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Greetings CYStians!

It's a Gazette Free-For-All here at the office! Too many of the staffers want to prove who the best writer is, and all I want to do is run a newspaper for the site! Well, at least I can print some more issues out of all this drama. For your reading pleasure, here are four short stories for you all to read.

Thank you to all the members of the CYS Monthly Gazette and especially fresh_out_the_oven, RKrallonor, Anthraxus and our Mr. Nobody for submitting stories and for being wonderful members of this publication. A special thank as well addressed to Yummyfood for giving us his permission to use his artwork!

This newspaper is a labor of love for us. Sometimes, it's hard for me to believe how far we've come and how many issues we're publishing in rapid succession. We hope all you readers enjoy this string of issues and stories!

The pictures here are clickable! If you want the slideshow of this article, here's a link.

Fags.

Throw 'em all off the bridge.

It's like tcat never left

Except Tardcat is banned. 

She requested that due to irl stuff though?

I miss her already.

Yeah. She banned herself.

Lmao. 

We should call them the Gayzette!

Oh my goodness, I crack myself up with the jokes I think of all on my own without any help from Sherbet.

You totally stole that from Sherbet.

Then again, he is PURE EVIL  in his villian era. Deserved.

Oh dear, the drawings look even worse in public. Well.

They're fine lol

I'd be more worried about two of the stories being the wrong genre entirely. "Four people on a writing site manage to turn out 2000 words in a week, two of them ignore the prompt" is not front page news you autistic queers. We need some better standards of journalism over here, Gazette has jumped the shark. Freedom of the press was a clearly a mistake!

Poor Mizal

Given the subsequent comments about all four of these stories and a long conversation I had with Fresh, I have a general question for the site readers: What does post-apocalypse mean to you? What are the things that you need to see in a story for it to register as post-apocalypse?

They look good to me, Fresh.

Please post your votes here!

Okay, thanks. I'd wanted to be sure since it said to "send in" votes and that the results wouldn't be announced until next month.

Votes can also be sent to MiltonManThing if you prefer to avoid a public post for some reason.

And it says that results will be announced in the next issue of the Ga(y)zette, which comes out around the 8th of next month.

You can come into the booth or mail in a ballot. We just want people to vote lol

Bracket I: Mizal

Bracket II: Thara

Harsh but perhaps fair.

For bracket 1, I'll go with Story B. I prefer the story of Story A a bit more, but I feel like Story B met the prompt better. For bracket 2, I'll go with Story D, as I feel it also met the prompt better.

I'm going with Story A for bracket one. I thoroughly enjoyed both but A went for quality over quantity with the characters and that made it the slightly better read. The language used was really good too. I'll vote for bracket two a little later (or never if the procrastination demon takes over :P )

At the time of writing this I haven't yet gone through the stories, but a quick browse of the thread told me enough. People apparently don't know what post-apocalyptic is, so let me say what I am looking for when the prompts is about being a post apocalyptic gang leader.

First up there's the apocalypse, the collapse of the world, where old systems and civilizations are destroyed, leaving a fermenting humus of humanity that struggles for survival. It's more often than not cynical, bleak to the point of being psychopathic, and following the principle that goodness of man stems from the social contract that forms the base of our civilization. No civilization? Man becomes beast. Friendly neighbors (no not the rotting husks at 42 we scavenged two weeks ago, the other ones at 46) have become rabid cannibals to prolong their pitiful existence, their hunger having gnawed through all pretense of being good. Basically imagine a post-collapse Yugoslavia.

Post implies it's after that. Theoretically, if you see the fall of the Roman Empire as an apocalypse, or even the fall of Babylon before that, everything after becomes post, so that'd imply our entire history is post-apocalyptic and that feels off. Wrong. So there's a cutoff. I'd say post-apocalyptic implies there hasn't been a new civilization formed onto the place of the old one. There, that feels sufficient.

Of course, hope is a human condition, and hope against all odds is a powerful thing. There will always the tiny dots of light in the darkness, tiny holdouts of groups trying to rebuild. Some are destined to fail, struggling until they cannot struggle any longer; others will act as the first seeds to make humanity shine once more.

Then we have the gang. We aren't one of those seeds. We aren't the ones who struggle to form a new society. We aren't the victims of the world. We have embraced the chaos and lawlessness and are wholly taking part of it, stealing and murdering our way through the wastes. Whether we do it for sheer survival or because we relish the act itself is up to the writer. Still, we don't murder and steal from the gang. The gang is our civilization. We steal from all the poor sods who aren't part of our new social contract. There is no angst, no despair. We take and take until there's nothing to take anymore. Then we move spots and take some more.

And I sure as fuck hope everyone here knows what a leader is.

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Now with that tone set, let's see who got the gist of it the best.

In story A I was immediately put off by the angst. The protagonist isn't a post-apocalyptic warlord. He's crying like his victim that just got raided into destitution with a shitton of teenager hormones on top of it. And then he got himself captured too, surrendered himself like a bitch. As a whole, the story is too overburdened with lore and telling, letting the plotbeats follow up on themselves too rapidly without giving the reader (me) time to immerse himself in the world or characters, a classic gripe of a story that's too ambitious for its wordcount. You've just sacrificed everything that makes a story gripping for plot and backstory.

But the plot itself was also nonsensical. Human experimentation is free game, but only as long as they willingly enlist? What kind of illogical morals are these from a bunch of portrayed scientific psychopaths living safe and secluding off-world in their own homegrown Elysium. If studying the plebs is that valuable, they'd either capture or entice them more actively instead of sitting around passively until their golden goose clucked along. Also why the fuck would they allow the child to walk free, but still be adamant about killing the mother. Why would you kill the mother here? You do realize that it's fucking dumb to kill off a rare captured alive specimen instead of studying it truly. Imagine they'd have a study design requiring two adult wastelanders, but hey that's no longer possible because you just killed one of them! You'll just have to wait a fuckton years for another desperate wastelander to kill one of your own scientists to acquire another.

It's dumb and stupid and this story should lose, no matter how bad the other is. Negative one vote.

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Story B.

Ah yes, the famed post-apolacyptic fantasy castle with an archwizardess. Nothing spells death and despair just like a little rhyme uttered standing upon the most pristine marble. Do you know what post means? It's Latin for after. Then why the fuck am I reading about the cause of, and consequent undoing of an apocalypse that's not even the true radioactive apocalypse we end up at?

Yeah like most fantasy short stories heavily involving magic, everything is a deus ex machina and anything can happen at anytime, lowering the stakes and emotional impact of any sacrifice or achievement. Remember those games you played as a kid where you each one upped the other's trump cards with ever increasing bullshit. The super bow beating the other kid's magic shield, but getting beaten in turn by his reflector laser shield 4000? It reads like that. Still, in contrast to story A this story actually managed to pull me in into the scene itself, so bonus points for that.

Also bonus points for giving a character I could imagine being a gang leader, though realistically this story should've started at the point it cut off. In this contest, it's only winning because story A was a steaming pile of shit. Congratulations.

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Story C.

Another mixed bag. One that leans too much in the other direction compared to the previous stories. Where for example story A was so overwrought with backstory and plot, leaving aside the quality of the plot, and story B detailed the cause of and ensuing undoing of a whole apocalypse, in this story nothing much happens. If I had to summarize it, it's a kid gets scared about a stranger, but the stranger helps with a random attack. Usually in these slice of life excerpts this lack of plothook allows the characters to shine, here, it simply didn't. Maybe I'm still miffed about the previous entries, or maybe these characters couldn't bear the weight. In any case, I got bored.

It does get bonus points for being properly post-apocalyptic, though. But minus points for not being a gang at all, being more one of those seeds of civilization I talked about before. Also the protagonist is a far cry from a gang leader. So perhaps the author simply stopped reading the prompt halfway.

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Story D.

The most technically sound and entertaining written short story of today. Can't really remark anything about the plot, pace or other random bullshit that usually irks me when reading these. So well done.

With that out of the way, let's proceed with the critique. It failed on all fronts on confirming to the prompt itself. In what way are a couple graffiti kids a gang. Where is the complete collapse of civilization? For all I know these are just a bunch of punks lowlives sowing discord in an otherwise safe and perfectly functioning society. It could be called a dystopian, if you think police officers (who'd be gunning down these vandals who vandalize property and start shooting at the law the moment they're discovered in our society) shouldn't be automated. But this story is definitely not post-apocalyptic, and for that it fails out of the contest.

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Long story short, my votes go to story B and C.