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Next prompt is on Wednesday.

Rules:

1. Pick one of the prompts and write about it for no more than 20 minutes. You can write for longer if you want, but only words written during the 20 minutes count towards your total, so mark where you ran out of time.

2. You will be graded on wordcount and overall coherence. You will not be graded on quality, so write as fast as you can while still producing something that makes sense and would be salvageable with cleanup. It doesn't have to have an ending or form a complete story, but it should at least read like an excerpt from a longer work.

3. When you're done, post your wordcount. Posting your story is optional. We understand it will be terrible.

4. You may go back and work on previous days if you missed them.

5. You may write fanfiction if your heart desires.

Prompt #1: A burglar goes to steal a priceless item, but it's not what they expected.

Prompt #2: A lady swimming with some mechanical fishies

@WouldntItBeNice @Steve24833 @JJJ-thebanisher @Seto @bbshark @Bucky @mizal @FrankIevatus @TheNewIAP @Romulus @TacocaT @Crescentstar @Mayana @Zulutrader

Went with Prompt #1. :)

Word count

Words: 403. I ran out of time with one word to go.

The world opens into an unmistakable blue. It moves from foggy to clear every few seconds as the moisture from my breath covers my visor momentarily. The sun dances in the heavens overhead while a stormcloud thunders below.

I close my boor and float through the thick-air. I see a fish swim away... a real one. I try to memorize the fish with its shining scales and blinking eyes. I don't them that often this high up.

I move to my garden in a mixture between swimming, jumping, and walking. I tend to it steadily being sure not to harm the kelp or over-fertalize the cranberries. I hum a familiar tune to pass the time as the sun slowly moves closer to the horizon. I stare at the stormcloud below. Flashes of white erupt from its fog and a rumbling moan soon follows. Everything is peaceful.

I hear a beeping and see a red flashing. The alarm is flashing on my house. I rush over to the shop and flip the switches to turn the machine on. I hear a slow churn at first, but it comes to a whirling explosion of light in matter of seconds. I look to the distance and see what looks like a golden cloud. They're coming.

Above the loud noises of my machine, comes countless squeaks and clanks coming from the gold. It gets louder and louder overpowering all else. I can make out the specks of gold in the mass. Then, I could see the tiny creatures beyond dots.

I set my machine to overdrive, and it emits and upwards explosion of green light. The creatures swim into the light being re-powered once again. Their color turns to a rich shade of the sun's golden orange. After the stragglers make it through my beam of green, I finally shut of my machine.

I see them all circling overhead. In a moment of excitement, I swim upwards to join their school. The fish swim above me, below me, all around... I laugh like a child.

I take a deep breath and take off my helmet. The think air blurs my vision, but I do not care. No, I can hear their mechanical ticks like a heartbeat of an overjoyed child.

For a moment, I am one with the machines, yet soon they have to leave. I put on my helmet and watch them swim down into the stormcloud.

Prompt #2, 304 words. (And maybe I squeezed in the last sentence in a thirty-second OT.)

I am smiling underwater!

I’m suspended in sweet sapphire after such a long moment in darkness. The ocean blue can be so cold when you don’t really know it, and at first I didn’t understand how to speak to the waters. Heavy like a stone! And now, fluid and buoyant as seafoam itself! My blood feels all airy and frothed and I can hear my own thoughts as they wobble along in waves, within waves - what a happy coincidence.

I look down and at my own gaze my body springs to life, and I tread underwater while strands of golden seaweed stretch up from their depths, wrapping around my cold limbs to fashion a most appropriate diving suit. A blow an air bubble and it gets stuck between the currents and becomes a helmet to help me breath beneath the surface. It’s as if the water wants me to thrive!

Around me the undertow seems to change, and from nowhere comes one free, happy twinkle, and then a wash of shimmering beside it. I laugh, a trickle of air pebbles streaming from my lungs, watching the butterfly fish gather to meet me. They all move in a kind of unison, rocking on their axes and letting the light from far above oscillate by their reflections. I am immersed in glee - how perfect these creatures are! I look closer at their little see-through scales, at their inner workings, how their organs look like the guts of a clock, tick-tocking out of time.

The fish whiz past and giggle back and chatter all around me, asking me to stay with them for always here in this new place. I hesitate for just a moment, peeking back up to the surface. But it’s happier here, and something tells me I don’t have a choice besides.  

On one hand, this is nearly a week old. On the other, eh. 821

Jack wrapped the old coat around his fist, taking in a deep breath. He immediately swung his fist forward, punching through the window's glass pain. He smashed it, sending shards of glass around him. He climbed through, into the old, ancient looking mansion.

Jack wasn't exactly a master thief, but he was expendable. When McDonagh told him of this place, owned by a aging weirdo with little-to-no security and a lot of strange but valuable shit. The guy was some creepy, religious nutter, apparently. Jack didn't know, or particularly care. He just knew it was valuable, that McDonagh's cousin was a collector of it, and that he'd get half the selling price of anything he took. He knew that his time in prison would be living hell, if he didn't end up going to the real thing, if he bounced on McDonagh, and his role in the IRA wasn't much more than grunt shit, so here he was.

Jack had once been a Primary School teacher, teaching Music, the only subject he was ever good at. It had been going well. He had a fiance, a nice apartment in the city, even a rib for going out on the weekends. Then, the diagnosis. He had breast cancer. What a fucking joke. That was some shit only women were supposed to get, not him. He didn't even get the bullshit sympathetic look from uncaring fuckers. He just got giggles, a raised eyebrow, and then clearly fake sympathy. He started drinking to deal with the constant shittiness of his life. His fiance always complained about it. Jack had thought she would've seen how unreasonable she was being after a smack to get her back in her senses, but she left him, claiming "abuse". What a fucking bitch.

His life spiraled out of control. Drinking, drugs, selling his shit, losing his house and boat, mugging knackers and langers on the bike path. Eventually, he found himself on the side of some hard Nationalists on the border. To Jack, his Catholicism had never been a big part of his life, but Jack found a home partaking in the crime that funded the patriotic fuckers, and they didn't bitch when he spent all his spare time pissed off his head if not unconscious. Eventually, the cancer went into remission at an astonishing rate, before the doctor finally said the magic words. "It's all gone". It was a miracle. Jack had survived. But he didn't change. He had nothing else but the bottle. He continued his work.

And... here he was. He pulled himself through the window frame, entering the old house. There was a small TV on, playing RT É. Jack shrugged, before pausing. An old man lay in the couch in front of the TV, covered in spilt liquor with an empty bottle of whiskey lying next to him. The man looked pale. Jack moved forward slowly. He clapped his hands to see if the man would wake. He didn't appear to be breathing. Jack slowly put a finger to his temple, still terrified of waking him.

Cold.

It seemed the old man had died. From the amount of empty liquor bottles filling the room, it was most likely from drink. Shit, all the money in the world, enough to buy a big ass mansion and priceless treasures, and drink had still taken the man. Fuck this, Jack thought. He wasn't going to end up dying on his own covered in whiskey. He was going to take his money from here and head back to Dublin, find a new teaching gig.

Jack turned from the dead body, and began searching the house. He swiped a petrified tentacle in a display case, before grabbing a small, curved knife covered in weird runes. Jack kept searching, looting various things that looked valuable, before pausing. At the top of the grand staircase, displayed first and foremost among so many other treasure, was a large, clay urn. It looked worthless. Still, Jack found himself quickly ascending the staircase. He just... wanted it. He grabbed the vase, holding it in his hands. There. He had enough. Time to get out of here.

Ironically, it was the bottle that did him in. Jack stepped forward, not seeing the wine bottle left on the staircase, drained in one of the owner's depressed and fugue states. The bottle broke as Jack yelled in surprise, finding himself tumbling down the stairs, as he cut his hands open on the shattered urn. He found himself lying on then ground at the bottom of the stairs, groaning, bruised and hurt. 

He turned to look at the vase. It had shattered open, revealing what was inside. It was a horrible, slimy red... creature. The slug-shaped monster was long, covered in red goo, with one large, unopened eye.

"What the fuck...?" Jack asked.

Suddenly, the the creature opened it's eye. The eye began to sing to him, as it enthralled him in its tune. The eye was completely black, with red stripes going across it, covered with white spots like stars, and looked exactly like a human eye, and thousands of other colors. Jack heard the chattering of billions of teeth inside his mind, while his ears picked up the sound of a man screaming in terror and madness. The creature stared into his very soul, it's eye burning away the very essence of his being, burning through all he was, shattering his sense of being, as he stared into the inhuman eye that broke all the laws of reality of a being much older the said laws. Jack felt a pain in the back of his head, as he realized he was smacking his own head into the ground. As he smacked his head against the floor again and again, unable to break the gaze of such a terrifying creature. 

Jack's last thoughts before his skull cracked were that he wanted a drink, that he wished it had been the cancer that did him in, and that the old man was definitely a religious nutter.