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Sjan Evardsson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019

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318 Followers
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150 Stories

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Guy in the Chair

Captain Charming smiled at the cameras and waved to the assembled crowd. I turned off the sound before the standard speech and crowd adulation. It was enough to keep an eye on the imposing figure in matte black ballistic armor and helmet. The live news carriers were showing the same thing from another angle, with crawl text that changed depending on the carrier.“Cap Charming saves major galactic shipping hub.”“Charming thwarts attack by suspected Trinalaxian dissidents.”“Charming voted ‘Most Eligible Bachelor’ second year in a row. What make...

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Elusive

Andrin’s feelers twitched in excited anticipation. Now that he had captured an “Elusive” from the Juria spike of the galaxy, he had a chance to advance. Maybe he would be allowed to mature to a female and start his … her … own hive.He could already imagine getting the medal of science for dissecting, describing, and providing an in-depth study of the physiology of an Elusive, and the limited technology of its ship. If he could figure out where their home world was, it would be an easy colonization for the Grand Hive. Maybe that’s where Andri...

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370-92

It is better to make no plan than to rely on the faithless and fickle. — Ch’tinga Book of the Holy, Chapter 370, Verse 92 — commonly quoted by Ch’tinga people The poor, deluded monks and scribes that wrote The Book had no concept of reality. Need to include the faithless or fickle in your plan? Make ’em faithful and reliable; grab hold of their tender bits and squeeze until they get the message. As long as you have ’em in your grasp, they’ll follow you anywhere. — Master General Ikthan K’ch’tua, Andim War — commonly quoted by armchair gener...

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Queen Brenna the Smith

I sat in the cafe, looking out at the hustle and bustle of the city. The round-ears were always in such a hurry. Always one task or another to get to. How many of those tasks were evil schemes I will leave up to the reader to decide. This, however, is the story of just one of those nefarious plots; the worst one ever. This is the story of how a round-ear blacksmith became regent and ended the elven Kingdom of Elian.When Queen Sylthia died in the nine-hundredth year of King Rikkan’s reign without providing an heir, the king married the young ...

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Gormund and the Tiny Pies

The plate in front of Gormund gave him a feeling he hadn’t had before. The squash and rashers were gone, and he’d sopped up all the juices with bread. Now there was just the bare plate where there had been a beautiful, if plain, dinner. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt a lot like the plate.He washed his plate and fork in the wash basin in his cabin and put them back in their place in the padded cabinet. It was turning out to be a lot of work to own a ship, even when he wasn’t the sailing captain. Decisions other than how to deploy sails, when...

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Storm Season

The rain came down in sheets. Having given up on keeping the rain from her eyes, Taylor McAllister stood unmoved as the deluge soaked her faster and more thoroughly than the shower stall in the cut-rate hotel. The gloom of the red dwarf sun hidden behind the thick clouds did nothing to lift her mood.Summons were one thing, finding the executor of a will and notifying them … well, it never got easier. She never knew what to say beyond what her job required. Sometimes they had known it was coming and wept soft and silent. Other times it came a...

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Clear Conscience

Abalon looked at the visitor. In his centuries as Hell’s Arbiter, he’d never met his counterpart from Heaven. In fact, he’d never met any celestial being any higher ranked than a lowly worker. “Welcome, Arbiter Galadriel.”If this was a first for Galadriel, she didn’t show it. “Well met, Arbiter Abalon. I’m here to help.”“Please, have a seat,” the demon said, materializing a large, cushioned chair behind the angel. “It will make room for your wings as needed.” He spread his leathery wings and folded them again in demonstration.Galadriel didn’...

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Jonnylad Rescue

“You dope! You climbed up there — if your ass wasn’t so big you can’t see around it, you could back down the same way you went up.” Ada buttoned up her heavy canvas jacket and put the hood over her head. Some protection was better than nothing against the claws of a frightened jonnylad. With a heavy sigh, she set up the ladder to climb up to the critter’s level. Ever since the introduction of genetically modified pecan trees to the colony, Ada and the other animal control officers spent an inordinate amount of time and effort to get the rear...

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Share a Smile

Elspeth was not having a good day. In fact, she was on the verge of throwing her hands up in submission. The thought that echoed through her mind drowning out everything else was, “Fuck it. Fuck this, fuck that, fuck everything and fuck you, too.”She tried to convince herself that the “you” in her thoughts was not a particular individual, just people in general. That wasn’t true, though, and she knew it. If she had seen her weasel of a manager at that moment, her day would have ended in a cell instead of her bed.As she walked through the cit...

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Wanted Sleep

A chill breeze raised goosebumps on Li’s leg that dangled off the side of the bed, free from the constraints of the blanket. Her sleep-addled mind didn’t register why at first, but it jerked her from sleep to an alert wakefulness. She’d thought the “graveyard” shift, four days between returning traffic to the station, would be a nice chance to relax.She lay without moving, feeling the movement of cold air across the floor. Something about it was wrong. Not just a little odd, but full-on ”sound the alarms” wrong.The silence. The air handlers ...

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Hell is High Water

If there was one place in the universe that could be the literal hell, eternal damnation, perdition, Te had found it and had found himself assigned there. The air clung to him, the unfamiliar scents put his mind off kilter. The ever-shifting surface beyond the rocky promontory where he now stood left him dizzy.Te turned around to face the building that would be his home for as long as his assignment lasted. The steady structure and solid ground around and behind it helped ease his vertigo.He grabbed the handle on his luggage, activating its ...

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Dire

Syl covered his mouth to keep from making noise. He shivered as the click-clack of giant spider toes on laminate floors passed the cupboard he cowered in.He breathed as little as he could, through his nose. As sensitive as his own senses were, he could smell nothing besides the wood of the cupboard, the roasted parsnip soup warming on the electric stove, and the earthy smell of the dire spider. Despite the sweat of fear drenching him, he could smell nothing of himself.In that regard, at least, the ritual had worked. The part that didn’t work...

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Noble Lie

The “All Hands” alarm blared through the ship three times. Jess stood at the ready in her armor, side-handle baton in hand. The boarding team stood behind her, the breaching airlock in front of her.The slight shifts in artificial gravity, along with the hum of the engines increasing, told her that the ship was trying to run. She listened to the inter-ship comms for a few seconds. “Why do they always run?” she muttered, before switching back to local.“It looks like they’re trying to run. Prepare for a forced dock.” She looked at the other tro...

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Don't Believe the Network

Humans are a noisy bunch of apes, that goes without saying. The fact that they broadcast their noise to the universe at large, well, it was bound to have consequences. Whether those are net positive or negative remains to be seen.“You weren’t part of any contact team.” The disbelief was plain in Orl’s voice and feelers.“I told you,” Lir replied, “I was a maintenance tech two on the contact ship. I wouldn’t want to be on the contact team. All politics and shit … boring.”“But you said you saw humans?” Orl’s feelers flicked in confusion. “How d...

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Gone

“Impossible!” Fleet Commander Nerl gouged a deep groove in the conference table with his rending claw.“Commander, I would have to say that while it is highly improbable, the evidence is against impossibility.” Political Advisor Grun laid her far larger rending claw on the commander’s shoulder. “It is up to the fleet to figure out where they’ve gone, while you determine the fleet’s response.”“But the entire forest … gone … disappeared in the time we spent in transit from the realspace translation.” Nerl swung his tail across the bench and dro...

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