1/13/2018

9/3/2025 2:21 PM

846

4

2 wins / 0 losses

Infrangible Warden

A Treatise on Heartly Manners

A contest entry for Bucky's year's end contest: choose your own prompt II.
Play as Lord Robert, the baron of Rivellon, at the lowest point of his life. He's cheated on by his wife, betrayed by his liege and filled to the brim with a turmoil of conflicting emotions.
How does his life end? 

Avarga

Entry for EndMaster's Prompt Contest 3. In this epic tale of courage, sacrifice, and redemption, Your journey will take you to the very edge of existence and beyond. Will you stand to lead; or will your story be cut short?

Brimstone

Allow me to share my story.

Cannibal Apocalypse

Pretty sure this isn't meant for the family-friendly category.

AvargB

unpublished

Contest Winner

unpublished

It did not win.

Darkest Hour

unpublished

The year is 2478 and the human race once again finds itself within Sol's borders. Like a phoenix from our bitter past, we have risen anew.

Like Aeneas, we had been cast out of our home. We searched the galaxy for a new home, and like him, we found it and made it our own. We struggled and were battered by the harsh conditions. But now, both ready and willing, we will eclipse the legends of old.

Now we shall fight to reclaim what is rightfully ours.

General Butt Naked

unpublished

FOR ENDMASTER'S CONTEST<, PRAISED BE THE LEGEND.

Liberia and Sierra Leone are small countries on the west coast of Africa. Like many African countries, the lands are extremely rich in natural resources and vibrant in culture.

However, in the 1980s the climate halted in corruption and mismanagement under the All People's Congress Party. With over 70% of the people barely capable of buying a single cup of rice, survival became much harder. Not trusting in the democratic process any longer, the RUF was formed to drastically revamp the economic system and redistribute the country's wealth. They fought for education, jobs, and true democracy. In the process, they pillaged the lands and cut off many limbs.

It is in these times Joshua Milton Blahyi is born, butt naked. And in these times he'll fight, butt naked. For he is:

General Butt Naked.

Neglected

unpublished

This is my neglected story.

zExpedition Aquarius

unpublished

For centuries, man has scoured the stars, desperate to find its likeness. Thus far all was for naught; empty husks and barren rocks worked hard to crush his dreams. There was just one anomaly, one beacon amid the darkness. This is its story. This is the story of man's first foray to the stars.

An entry to Mizal's Tiny 'topias Jam. Where a lot more little bite-sized stories are -and will be- shared by other authors.

And for those that don't have the extension, and thus can't click on the storygame to open it, here's a tiny backdoor left open. Feel free to make use of it, and even leave a comment if you like.

Expedition Aquarius

zLetters Unanswered

unpublished

An epistolary novel containing the desperate pleas of a sole father. How will he bring his daughter safety in a city ripe for rebellion?

An entry to Mizal's Tiny 'topias Jam. Where a lot more little bite-sized stories are -and will be- shared by other authors.

And for those that don't have the extension, and thus can't click on the storygame to open it, here's a tiny backdoor left open. Feel free to make use of it, and even leave a comment if you like.

Letters Unanswered

I always like a nice graph. Well done on running this whole multi-month reading contest smoothly (or at least I wholly trust you'd done so because that graph is nice)! Congratulations to Cat also. Seems the site's penguin squad really got some fierce catty competition this time.

Absolutely crazy to imply a bunch of happy spray painting kids would be closer to the man's vision than a roving murdering, stealing and raping bunch if you want to play it that way.

Their rates have gone down since they started rioting over there, so I can't complain

I have a dishwasher

The separatist specter remains imposing even after death.

I've always wondered how it felt to die.

No matter how many you put down, you're still an outsider, a passive observer of that special something that wasn't meant to be shared. I always felt like an intruder on the battlefield, in those quiet moments after the deed was done. The battles were too many to name, the names eluding me now. Things that were so clear before pour from my leaky memory alongside the blood flowing from my many wounds. It's so silent now.

My name is SSG Carter Neil, known throughout the Fallen Lands as the Veteran of Albany. I've fought for her for many wars. I've laid siege to most cities you've heard of, and some you probably haven’t. Sacked every one that did not immediately surrender to either our President or his CEO successor. Today I will finally meet my own final end.

I imagine it will be an artificial thing. The sanctity of that voyage marred by the one that abhors the very humanity in it. It's a regrettable thing. Shouldn't have ended up like this, got only myself to blame. There is a lot to blame in this world.

I feel my body, more corpse than man as of this moment, lifted by that one's metallic touch. Robots. Cold. Asimov had coined the term. Workers. Mindless drones. Dozens of them carry the five us deeper down his technomantic dungeon.

It was eerily silent. The Sigmarites had fled, alongside their Regulator traitor kin, taking the sounds of battle with them. I felt a distant grudging professional respect for the proper way they'd conducted their ambush, quickly downed in a dark pit of deep hatred for their ilk.

Yes, it was hate that kept us going long after any reasonable human would have been put down. A divine sense of vengeance that had kept us going after most of us had lost our lives. Our wives, children, neighbors, all ended in one single moment. This was vengeance. It punished us for straying from its wrathful path. Albany, that beautiful city I had killed so many for, bleed and now die for, that prosperous pearl of the wasteland, was nuked by the Sigmarite filth. And honor demanded retribution.

We are deep below ground now and a low hum rises from the many pipes here. A fitting hell for a man like me, one that had failed her at the very end. How wrong we were, to put aside our revenge to fight for the sake of humanity for even a moment. We were ready to bleed for humanity. Lowly men and women that had struck us in the back for it.

Yes. This fate is what I deserve for even considering fighting side by side with the rats that had scourged my home with radioactive hellfire. It's funny. I've always wondered how it felt to die, but hadn't realized how peaceful it would be. In this hell I will be reforged. I am ready to repay their sins a thousandfold. I am once again on my path.

There is a chamber, an altar placed at its very center. I see him clearly now. The one who will extend my stay on this wretched earth. He doesn't speak, yet his eyes tell me enough. Inhuman calculations run behind them. There is no mercy to be found here. His cold eyes ask me just one unspoken question. I nod. I am once again on my path. He moves.

Jon screams his lungs out, his mind fraying at the seams at the sight. I pity him. He had always been a broken thing. After Iowa’s first sacking, he had wandered the wastes, somehow finding himself back at Albany, crucial in the changing of regime. I do not know why he remained loyal. All I know is that in New Iowa’s destruction, he had done the most. Did not sleep for seven nights. Did not say much after, when the deed was done. Now we'll join him.

He moves through our ranks, his mechanical hands stitching together wasting flesh and injecting more of his creations in whatever pieces of us that remain. Preston and Patrick face their end with the same grim determination I do. We had all been dead men walking the moment that nuke hit, cut off from any help, abandoned to the whims of fate. Yet it had led us here, one final end that delivered us to the one man that would exact our vengeance. If humanity had betrayed us, it deserved to die.

The Taskmaster is standing before me now. He pauses, mechanical dendrites halting their efficient actions. His eyes stare at me in silence, merely observing my last moments. Did he wonder too? I try to speak, to convey just how it felt. It was in vain. It's still so quiet. Too bad.

For if this was death. Death wasn’t bad at all.

https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/what-gang-definitions I mean your own government defines a gang as quite literally a goonsquad. If you ain't a goonsquad you can be one of those survival group schmucks, or be even more fancy and call yourself a band.

Unless explicitly told otherwise I'm now picturing him going to battle as one big rolling fleshy wrecking ball with perpendicular arms holding guns shooting things at random, more for the noise and spectacle of it than anything else, and the biker's gang being absolute retards for not splitting up and performing a fighting retreat in their vehicles. With the way the treatment made him rejuvenate and expand from even bullets and acid rains, I imagine him being around long enough to be more than a simple mythology story though. No way he's gonna keel over one day from something as base as old age and people will find out real fast it's better to pay a sheep tribute once a while than go the way of the bikertard.

Damn, that story A in that thread turned out to be great, pretty much what I would want to see in a short story

Mizal It's always hard to critique a story that's meant as a throwaway piece propped up by humor and ironic distaste of what happened in the other thread. At least that would be my opening critique after the introduction of Larry and Barry, but then the story actually became good. So it's always hard to critique a story that's conforming to the prompt perfectly, offering a twist while at it and balances the plot and pacing in that 2001 (almost perfect) wordcount well. What should I even talk about? The rest of the review would have included thing you could add (mainly how one shambling mass of limbs manages to outpace and completely eradicate a gang of bikers, that's done away with 'uh I don't recall fighting scenes really', but you're already at the max wordcount. I'd also be intrigued at what just held back society if long enough that a time period long enough has passed for new languages to form (assuming it's not Guy's mutating mind fraying further) but we're still fully in that post-apocalyptic genre. But the most important thing here is that the short story is both a self-concluding arc and invites curiosity on further stories, just how that shambling mass of limbs could reintegrate and uplift a post-apocalyptic society. Whether it'd grow into a beacon of hope, or that human paranoia will extinguish that light before it was even lit up. Well done. Oh yeah there's some typo's but pointing those out in detail instead of going for the bigger themes is gay. It didn't detract, so it's good enough for a quick short story on a hobbyist site. Thara It's always hard to critique a story that's meant as a throwaway piece propped up by humor and ironic distaste of what happened in the other thread. At least that would be my opening critique, but then the Iron Cunts arrived and you got me. The story actually became good. Perfectly fitting the prompt, and above all entertaining. The jokes hit and the rest don't matter compared to these points. The main thing I got is that I've apparently missed the more artistic first edition of this. That one must've been a true collector's item, even better showing off this totally reliable narrator. That's all. Well done. ------ Yeah, both of these stories are exactly what I'd expect from a post-apocalyptic gang leader, and well written at that.

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