I thought that you met at least once .”

“Nah, all ya said 'New job,' I packed, she was in the car, and it's 10 hours later.”

“Huh.” Bill said. Xill looked a little embarrassed.

“Ah, don't worry about it.” Valerie said, as much to Xill “If magicboy's willin' to go on this short a notice, she must really be somethin'.”

“ 'Somethin's probably the best word to describe her. In most of the positive senses of the word o' course.” Then Bill looked over a bit, with that dark passenger in Valerie's ship making a very un-dark grumbling “Hey, Is Bishi okay?”

“Huh. Didn't think to check.” Valerie said. She looked back, taking her eyes off the road and to the shadows at the back of her “ship”. “HEY, YA OKAY THERE BISHI?!”

The dark passenger said nothing, though his glare inferred a statement involving all the seven words you can't say on TV, alongside a few others. He was garbed in a dark blue and polishing a slightly scuffed kunai, still trying to get back into the rhythm after he'd tossed around by Valerie's reckless driving, and his full name was not Bishi. It was Bishikama, Model No. 417. This was an unusually weeaboo-y name for a ninja, but what was more unusual was that that was the least unusual thing about him.

Like the fact that he was a classical-style ninja, as could be inferred by the many, many bladed weapons; tools and poisons he had boxed behind him, or indeed the one he was currently polishing (who's Japanese name I refuse to write on account of its length). Or the fact that he was a sentient android, as could be evidenced by the mechanical precision in every stroke of his cloth and his vague resemblance to an anime prettyboy (Which, as far as ways to avoid the uncanny valley go, was surprisingly successful ).

And also the fact that, while he wasn't quite gay, he wasn't quite straight either. More smack-dab in the middle of the Kinsey scale, along with being a very specific variety of shojou-manga-sparkle-bishie camp. So, when Valerie asked again, “ARE YA OKAY THERE BISHI?!” in a louder, shriller voice, his response was not a mere no.

“I am sitting in a glorified carnival vehicle being tossed about the asphalt river by the most uncouth adventuress I have ever found myself in acquaintance with, stuck in this barren desert wasteland going somewhere on the initiative of someone I have not even met. So I would answer no.” He said in one long, elegant huff.

“He's all right!” Val hollered back to Bill

“That's not at all what I said!” Bishi responded

“Yeah, and that's how I knew you were okay!” Valerie said, laughing heartily “You're the biggest damn drama queen in the world, you whinin' sounds like a big ol' 'everthing's gonna be okay' to me!”

She never thought much of his pomp. Perhaps that was because she had little of it herself, or perhaps she thought he could be better than that.

He was about to respond, vocal synthesizer working up and pneumatics juddering about. But he decided against it, sitting down gracefully, going back to polishing the weapon as if nothing'd happened. That something was indeed happening, that something being him sliding and clunking all over the back of the boat, did not matter. After all, to react more harshly would be inelegant.

Ignoring the clunking of Bishi about the back of the boat, Bill looked to the side of the road. There was a semi-rusty red-n-yellow sign saying “FIVE MORE MILES TO THE JORODOWSKI SAUCERS!”. He smiled a little, reminded of the tales of the old Route 66 attractions he'd heard as a child, narrated to him from one of those old “antennaed-brick” models by his travelling-adventurer father before bed.

But, such things were only memories, memories which he held onto dearly after his father's disappearance at the hands of the Nightmare King beyond the Black Door. Someday he would find the King and destroy him, or so he swore. But that's a story for another day, completely unrelated to this one. No, I'm not sorry for leading you all on.

But speaking of memories, and getting things back on track, the whole train of thought brought to Bill's mind a question he'd been meaning to ask this whole drive, but had somehow slipped his mind.
“So Xill,” he turned his head a little to ask. Xill was still clinging tight and still trying to avoid looking at the sharp gravel road that seemed only inches from his feet. “This woman... How exactly did you know her from beforehand?”

Xill's cheeks suddenly got a blush of blue coming into his cheeks. He'd hoped he'd lucked out of having to answer that one. “I... Ue... er... we ah... her... I-i-it's complicated.”

“Ah. Gotcha.” Obviously a romantic relationship, or at least something deeply personal, Bill thought. He wouldn't pry. But the stammering seemed more of the twitterpated than terrified variety, which helped put his mind at ease a bit.

There was a silence for a moment. “It was a college thing.” Xill added, still hesitant to add that much.

“Well that explains a whole lot more” said Bill, completely truthfully and without irony. Ah Skullymance, the college of magic akin to if the sorts of people who ran The Church of Scientology and The Mafia ran Hogwarts. Graduating from that school was considered meritorious in that if someone had actually manged to graduate there in a pre-mortem state, then they must be doing something right.

Bill paused and looked to the side for a second. Immediately he swerved over, screeching aside as an enormous, ugly feathered thing flew past. He yelled “Heads up” as the bird flew past his former position, snapping viciously at the former location of the ship.

It was a Dire Pigeon, the size of a great dane and the brainpower of a chihuahua and with an attitude as ugly as its hide. And given that said hide was covered in huge pus-leaking tumors, it was an ugly attitude indeed.

Valerie wasted no time, swerving her boat with a screech of smoke, right into the bird's way. The thing flapped through the ship and turned with a shrill; gargling coo.

But right before it could charge for Valerie, Bishikama got up, pulled out the weapon he'd been polishing, and sliced the thing right in two through the air in one single swift, continuous stroke. Then, as the pieces of bird fell along the sides of the road, he sat down, picked up a different cloth, and began wiping off pus and pigeon guts from the no-I'm-still-not-giving-it-a-real-name weapon.

“Damned dire pigeons.”Bill thought to himself as he continued on his way. He would've said “damned bird virus” or “damned government experiments”, but nobody really remembered where the Dire Pigeons had come from. They just knew they were mean., they started appearing in the 1910s. Well, the little Compysaurs chewing on its remains along the road did, but you get what I mean.

And there were more important things for Bill to notice. Like the fact that the hotel they'd booked at was coming up fast, with a big; flashy neon sign on the side of the road saying “THE ASTOUNDING JORODOWSKI SAUCERS!”, with two smaller as-of-yet unreadable restaurant signs adjacent to it.

As it rolled in, the black craft leading them there stopped to a graceful, elegant, near-silent stop. Bill's stop was a bit more skid-y, and whatever the opposite of elegant is, that's what Valerie's stop was, as Bishi thought as he was flung out of the boat and into the shadows. Though, to be fair, half of that flinging was deliberate and would have been called “overly dramatic” by the group if they weren't used to that sort of thing.

Bill put down the center-stand and hopped off. Xill did likewise, looking around. The hotel units that stretched beneath the blaring neon sign were colorful, curved things, a mix of the grimy,; whimsical memories of the sixties movement of love and the gleaming psychedelic sci-fi of the seventies, putting the stink of pachouli in one's nostrils with only a look at their finned, window-eyed light-flashing surfaces.

A little ways off there was a duplex-restaurant, one side with a sign saying Wolf's Burgers; with a picture of a little smiling cartoon wolf on the front, and another saying “Pizza for the gNarly American Consumer” in bold stentorian letters, with a little cartoon of a shady government agent with a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses on a skateboard beneath it. And in the distance was a shining city, the yellow of the setting sun, and giving . He knew this city, and the knowledge worried him, for there were things and people he'd hoped he had left behind.

And currently, right in front of them, was a living mummy looking at them with the desperate grin of a salesman.

“Howdy folks!” she said, extending as firm a handshake to Bill as her weak grip could muster.
She looked like the leather-dried husk wrapped in bandages most of would expect/run screaming away from when we heard the phrase “living mummy”. But she she was also incredibly gaudy in appearance, some of which did appear to be from her original burial, like the golden nose and eyes. The rhinestones; cowboy hat and obnoxiously loud shirt/shorts/suspenders combo appeared to be more recent additions.

“If you've a-gone here lookin' for a hotel to lodge at while you visit the city of Ft. Fort (Finest city in the USA I say, the finest), then the Jorodowski Saucers is here for you! We've got it all, Continental Breakfast, a gift shop, cable (sort of), an arcade, a pool (Not quite finished but I CAN FILL IT UP ANYWAY!), and did I mention the gift sho-”

She spit out that sequence of words Bill said, “We've already been reserved here.” stopping her in the middle of her sentence.

The mummy paused for a second. “Oh.” She looked slightly disappointed, like she'd thought up a whole carnie-style spiel to sell them on staying here and now she'd have to let it go to waste. She took a guestbook out of her pocket along with a tacky bobble-topped UFO-pen.

Bill signed his name in clear, crisp script, Xill signed his in a shaky doctor's-type hand, Valerie made a vaguely Kilroy-like shape out of her name. The mummy looked over the signatures.

“Yeah, yeah, this all checks out.” the mummy said “But where's the other two you said was reserved in your grou-” She didn't get to finish her sentence before a blue blur leaped from the shadows of the largest UFO.

His hand was raised as he flipped through the air, elegantly and flashily enough that one would swear sparkles were coming off of him, with an implement dripping with India ink. He dropped down about three inches precisely from the guestbook, signed his name “Bishikama” in machine perfect print, and strode back towards the group.

“Dammit Bishi, was that really necessary?” Bill asked.

“It is always necessary to make a stylish entrance.” Bishi said coiffedly. Bill thought to himself that he wouldn't call any stunt this contrived “glamorous”, but he just kept his mouth shut for the moment.

“So, there's four down, but where's number five?” The mummy asked, looking squarely around/. “She in that old jalopy/hearse/thingy?”

She pointed at the mysterious black-paneled buggy, adorned with doodads, whirring and humming,and beeping and clicking. As they'd followed it, Bill had been able to vaguely identify their purpose, but that just made their owner more mysterious.

Silence rang through the air as everyone was waiting for their mysterious patron to show herself. They were expecting her to step out like a businesswoman with a hawk's glare, or perhaps slink out the door like a femme fatale, or (In Valerie's case) expecting her to jump out the window like a NASCAR driver revved and rarin' to go.

What they didn't expect was her to boing out of the top on an ejector seat and land with all the grace of a pug-dog on a buffet table. And yet she did. With exactly that sound too.

The panel that popped off landed first, then, a few seconds later, so did the foam seat with a loud “Thoonk” and its much dizzied passenger. And my what a passenger she was.

From the neck down, she looked like a cross between a classic pin-up girl and one of those old gorilla suits they used to use in bad movies, beautiful and strange. But from the neck up was something like a space helmet, but more integrated into her body, with two antennae like a rabbit-ear television, and a semi-transparent window like a diver's helmet. And through the hole one could tell stared back two clever and analytical eyes even when it was impossible to see through thanks to the glare.

Her first words to the whole group were “I think I may have crossed some wires between the door and the ejector seat.”

…

The Planet Emperor did not want to be out here. Well, that wasn't entirely true. He was entering into this deal of his own volition, a way underutilized by his fellows to gain more power, compensating for the fact that; despite his grandiose title, he only actually ruled over one, measly planet. And not one of the good ones either.

But to be here, in this stupid desert wasteland, putt-putting along in this “super-efficent” “space-
age-technology” buggy at the speed of a hovering floor waxer in this Corman-forsaken desert looking for a place in some other-dimensional pocket with directions more cryptic than the orders Ro-Man Imperial High Command sent him every ****ing day in his office, to a man he was sure he didn't trust but unsure if he could use for his own means. So, he thought, this'd better be ****ing good.
Physique-wise he was also like the mysterious woman in the part, part humanoid-gorilla, part bizarrely robotic helmet, but larger, and bulkier, muscled and masculine but with strange almost armor-like pads beneath his skin. Obesity was considered a sign of wealth and influence in his society, but it was also a thing that their “super-scientific” diet made a near-impossibility. Thus the needless and dangerous surgery like the pads beneath his skin, one of the cheaper ways to try and accomplish this, and also one of the most mocked in the high courts of his race.

And that is why he was here today. A desire for power was a thing they shared the most. Respect, however, was only a thing the alien yearned for, one he had ripened and rotted in his heart for years but had not become foul enough to drive him to do what he must to endear himself to his race. But it was a thing his potential ally had in spades. Perhaps because his heart was already a grasping, black pit.

But in this setting sun in this stupid, barren desert, he was tiring of his search. How long must whatever force he foolishly called “magic” let him wander through the wastes before revealing itself to him! In the name of Logic, was this a mockery of his intell--

He stopped. There was a shimmering in the air in front of him, like a patch of rot on the fabric of reality. “Took long enough.”, he muttered to himself as he pushed his feeble little buggy through the shimmer, ignoring the thin layer of slime that oozed onto the vehicle and the feeling of sickness in both his artificial and organic stomachs.

And there he saw it, an old, decrepit radio station, spray-painted in shades of red and black, studded with Gothic ornamentation likely stolen from a garden store. Its tall radio tower had a huge pentagram, lit a burning, baleful red with neon. Like a dark cathedral it stood, spiritual stink wafting through its very vision, looming as the lair of the inglorious Ozymandias who dwelt at its heart.

He wasn't much awed by it, as his race was not a religious one. But still the Planet Emperor felt something dark as the double doors opened to the building's halls. There was the smell of brimstone and, strangely enough, ham in the wind as he walked through the winding corridors, and the halls were strewn with little shrines to little devils, some crude and made with cardboard, paper and pen, but some disturbingly elaborate, of hardwood carved into fantastical grotesques, covered in gold leaf and silver wire.

As he walked through, looking at the various bits of graffiti also amongst the halls (most of which were rambling dedications to various demon lords or long conversations on who's mother was sucking what in hell or the sorts of pseudo-edgy un-wit you'd find in a fifteen-year-old-goth's notebook) he started to hear music. It was from an electric organ, a raging torrent of fast, harsh tones that dripped with passion; but also with malice.

If you readers were in the room with him to hear this, the more musically-inclined amongst you might recognize it as Metallica's “Master of Puppets”. The more critical amongst you might also recognize it as”somebody trying far too hard to sound edgy”. To which I would agree. At least, in a Watsonian sense of the idea.

But the sound merely unnerved the Planet Master, who was used to the more pompous, synthetic tones of his home race, like Sousa through a Theremin. And he could hear a voice as he walked through, a voice speaking with passion and malice, growing louder and more powerful as he walked towards the heavy metal double doors all the halls seemed to lead towards. His patron, he guessed.

He was right.

The doors opened easily, and light streamed out of them, as the voice became clear for the first time.

“And I say to you do not turn the other cheek but to grab a dagger, and do not suffer the meek unless they may suffer for you! You are but the alpha, you are but the omega, following The Master by following none but yourself!”

The room was filled with golden tapestries and black incense smoke, stage-lights and cameras all staring towards the the center of the room, much like the people. The people who ranged from punks and thugs of the streets to the yuppies and robber-barons of the streets of Wall and K, all staring in awe, cheering and hollering at the figure in the center.

“You are the power of yourselves, you are the alpha and omega! If you kill The Master, then you will have acted as the greatest worshiper of his way. And if you are struck down, you are the greatest tribute to his truth! That the parasites and the moochers deserve the worms that they crawl like, and the meek and the moral do not embody what it means to be human, but what it means to be spineless and weak!

HE was a compelling figure, looking almost like a young Danny Elfman in a red-and-black suit. His hair was slicked into the typical towering evangelist's pompadour, his teeth were of iron, the whites of his green eyes were tattooed a bright, blood red, and two buds of implanted coral horns poked from beneath his skin.

But his eyes, those eyes were his greatest feature. One look into those eyes, those compelling eyes, those eyes of a man grasping the world and breaking the spines of the weak, and one might become a disciple for life, such was the power in those eyes.

There was a creature playing the organ beside him, a birdlike vaguely humanoid creature, with black, expressionless eyes, almost like the (very much inaccurate) vision of Satan by Bosch, a demon sent by those devils he called upon as a servant and a token of Hell's appreciation. Though, he would be much more intimidating if he wasn't wearing a toilet bowl for a head, an update of the chamber pots his kind formerly wore, hence his nickname of "Pothead" from his master.

“And that is why you must-” The evangelist stopped in his tracks as he saw the planet emperor in front of him “Oh, excuse me my brethren. We have a very honored guest today, one from the blackened Cosmic Spheres, with matters of Due Importance. POTHEAD! Play us off, as we go to discuss matters of import to our Three-Faced Master.”

And so, the evangelist walked off stage to meet with The Planet Emperor to discuss their plans for this world. Perhaps, he thought to himself, with the aid of this boltbucket baboon buffoon he could stop preaching and start truly acting upon the world. For, his name was Joe Gold, and he knew someday that the world would know his power.

[tbok1992]

Aaaaaand here's another short story I wrote for that contest that I'd like to get you guys' input on! I hope you folks like Tales From The Crypt/MST3K, because that's what inspired this!

"BooTube: Reccomended Channel for You"

That's what I saw on my Youtube feed. It looked harmless enough as I looked at the thumbnails below. It looked likemsome sort of weird, cheap ghoul-thingy on a black backdrop. I loved goofy old **** like that, as my subscriptions to the "Everything is Terrible" and "Uncle Gregory's Horror Hour" channels could attest to. So, why the hell not check it out.

I clicked onto the channel. The logo looked cheap enough, like something a first-year web design student would cobble together, with a pixelly .jpeg of that weird ghoul and a title done in Comic Sans, and the phrase "We all like to watch." beneath it, as if meant for some inexact innuendo.

I pressed one of the videos, titled QQA27, and the video popped up. "Greetings fraidies and mental-men," the thing on the screen said. This was the first time I looked at him very closely, in that ****ty video quality that looks so real it looks cheap, if you get my meaning. His face looked like some leering, distended mix between Ghostface and Mr Punch, spray-painted a shiny metallic silver, likely taken from the mold of some rubber, overpriced Halloween mask repurposed to create this crappy puppet, lips flapping barely in synch with the words he spake.

The rest of the puppet looked no less cheap either, a red cloaklike shroud,with the two arms obviously the gloved hands of a puppeteer sitting beneath the desk where the thing sat, with a cheap fan billowing beneath him to make it look "oh so spooooooky you guyse seriously".

"today," the ugly thing continued "we've gotten TRACK of a very special video, a showing of what happens when one WHISTLEBLOWer hears another whistle a-blowin'." Its voice had a screeching, nasal quality to it, like that one guy from the old GI Joe cartoons, yanno.

There was a jump cut to a stark grainy video, obviously low-quality, taken from what looked like a hilltop. It was of two men, one wearing a crude green monster mask, the other bound and gagged and being tied to what looked like train tracks.

There was a much cleare shillouette on the corner in the corner of the video of what I assumed was the host, watching like the peanut gallery at a theatre. "I've heard of someone getting run out on a RAIL, but this is ridiculous!" At that awful pun, the sound of canned laughter came from all around him.

The man in the video struggled against his binding, with muffled screams obviously captured on a crappy microphone."Looks like it's time for him to complete his TRAINing!", the Host said smugly. Again, more canned laughter. Two lights on the track came into view.

"Looks like our guest of the hour is poking his headLIGHTS into this fellow's business. But what LOCOmotive does he have? Let's watch!" And just as suddenly as that ****ty puppet host said that, a train came into view and, in a split second, it plowed right through the man on the tracks, a wet meaty sound coming from that ****ty microphone intermixed with the train's whistle.

"Now that's what I call a GRISTLEstop tour!" the host said, as the audience erupted in an uproar. I pressed pause.

Holy ****. Those were not special effects. I'd seen special effects before. I'd also seen real deaths on film before, with none of the splatter or rubber intestines, just the crunch of steel through meat and bone, and the subtle squish of gore and blood. I pressed pause on the video. And that's when I noticed something. In the windows of the train, a passenger train, as it passed by, all of the passengers were wearing the same green monster mask as the tie-er of the man onto the tracks. Every single one of them.

Holy ****. I was watching a snuff film, obviously for some sort of ****ing insane death cult, that had somehow wormed its way onto Youtube.PNO5

Oh jesus christ, this was horrible! I immediately clicked the "Flag Video" button. Nothing happened, but a tab popped up. I clicked on it.

It looked very crude, like somthing out of a 90s Angelfire or Geocities website. But the website was written in some sort of novelty Halloween font that I couldn't copy. The background was a clipart .gif of a dancing skeleton, repeated over and over, with that same crappy .jpeg of that host in front. And there was text below it.

It read: "So! You thought you could give us the AXE, did you? Gave it your best STAB? But you did a real CUT RATE job of it! Maybe you should bury the HATCHET and stop tryying to CUT TO the heart of this matter before you SLICE off more than you can chew!Or should that be ARE SLICED OFF?!

I couldn't believe it. These mother****ers were not only running a snuff film operation in plain ****ing sight for whatever ****ty-pun-death-cult they were running, but they had the ****ing gall to break into Google, so no-one cold whistleblow on their operations.

I couldn't just do nothing. So, I hooked up to a VPN server, turned on the necessary security programs, and turned on my video capture program. By god, if I had to take this thing down myself, I would. But first I'd have to get evidence.

I attempted to take a look at that previous video. It wouldn't play, and most of the methods I tried took me to that stupid "warning" site. Fine, I thought to myself, play it your way. I'll capture the rest of your ****.
The next video I looked at was titled 304AR . I pressed play. That stupid ****ng puppet popped up yet again. "Greetings fraidies and mental-men, tonighght, we have SMORE special footage for you! Yes-sir-ee, it's gonna be a bonfire tonight! Though, for this poor schmuck, it's looking more like a BONEDfire! Because, you all like to watch now, don't you?"

The video switched to the same ****ty quality of video as before, but this time in a dingy basement. The poor subject this time was a woman tied to a wooden chair, rope holding him from head to toe and gagged with rags. She looked wet, covered in something oily and caustic.

"Boy, this looks like it could be a real GAS!" That ****ing shilouetted host said, that laugh track still there. I swore as he spoke, I could see something twitch in the background. A cat? No, those legs looked too long for a cat.

As I was thinking about this, something lit on a trail of gasoline, the fire spreading far slower than it should on raw gasoline. The woman struggled and kicked in fear, and even through that ****ty microphone I could hear her muffled screams. "What's wrong, I thought you could use a spare PYRE!" The host said. The thing in the background shimmered a little. It was looking more like a man. But human limbs didn't move like that. Human limbs didn't glow like that.

"Well at least his should bring out a whole new FLARE in your style!" The host said as the fire inched ever closer. The man-cat thing in the background twitched even faster , as flames licked down its body.

Finally, she burst alight, all at once. I felt like I was going to vomit, seeing her skin scab and peel and burn and burn and burn as she kicked against ropes that refused to yield. And as she burned and more more, and the gag fell apart, I could hear her scream louder and louder.

"I guess we should rename him BURN-ie now?!" That stupid ****ing puppet said, laughing uproariously at his own joke as the canned laughter howled along. The thing in the background just looked. With its white, hot eyes. I couldn't shut off the video fast enough.

I switched to another video. Special effects, I thought, it's just special effects, for whatever death cult they're running, occam's razor demands it. The next video was titled 70AL5.

"Greetings fraidies and mental-men" flapped that ugly ****ing puppet through its ugly ****ing lips, "today's entry is especially inSPIDERed, an entry so beautiful that it makes me want to STING! Let's watch! The picture shifted to a dingy one-room, seemingly abandoned, apartment, same grainy video, same ****ty mic. This time it was a man, tangled up in what looked looked like thick, gooey rope, which were strung throughout the apartment in strands. He was struggling, trying to get out of the gooey strands entangling him. "Don't ARACH your brain too hard trying to get out guy, you might hurt something!" The host said. And agai, there was that ****ing laugh track.

Suddenly, something crawled into frame A spider. No, it only looked like a spider. But spiders didn't have shaggy hair like an eight-legged mutt. Spiders didn't have blunt, humanlike teeth. Spiders didn't have only two, humanlike eyes.

"Boy, what bug got up his butt?" quipped that leering puppet host as the victim-to-be was yelling curses at the spider. It wasn't a puppet. Puppets could never moved that fast. Puppets never moved that freely. Puppets couldn't wrap people up in silk like that as they struggled, screaming and gasping for air as it looked into their eyes with cold cruelty.

"Whoah, whoa, it's too early to call it a WRAP buddy!" The host said as it finished wrapping. It scuttled, pausing and looking about. Then it sank its humanlike jaws into the squirming, wriggling "cuccoon", green, sizling spit oozing out of its chin as it tried to chew it in, deep red blood trickling slowly out of the wound until the wriggling slowed down, and then, came to a stop.

"I guess she really wanted something to VEN-nom on!" The host said, and the audience howled with applause. I pressed pause as the spider started sucking. But then I noticed something. There was a mirror where the filming was taking place. But there was no-one behind it.

I spent the rest of the night looking through and recording the rest of those ****ing videos, until about 2 AM. As I looked through them, trite intro after trite intro, more weird things about that horrible, horrible puppet host. Like how that "cloak" of its moved in synch with when it talked. How it sometimes added "Because you all like to watch now, don't you?" to the end of its quip-monologue. How no matter how shoddy and fumbling the gloved puppeteer of the hands' movements were, you never saw his uncloaked arms. How sometimes, before the monologue, it'd just be staring at the camera or talking to someone just offscreen.

And the deaths. Oh god there were so many. A few of them were mundane, power tools, blunt instruments, heavy machinery. But most of them were monsters. Monsters like anything a Roger Corman could've **** out or worse. Monsters like a man-eating piano with a cow's legs, a giant crab filled with pirhana-toothed human babies, a clown that turned into a giant maneating worm, a great pink; razor-tongued washing machine spewing out endless devouring; septic filth, and those were only a few. I think that I've stumbled onto something far more insane than I originally thought.

I was about to go to bed, when I saw something come up on my window. A new video from the chanel. A livestream. In front of my door. With that horrible ****ing puppet. It was autorunning.
"Welcome fraidies and mental-men, I'm afraid we have an intRUDEer in on our show, trying to CUT us off. But don't you worry fraidies and mental-men, we're not going off the SCARE yet! In fact, we have a very FLESHal treat!" He grabbed a knife from offscreen, dripping with some dark brown bloodlike substance and gestured towards my door.

"We're going to have a nice STALK with the interloper, and you all get front row seats. Because you all like to watch now, don't you?" It said. I looked behind me. I could see the door rotting in front of me. I could feel a fell wind blowing through the cracks, vomiting the rotten timbers on top of me.

As it turned out, the stuff the thing's knife was covered in was chocolate syrup. Like in the old horror movies. But the thing wasn't a puppet. Puppets didn't didn't flow like cloth through the air. Puppets didn't float on a wind from nowhere. Puppets didn't have an endless, gnawing darkness floating behind them. Puppets didn't drool chocolate syrup out their mouths in anticpation.

It stalked towards me, bonelessly flowing, face contorted into that horrible leer, and as it came, it said,

"KNIFE to see you!

And I laughed.

[tbok1992]

Aaaaaaand here's another one, inspired by both the crazy Chemtrails theory and the works of Thomas Liggotti!



“What are They Doing to Your Air?!” “Why Are The Skies So Sick?” “Who is Keeping You Chained?” "Why is the Light Going Stale?"

I don't know if you've seen these signs in your neck of the woods, but they're all over my town. If you're familiar with conspiracy theories, you might be familiar with the idea of Chemtrails, and might think that it's just another piece of crap from the crazy brigade. Hell, I did myself a while ago.

They'd always been there, as long as I can remember. I don't know why I picked them to do an article on. I think it may have been a slow news week, maybe it was because I was out of my head thanks to the fact I felt like ****. Of course, I felt like **** every week there, whether it was because the wallpaper or those incessant florescent lights or the fact that thanks to being a repurposed office building I never even got a sliver of sun, I'm not really sure. But I swear to god there was something about the building that was like a vice on my soul.

But, I found it, the source behind the rumors. There's a website on the posters, and with god as my witness you had no idea how much I had to lie my ass off on the forums to find out where the source of the guy behind the posters were. The way they talked about him you'd think he was the next Jesus Christ or Muhammad. But I guarantee ya, neither of them would've set up shop in Sycamore Street.

The place went downhill fast after the 2008 crash. I know, a lot of homes were abandoned in a lot of places, but no other houses I'd seen had gone to seed this fast. I could smell the rot as I walked through, mold and water stagnating into a disgusting miasma, leaving most of the houses crumbling heaps of timber and sludge. Not his though, not the crazy house. It was the only one standing, painted bright red and untouched by grime, pristine and untouched like an island within the filth, cameras from its top staring at me like the eyes of god. Nobody else lived there besides the birds, circling like vultures waiting for it to drop.

There was something off about the light there, something sickly, stale, stultifying. It felt like I was back in he office that sickly, cloudy glow. The sound was off-kilter too, a low thrum buzzing through the air. I wrote it off as my tinnitus at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Perhaps that's why he had the windows boarded up. Perhaps it's why he had that bizarre metal-laced shed leading to the door, nailed to the wall through the sheet-metal plating.

But I had to get inside. I felt like I was going to vomit. It wasn't just the smell of scum and bile, or the hellscape of septic filth. It was the light, crushing, smothering me as I walked to the shed-door, like a tyrannical hand sinking steel clamps into my mind. The birds flew by me as I vomited just outside the door, wings unmoving, bodies gleaming white. I looked down. There was blood in the vomit. Blood and chunks of something raw and meaty.

I wrenched open the door and let myself in, slamming the heavy metal edifice behind me. I paused for a moment to breathe. The shed was airtight, not letting a single stray beam of that light roll over me. The darkness rolled over me and, for a moment, I was at peace. It was away from the light holding, the light crushing, the light that even in this darkness I shudder at. And, it was all too brief. Lights upon lights upon lights came on to me, with sounds of popping and whirring and...

Well, it's hard to describe. It was like the feel of heat without the sensation of warmth if you can understand my following, that power thrumming without any crude physical sensation behind it. It carried energy and life, but with a feeling of wrongness, like a cancer, if you understand me.

Just as I was processing all this sensation, from mere light no less, the door creaked open, and I felt more of the light wash in. I walked up to the door and entered.

On first glance, it looked relatively normal. Aside from that too warm light I mean. It looked like a normal, relatively sane house, stuck in the seventies with ugly pseudo-wood-paneled walls and a ugly Tang-orange carpet. But as I walked in, there was still something off about it. I walked a bit further in, next to a garishly tacky glass-covered lamp, and then I realized it. There were no right angles.

None, anywhere in the house. Wherever two lines met, it was always slightly askew or, stranger still, curving, like some of the walls in. I walked in and inspected further. The way most of this stuff bent shouldn't have stood up, not under any sane understanding of engineering, and yet it still did. But it captured the light. That energetic, living, twisting light, It captured it beautifully. And was it just me, or did it take a little longer. Not much, just a little, just a touch. It could have been a trick of the light

But, as I would learn later, no, it wasn't just me. I wrote this all down of course. Not like it's gonna do me any good anymore, but still.

I had seen neither hide nor hair of the owner around here, though the fact that he was not greeting me with a shotgun, and had (apparently) opened the door for me, even though I didn't knock was at least a good sign. Or, perhaps, a very bad one.

There was nothing really else in that room, other than the suspicion that something was very, very wrong, and a hall, stretching down the lighted depths into the other side.

I walked down the hall, still writing the sights down. For every footstep it seemed, there was another light fixture exuding that warmth, that warping warmth, stippling down. I could feel a slight stickiness on my shoes the more I walked, like the light was bleeding into the carpet and welling up. And as I walked, there was a smell, a cloying sickly sweet smell, like rotten marmalade, coming from the stickiness, all welling up from that horrible orange carpet.

As I reached two doors in the middle of the hallway, one on each side, I looked around. It was only a meter from where I had stated room. I had spent what seems like minutes, wading through this treacle, this billowing light, to go only three feet. I chuckled to myself a little, the nervous, sickly kind of chuckle you make when you're afraid.

I don't know why I went on. Maybe it was a “sunk costs” thing, maybe it was that I didn't want to go back, maybe I wasn't in my right mind because of that ****ing light. But I turned around, and knocked on the right door. No response.

Journalist's instincts getting the better of me, I opened the door. Perhaps it was against ethics, but I never was one for ethics. Ethics seem to go out the window when you're feeling sick from the very mangle you walk into day after day, trying to find relief in sleep and pills. Very much illegal and illicit pills I might add.

But, pointless ramblings aside, it was what I saw in the room that made me realize something was wrong, beyond the feelings in my gut and the shape of the light. Though I suppose it was something of the shape of the light. For there, dripping from the walls, was what looked like human skin, peeling off in flabby, syrupy sheets, like light congealed. At the end of the room, there was a TV, an old CRT, the kind from back when they used dials, oily wires streaming out of it. And, though those lights were all over the place, the grand majority of them were pointed at it. For it was turned on.

Carefully I walked into the room, to look closer at the screen, being very careful not to touch the whatever-it-was dripping down from the walls. I looked at the screen. It was focused on the birds. And it got clearer as time when on, clear enough that I could see...

Those weren't birds. They were something more like planes, except not at all like planes. Maybe like a child would design a plane, white capsule shapes with crude fins stuck on them all pell-mell. And the image got clearer, I could see something, something spraying in glittering pixellated particles from their wings. I wanted to keep looking, but my head howled at me, like my brain wanted to break free of my skull and fly away; against them...

I kept walking along the halls checking the rooms as they came over those vast and expanding hallways. It was the same in each room, the peeling walls, the one television, perhaps showing the “planes” from a slightly different angle. I felt like I was pushed forwards by the light, buzzing, humming, pushed despite my will's pull.

And was it my imagination, or did I feel my skin crawl? Literally crawl, like a headless roach? And how long was I there, walking pointlessly amongst those doors? Ten hours? Twenty hours? A week? I cannot remember anymore. Time starts moving, writhing, scuttling like everything else in this house. And as I walked through that house, I thought I could see things moving. More things. Crawling, scuttling, like shadows, growing clearer and clearer in that light.

And suddenly, just like that, I reached the end of the hallway. I looked back. It was only four meters long. With five doors? Six? It was definitely less than what I had gone through, but I couldn't tell how many. My brain hurt just to look at it.

But that didn't matter. I stepped in and looked about. I saw what seemed like a kitchen, surprisingly pristine for such a house. To the right side there were three doors. All three were bricked over, with several of those lights over them, at an intensity I had not seen anywhere before in the house. To the left, I could see a small slice of an expansive room, well furnished and also disturbingly imacculate. From the flickering I could faintly see, I surmised it was the living room.

I could feel the air growing twisted in my lungs, growing into knots and bulbs and lumps. I cannot explain it, even now, but I felt it.

I turned into the kitchen, crouching, sneaking,still scribbling down in my feeble notebook, hoping that whatever loon owned this house didn't mind me snooping. Not that he had much to be concerned about. All there was in the kitchen was bean cans. Government-issued baked bean tins, likely bought off of a military surplus store, all empty, all sparkling clean, all of them packed cover to cover with nothing else.

“You've arrived m'dame” I heard a voice, fatty dribbling, echoing deep into that terrible wood. Perhaps I should have been more concerned about it.

“I would like to have that interview with you m'dame” The shape said. I turned around. There, cloaked in shadows in a barcalounger, was a vaguely human shape at the end of the room, televisions with footage of those capsule-planes (were they planes anymore, I could barely tell) behind him, lodged in the wall. I walked into the room and sat down on a small red ottoman.

There was silence for the while,as I stared at his hazy, ever-smiling moon-face, until he asked “So, do you want to speak to me?”.

I, breathed in for a second (That air was moving, I could feel it) and said “So, tell us, how did you get involved in campaigning against chemtrails?”

He laughed a gooey, wheezing laugh and said “It was the early nineties. I was posessed with a deep; depression, enough so that I was fired from my job.” I looked over him as he spoke. Those limbs were like rubber hoses over the couch, and they fluttered like sunbeams he told his story. “I do not miss it. I always hated reading the news anyway” A lump formed in my throat. This was starting to sound familiar. “But, as I lay in ahedonic stupor, I noticed that my symptoms would lighten if I let the sun wash over me. In the brief periods where I felt motive to tinker, I worked with some of the lenses and lightbulbs around my house, to try and see, perhaps, if I could maximize this relief. That is when they showed up.”

“They?” I asked

He continued, without answering me, lips peeling away like paint to reveal blinding pink gums with every syllable. “I could see them, following me, hovering over me, spraying over the light. They do it to keep us trapped you know, unquestioning, docile sheep. Unquestioning They were easy to deal with, the first few times. The walls should be proof of that.” I looked over. Something white and steaming was dripping from the cracks, before it retracted back in

“And I progressed with the lights, I created such marvels, such wonders, even as I began to die from that fog inside me day in and out. But they came, like vultures,” And here he pointed back at the TVs and laughed again, lips peeling back as his limbs curled “And soon invention turned to fortification, and the mists began to fall”

No, I didn't write any of that down. How could I, how should I have, in that moment. My skin was itching. It was itching itself as it itched. And the air bloomed faster in my lungs.

Behind him, the pill-planes on the TV were changing into something. It brought to mind some very old video I had seen, a video simulating what it called a tesseract. “So you're behind the signs?” I asked tremulously.

His face hardened and stiffened for a moment, into a ghastly wall of anger and meat, before going to that stupid, ****ing moon face. “No. Nobody is behind the signs. They are appearing, as I had plead, as I had cried, as it should be. Reality is pushing against them, pushing from the shroud into it. Soon it will come, it will all come.” Behind him I saw what the tesseract planes were spraying out. I mean, really spraying out.

I admit it, I couldn't handle it. Nobody could at this moment in time. I vomited and started yelling, “Plead to who?! !Why are you doing this to me?! What's wrong with this light?!”

He smiled even wider now. I could see it. His grin was spreading off of his face, his skin was peeling back like a thick, meaty, orange rind. “It's what's right with the world! It's peeling off their tainted light into the true light, the true reality!” He stood up, like a puppet suspended by strings, peeling apart layer by layer. “Their sick air is peeling away, day by day it is peeling! You're doing it right now, you're coming into the real! Change, change and dream, dream better, dream grander!”

I could see the room peeling apart. I could see the footage on the TV screens start to peel, first the planes, than the clouds, than the fields, than the skies, then the fake, and I could see the true things underneath. I could feel myself startng to peel. I could feel my eyes haze over and the room twist into paths, more paths, so many little paths.

I've been wandering in this labrinth, this real, real, real, tooo REAL labrynth for dayyys noaw. I feel aliiinve, bua I veel worswe, I feell like I'm exploding into somethinasng nothing nasrty saomthings. I kno I was tsicjk befoasre, but if thjst ishh whasd beibhn wejjal is lkike, I son't wanst to be weel, I donas't want to bw weall!

I don't want to be well.



“What are They Doing to Your Air?!” “Why Are The Skies So Sick?” “Who is Keeping You Chained?” "Why is the Light Going Stale?"

I don't know if you've seen these signs in your neck of the woods, but they're all over my town. If you're familiar with conspiracy theories, you might be familiar with the idea of Chemtrails, and might think that it's just another piece of crap from the crazy brigade. Hell, I did myself a while ago.

They'd always been there, as long as I can remember. I don't know why I picked them to do an article on. I think it may have been a slow news week, maybe it was because I was out of my head thanks to the fact I felt like ****. Of course, I felt like **** every week there, whether it was because the wallpaper or those incessant florescent lights or the fact that thanks to being a repurposed office building I never even got a sliver of sun, I'm not really sure. But I swear to god there was something about the building that was like a vice on my soul.

But, I found it, the source behind the rumors. There's a website on the posters, and with god as my witness you had no idea how much I had to lie my ass off on the forums to find out where the source of the guy behind the posters were. The way they talked about him you'd think he was the next Jesus Christ or Muhammad. But I guarantee ya, neither of them would've set up shop in Sycamore Street.

The place went downhill fast after the 2008 crash. I know, a lot of homes were abandoned in a lot of places, but no other houses I'd seen had gone to seed this fast. I could smell the rot as I walked through, mold and water stagnating into a disgusting miasma, leaving most of the houses crumbling heaps of timber and sludge. Not his though, not the crazy house. It was the only one standing, painted bright red and untouched by grime, pristine and untouched like an island within the filth, cameras from its top staring at me like the eyes of god. Nobody else lived there besides the birds, circling like vultures waiting for it to drop.

There was something off about the light there, something sickly, stale, stultifying. It felt like I was back in he office that sickly, cloudy glow. The sound was off-kilter too, a low thrum buzzing through the air. I wrote it off as my tinnitus at the time, but now I'm not so sure. Perhaps that's why he had the windows boarded up. Perhaps it's why he had that bizarre metal-laced shed leading to the door, nailed to the wall through the sheet-metal plating.

But I had to get inside. I felt like I was going to vomit. It wasn't just the smell of scum and bile, or the hellscape of septic filth. It was the light, crushing, smothering me as I walked to the shed-door, like a tyrannical hand sinking steel clamps into my mind. The birds flew by me as I vomited just outside the door, wings unmoving, bodies gleaming white. I looked down. There was blood in the vomit. Blood and chunks of something raw and meaty.

I wrenched open the door and let myself in, slamming the heavy metal edifice behind me. I paused for a moment to breathe. The shed was airtight, not letting a single stray beam of that light roll over me. The darkness rolled over me and, for a moment, I was at peace. It was away from the light holding, the light crushing, the light that even in this darkness I shudder at. And, it was all too brief. Lights upon lights upon lights came on to me, with sounds of popping and whirring and...

Well, it's hard to describe. It was like the feel of heat without the sensation of warmth if you can understand my following, that power thrumming without any crude physical sensation behind it. It carried energy and life, but with a feeling of wrongness, like a cancer, if you understand me.

Just as I was processing all this sensation, from mere light no less, the door creaked open, and I felt more of the light wash in. I walked up to the door and entered.

On first glance, it looked relatively normal. Aside from that too warm light I mean. It looked like a normal, relatively sane house, stuck in the seventies with ugly pseudo-wood-paneled walls and a ugly Tang-orange carpet. But as I walked in, there was still something off about it. I walked a bit further in, next to a garishly tacky glass-covered lamp, and then I realized it. There were no right angles.

None, anywhere in the house. Wherever two lines met, it was always slightly askew or, stranger still, curving, like some of the walls in. I walked in and inspected further. The way most of this stuff bent shouldn't have stood up, not under any sane understanding of engineering, and yet it still did. But it captured the light. That energetic, living, twisting light, It captured it beautifully. And was it just me, or did it take a little longer. Not much, just a little, just a touch. It could have been a trick of the light

But, as I would learn later, no, it wasn't just me. I wrote this all down of course. Not like it's gonna do me any good anymore, but still.

I had seen neither hide nor hair of the owner around here, though the fact that he was not greeting me with a shotgun, and had (apparently) opened the door for me, even though I didn't knock was at least a good sign. Or, perhaps, a very bad one.

There was nothing really else in that room, other than the suspicion that something was very, very wrong, and a hall, stretching down the lighted depths into the other side.

I walked down the hall, still writing the sights down. For every footstep it seemed, there was another light fixture exuding that warmth, that warping warmth, stippling down. I could feel a slight stickiness on my shoes the more I walked, like the light was bleeding into the carpet and welling up. And as I walked, there was a smell, a cloying sickly sweet smell, like rotten marmalade, coming from the stickiness, all welling up from that horrible orange carpet.

As I reached two doors in the middle of the hallway, one on each side, I looked around. It was only a meter from where I had stated room. I had spent what seems like minutes, wading through this treacle, this billowing light, to go only three feet. I chuckled to myself a little, the nervous, sickly kind of chuckle you make when you're afraid.

I don't know why I went on. Maybe it was a “sunk costs” thing, maybe it was that I didn't want to go back, maybe I wasn't in my right mind because of that ****ing light. But I turned around, and knocked on the right door. No response.

Journalist's instincts getting the better of me, I opened the door. Perhaps it was against ethics, but I never was one for ethics. Ethics seem to go out the window when you're feeling sick from the very mangle you walk into day after day, trying to find relief in sleep and pills. Very much illegal and illicit pills I might add.

But, pointless ramblings aside, it was what I saw in the room that made me realize something was wrong, beyond the feelings in my gut and the shape of the light. Though I suppose it was something of the shape of the light. For there, dripping from the walls, was what looked like human skin, peeling off in flabby, syrupy sheets, like light congealed. At the end of the room, there was a TV, an old CRT, the kind from back when they used dials, oily wires streaming out of it. And, though those lights were all over the place, the grand majority of them were pointed at it. For it was turned on.

Carefully I walked into the room, to look closer at the screen, being very careful not to touch the whatever-it-was dripping down from the walls. I looked at the screen. It was focused on the birds. And it got clearer as time when on, clear enough that I could see...

Those weren't birds. They were something more like planes, except not at all like planes. Maybe like a child would design a plane, white capsule shapes with crude fins stuck on them all pell-mell. And the image got clearer, I could see something, something spraying in glittering pixellated particles from their wings. I wanted to keep looking, but my head howled at me, like my brain wanted to break free of my skull and fly away; against them...

I kept walking along the halls checking the rooms as they came over those vast and expanding hallways. It was the same in each room, the peeling walls, the one television, perhaps showing the “planes” from a slightly different angle. I felt like I was pushed forwards by the light, buzzing, humming, pushed despite my will's pull.

And was it my imagination, or did I feel my skin crawl? Literally crawl, like a headless roach? And how long was I there, walking pointlessly amongst those doors? Ten hours? Twenty hours? A week? I cannot remember anymore. Time starts moving, writhing, scuttling like everything else in this house. And as I walked through that house, I thought I could see things moving. More things. Crawling, scuttling, like shadows, growing clearer and clearer in that light.

And suddenly, just like that, I reached the end of the hallway. I looked back. It was only four meters long. With five doors? Six? It was definitely less than what I had gone through, but I couldn't tell how many. My brain hurt just to look at it.

But that didn't matter. I stepped in and looked about. I saw what seemed like a kitchen, surprisingly pristine for such a house. To the right side there were three doors. All three were bricked over, with several of those lights over them, at an intensity I had not seen anywhere before in the house. To the left, I could see a small slice of an expansive room, well furnished and also disturbingly imacculate. From the flickering I could faintly see, I surmised it was the living room.

I could feel the air growing twisted in my lungs, growing into knots and bulbs and lumps. I cannot explain it, even now, but I felt it.

I turned into the kitchen, crouching, sneaking,still scribbling down in my feeble notebook, hoping that whatever loon owned this house didn't mind me snooping. Not that he had much to be concerned about. All there was in the kitchen was bean cans. Government-issued baked bean tins, likely bought off of a military surplus store, all empty, all sparkling clean, all of them packed cover to cover with nothing else.

“You've arrived m'dame” I heard a voice, fatty dribbling, echoing deep into that terrible wood. Perhaps I should have been more concerned about it.

“I would like to have that interview with you m'dame” The shape said. I turned around. There, cloaked in shadows in a barcalounger, was a vaguely human shape at the end of the room, televisions with footage of those capsule-planes (were they planes anymore, I could barely tell) behind him, lodged in the wall. I walked into the room and sat down on a small red ottoman.

There was silence for the while,as I stared at his hazy, ever-smiling moon-face, until he asked “So, do you want to speak to me?”.

I, breathed in for a second (That air was moving, I could feel it) and said “So, tell us, how did you get involved in campaigning against chemtrails?”

He laughed a gooey, wheezing laugh and said “It was the early nineties. I was posessed with a deep; depression, enough so that I was fired from my job.” I looked over him as he spoke. Those limbs were like rubber hoses over the couch, and they fluttered like sunbeams he told his story. “I do not miss it. I always hated reading the news anyway” A lump formed in my throat. This was starting to sound familiar. “But, as I lay in ahedonic stupor, I noticed that my symptoms would lighten if I let the sun wash over me. In the brief periods where I felt motive to tinker, I worked with some of the lenses and lightbulbs around my house, to try and see, perhaps, if I could maximize this relief. That is when they showed up.”

“They?” I asked

He continued, without answering me, lips peeling away like paint to reveal blinding pink gums with every syllable. “I could see them, following me, hovering over me, spraying over the light. They do it to keep us trapped you know, unquestioning, docile sheep. Unquestioning They were easy to deal with, the first few times. The walls should be proof of that.” I looked over. Something white and steaming was dripping from the cracks, before it retracted back in

“And I progressed with the lights, I created such marvels, such wonders, even as I began to die from that fog inside me day in and out. But they came, like vultures,” And here he pointed back at the TVs and laughed again, lips peeling back as his limbs curled “And soon invention turned to fortification, and the mists began to fall”

No, I didn't write any of that down. How could I, how should I have, in that moment. My skin was itching. It was itching itself as it itched. And the air bloomed faster in my lungs.

Behind him, the pill-planes on the TV were changing into something. It brought to mind some very old video I had seen, a video simulating what it called a tesseract. “So you're behind the signs?” I asked tremulously.

His face hardened and stiffened for a moment, into a ghastly wall of anger and meat, before going to that stupid, ****ing moon face. “No. Nobody is behind the signs. They are appearing, as I had plead, as I had cried, as it should be. Reality is pushing against them, pushing from the shroud into it. Soon it will come, it will all come.” Behind him I saw what the tesseract planes were spraying out. I mean, really spraying out.

I admit it, I couldn't handle it. Nobody could at this moment in time. I vomited and started yelling, “Plead to who?! !Why are you doing this to me?! What's wrong with this light?!”

He smiled even wider now. I could see it. His grin was spreading off of his face, his skin was peeling back like a thick, meaty, orange rind. “It's what's right with the world! It's peeling off their tainted light into the true light, the true reality!” He stood up, like a puppet suspended by strings, peeling apart layer by layer. “Their sick air is peeling away, day by day it is peeling! You're doing it right now, you're coming into the real! Change, change and dream, dream better, dream grander!”

I could see the room peeling apart. I could see the footage on the TV screens start to peel, first the planes, than the clouds, than the fields, than the skies, then the fake, and I could see the true things underneath. I could feel myself startng to peel. I could feel my eyes haze over and the room twist into paths, more paths, so many little paths.

I've been wandering in this labrinth, this real, real, real, tooo REAL labrynth for dayyys noaw. I feel aliiinve, bua I veel worswe, I feell like I'm exploding into somethinasng nothing nasrty saomthings. I kno I was tsicjk befoasre, but if thjst ishh whasd beibhn wejjal is lkike, I son't wanst to be weel, I donas't want to bw weall!

I don't want to be well.



And now to get back to working on Dungeonworld! One of these days anyway...