Variations on a Theme

The Literary Lab is having their third annual writing contest and anthology. I think I'll be participating this year and will post updates here as I work on it. For now I'm off to read The Tinderbox and The Huntsman for inspiration.

Opposite Day

Back for another week of the RPG Challenge, 

Current Challenge

The challenge for this week is titled Opposite Day. I want you to take a classic villain, hero, or monster and reverse them. What would King Arthur be like as a despot, Robinhood if he stole from the poor, or Vecna if all he wanted to be to do was be mortal?

Here is my submission :

Panahasi lay in his sealed tomb, hands crossed with his body covered with wrappings and again reached out with his mind. Not expecting to find any change, he had done this same thing on every new moon for over two thousand years, he yet held out hope. That hope was validated this night when his wondering mind came across a group of pillagers in a tent not a mile away.

Their dreams showed Panahasi that these pillagers had been told that there was an undiscovered tomb within the sands in this area, full of riches beyond their imaginings and ripe for the picking. "They are welcome to my riches," Panahasi thought to himself, "if they merely let me free to roam these lands again."

Unfortunately, the pillagers had no idea where they were looking. They had even recently turned in the wrong direction, but Panahasi had little power with which to redirect them. He reached out and pulled at the sands near the camp, shaping and directing them with his will. As he did so a small mound of sand not far off shifted and adjusted. The sand at the top slid off revealing the newly created golding cup, directly in line between the pillagers and Panahasi. With this effort complete he withdrew back into his husk, exhausted and now relying on hope alone.

---

At the next full moon Panahasi awoke again and immediately reached for the surface, looking for any sign of the pillagers. What he found instead horrified him. Half way between where they had camped and where his body lay he found what was left of the pillagers. They had been slain on their way to him. He reached his mind back along the stream of time to the night they died and watched in impotent dismay as his own descendants, who had been "guarding" his tomb for thousands of years, came out of the sands and slew the pillagers to the last.

In their misguided attempt to protect his remains his own kin had once again damned him to this half life. Not alive, not free to roam but not dead and resting either. As his heart, in its jar mere feet from his tomb, beat out its fourteen beats he pulled at the remains of the pillagers, attempting to bring them back to life to save him. One skeletal hand raised from its resting as his heart beat its last for this moon-rise and Panahasi fell back to sleep screaming to himself in rage.

---

With the next full moon the bodies were gone, there remained nothing within his reach to which Panahasi could cling. He fruitlessly searched the surrounding miles in dismay, hoping that one day he would be found and set free.

Unconventional Transportation

Another week, another r/RPG Challenge. I won the first week I participated. This week's challenge is this:

Current Challenge

The challenge for this week is titled Unconventional Transportation. Jump gates, teleportation, and horse drawn carriages are so passé. I want you to come up with new ways of getting around. I know I'm not the only one who loved the idea of [3] Silt Striders  and [4] Improbability Drives. Let's see some other novel ways of getting from one place to another.

Here is my entry :

Jake walked into the booth and typed in his destination, "London, England" and waited. It shouldn't be too long, there was usually someone ready to swap between London and Atlanta at any given time and this was no exception. Just two minutes later a message popped up on the screen telling Jake he'd need 142lbs.

"Whoa, you got two people with you over there?" Jake muttered to himself as he started unhooking weights from the booth's wall and strapping them to himself to even out the weight in the two booths. Once he had the 142 lbs on, 40 of it sitting on his feet because he just couldn't stand straight with that much weight on him, he reached out and grasped the transfer bars.

One brief flash of light and a tingling sensation later and Jake was in London, weights and all. He hung them on the hooks in the booth and climbed out and walked into the street.

r/RPG Challenge - Strange New Worlds

I've recently started participating in a weekly challenge on reddit's r/RPG subreddit, 

Current Challenge

This week's challenge is titled Strange New Worlds. I want you to create a new planet. The twist is that I want you to describe it from the point of view of landed explorers. That doesn't mean I'm specifically looking for a narrative, but I'm not looking for an encyclopedia entry either. If the explorers were sending reports back to their home planet how would they describe the new world? I'm looking for something that might not be 100% accurate or contains mysteries to uncover.

Here's my first submission :

Another loud crack echoed around the lab as Karen typed her report. At this point it wasn't enough to even get her to glance toward the window. "The number of floating rocks to strike the windows of our field lab have increased drastically since we gathered a few samples. They have also increased in speed. Earlier today one of the rocks slammed into one of our windows, as John was walking past, with enough force that the rock shattered."

While she typed the rock in a sample container near her started to shake slightly and almost lifted off the table, container and all. Karen casually reached across and set a book on top of it. "As the rock shattered John reported seeing a series of quick sparks in the air before the pieces of the rock fell to the ground. He quickly gathered up what was left but analysis shows that the rock is full of a strange criss crossing pattern of what appears to be phosphate glass wires."

"When he first gathered them", Karen stoped typing as the sample box next to her shot out from under the book and flew toward the window. The box slammed into the window and bounced off, denting the sample case. It then dropped to the ground with a shattering sound. Karen ran over and dropped to her knees to exaimine the box.

With a flick she opaqued the top of the box. Inside the phosphate glass wiring was spread out, partially embeded into the walls of the box. The wiring was particularly bunched around the small battery pack at the back of the box. The batterys power indicator was now blank. She got to her feet and took the sample box to the safe and locked it in.

Returning to her report she erased her aborted start of a sentance and continued, "The wiring appears to be capable of digging into our own electronics as it just dug through the casing of a sample box and drained a full battery dry in just a moment, while hurling the box its self at the window of the lab."

"I reiterate my request from last time, please let us come back up to the ship and come home. We are not qualified to deal with this kind of situation.

Signed, Dr. Karen McCade"

Eton Malhoon, Profile in Brief Redone

I've been listening to Writing Excuses and reading more on writing and realized part of the reason I've stalled in my book is because my main character, Eton, was a cliché. So I'm going to re-do his profile from before :

Gender: Male


Detective Eton Malhoon


Personality Type: Tragic Hero

Age: 25

Hair: Red-Brown, Shoulder Length, Natural Color

Eyes: Blue, Caucasion

Nose: Slightly long and hawkish

Mouth: Light Red, thin, the start of laugh lines

Cheeks: High cheek-bones

Ears: Small, close to head

Height: 5'8"

Build: Thin, a hint of atheleticism

Skin: Smooth and lightly tanned, several unremarkable scars

Clothing size: Medium

Hands: Thin, long-fingered hands

Voice: Generally unremarkable, has sudden coughing fits that last 30-45 seconds because of a blood magic spell gone awry when he was 16.

Coordination: Coordinated

Nationality: Rynaldi

Attitude to technology: Useful but not overly interested, just slightly above "User" level

Attitude to magic : Very curious but, as a human, he does not have the ability to utilize it directly so he collects magically enhanced items and uses them in place of more mundane things when he can.

Clothing style: Very situational, usually subdued when on duty. He's a "Plain Clothes Detective"

Skills: Investigation, Straight-faced deception, Observation, Acute Critical Thinking Skills, Speaks most of the native languages

Employment/education: Five years as an apprentice in Aeros under Jubal Bemis, became a citizen at age 9 and began as an informant. Underwent a background wipe and reinvention at 15 to join the police as a deep cover Internal Affairs agent at 18. Spent 4 years as a beat cop before becoming a detective in the violent crimes division.

Mother: Vashti Mahdat

Father: Tannon Farnham

Theme Song: Mad World - Gary Jules