The year is 21XX. Seventy years after the Sun's disastrous irradiated solar flare, the last vestiges of humanity cling to small pockets of civilization. In the fissure formerly known as the Grand Canyon lies the domed city of Fort Kalen, a small but tightly knit community dedicated to protecting its own.

Five years ago, the Prometheus protocol was triggered under mysterious circumstances, leading to a lockdown of all human settlements. Distrust and scavenging runs rampant. Juno Turner, survivor of the Prometheus incident, remains the only one who knows what truly happened that day.

The clock is ticking. 

There's a bit of inspiration here that I'd like to nurture; could become a short storygame, not sure. The idea is that Tyler's friendship (or more?) with Maggie drove him to tolerate the body-snatcher, as otherwise he'd have lost her forever. That could change later on, of course, but that was the original idea.

Rest in piss 2x

It's October, there's 28 days until Halloween, and I wanted to write a body-snatcher type story. Anyway, enjoy! Since it is a horror story, there's blood and such. 

--

There was always something a little off about Maggie Gibson.

She was gap-toothed, snarky, and a bit of an asshole. She stole your favorite gel pen in middle school. That’s how you both had met each other—scowling at each other at the same desk in second-period English. She wasn’t too bad, you decided eventually. Maybe she was worth giving friendship a try. 

Maggie stopped being gap-toothed after she had braces for a few years. Her snark disappeared once she realized that teasing you wouldn’t work as well as it did when you were twelve. She was still an asshole, though—a somewhat more tolerable asshole. You liked that about her. She didn’t care about what other people thought of her, sometimes to a fault. She cut her own hair with scissors and tried to give you a haircut, too, and then buzzed all your hair off until you looked like a thumb.

But it wasn’t so bad. It was something the two of you laughed about, now that it was the last semester of senior year. Your hair had grown back, and hers had grown longer, and suddenly you felt the time that had passed. You remembered when you’d seen her with new eyes, when she’d tripped on her untied shoelaces playing basketball in your driveway. What an idiot, you remembered thinking. She still needs me to tie her shoes. Maggie didn’t look to you like she used to—like an angry twelve-year-old with pen-stealing habits and a gleam in her eye. She looked seventeen, newly blonde. She smelled like soap and a bit of rose. There was a new lump in your throat, but you pushed it down. What was the point? You were both going to different universities now, anyway.

That’s why now, when you sat staring at your melting popsicle in the Texan summer sun, sitting together on the front porch, you felt that something, somehow, had gone wrong. That lump in your throat felt even more uncomfortable, but not in a nice, fluttery feeling. It felt as if you’d eaten something bad. You felt uneasy. The humidity felt like acrid soup against your skin, mixing awfully with the anxious sweat sliding down your neck.

Maggie was prattling on about that new Transformers movie that just came out, but you weren’t listening. She was still smiling at you, that same crooked smile from second-period English. 

She hadn’t blinked, not once.

Whatever was sitting next to you wasn’t Maggie Gibson. 

You knew that because you saw her dead body, her face broken open and mangled in the woods behind Lakewood High, two months ago. 

It was a rainy day, not unusual for April. Your fingers were slippery around the hard plastic of your flashlight, your raincoat hood pulled up against the downpour. Your eyelashes stuck together, but you weren’t sure if it was from tears or the rain. She had texted you two days ago to tell you she was dropping by the bakery, asking if you wanted anything. You said no, teasing her about her sweet tooth. She sent a rolling-eyes emoji in response.

She hadn’t been seen since. The entire town of Swanton started a search effort, combing over all the spots she frequented—that you both frequented, together. Every hour that passed that Maggie didn’t come home felt like a nail in your heart. You couldn’t sleep. Everyone told you she probably got lost on the way back, that Swanton had virtually no crime. She’ll turn up eventually, they said.

But that restless worry brought you to the woods in the middle of the night, stepping over splintered, rotting logs. The smell of wet oak leaves filled your nose like a thick, noxious gas. It was hard to see anything with the rain coming down this hard, scattering the light through the trees. It hadn’t been long since you’d gotten here, wondering if she’d decided to sit and eat a warm cookie where the two of you used to play, like she liked to do sometimes. You’d searched it yesterday but felt a stubborn pull to go back there, like maybe this time, you’d find her.

You took another step forward, but you felt your Converse slip a little extra. You looked down, following your gaze with the flashlight. The leaves here weren’t glistening with rain, but instead with something different—something reddish-brown. You felt the warmth drain from your face. Surely not, right? Maggie always was a messy eater. It’s chocolate. It had to be.

You lifted your head slowly, like if you took longer to look, maybe it wouldn’t hurt as much. Slumped against a tree, her blonde hair was unmistakable. Blood covered her chest, spilling down her neck. It was hard to tell if it had dried at one point, the blood now mixing with the rain to create a terrifying, sobering, horrific sight. Red was slithering down her arms in rivulets. Her skin was pale, like the flesh under a mushroom, thin and delicate.

You couldn’t help it. You fell to your knees and threw up, your stomach convulsing in on itself. It was hard even to recognize her face. Someone had taken an axe or something to it, swinging multiple times, hacking away at her. Only one blue eye remained, glassy, staring lifelessly out at the world. 

Her mouth was split in half. You threw up again, wheezing into the air. 

Fuck. Fuck.

Snap.

You blinked, feeling the popsicle break off in your hand. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said in the last five minutes, goober?” It asked, punching lightly at your shoulder. “I swear, Tyler, you have the attention span of a fucking goldfish.”

You had to stop thinking about it. Needed to stop remembering how Maggie looked, dead and butchered, in the woods that night. Not while her imitation was looking at you. Or whatever it was.

“Yeah, sorry,” you said, watching the red popsicle juice slide down your finger. “Got distracted.”

Rest in piss.

What do you mean by not "hand drawn with pixels?" Are you saying that you don't do the pixel art by hand yourself, or is this more so about the AI generated reference?

I am determined to climb the ranks of the fastest typers in our team!

Aren't you friendly!

I've been trying to exercise my writing muscles while studying for law school, so here's a short story I wrote during a study break. It's part of a bigger universe, but it's a brief scene that I wrote as an attempt to worldbuild. More to come later, maybe...?

---

Juno Turner remembered the stories about the city that never slept. According to her mother’s stories, it was a city of millions upon millions, constantly bustling with activity. Giant screens eclipsed nearly everything else around aside from the massive buildings that scraped the skies. Smoke and laughter intertwined as buzzing machinery made up the heartbeat of the city. When she was a child, the bedtime stories made her yearn for life outside the walls of Vortan Reach—for a time when she could run in the open air, arms outstretched, feeling the warmth of the sun on her face, without a care in the world. 

The last time she had seen the sun, it almost killed her.

She looked over the city, one arm dangling along the balcony railing. The deep scars of the earth, created by roaring water over thousands of years, were now filled with dotted structures, far more scarce toward the surface than at the center of the city. The artificial dome above served as the only shield against the harsh, unforgiving rays of the sun. Without technology, the city would be in a constant state of perpetual darkness. 

Long ago, refugees from a town called Flagstaff had survived the initial Ashen years and converged on this spot for survival. Naturally fortified against the sun and nearly impossible to venture through without a guide or equipment, it became a natural defense against the Burned. Other human safe havens were far enough away to deter bandits. Now, the city of Vortan Reach simulated weather conditions—sunlight, wind, rain, heat, cold—to keep its inhabitants sane while living in voluntary captivity.

Juno fumbled in her pocket, retrieving a stick of Kepler B and her military-issue lighter. She put the Kep B between her lips, cupping her hands around it and waiting until it sparked that nostalgic, familiar glittery purple. The governor had the engineers occasionally crank up the circulating fans to simulate natural wind. Juno always thought that while it brought the citizens some sense of normalcy, it only truly benefited those who had now grown old and gray—the last ones to remember Earth before the flare. They had become few and far between, much more withdrawn and bitter than the rest of the canyon dwellers. The only one Juno had known was her grandfather, the former governor. 

“Thinking about tomorrow’s expedition?”

Juno inhaled deeply, delicately plucking the stick of Kep B from her mouth to exhale a stream of heavily medicated purple smoke. “Private Darren,” she said, not looking away from her people-watching, “You, out of everyone, should know not to sneak up on a commanding officer.”

He stepped into the simulated moonlight, close-cropped brown hair turning almost silvery. The dog tags around his neck shimmered against his collarbone when he spoke. “Yeah, but I know how much you hate the patrols out there. Just wanted to talk to you about it for a sec.” Darren shrugged, warily eyeing the thin white modulator balanced between her fingers. “I don’t know how you smoke that shit, Commander.”

She shrugged, taking another puff before looking back at the scenery, watching as a young boy zipped through the narrow streets on a salvaged old mountain bike. “Military-grade poison is the best kind. You’ll learn soon enough.” 

Darren saw the rigid, sharp outline of her implanted artificial spine against the thin fabric of her shirt. He swallowed, tearing his eyes away to instead focus on the mission briefing cradled in the crook of his arm. Commander Turner was infamous for the Prometheus incident, a mysterious above-ground expedition accident shrouded in airtight layers of security clearance. It was obvious that she had returned irrevocably changed from whatever had happened—a good third of her body was entirely or partially replaced with cybernetics. Her left arm was threaded through with artificial joints that peeked through the skin, something that often frightened new recruits. Despite the harsh reality of the city, cybernetics was a last resort. They didn’t want Juno’s talents to go to waste, apparently.

Whatever happened, it wasn't good, and everyone tended to avoid her line of sight.

He didn’t want to question the Kep B use, as most Reach soldiers relied on a steady supply of it for the numbing properties, but it was common knowledge that the only way to get it was from the Outer Rims—the furthest corners of Vortan Reach. The slums, carved into the far walls of the canyon, were known to host a sprawling complex of tunnels, the complete depths of which are unknown. That made the Outer Rims a perfect location for nearly every illicit and illegal market. He supposed that, given the fact that her body had to be heavily medicated around the clock to prevent cybernetic rejection, she had every right to a puff now and then. 

“Are you listening, Private?”

Darren blinked. Juno was giving him a quizzical look, a metal hand outstretched toward him. “Yeah,” he said, handing her the touchpad with the mission briefing. “Sorry.” He straightened.

Funnily enough I have my mom's hardcover copy of the Da Vinci Code on my shelf right now. Unfortunately, I won't be able to pack it in a suitcase to bring with me, but this made me pick it up again! I'll try to read it before I go. I've heard great things about it.

I'm going on a 10-day trip to Italy with some friends in August and looking for recommendations on books to bring along! Both travel days there and back are going to be pretty long so length of book doesn't matter. All genres accepted. Just looking for something thought-provoking to read on the heinously long plane and train rides to and from the airports, or maybe something to read while on the beach. Perhaps this can serve as a resource for other people also looking for books to read on a flight!