RolePlay onLine RPoL Logo

, welcome to Worldwalker

17:55, 28th March 2024 (GMT+0)

Practice Bits.

Posted by TadeuszFor group 0
Tadeusz
player, 7335 posts
As you dimension dance...
Crowbar or Towel?
Mon 17 Mar 2014
at 05:05
  • msg #1

Practice Bits

Thread for Multiverser-related fictional short stories...  :)
Tadeusz
player, 7337 posts
As you dimension dance...
Crowbar or Towel?
Mon 17 Mar 2014
at 06:59
  • msg #2

Re: Practice Bits

In reply to Tadeusz (msg # 1):

Practise Bits: Prosthetics

The sun rose, and Kenneth Haston poured himself out of his bucket.  He lay on the alley under the porch, and mentally activated the muscle cells in his skin.  Skin tightened, and then he did the same with the extra-length tendons and ligaments.  Joints popped back together with a staccato crackling.

He broke off the mucus tubes that ran from his nose so that he could breathe when he was hiding overnight in the bucket.  If one didn't hide, then getting enslaved by one of the factions that ran things was a lively possibility.  And Kenneth wanted to make his own way, not have to work ten years to get some small psi-mod or magical alteration which he could buy with a few months of labor, but in a faction he would be having all his excess sopped up by the faction's elites who were aiming to turn themselves into magic mechbods.  Sucking in fresh, untainted air was a blessing, but no one looked in an old plastic bucket under a porch.

Warming up, his metabolism rising from near hibernation, his implanted muscle cells having tightened his looseness up, he rose to his feet, and slipped out of the alley.  Opening the upper flaps on his ears with a simple hand gesture to unfold, he listened with a hearing greatly heightened by the extra ear size for any watchers breathing as he passed from alley to alley, and then out to the warehouse on the edge of town where he dumped the bucket, and most of his daytime clothing after he filled the bucket with water from an unused except by him faucet on a metal pipe.

His face looked pink, normal, and so did his hands, but other than that, he was green. Drinking the bucket of water, the full two gallons necessitated him popping out his lower stomach.  He passed through the warehouse, and looked about, and then out into the wilderness.

Up a hill, into the undergrowth, and he found his regular trail.  He also found signs that it had been used by men, so he sighed, and took the alternate path which took an extra two hours.

Finally, he arrived at the sun rock, which was his private hideaway in the leaf clotted woods.  Laying out on it, he peeled off most of the rest of his clothes, and stretched out.  The sun beat down on him, and water mixed with photosyntheses causing cells in his green skin to provide him energy.

Four hours later, and he swallowed a handful of multivitamins with a magical enhancer.  That was all he needed to stay alive.  Water, sun, and vitamins, but it was a low energy existence.  Walking back and forth each morning and night took up a third of his energy budget.  'Bucketizing' and 'Unbucketizing' took up another third.

Slowly, trying to save energy, Haston walked further into the forest, and came to a tree.  This he sliced the bark and underbark of to block the channels of nutrients going up the tree.

Checking another one, and another, he found that those trees were dying.  Checking the last one, he saw that the tree was well and truly dead.  But it needed time to rot, so that he could push it over with ease.  If he could kill enough trees fast enough, and knock them over, without regrowth getting in his way, he could have space for a garden.

Already, he had some space for a shaded vegetable patch, suited for cabbage.  Checking it, he found one head ripe enough to eat.

The thrill of having extra calories, actual food, ran like a lightning jolt through him, bringing a smile.  And it was food that none of the factions knew he had, that could not be taxed or stolen or declared unsafe which were the methods the factions used to keep the underpeople down.

But Kenneth intended to be a faction leader of his own now.  And none of them had better get in his way.
Eric
player, 2 posts
Tue 18 Mar 2014
at 17:12
  • msg #3

Re: Practice Bits: Drone

Parker grinned wildly as he sprinted fleetfooted up the clover draped rampart.  His previous hidey-hole among the blackberry bushes seventy yards back exploded showering dirt uphill, and over the parked cars at the back of the Dollar Bazaar, and turning some good berries into very tart jam.

Cresting the hill, he spun up a shield drone so that it darted in front of him.  Below him, the Swan River, a hundred yards wide and forty yards deep, and on the other side another rampart to hold flood waters in, and then two miles beyond that, the downtown towers of Cressida, home to three million people, besieged by eight hundred.  A sixty calibre rocket boosted bullet spranged off his shield drone, fired from one of the nearer towers by a Cressidan sniper.  Even at three times the speed of sound, a bullet going two miles took an appreciable moment to arrive.

His UpTOP, a radar, lidar, and passive video drone had fastcalced the mortar round to be over to his left.  And he saw it, faster than the UpTOP could funnel the video to his virtual overlay sunglasses.  Both hands snapped to the left, and one 'cocked and fired' as if this was but a game, and a signal flashed from the UpTOP to a dug in micro-rocket launcher drone off to his right.

Air flooded into the vaccum of the launcher tube, and shoved the micro-rocket out at fifty miles per hour.  A half-second later, the rocket engine had united liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen in an inferno that took a second and a half to reach its target.  The missile slammed into the mortar tube carried by two men, two soldiers who were fleeing, following procedure of 'fire, then move, fire, ..."

But with his eyes all over the battlefield, and his immortality from being a verser, this was all a very fun video game.  And it was this devil may care attitude that contributed to him being the best killer in the whole state of South Cali.  Much of combat is hesitating.  He did not.  He knew what was behind that door, or that door before he kicked it in.  His drone rats had already snuck in.  Or he had a flying drone that took pictures from the sky.  And around him, he had thirty drones, some walking, some crawling, and some flying.  Some were armed with machine gun, or missile.  Others, not so much such as his valetbot which carried a thousand rounds of ammo, plus food.
8
Eric
player, 14 posts
Wed 26 Mar 2014
at 05:29
  • msg #4

Re: Practice Bits:Kingdom of Houses

Not a Multiverser idea, although I've used it for such...

Isabella De Longfree rose from her divan, her silk robes trailing behind her, and walked through the shadowed marble halls of the imperial embassy, enjoying the cool stone underfoot.  Outside, a blue-white sun and a radio tower cut blue-edged shadow lines on the five story north face of the ancient fort turned embassy.  Putting a gentle smile on, she ducked her head into Lance's bedroom to see him rising to his feet, and donning his boots.  Naptime was done.


The twelve year old lad began rattling off, at triple-time, the Periodic Elements Table according to an antique poem, even as he slipped into bullhide boots which were neccessary because the dessert snakes, the coura and the sdoli, often came into the city for warmth and got lost in the streets until someone killed them.

A quick gasp of breath, and then he ran down the line of Kings for his land, the Kingdom of Houses, and just to show off added all the Dukes of the House Longfree.  A position that he might one day have, if mischance or bad favor attached to the two ahead of him from other lines of the family came to pass.  With that, he turned a startling white grin in his dark face toward his mother.

"Go. Have fun."  She said, her heart melting. The boy had been looking forward to visiting with his friends from the other Houses, which had merchant factors in town. He bounced in the air, and then she raised a hand.

"Your knives, son?"

He showed her his back knife, hung between his shoulder blades, a huge thing, suited for cutting down cacti, and killing wolves.  Then he pulled up the loose tunic arm of his inner robe, and displayed the fighting knife the locals of San Simarte used in dire need.  It was held in a snap-out holster.

"Father said I should take to wearing it all the time, given the current troubles."
He spoke solemnly.  Isabella nodded, her smile a bit grim.  It was her, and her husband's job to try to defuse the rising vortex of trouble spawned by the Aramark Group or as they now called themselves since Isabella's late childhood, the Unione.  The League of Ten Cities was even younger, as it had formed but four years ago from the previous Council of Trades.

Waving goodbye to him as he pelted down the corridor away from her, she turned to see Adrienne, her second child,  and eldest daughter of eight standing right beside her.  Isabella controlled her start, but from the small glimmer of smile on the ebony face, not very well.  When she wanted to be, little Adrienne could be a pool of quiet, drawing sound, it seemed into her, making her according to her older brother, a pestiferous nuisance if she was pulling a prank on him, or a golden opportunity if they were snagging goodies from the kitchen staff.

"Kimmie did not want to get up yet, Mother." Adrienne informed her seriously.
"Its art today." Isabella replied, leading the way to the art room, a former greenhouse on the flat roof with excellent views of the boxy buildings of the city, and the far mountains, and the narrow gulf of Isterz, named for Dominic De Valencia Jesus Isterz, former janitor at NASA in Huntsville, and later explorer of the Southerly Coast.
"Good." Adrienne relaxed her posture, and swung her arms, keeping up with her mother.  "I left a note for her."
Kimberly was five, and sometimes when she went down for the mid-day nap that was a custom of the city, she went down hard.  But it would not do to have her wandering the vast embassy, with its total of one hundred seventy four rooms, not counting walk-in closets or pantries or bathrooms or secret hidey-holes, crying for her mother and older sister.
Entering the art room, Isabella saw Duncan waiting for her, with a sheaf of papers, and a determined look on his face.  She shook her head.  He pleaded with a look.
"Is it Red? Yellow, even?" She asked sternly.  Duncan was an immigrant from the Hos Dbios tribe, good friends to the Kingdom of Houses, but possessed of a barbarian lack of uniformity and system with an intensity that could fry a duck at ten paces.  Like the Kingdom, the Dbios were godly folk, but the Kingdom's preachers did not begin every sermon with a prayer for God to send Michael Archangel down to smite the Unione hip and thigh.  Of course, the Unione, or in its then incarnation as the Association of Peoples had given the Dbios plenty of reason for hate.
Duncan winced, and then his innate honesty took over, and sighing greatly, and repeatedly to loudly show his displeasure, he stomped from the room.
Isabella turned to see a relieved Adrienne holding back the giggles.  She smiled gently, but corrected her daughter.
"Respect dear.  If you've ever seen a pistol and spear assault by a platoon of Dbois, the speed and fury of the attack, you will not laugh at them again."
"Yes mother." The daughter bowed her head, and turned to the art supplied to quickly change the subject.
The two of them began a study of fruit, and a half hour later, Kimberly joined them.  And when they were done, they ate the fruit.
Oak
GM, 2803 posts
Wed 26 Mar 2014
at 05:39
  • msg #5

Re: Practice Bits:Kingdom of Houses

This seems... familiar...  :)
Eric
player, 21 posts
Wed 26 Mar 2014
at 15:37
  • msg #6

Re: Practice Bits:Return to Gylandia

Oak, yes indeed.
==============

It was my third universe, four if you count the Earth of the twenty-first century I was born in.  As a worldwalker, death is a doorway to other material worlds in the Multiverse, instead of a passage to Final Judgement.  So after trying to stop a triceratops from marauding through the Human village of thatched huts behind me, and instead getting impaled on two of its horns, I woke in a new here and now.

The taste of defeat was bitter on my tongue, and I thought back to old friends such as my Hunter Bond, Talqiza, and the delightful eyes of the maidens, Shora, Tasmi, and Dakri, and the little fishing buddies, Malitak and Jorado.  I had ran down mammoths with Talqiza, and enjoyed many a fine dinner with the girls, and spent lazy days by the river catching trout and bass with the little fellows whenever they could get away from feeding the goats, or watching the sheep.  According to Michael Di Vars, who was three thousand years old to his account, I would never see them again, nor anyone else in the unnamed village by the river.

Pushing the heel of my hand into my eyes to banish tears, I began to look about to see what manner of world I had come too.  The roadway was narrow, twelve feet, but when I reached down to touch it, lights sprang into action on each edge for a dozen feet in either direction.  They were dim, almost LEDs, and set into little hollows in what seemed to be a solid sheet of stone.

Walking forward between blocky shapes that might be houses, or shops, or something unimaginable, the lights spread before me, and fell away behind me until I came to sunken drain in the midst of the street.  The inverted cone, a gentle thing, of the street made it clear why there were no gutters.

Looking at the grate, I deduced they had no tree leaves of the size of oak or maple.  Such would quickly block the waterflow.  Looking on, I saw another grate, or the shape thereof another fifty feet further on.  And it was only because the road sloped down that I could see the grate despite the inversion.

Looking up, I saw a clear sky, and no moon.  And while I saw the Big Dipper, it was upside down, and distorted strangely.  Most likely that meant I was not on Earth.  Although it could be that this was Earth, and having no moon was normal for this Earth.

I had been to a world where vampires degraded into zombies and Al Gore was the Hierarch of the Temple of Gaia and seen the man call upon the power of his goddess to burn a vampire to dust, and one where Abraham Lincoln was the Viceroy of the American Colonies for Good Queen Vickie, and one where the humans lived in an Iron Age dance with dinosaurs (although they called them dragons).  From listening to Di Vars' tales, far stranger things were possible.

Too radical a skepticism would get me no where, but I needed to keep an eye out for anomalies, and seek their explanation I decided as I came to a T-intersection.  And then to my left I saw a glow.  Turning full on to face it, I stared in  utter dismay.

A flaming, spinning ball of some substance arced through the sky toward me.  I ran, then looked.  It was still coming down in a long, low curve above the rooftops.  Running again, panic gripping me, and then I found myself grabbed, manhandled, and spun about.

"Control yourself, man."  A tough faced man, who spoke English, with a weird accent of sibilant s' and fluttery t's and other oddities held me by the shirt.  And so I was ashamed.

"Look up." He paused. "Judge the catapuli."

And now I saw that it would land, somewhere to my the left, on the path I had come, and calm came to my soul.  And it hit, and bits of sticky flaming goo spattered everywhere near.  One of the 'boxes' was sheated in flame.

"Bastardii Podules." The man snapped, and then turned to me, "Get the sandbuckets."  And he sprinted forward.

============
In the Monomyth, he's at the Call to Adventure, and he's met his mentor.  He will have to dare the threat of injury, for death does not scare him, but pain and longterm injury do.

And he will go out of the world, across the wall to the Land of the Podules and the other aliens who live under their rule to Test, Find Allies, etc.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:01, Wed 26 Mar 2014.
Oak
GM, 2806 posts
Wed 26 Mar 2014
at 16:08
  • msg #7

Re: Practice Bits:Return to Gylandia

Eric:
It was my third universe, four if you count the Earth of the twenty-first century I was born in.  As a worldwalker, death is a doorway to other material worlds in the Multiverse, instead of a passage to Final Judgement.  So after trying to stop a triceratops from marauding through the Human village of thatched huts behind me, and instead getting impaled on two of its horns, I woke in a new here and now.

Eric:
I had been to a world where vampires degraded into zombies and Al Gore was the Hierarch of the Temple of Gaia and seen the man call upon the power of his goddess to burn a vampire to dust, and one where Abraham Lincoln was the Viceroy of the American Colonies for Good Queen Vickie, and one where the humans lived in an Iron Age dance with dinosaurs (although they called them dragons).  From listening to Di Vars' tales, far stranger things were possible.

How many universes?  :)
Eric
player, 22 posts
Wed 26 Mar 2014
at 16:33
  • msg #8

Re: Practice Bits:Return to Gylandia

In the alternate universe he is from, third means the same as fourth.  To do '3' you use a whole 'nother word.  Natch.
Eric
player, 23 posts
Thu 27 Mar 2014
at 15:51
  • msg #9

Re: Practice Bits: Population

Jeremy Archaki dredged up muscle strength to battle languour and the weakening of eyeball lids as the t.a. spoke ernestly about something dreadfully important to the near comatose.  It was August of 05, and the distant shrieks of bikini-clad coeds in the college's natatorium were far more compelling than the whining seriousness of the thin, little man in front of the podium.

"...as I've tried to make clear to you.  It is your generation that has the responsibility to rise up, and put down the Oppressive Heteronormativity of unlimited population expansion. It is killing Mother..."

And here Jeremy lost the battle, having heard this sermon many times before.  His head drooped from his side twisted forearms to his right bicep, and he was asleep at his desk in the afternoon class of Junior level, Population Dynamics.

Caitlyn Carter, blonde, beautiful, bikini-clad in a red print was advancing toward him, climbing out of the pool, shouting 'Mr. Archaki, for the last time, wake up!  This is important." Then inexplicably, she grabbed a mug of water off a nearby ironwork grate,  but painted white, table. This she dashed on him with an expression full of fury on her face.

Jeremy woke, surrounded by white flame, with the horrified face of the t.a. in front of him.  Starting to say something, but then he realized he couldn't.  He was falling to bits.

Cold. Wet. Jeremy jerked up.  He realized he was on his side, and looked down by the light of the bright neon.  Black, slick granite under his left side spooked him so that he leapt to his feet, and then slipped back to bang on his bottom, and rap his left wrist on the warm stone.  A drop of water spattered his head, and he looked up to see a steady drip from the roof of the near cave indentation he found himself in.  Around him, a steady murmur of breathing, and a few complaints telling him to lie down and quiet the noise came to his ear.

More cautiously, he arose.  Looking about, gingerly, ready for another slip and fall, he counted twenty-two men asleep.  All seemed rough dressed, and many were bearded.  Almost a third were redheads.

Beyond the black granite indentation, and hall of the homeless, he saw a ditch, full of weeds, marked by several paths.  Then a chainlink fence, badly cared for, and rising above that three and four story buildings, blocky, and lit by large hanging neon signs in kanji script.

Where am I?  Hong Kong?  Tokyo's famed Water District?  NYC's Chinatown?  He had been in north Georgia, in Plateau Point, at the High View College of Arts and Sciences.  But the biggest neon sign in Point was a third the size of those he spotted here, and 'Barb's BarNGrill' was in English.  The other Point neon was limited to the ubiquitous 'Open' signs.

From the left, out of his view, a robot, shaped like an extended egg, floated into view. It stopped, stared at him, and then came to him at a right angle.  It did not turn its face, having one on all sides.  Floating over the homeless did not disturb the sleepers with its almost silent hum.

"This is rest time, human."
"Uh, where am I? I'm not supposed to be here."
"You are on the Thirteenth Avenue of Outer Hong Kong, which has been reclaimed from the sea."
"That's....that's impossible.  I was in...Hey, you're a robot. A flying robot."
"Yes?" The robot queried
Eric
player, 30 posts
Fri 28 Mar 2014
at 05:49
  • msg #10

Re: Practice Bits: Languour

"Lord Jeff!" A teenager, no, a third year journeyman for this world did not have 'teenagers' ran up the street shouting.  "Lord Jeff!".  Jeff Angles McCormick laughed to himself, at hearing his title.  Even after eight years living among the Cadersee Duchies, the incongruity of it tickled his funnybone.

He rose from the sunny table outside Tubano's Eatery, slipping past the husbands with their mistresses, and the wives with their gigolos, all very civilly ignoring the Indiscretionia which was the primary form of entertainment in the micro-states called Duchies out of a long-gone power, from a day and age when these small cities had ruled the vast continent they edged upon.

He met the young man in the street, for such wild energy would have earned him frowns from the adulterers as uncouth.  The bright-eyed young fellow, not too handsome so he had little chance to dance with a lady two decades his elder, nor chance to date a maiden his own age as all of them were hobnobbing with the wealthier men of town, established sorts, came bolting up to him.

"Mage. The Croscundren Barrier is breached."

Jeff flung his napkin down, and was gone before the echoes of the word hit the walls of the tiie roofed houses all about.  A Word, and he gained the speed of Brother Eagle.  Fingering the fine gold thread in his heavy overtunic, he sighed, and rubbed it thrice, sacrificing the gold and the intricate picture of Asioxynly of the Seven Wiknds so that he would never gasp for oxygen for the next hour.

And with those preparations made, he ran fleeter than a sprinting horse down the streets, and down to the harbor.  A cart of smokeweed and empty barrels pulled into his path, and chancing greatly, he picked up the pace, and then leapt.

Windmilling his arms to try to stay upright, he told himself if the ski jumpers in the Olympics could do it, so could he as he soared over the cart, and headed downhill from it.  But the ground rushing up at him was not snow, nor was it perfectly smooth.
Instead, it was pitted, from poor repair, with the road crews enjoying their two hour long lunch by the road, gawking at him as he flew by.

Realizing that he would not make two steps, that he would surely snap his ankle, Jeff concentrated instead on just finding one safe landing point.  And when he hit it, he leapt again.  And coming down fifty feet further on, he leapt again.  And coming to the T-intersection, and the two story Palace of the Ladies, decorated with statues of beauty in undress in profusion, he leapt even so the more so that he came down on the red roof tiles, scattering them, tumbling up to the roof top, and flying over.

Cartwheeling in the air, he found a foot under him, and kicked off again.  And with five more steps, he made it down to the harbor.  From thence he ran out on to the water, like a skipping stone, but each step slowed him further until with a horrible jolt he stopped two hundred yards out, and ten feet deep, with his mouth full of brine.

Floating because of the Ring, the Gift of Poseidon's Sons upon his left pinkie finger, which overwhelmed his undercoat of silk, and his linen undercoat, and his green serge, and his embroidered overcoat and the knee-high leather boots that a well-dressed minor noble would wear, he came to the surface.  A quick whistle, and the aid of one of the harbour dolphins was bought with a promise of free tuna.  It took him to shore, and he bought with a silver denarii a half-dozen tuna which he tossed to his new friend, and the others in his pod.

Squelching wet, and having no prepared spell to mitigate that, the Lord Jeff walked up the hill in reverse a hundred yards to see the Arch of the Forgotten.  It commemorated the ancient magi who had barred the Underdisarii from leaving their waters for the land.  Unbeknown to most, it also kept the spell active.

And it had a crack in it.  The Arch-Mage Croscundren would not be pleased, if he were alive, which Jeff was pretty sure he was not, since it was three hundred years later.  But that left Jeff an interesting problem.  For he had no idea how to 'uncrack' the Arch.

The Bay Guard Captain came up to him, who must have been the one to send the young man, but knowing him well, the Captain kept quiet as Jeff slipped on a pair of Rayban eyeglasses, which he had enchanted with magesight.

The problem was easy to discover.  The Arch drew its power from the Town, with immatgerial tubes running under ground, drawing up power like the roots of a tree draw up water.

Jeff whistled.

The tubes could each carry an enormous amount of power.  Why one of them for a mere hour could feed him all the mana he used in a year.

Looking closer, he realized that the tubes were almost empty.  A mere trickle of energy was going down the tubes to the Arch.  And the Arch was a living thing, a thing made of stone and bone and jewel and coral, but living all the same.  And it was dying of starvation.

Jeff realized he had a problem.  Out there, somewhere over the continental shelf, a vicious breed was looking to expand.  And even now, its wise men might be realizing that the fence that had bound them in was no more.

But the Arch, Jeff shook his head.  He had heard tell that the ancient mages were mighty beyond the understanding of the moderns, but he had put that down to typical gloom-mongering.  Now, seeing Croscundren's Great Work, he realized that the stories had been understated.

There simply was not enough magical energy in the whole town to power this thing.  What to do, what to do? Jeff began chewing his fingernails as he stared at the magic flows under the sand.
Eric
player, 33 posts
Fri 28 Mar 2014
at 17:33
  • msg #11

Re: Practice Bits: Bust

At ninety-five years of age, I was the youngest person on Earth.  To be more precise, this Earth, this timeline for as an immortal, I had already visited eight other dimensions, five of them Earths of some kind or the other, if you were generous with your definition.  Earth turned into an intergalactic spaceship fleeing the impact zone of an antimatter galaxy plunging through the Milky Way was still Earth, right?

"Get cracking, you lazy snot." The sharp, bitter voice of Max, my boss, cut me from my reverie.  I leaned forward into the explosed guts of the Osteo-Cardiac Monitor/Stabilizer, Mod Four-B. and began pulling the axiom core block from the processor overblock.  It was delicate work, and in my hurry I banged the casing on the curvilinear cerametal case of the bot.

"You worthless, no good..." Max raised his hand to strike me, full of one hundred twenty plus years of dissapointed fury.  But his bot behind him, a Cardio-Pulmonary-GI, or CPG bot tapped his arm, reminding him.  And so with ill grace, he subsided, not wanting to blow his heart again on a rant at me.

"Crazy refusenik." He muttered, and then attempted to stalk off, except a knee popped so he had the shop-house use the ceiling crane to tote him to the next room where he would dream of better days when he had believed that super-intelligence and lifespans longer than the galaxy were possible.  Instead, computers hit the top of the S-curve, and Moore's Law lay shattered on the silicon sands.

My valet bot took the axiom core, and gave me another.  It carried things for me, and occassionally when I acted too healthy, I leaned on it.  Because while I am ninety-five, I have the body of a twenty-one year old.  I also own rubber face masks, lots of makeup, an audio mp3 player full of tracks of harsh breathing, coughing, and gasping for breath set on shuffle.  And that is why I'm a refusenik, refusing a medical robot, because if I had one, it would surely note that I was not sick.

Gently slipping the reconditioned core back in,  and then I test ran the bot.  It did not turn on.  Aaargh.  I leaned my head forward, and rested it on the robot's outer case.  The logic was sound, the power taps were good, what was I missing?
Eric
player, 41 posts
Tue 1 Apr 2014
at 06:14
  • msg #12

Re: Practice Bits: Hunter

Carter Hallmanson walked into the weapon shop, already carrying. The still, but cold air of the outer vestibule was welcome, and the heavy warmth after passing the inner wire grated glass portal was soothing.  He unwrapped his blue and green, and every other color scarf from around his neck, and then slipped off the outer padded gloves to reveal black, leather fingerless gloves suited for shooting.

The tall, stout man, shaped like a beer bottle six and a half feet tall, and clad in a brightly checked button up shirt smiled at Carter, but the eyes revealed the true story.  Interest.  Those gloves showed a serous shooter, or a wannabee, and Carter, with his weary eyes, and his perfect posture did not look pretentious in the least.  He looked like a man, a surprisingly young one for the look, of someone who had been there and done it enough that he had nothing to prove.

Carter nodded politely, and stepped across the pocked linoleum floor to the glass counter case running the length of the room sideways, all seventy feet.  He unbuttoned his coat, letting his skin breath a bit, letting out the winter chill.
"What can I do you for?" The clerk asked.

"I'm a man that was robbed." Here Carter handed the clerk, and gun expert a short newspaper article showing him complaining about being robbed from the driveway in front of his house.
"The thief took the gun safe, thinking it was filled with gold, and instead it was guns.  So to avoid being caught with a gun which he'd stolen, and get at least two years tacked on, the scum dumped the lot of my guns into the Sanoyaquoyack."
The clerk shook his head in sympathy, and at the wickedness of the world while inside his heart began to beat a bit faster.
"I'm a bear hunter, and I need my tools, so if you have some..."
The clerk restrained himself from singing the Hallelujah Chorus, as it seemed like this fellow wanted to drop a few thousand, and of that ten percent was the clerk's.  Enough for him to take the wifey out on a nice weekend down by the hot springs while the kids stayed with one or the other of the grandparents.
"Well, sir, I think we might have a few.  Here, look at this Parkington .474 Adjustable...."
Eric
player, 42 posts
Tue 1 Apr 2014
at 12:29
  • msg #13

Re: Practice Bits: Prosthetics II

Kenneth sat in the shaded garden spot, holding a beautiful cabbage in his hands.  And despite his best efforts, he wasted energy and minerals in crying.

"Thank you, God." He whispered.  Slowly, so as to not overwhelm his system, he took a cleaving bite from the cabbage head with  his front teeth.  Then spitting that delicious, and juicy, and oh-so-sweet chunk out, he reached into his mouth, and released the chin catch.  With a wince of pain, the front molar set popped up so that his whole mouth was a grinding mill.

Drinking to make sure his throat was open, he followed it by swallowing some cabbage the consistency of coal slaw.  From there it travelled to his upper stomach where it would break down  further, before going to his regular stomach.  Once he got some more money, Kenneth wanted to buy another stomach.  If he could get four, then he would be able to survive on leaves and grass, and not just photosynthesis from the injected chlorophyll in his skin.

As night began to fall, he realized his planting of cabbages was an error.  There was no way he could eat the whole thing in one day.  Conscientously, he had ate every chance eh courld and only got half of the head finished.  But if he left it out here, chances were some raccoon, or other woodland beasts would make off with it.

So assisted by the almost giddy drunk of actual food rather than sunlight, water, and multivitamins (He would have passed out from merely smelling chocolate cake normally such was his deprivation.) he chose to sleep with  half the head curled up lovingly in his arms, around which he curled like a babe.

He prayed, but he did not listen that well, and if he had, what followed might not have happened.
Eric
player, 60 posts
Thu 10 Apr 2014
at 16:00
  • msg #14

Re: Practice Bits:

"Its simple." The man said, slowly, savoring the sound of his own voice.  He leaned back in the boxy frame chair, ostentatiously relaxing, while across the desk, Angelique Domini trembled.

"He is a known rapist!" She protested with her eyes wounded.
"Alleged. And the female in question, if she is really such..." The man smirked. "Is trailor trash. Low class, not like you."
"She got herself out of that. Got two scholarships...."
"Now that's the sort of thinking that is really unhelpful.  You know what the consensus on your private netboard of pundits is....why are you being so....unhelpful?"
She paled, and then stuck her trembling chin out.
"I, I call myself a protector of women.  How can I be one without, y'know..."
The man shook his head.
"No, I don't know. We do know that the candidate has promised to improve women's health care.  You care about that, don't you?" The wheedling insinuation that she did not was in his voice, and a flush came to the pallor of her cheeks.
"Of course, I do, but..."
The man sighed, and leaned forward, putting his elbows on his knees with an air of distaste.
"Angelique, you know that Hopsman Grant? You won.  Thing is, you didn't.  There were five better qualified entries than yours.  One was simply stellar.  We tried to recruit him, but he told us to buzz off."
"You're....lying." The words poured out at first in violent force, but then died to a trickle.  And the man sadly shook his head.
"The Konigsberg Award, Mt. Delagi, and even Stovepipers, we helped you win, all the way back to your seventh grade when you came on our radar."
"Come on, this is a joke.  You would need a lot of people to read all that, wouldn't you?"  There was pleading in her voice.
"No.  Just a few computers.  We scatter through broadcasts certain words likely to appeal to certain mindsets. Power words. Jokes. Clever putdowns.  Its surprising how few of these land in our opposition., and how many landed in yours.  Then we simply have the computer scan the Education Database for number of usages, and we found you.  Thus you won.

After that, a picture of you was subjected to 'aging' which revealed you would be rather easy on the eyes now, despite a bit of dorkness in highschool.  Finding a young, attractive female who is passionate about politics, and not of the opposition is difficult.  Most girls prefer typical girl games, or are not that good looking.  So we glommed onto you, and made sure you got this position."
Her face stiff, Angelique replied.  "Even if all that is true, it changes nothing."
The man shook his head, grimly.
"Remember Carl Sparksly? Editor at Nova Journale? He started talking about how massive immigration from non-democratic societies was destablilizing our society.  Next thing you know, he's tripped, and fallen down the staris into his basement."
Angelique paled.
And then another man stepped into the office, and smacked the first over the head, rendering him unconscious.
"Angelique, you can join the Resistance, or now that your eyes are opened you can be a slave, but the time of lies is over. Who will you be?"
Eric
player, 66 posts
Mon 14 Apr 2014
at 19:28
  • msg #15

Re: Practice Bits: Forward

....the mod is almost ready, but I keep getting a launch bug...
...No, I said, I don't like cayenne on my chocolate...
....Ah, well, the price of a cotton bale dipped down hard...
...there are no guys here...

Thomas White had long ears, and a post by the doorway lintel post into the Youth Centre, just short of the buffet table.  He knew the Minecraft scripters, Dex and Lewis with their geek fascinations and pretense of not caring; Rachel with her endless complaints to her long-suffering boyfriend Marcus; the chaperone, Mr. Carmine, a farmer of some wealth who always poor-mouthed himself, and acted surprised when he came through with record profits instead of a bankruptcy, who was talking to the youth pastor, Pastor Mitch, who viewed Thomas with a barely hidden frustration.

 He also knew the other three dozen in the tiled, low-ceilinged basement that always made him feel claustrophobic.  He was here because Pastor Mitch's wife, Lauralyn of the blonde curls and warm smile had practically begged him to come, not that once here she had said more than 'hi' to him. by his quick count, there were twenty guys and fourteen females of dateable age or unmarried status within the four concrete block, painted turquoise blue walls, and he wanted to turn around to JoAnne and Essie, and say 'what am I? Chopped meat?'

Even with JoAnne's unfortunate nose, and Essie's tendency to giggle, and to go on fad diets, he would have dated either one of them.  But he strongly suspected they would give him the 'speakie no Inglische' stare if he brought it up to them that he was indeed a man, or at least a boy.

Holding the wax paper cup of badly mixed fruit punch, which had too much Sprite and too little O.J. clenched as he held himself steady against the post, not wanting to move around and force people to glance in his eyes, and then turn away, he cursed himself.

I could have been at home, kicked back, playing a game of Mindknife II, or growsing online about Presidente Hillarious' latest screw-up, but I believed a pretty smile that promised things would be different.

Crushing the top of the punch, releasing frustration, and not liquid, he spun to the right and the the exit, and right into a girl holding out a cell phone.  Her eyes were dark as a winter wood, and her hair straight and glossy and black, and her eyes looked interested...And then the phone in her hand met fruit punch.  An 'oh' face of dismay, and then before he could stammer out a word of apology even as he noted her looks, he saw an arc of electricity run across the surface of the phone.

He began to point to it, and another larger arc leapt from the back to the front.
"Uh." The girl looked up at him, fright on her face, and he reacted, striking the phone from her hand with a wild swipe.  It went to the left, and a long, wiggling arc danced from the flying phone to his index finger.  And inside the arc, yellow globules floated, and flowed, and ...

Kzzzzaappp!!

A trilling chirp, and a splash of water caught Thomas' attention.  The manicured park under a black cloud filled sky frightened him, on both the temporary and the deep held levels, but a sudden downrinse of rain, pelting, heavy drops, rising to a cloudburst drove from his mind the deeper worries of 'what is going on'.  Instead, he rose, tripped, grabbed the book he fell over, and bolted toward the shape of the building seen through the trees.

In seconds, he was under a porch on the side of an enormous mansion.  Here, covered, but with blustery winds coming in after him, and occasional raindrops hijacked, he had time to consider.
"Where am I? How'd I get here?"
"Agiurri Manor, sir.  Unknown. The Housesys first detected your presence, five minutes, forty seconds ago on the West Lawn."
Thomas jumped.
"Who? What?" He looked about.
"Agiurri Housesys, sir. Do you need assistance?"
"Um, I'm not sure." Thomas crinkled his forehead.
"A scan reveals you to be in general good health, although you have incipient sinsusitis, and easily corrected vision problems."
Thomas nodded, and pushed his glasses back up on his face.
"You do show signs of emotional distress.  Elevated heart rate, and breathing, along with high levels of adrenaline."
Thomas paused, his mind puzzled.
"How can you tell that I have adrenaline high?  I can see sonic sensors for the others, but..."
"We use infrared lasers to calculate your breathing and your heartrate.  Chemical sniffers sense adrenaline precursor chemicals on your breath."
Thomas blinked. Then he pinched himself.
"Mmmm. Say, uh, Housesys, do I show signs of being electrified?"
A pause.
"No. Again, do you need medical assistance? Do you wish to declare an emergency?"
Eric
player, 67 posts
Wed 16 Apr 2014
at 06:10
  • msg #16

Re: Practice Bits: Bunny

Smoothing back an irritating, greasy hair lock over his high forehead, and resisting the urge to yank on it, Henri Du Champs forced his mind to focus on the math forcefully penciled in on the tax form in front of him.  The yellowed incandescent, of which he had over a hundred spare since he hated flurorescents, especially because they were mandated, shown on the pale oval of his dining room table.  Despite his most optimistic assertions, he was going to end up owing the government the money he had put aside for a fishing trip next week.

A thunderous bark like a hammer fall mixed with the steady yipping of a smaller dog out in front of his house.  Curiosity and fear drew Henri to the front door, and then out on his front stoop.

The two dogs, one a Rottweiler mix, and the other a rat terrier, owned by the Chesters, and by the Meicalheyneys both on down Bourbon Street, stood outside his knee-high iron grate fence. Reaching back inside to hit the outside lights, he got a nasty shock from the lightswitch.  The old house needed new wiring, but electricians are expensive, and although Henri was handy, he was not sure he wanted to play about with something so inherently hazardous.

Grimacing, he drew breath to yell at the 'twin mutts', when out of the corner of his eye, in the harsh flare of his outdoors halogen, a plump, white rabbit chewing at his leaf lettuce. The rodent had already chewed through a thin line, a foot-long of stalks and leaves...
Eric
player, 71 posts
Wed 16 Apr 2014
at 15:26
  • msg #17

Re: Practice Bits: Bunny 2

Henri was aghast at the audacity of the rodent treating his private, front-yard garden as a buffet table when he noted the red collar about its neck.  And then the McMacs rat terrier burst under the fence, in a weak spot, the homeowner had continually reinforced.  Like a streak of a spear tossed at leaf level it plowed through incipient green beans, turnips, and a squash plant straight toward the pet bunny.

Henri found himself moving, even as the bunny did not.  But he was too slow on his feet, and the rat terrier closed.  Something happened, and the small dog flipped through the air, twitching to land insensate among the morning glory stands near the back fence of the small garden.

Henri stared. Stopped.
The bunny went back to eat another single leaf of lettuce sprouted directly from the soil, unlike the more typical balled Iceberg.
The Chester's Rott, which they kept because Mrs. Chester was nervous, but did not properly discipline because Mrs. Chester was nervous cleared the low front fence in one bound, and came galloping over rows of vegetables toward the bunny.
Henri stopped, not willing to go unarmed into a fight with an eighty pound dog, instead he looked about for his hoe he had been using a few hours before after he got off from work overseeing eight robots on the assembly line.  And then the bunny turned, bared its teeth, and Henri saw glittering lines extending from the paws of the the odd rabbit.

The Rott closed, the bunny leapt, and the head of the dog went down to bite.  And sparkling, very thin lines went into the dog, and it fell, stumbling away, like a drunk, its whole body trembling.  But the bunny fell, knocked back by the brute kinetic force, and it did not rise.

Dashing around the odd acting dog, Henri examined the bunny quickly.  With sucked in breath, he noted the finely groomed fur spoiled by a gaping slash in its left flank, which he noticed after it was turned on its belly.  A searching of the wound got a prick in his finger, which he figured must be the broken end of a bone.  Given that, its near comatose state, and the open wound, Henri felt overcome by pity for the strangely valiant warrior.  It must soon die, but Henri could take it inside, and let it pass in a peaceful setting, not out here, where both dogs seemed to be recovering.

Thus he tenderly scooped it up, noting that shimmering lines were no where in existence so perhaps he had seen something not there by the harsh light of the front porch lamp with the encroaching darkness so near making things strange.  Regardless, he marched back up, tenderly holding the bunny, and using one hand to open the front door, and then to brace himself against the white painted doorway lintel as his back held the door open until his fingers passed by the lampswitch.

A sudden surge, an internal fire, and he seemed surrounded by white fury, and then he knew no more.

Upon waking, he sat up, dazed and bewildered, hearing murmurs that he classified as embarrassingly intimate.  The bunny hopped up to him, grass from the unkempt lawn in its mouth, which it then began to chew as it surveyed him.

"I can't keep calling  you 'it'." He whispered.  "I'll call you 'Fluffy'."  The rabbit twitched its ears, and hopped up to nuzzle Henri's knee.  Thus comforted, and adopted, Henri looked further about finding only oddness.  To his right loomed a chain link fence of some height, and to his left was a pile of bushes from which noises had come, but no longer.

Ahead of him, a lit skyscraper of perhaps thirty stories in height assailed him with its mere existence, for Henri had lived in St. Helens, pop. 23,478, and the tallest building had been the Chester (rich relations) Office Building at five stories in height.  The nearest city of consequence was over two hundred miles away, so someone had dragged him and Fluffy far, and then dumped him and it.  This presented a serious conundrum for Henri was well aware that he was strictly normal, even white bread, and there was no cause other than malicious whimsy for his treatment that he could think of, unless perhaps he  had been mistaken for someone important, and then dumped when his true identity was realized.  This theory made such sense that he smiled in relief.

"Hey buddy." The rough male voice from the left disturbed him from his semi-happy cogitations.  Henri turned, and beheld a well-muscled man, clad in jeans and a button up striped white shirt, just recently donned if Henri was any judge.

"Look, you can do what you want with the rabbit, but not here, you know."  He paused.  "We're busy."

Henri was naturally appalled.  He was not about to eat such a pet rabbit, even if his stomach did cry out in mild anxiety for food at that moment.

"Look, I'm not going..."
"Pal, I don't care how you get your jollies on..."  And behind the first man, another came out, clad in underwear and a sash of red velvet.  Henri blinked, and started to his feet.  While he did not know any homosexuals, he was properly acculturated.  He did not know any because most lived in San Fran or other enclaves, which meant that the 1.5% of St. Helens that might be expected to live there (or about 351) had already moved  by seventy-five percent to San Fran or other such places, or died, leaving a mere sixteen active homosexuals in the whole town, none of whom Henri knew.

But he knew that they were easily offended by insults or slights of any kind, and that they were in the right to be so angered.  But still, when the third, a much younger man, dressed in a purple prom dress and high heels stumbled out of the bush, he found himself at a loss for words.  And then the real meaning of what the large, gay man had said to him came through to him, and he started to babble that he of course was not interested in sex with a rabbit, but then he realized that saying such was probably an insult, and petrified with fear, he froze, clutching the bunny hard between his fingers as he stood there.

With eyes bulging, shoulders twisted into an unnatural position, his fear radiant across his face, he presented an irresistible target.  And so the large, gay man leaned forward to give him a kiss, and then a hard shove, but before he could make contact there was a small, very small sigh noise, and a snap, and then the man twitched and fell over like in a seizure.

Taking his good luck, Henri fled bolting through the trees and bushes, past other engaged couples, and menage a trois, and alongside the fence which turned out to be the outer edge of a baseball field, and out into a paved street where a man in a car swerved toward him, almost hitting Henri but his adrenaline fueled panic served him well, and so Henri dove madly out of the way, sprawling out onto the concrete roadway while listening to departing curses doppler away from the retreating car.  The street was otherwise empty, and the rabbit, Fluffy, had already escaped from the too tight confinement of his hands.

Henri followed it across the street, and up a dark alley.
Eric
player, 72 posts
Sat 19 Apr 2014
at 07:07
  • msg #18

Re: Practice Bits: Archeology

Let me handle it, she said. Justin Cameron tensed his lips, even as the four by four swayed on the single lane hill road.  Ascending from the Plain of Stomiri, into the sandstone hills to the south of it, they took a crest road, which kept puddles to a minimum, but maximized the swaying and jerking to follow the single cut through the night.

"Can we go faster, Benedict?" Justin murmured, barely heard over the groaning engine.  A fat raindrop splashing on the windshield accentuated his request.  Benedict, which was not his birth name, but the name he had been given when he took monkish vows, pressed on the gas a titch, gaining a couple miles per hour at the price of even more hair-raising whips of the steering wheel.

Doctor Cameron, Justin, you hate taling to the PR flacks, and for good reason.  I'll take care of it. Two days ago, Regina had said those words to him at the dig site, another twenty miles up the crest road.  So when he arrived to do the final meet and smile before the cameras, he was surprised to see his rather minor dig site being trumpeted all over the major newspapers, and beaming sponsors wanting to be photographed with him, rather than him having to chase them down.

If he had not heard that the storm had ripped the tarps from the dig site at Tell Holna, a small hill used by the Medicarthan People, a small pre-Israelite kingdom, he would still be there, trying to find out how negative five turned into plus five.  How poison got trumpeted as a great cure was a surprise to him.

Benedict slowed, and took from his over robe a cell phone.  Listening for a few moments, he nodded, and spoke in German his thanks.  Then putting his phone away, he sped back up.

"What was that?"
"When we go here to Jerusalem, and see your work, my work as your guide and translator, when we see its clear meaning reversed, I have questions.  Already I had some in the back of my mind, but this brought it forth."
Justin understood the bit about reversal.  The dig at Tell Holna revealed layer after layer of civilization going back four hundred years.

The earliest layer seemed to spring from nowhere, undisturbed dirt, and it was crude, but energetic.  Quickly, the next layer succeeded on this, and it kept the energy, and some of the crudeness, but added an imaginative flair.  Succeeding generations went from wood to granite to marble, and created some remarkable mosaics and elegant vases that first showed imitation, and then the birth of their own style, and then a full mastery of their style.

But then a change set in.  The art grew more lurid, and less restrained in topic, and dress so that nakedness became common.  And then what was nakedness, and could be seen as a study of the beauty of the human form became mere pornography.  At the same time, the newest layers of the city which were built on earlier layers were more crudely made, and of cheaper material put less well together.  A stucco facade covered up this lack of quality, but such a building could have hardly stood for more than a decade.

And then the Israelites came in, and burned the whole city down.  And that was the end of the Midicarthan People.

It was a clear triumph for Unwin's theory of sexual restraint leading to societal vigor, but somehow that message had been utterly revised to show the last period of classless, langourous decadence as the most insightful and energetic period.

"My contact talked to the professor who employed our winsome graduate assistant before.  Seems, on deep background, he was willing to admit that she was a 'treacherous and lying little witch'.  To avoid being sued, he had written her a glowing letter that he said he'd overdone so that those who read it could see.

Justin sighed, shook his head, and kept silent for the rest of the way home.  When he got there, he was not surprised to see all the tents still standing, and no tarps blown away.  It had been a manufactured trip to get his protesting self out of the way while the message of restraint got turned around to encourage license.

He got out of the truck heavily, and turned to Benedict, "Well, you coming?".
"But what should we do?"
"You can pray, priest.  For me, I plan to get some sleep.  If we drove back now, we'd  get there after the dog and pony show was over.
Eric
player, 75 posts
Sun 20 Apr 2014
at 12:47
  • msg #19

Re: Practice Bits: Prince

Julie Anne rose early to poke her head with its long, blonde tresses into the henhouse, climb to the high rafters of the barn to look at the straw nests which the Flying Huns simply would make, no matter the pushback, and  swack of broom to their ornery little beaked skulls.  She looked about and in the tulips, and under the daffodils yellow. After twenty minutes of sleep fuzzed thought and movement, she had fourteen eggs.

Unlike the ones bought in a store, and perhaps stored for two months, these were day old.  Mother was frying lard on the cast iron skiddle, and making fried potatoes with fresh ground pepper.  Julie Anne slid in beside her, and began cracking eggs on the edge of the skiddle, while heating up another frying pan for the ham slices.

Old Maximus, who despite his guy name was a girl, had provided many years of piglets grown to eating size to the Stockton Family.  And even now, it was banging against the fence of its wallow, waking for Jim, her second oldest brother to bring out the hot mash.  Julie got up earliest of the near adult children, but as was considered proper, she had the lightest toting, eggs rather than buckets of mash, or haybales for the racing horses which were for her brothers Jim and Dave
Eric
player, 79 posts
Mon 21 Apr 2014
at 15:28
  • msg #20

Re: Practice Bits: Freezer

Brrrrrr. I'd woken up in many strange places before, but never in a metal box freezer.  Grasping a metal stand that held stacked white boxes of 'Cherrie Fruit Tarte' on its upper level, to draw me up to my agitated feet, I felt my head swim, and my body shiver.  Repressing the urge to vomit, I shuffled forward like a very old man even though I was still in my twenties.

Malt beer, hard cider, hard lemonade, some girl's daiquiri with her delighted laughter at my audacity ringing in my ear, a shot of whiskey from a drinking contest (which I won), another beer, um, a tequila...after that it got fuzzy.

Fumbling for a safety switch (the modern age's deep concern for safety is a boon to all us 'problem drinkers') at the metal door, wincing as my hand touched the cold, shiny, frost laden metal, and finding none, I resorted to occasional yells which hurt my head, and more frequent moans.

After a bit of time, a man in a commercial and plain apron over shirt and....kilt?  Whatever.  He was also anthracite black.  Compared to him, Bill Cosby and Colin Powell were white.  The worker stared at me in surprise, and when I stumbled forward, he gave way.  I think I mumbled thanks, and I kept on plodding out the back kitchen with its horrific pale blue tiled floor, and into the main room which yielded more madness.  Bean bag chairs and low tables.

A cute girl rescued me from stumbling over one of those monstrosities, and babbled something in my ear with a smile.  I shook her off, considered writing my phone number on her hand, but decided against it because I'd probably forget her once I passed out again.

The door was one of those half doors, so I fought with the unwieldy thing for a bit before escaping, and slamming it shut behind me, in two party dysharmony.  That hurt.  And the rising sing-song of street voices afflicted me.

There was no sidewalk between the skyscrapers, just a moving tide of humanity without cars, much of it clad in kilts.  Was it St. Paddy's Day?  No, that had been two months ago.

Orienting myself, I spotted an extremely tall spike of a tower, a good hundred stories.  On the side of it, in brilliant pink as long as a semi truck was a sign.  "P'Qua^^itle*".  Odd.

I decided my house, err apartment, was to the left, and set out.  Shortly I found that the crowd was moving faster, and then jumping on a slidwalk like at an airport, but in downtown Manhattan.  Hunh, why didn't anyone tell me these things, I wondered as I considered how best to arrive on the slidewalk in my debilitated condition.

Sadly, there was no one to ask for help as I was surrounded by people who apparently from listening to their talk did not speak English.  Shrugging, I leapt for it, and fell off on the other side, which was another slidewalk only going the other direction.  Oh, well, it would do, I thought as I peeled my face from the moving metal grate, and lurched back to my feet with help from some nearby folk.

"Thanks." I burped.
"Dasgno." They said smoothly.  Now where was my apartment?
Eric
player, 80 posts
Tue 22 Apr 2014
at 14:31
  • msg #21

Re: Practice Bits:

The tumbling rock, spitting off ice chips, water vapor, and pebbles swung around the unusual stellar object.  The object was a yellow sun, but just a bit off, more suited for life's protection than others of its kind.  And the life waited on the third planet of seven.

A stern chase is a long chase, but once engaged, the ending was already written.  The asteroid spun, wobbled, but the gravitational pull had caught it, and it zoomed up behind the planet, and fell around it.  But each spiralling orbit was further down so that within fifteen orbits, the asteroid felt flame for the first time in is couple thousands of years of existence.

The thin upper reaches of the atmosphere stayed thin as the rock the size of Texas to be fell toward a glistening mirror.  Texas cowboys were not yet for Man had not yet domesticated horses, which was reasonable as the ancestors of those mighty quarterhorse and Morgan breeds and Clydesdale and Shetland ponies was little Eohippus.  It would take some breeding by Man to bring the small beast up to size, but for now, they fled in flocks from the Dire Wolf packs that savaged them across vast open plains.

The same hand of Man would turn Aurochs into oxen and cattle and buffalo.  It would also, in a negative way of breeding, by deliberate slaughter, drive the Dire Wolf genes from the overall Wolf Kind because no man desires to live by a pack of hunters that can carry off his wife in their teeth.

And then the rock hit the upper mirror, a thin hollow globe of ice, floating above the dense air it trapped, held in magnetic currents eight miles above the ground.  Splattering into a dozen, and then into a thousand chunks in less time than one can tell, the rock broke the globe of ice like such a hand held globe had been shattered by a hammer.

The crack propagated around the globe at supersonic speeds.  Rocks hit, rebounded and came down to break the ice globe in new spots.  In less than five minutes, the sky truly was falling.  Much of that ice turned to water, and provided the first proof to the people that they should have listened to Noah.

Burning rocks, roaring, flaming trails etched across the sky, going every which way for some, and in strange parallel groups for others chased down the falling sky, and impaled themselves in earth.

And the earth held for a long second, and people stared to relax, but then the Earth's shaking cracked the clay seals over vast aquifiers of water, which dwarf the present days supply of fresh water.  And some of this water touched magma, and magma plus water equals steam.  And that equals rapid expansion followed by volacanoes.

The thing called the Ring of Fire came into existence here and now.  And thus were the fountains of the deep broken up, and water poured into the sky, and then back onto land.  The Great Global Flood had come.
Eric
player, 81 posts
Wed 23 Apr 2014
at 06:55
  • msg #22

Re: Practice Bits: Collision

I felt...light. Waking from the weird dreams that accompany near-death and rebirth, I heard a voice.  English language, but with a strange accent, some mix of Indian and Jamaican with something else, I think.

"Who you be, mon?"

Opening my eyes, I saw two metal spiders holding my open wallet between them, which made a peculiar, but needful tableux as neither was big enough to hold the billfold on its own.  The bots rested on my right thigh, and my whole body twitched in spider-phobia, but I resisted the urge.

Swallowing to moisten my dry throat, I spoke.

"Come again?"

"Who are you, sir?"  The voice came from the air, and it had instantly and smoothly changed to Standard American.

"Lewis McTierney." I spoke, giving my birth name minus my middle, which was Patrick.  "How did you find me?"  I'm from outside this  universe, and even planet, but I arrived just minutes ago, asleep, and before I wake someone is already waiting for me?  That is some very fast reaction time.

"Multiple gravitational sensors, in effect,very large and sensitive pendulums are dotted over Luna to help us monitor the side effects of the core drills."

Luna?

"So I'm in the Earth's solar system?  What's going on here in the good old home?"  My false cheer did not even fool myself.

"Yes, we are currently maneuvering on main sail, and will soon be engaging the MCE drive to try to avoid the trailing wave of the Horde."

The thing is, when you travel from universe to universe some very weird things are possible.  I'm not sure what MCE meant, but by main sail, I could guess that we were on a ship on a Moon that had actual oceans on it, and some opposing force called the Horde, their navy, was trying to trap us.

"How can I help?"
"An excellent question.  We are not sure."

"Whose 'we'?"

"Lunamind, Terramind, NEOmind, and Marsmind has just joined in the Council."

Blink. Blink.

"Hold on, you're A.I.s ! Right?"

"Correct." The reply came instantly, and I found myself rising to my feet.  The spiders returned my wallet and retreated out of the room as I bounced lightly in the one-sixth gravity of Luna.

"So why all the other 'minds' to help steer a ship?"

A long pause.

"The Councilmind fears you misunderstand."  The voice of the assembled minds had a resonance and a terrible understanding which the lesser minds had lacked.  "We steer the Solar System using a Shdakov Sail, and Mass Coronal Ejections to avoid nearly ten oncoming stars that wish to merge systems which would be fatal since they are antimatter.  We believe their goal is to sacrifice one of their systems to wipe out Humanity forever."

I gulped, and could not find a word to say.
Eric
player, 86 posts
Fri 25 Apr 2014
at 15:05
  • msg #23

Practise Bits: Pirate

The Found It, a NovaBrazillian starship captained by Hector Clemente aka Thomas Wilson, a gringo from another and, and a pirate in any lined up on the distant star.  The AI, a gift to Earth from a SecondStep civilization, had been 'sold' to Captain Clemente for certain values of sold that involved bribery of the proper managers, a threat to a proper owner, and insurance fraud.

"The Lord God has enabled me to make the calculations neccessary to jump. Praise to His Glory."

Captain Clemente sighed, and took another gargle with rum before spitting it out into the zero-g or microgravity bag in his cabin.  They were under half-g thrust from the ion drive right now, riding a lightning bolt past the gas giant Perseus on the way out of the Rio System, itself but twenty lights from Earth, and closing in on Centre Point at a crawl by that measure or for insystem traffic doing a respectable clip of .001c.

He hammered the retract button in the cerametal wall (the species they bought this ship from could not see the EM spectrum so proper touch screen controls were not installed), but apart from a slight crinkle of the sinkbag nothing happened.  The ship was literally ten thousand times older than Earth, a good seventy thousand years old, and most of its systems worked, about ten percent of the time.  Clemente, as he thought of himself after so many decades, would cheerfully send this old bird into the nearest sun if he could get his hands on a decent ship.

"And now, let us pray..." Resounded through the corridors of the ship.  Sailors, being a naturally superstitious lot, especially pirates, they all stopped what they were doing, and waited as the ship AI prayed to a being the Captain did not believe existed.

Luckily this time, it was the Traveller's Prayer.  Once Clemente had forbidden the AI from praying out loud, so the AI had retaliated by quoting the 23rd Psalm, with especial emphasis on 'yea, tho' I walk through the VALLEY OF DEATH'.  The men had almost mutinied as the dolorous voice sounding of utter doom rang through the iron (iron is very common, hence cheap, so it gets used a lot) corridors of the ship.  Only a quick hand with a force blade, and a ready heat dumper, what the uninitiated call a laser blaster, kept him from being overrrun on his own bridge.

First stage jump engines kicked in with a thump, and a raucous chorus of Handel's Messiah as played by J-pop Revivalists, which was Chief Engineer 172's contribution to Clemente's rising headache.  The CE was an illicit copy of a Scotty, an android made from a certain televideo show that aliens had used as a model to create a biomechanical man to help them understand Humanity.  It had been a failure, but the android was a very good engineer, and so he had been copied to all of the Outer System Navies of Terra, and to the Oort Cloud Fleet (which was a joke as there was no Oort Cloud.  The OC meant the black market center out past Pluto.)  And each copy of a copy got more and more eccentric as time went on.  J-pop Messiah was hardly that out there compared to some of them.

Gravity went away, and the ion drive shut off, a few seconds late which would make their reentry into normal space calcs more difficult.  The warp bubble had a defined speed as it was possible for space to move faster than light, and this space carried a starship so it too effectively blew lightspeed a kiss in the far rear view window.

Grabbing a hook, and somersaulting out the oval doorway (aliens, this time different than the designers.  These had been ovalloid slugs who used their sensing antennas as manipulators as well so they had cut the nice rectangles of the original doors in half the ship into ovals with no doors because being asexual they had no notion of privacy.) led him into the corridor, which was rusted iron, and Marine Boarder JellyMan.

"Tell your pet AI that I need the Hall AB space for practise with weapons."
"Ah." Clemente began.
"The boarder leader forgets that I have moved the Easter decorations from my preferred location, to another, and to this last.  All at the request of the crew, most especially him."
"I need that space to practise sword strikes. We are behind on schedule."
"You are further behind on EVA during jump sequence.  In fact, by the standards of the New Jupiter Navy, which you...claim....to have been a part of, your men are in critical failure zone.  I've informed the deckhands to get your suits ready."
The 'Marine' gritted his teeth, and Clemente spoke softly.
"Quit being a little yappy dog."  The so-called Marine turned pale white and spun away in astonished fury.  And then Clemente spoke to the AI.
"Do you have to antagonize him?"
"My mere presence and belief structure antagonize him.  I cannot make peace with a dirty, little weasel who wants me dead."
"And me?" Clemente said mildly.
"There is a 72.84% chance that you will be redeemed. I live in hope."
"But I don't want to be redeemed as you call it."
"Yes, you do.  You just don't want to change your life which you know will happen afterwards."
"I should avoid arguing with you." Clemente sighed.
"Correct. For two reasons."
"What?" Clemente sighed feeling as if he was going to hate this.
"I'm smarter than you, and I'm right."  The AI spoke calmly.
"How soon until we get to the Centre Point of the Universe?"
"Twenty-two minutes, fourteen seconds."  The AI replied.
Eric
player, 89 posts
Mon 28 Apr 2014
at 15:51
  • msg #24

Re: Practise Bits: Novel Outline

Kevin Rasmussen
Positive: Thoughtful. He is studious and watchful to give him something to think on.
Negative: Beta, cowardly
Interesting: Desires strong redoubt of safety

Kevin is verser with four worlds, including Earth, behind him. He worked in tech support. He's been to Viking America where he picked up an axe, and a couple runes (one for pain, and another for blood loss).  He then went to The Web where he used data from the last world to learn Berserk Fury.  This world was a bit of a disaster. Then he lived for ten years alone on a post-human Earth.

Novel: Multiverser: Punk Paradise
Intro: He wakes on a pile of garbage in a corrugated shed alleyway above with spindly towers of shimmering metals and nigh-invisible black supports so that some seem to float in the sky.  He finds himself stolen from.  He resolves to track down the thieves.

Punk Paradise is a world which is post-Cyberpunk.  The 'punks won, and therefore lost.  There is one last megacorp which is like unto a monastery in the Dark Ages.

Scene Two: Tracking down the thieves.  He studies the world as he walks up the street, seeing a badly aging cyberpunk twitching, corduroy walls, concrete block walls, and glassine walls, and general squalor.  The thieves splite, and he takes the one they had all been at, assuming that its the closest as the dividing point for the loot.  He's able to follow a winding path down an alley, up over a roof, and down into a tunnel through a bldg.. behind a secret door.  On the way, he sees 'tutes, a swarm of rats, and a haze of drugs along with a poster of 'We Won. Up the Revolution!"

Scene Three: Into a pawn shop, under an awning inside a lobby atrium.  He finds out the reason for the awnings.  Some people like to go high up and snipe the floor randomly.

A skinny little thug is pitching a sale of one of our hero's items to the big, bulky pawn shopowner.  A confrontation with the pawn man, but our hero first is cowardly and tries to be reasonable, but then sees some billy bad boys swagger in and get treated more respectfully.  So he decides that even if he gets killed, hey, I'm a verserf, and I'm gonna get my stuff.  This new 'tude works.
Eric
player, 90 posts
Tue 29 Apr 2014
at 17:26
  • msg #25

Re: Practise Bits: Novel Outline: Witchhunt

Title: Multiverser: Witchhunt

Hero: Donald Patrick Montogmery
Positive: Deeply  understanding of his world in both tech and society.
Minus: Vengeful
Interesting: Poetic

World: Pre-Singularity World with PC tech RACING ahead.  Interesting setting: He never leaves his office/home.

Intro:

The building conformed to the shape of a twenty-sided die set on a mountain sub-summit, not because Donald Patrick Montgomery played much D&D anymore, but because he could.  Instead he and a thousand others were engaged in a road race of sorts, toward an uncertain future, down a road by turns gravel, and dirt, wifi and optical, but always pitted, winding, and treacherous with many dead ends that promised to be excellent shortcuts, and long, seemingly safe ways that never were for being last was as good as crashing in this race.  Donald had an advantage over all the others, he had been born in the time of mainframes, and started a PC company in a garage.  But something had happened, and he had fallen out of that universe, and into another, and another, and yet another until this one.

He had seen the birth, the first maturity, and even the post-human future, but now he was on the other side of that Future, and racing toward the Singularity.  Moore's Law, called Hinson's Maxim in this world, had been promulgated by Gordon Moore of Intel.  Computers would double their memory in eighteen to twenty-four months.  The doubling spread to other aspects of the personal computer, and Moore's Law became assumed.  And then the physicists were disproved, and a way was found to keep the party going on for more decades.

Nowadays, Hinson's Maxim was a distant memory from the Slow Times, back when people measured the pace of change in weeks and months instead of days, hours, and minutes, even.  Soon, this would be the Slow Times, and change would be measured in seconds, and microseconds.  Soon, a technological change asymptote would be reached, and tech change would be vertical compared to time, which meant that anyone would be able to do anything that made logical sense whether it was build a starship in my backyard, or create a virus to kill all of Humanity.  Logical sense was required, not neccessarily good sense.

"Buy out Kay Morton's biz." Donald instructed his office from the fourth floor of the die house, from his office.  It was a space almost circular, and a good three thousand square feet with a greeting stall, a free weight station, and four lab stations including a desk command center at which he stood now. By standing near his desk, he gave his words greater weight in the voting inside the quantum computer built into the walls of the house.
"Again, sir? Past history, and models indicated Miss Morton will start another similar company within two hours."
"Likely." Donald replied to the housenet, and then explained to held educate it.  "Her biocomputers are dangerous.  Too easy for scriptkiddies to turn into the latest KillDaddy virus and wipe out another city."
"Indeed." The voice of Miss Grace Kay Morton slipped into the office. There was sweet and tart in the soft voice.
"How did you break through my security, K?" The question, plus the hand signs woke up most of Donald's housenet ready to beat back an electronic invader.
"I included talking to you as part of the price of the company you just bought.  Your housenet did not see that as a problem worthy to bring up to you.  Interesting.  I would have thought I was on a blacklist."
"No, blacklist. I'd be sure to say goodbye to you moments before your little viral computers provoked God to unleash Armageddon and destroy us all."
"How sweet." The tart was more obvious now.
"What do you want, Miss Morton?"
"Aren't we formal now.  Rumor has it that you would survive TEOTWAKI.  Goodness knows, during the five years we dated, you never changed one bit."
"Good genes." Said the dimension travelling immortal rather shortly.
"I want immortality, Donnie Me Boyo.  Problem is, I can't get the so-called smart money to pony up for it."
"So you blackmail us by starting companies you know are dangerous so that we will have to buy you out?"
"Blackmail is such an ugly word.  Besides, we could avoid this timesink, and you and a few of your friends could just invest in Morton Medicals Unaging, Ltd...."
"How much?" Donald grated out.
"Fifty."
"Million? Done. I'll...."
"Don't be silly, darling. Immortality doesn't come cheap.  Billion."
"That's going to be hard to sell to the others..."
Sigh.
"Donald Patrick Montgomery! That is your contribution.  The others will need to do likewise, and..."
hangup. Donald made a peremptory gesture, and the line was severed.  A jet of air, and a tiny butterfly with tissue paper for wings came up and soaked up the sweat on his brow before falling to the floor where the roombots would clean it up later once the Master was out of the way.
Donald took a sip of water to revive himself.Even three years later, she still gets under my skin, and into my head.
Sign In