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Weekly Contest #374
Mell walked to the door she thought the figure had come from; it was the file room for the Department for Building, Fixing, and Anything Else to do with Roads. One drawer in the file cabinet marked CONFIDENTIAL was slightly ajar; it should've been closed and locked, of course. Mell tried to remember what she'd seen; after a moment, she lit on a name: Lottille Snick. The person looked like Lottille Snick; or rather like Lotti would've looked in a long, hooded coat running down a hall. Mellene Whump didn't trust Lottille Snick as far as she co...
Weekly Contest #371
Cedric Carson arrived at the abandoned inn an hour before sundown. He tied his horse to a hitching post at the back—no reason anyone should see his horse from the road—and creaked open the disintegrating door. He was almost exactly halfway between Keif, where he lived, and Ondrun. Ondrun was less than two miles from the border with Morgrava; the tension between Sahmach and Morgrava had been building. There'd been violence—mostly bombed buildings, but some casualties—on both sides of the border. He looked back at the low gathering clouds and ...
Weekly Contest #370
The room seemed to have been set up to make her feel nervous. If so, she had no intention of complying with that desire. She sat with her back away from the back of the chair, posture straight but not stiff. It was not as easy as it usually was for her: the chair was slightly tipped forward, the front legs a little shorter than the back. Her blue eyes moved between the two people across the table from her. She was trying to be very deliberate with her eye movements: no flicking from one to the other; she looked at one long enough to hold the...
Weekly Contest #368
I should start with an overview of my assignment on Earth, and perhaps provide an example. I'll get into more details shortly, but the basic idea is that I use my perfectly natural powers to help humans with rather minor problems. I use the term "perfectly natural" from the perspective of Celestial Beings, of course. Sorry, but I want to remind whoever's reading this from the Celestial Gazette and Register staff: when you asked me to provide a few thoughts on my work helping humans, you did say you'd edit this, clean it up, make the narrativ...
Weekly Contest #367
He didn't expect to feel this way, not at all. The pure, walking-on-air excitement he'd been feeling for days was being crowded out by something else. He couldn't quite put his finger on it. It was like...falling. But not quite. Or maybe worse. His friend was snapping his fingers. "Claggy. CLAGGY! You still here? Or are you already a hundred miles away?" Claggen Tosk blinked. "Sorry, sorry. I'm just thinking about packing." "I thought you already packed." "Oh, yeah, sure, I did, but I think I forgot to pack my lucky socks." He didn't want to...
Weekly Contest #366
Content warning: offensive, hurtful insults; language; talk of violence I'm beginning to worry about Danny. His behavior is becoming more erratic. For a time, I thought maybe he was just another angry young man, but he seems to be taking a darker turn. In hindsight, maybe the signs have been there for a while. His disagreement with the server, for instance, feels more than quirky now. He was, after all, having lunch with his mother. His mother. It was ridiculous, really; the server refilled his mother's iced tea without asking, and that tri...
Weekly Contest #365
"She got the job because she's...you know...with the Town Manager." Mellene Whump stopped dead. She knew that voice: Lottille Snick, someone who'd been a thorn in her side since...well, almost forever, it seemed. A male voice answered Lottille: "Now, when you say, 'you know', I mean, that is to say, as it were, I don't." Short pause. "Know, that is." "Ugh, Mittel, you're so dense. It means...you know." Lotti harumphed once or twice. "She's...you know...with him." "Like in meetings?" Mell knew Mitt also; he seemed a harmless sort, sometimes k...
Weekly Contest #364
Glynon Floom was all nerves and twitches as he tried, and mostly failed, to stand straight and speak confidently to his boss. "Sir," he began, "I'm surveilling the tavern across the road," he pointed to the tavern, "as I've had a tip that there may be," he paused to search for words, "what might possibly be alleged to be," another pause, "illicit activity." He was desperate to impress the Inspector; Floom was a Detector Apprentice in the Bluff-on-Sea Enforcing, Detecting, and Inspecting Department. (Clumsy, overly long, redundant, and someti...
Weekly Contest #363
The cave had an unwelcoming aroma, to put it mildly: if either of the two young men possessed strong vocabularies, words like "pungent", "acrid", or "putrid" might've occurred to one or the other. As it was, the best Drubel Schnubel (yes, really) could manage was "peeeee-yew!" "I think that's bat poop," said Fudmul Schruck. "I think I might barf." Drub looked around for somewhere that seemed a clean, dry place to sit. "We're stuck, I guess," said Fud. "We can't go back out in this, and it'll be dark soon." The storm had caught them by surpri...
Weekly Contest #359
Content warning: includes graphic language, violence, mental duress, and torture Cedric Carson looked at it as it lay in the thick, tall grass next to a stream; he knew it could bring an end to the life he'd spent a decade building for himself. It was a simple brass tube, capped at both ends; a small thing, not a foot long. As he lifted it, it seemed to pull his hand back toward the ground where it lay. It was weighted with the past, with another life, another version of Carson. He desperately wanted to drop it where he found it, to forget ...
Weekly Contest #358
Deljon Gint hated it when his boss started in on "mentorin'". Deljon wasn't sure what the word meant, but he thought it must at least partly mean "more work". "OK, Del,“ Rikherd Gormal would say, "today maybe I'll mentor you on the proper way to join up two lengths of iron pipe." Next thing Deljon knew he was up to his neck in pipes to join up, along with all his other jobs. And, once he got good and fast at pipe joining, so he had some time to sit and rest himself when Rik wasn't looking, Rik would mentor him on something else, and he'd be ...
Weekly Contest #357
When Mellene Whump was 12 years old, she told a teacher how the town of Bluff-by-Sea could improve access to its harbor. She had noticed ships often had to do rather complicated maneuvers to successfully dock, and she had puzzled out why. "It would be so simple to fix," she said. "They just need to remove some of that spit of land that sticks out to the northeast, then the boats could sail in more easily given the prevailing easterly winds." The teacher had looked at her a long while without speaking. Mell thought she had the look grown-ups ...
Weekly Contest #355
When Shandol Gelbil spotted a kid sidling toward a pie she had left on the windowsill, she shouted "STOP THAT!" with such volume and ferocity that mischief of any kind, anywhere in the village, ceased instantly. There was also at least one incident of wet undies, those belonging to Drubel Snubel (yes, really), though Drubel vehemently denied it. Even before that, Shandol's voice had been famous in the village of Wood; famous, sometimes annoying, and often feared. So when Shandol yelled "QUIET!", the Village Hall got quiet in less time than i...
Weekly Contest #354
Spencer Reay floated back into Lewis's view and waved, his left side brightened by the sun, his right in shadow blacker than black. "So long," he said, and Lewis didn't even have time to be confused. There was a pair of heavy shears in Reay's hand. Why the hell does he have those? Lewis thought. Then it was done, the tether cut. The capsule and Spencer Reay began, slowly but absolutely irreversibly, to drift apart. "Control, Reay has cut the tether, repeat he cut the tether." Lewis tried to keep his voice neutral, factual. He expected he fa...
Weekly Contest #353
"My name is Arie, and I'm a merrow. My friend James says in some other cultures, my distant merrow cousins are called mermaids." --From Arie: A Myth Come to Life by James Gray (unpublished) She had been waiting, her long, green hair drifting lazily in the cold water. She fanned her tail idly, stirring the seaweed. She should've heard the signal by now, the series of clicks and moans, stuttering, then drawn out, the "hello" in her own language. The sounds were made by a human. Or rather, by a machine the human used. She recently learned a...
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