Universal Remote

This one's a bit silly, but I've put it up because it served as a writing exercise. This isn't a finished story, isn't something that I will edit, but it's an idea nonetheless.

Mum came in and snatched the remote.

“Hey!” I shouted, making a grab for it.

She kept it out of arm’s reach. “You shouldn’t watch so much, you know,” she fussed. “Rots the mind. There’s a world out there. You should get some fresh air.”

I turned and stared out of the window. It had been howling a gale all day and raindrops splattered onto the glass, giving everything a melted look. As I watched, one lonely passerby was battling to reach the bus shelter, clutching an inside-out umbrella.

“Have you seen the weather-“ I began, but she was already gone, taking the remote with her. I flumped back down into the armchair and stared at the screen. “So unfair,” I muttered.

The White Tiger

I've been playing with a few ideas for shorter stories after working with the fantastic Nana Li. It's a real challenge; I've realised that I tend to treat short stories as if they are part of a larger work, assuming knowledge on behalf of the reader that they perhaps don't have.

This is a longer story, twice the length it needs to be. I will, perhaps, cut it down at some point. For now I think I'd rather look at other stories and see if I can make full, concise stories below a thousand words. Something there for 100 themes challenges!

My grandfather’s voice floated up into the loft. “James, you find anything up there yet?”

I waved my hand in front of my face to clear some of the dust floating in the air. There wasn’t much space to start with; cardboard boxes were stacked everywhere, leaving only a thin corridor. At least there was light; a single bulb hanging down, flickering but enough to read by.

“There’s… let’s see. This one says ‘magazines’,” I called back. The handwriting on the labels was old-fashioned, and I squinted closer. “I’ve got another that says ‘baby toys’… ‘toy cars’-“

“Ah, that one’s your inheritance,” he called back with a chuckle. “A few Dinky Toy cars in there that are worth a bit, or will be one day soon.”

I wrinkled my nose at the dirt-covered cars, their painted bodies chipped and dented, and moved on.

The next label was yellowed and I had to smooth it down to read it. “Newspapers – is this the one, grampa?”

“Aye, that it is; bring it down, then, let’s have a look!”

040 - Rated

Another Eve and Tic story. This one developed the idea that Eve lives in a post-human world, a place where we, as the Antecedents, left some of our technology and our iconography, and that's about it. I really like this idea; I've read a couple of things set in this kind of post-human world and they're always fascinating. I love new, fantasy-inspired, looks at current technology. It's also handy to clear another of the 100 themes off the list. This project's hanging around like nothing else.

040 – Rated

Sprinting for the inner chamber, Eve gasped out “Tic, what’s ahead?” Her boots echoed off the stone walls, undoubtedly announcing her presence to von Due, but that didn’t matter now. There was some sort of vivid blue light emanating from the doorway at the end of the corridor: it could already be too late. A humming sound was getting louder the closer she got.

“I’m only picking up the energy ahead; it’s masking everything else,” Tic warbled. “It’s like staring into the sun- eek!” Suddenly he was frozen in mid-air, lightning crackling over him as he screeched in agony, and then he dropped to the floor, motionless.

As Eve turned to look at what had happened, she tripped over something hidden in the darkness and tumbled headlong into the chamber ahead. Slid to a stop at the foot of a short flight of steps.

As she opened her eyes and looked around, head throbbing, she took in the murals on the walls. There were pictures of lightning and the Antecedent hieroglyph for danger; a flash of white in amongst the blue at the top of the stairs drew her gaze and she staggered to her feet. The noise in here was loud, a hum as loud as that which the College’s own experiments with amber and lightning produced. In here, though, was none of the machinery and looping cables they used. All was stone and dust.

At the top of the stairs a large hole had been cut into the ceiling, a rope hanging down from it. Two torches, their light barely able to be noticed through the dazzle. A dark shadow stood in front of a small niche carved into the wall, in which a silvery object was suspended as if by sorcery. It was from here that the blue light was emanating. The shadow turned, all features lost in the brilliance of the light, and then it took a step towards her, details coming in to focus. The black coat. The suit. The gold pocketwatch, the black wooden cane, the carefully-trimmed white moustache and beard. The eyes that glittered like diamonds.

Katze von Due had beaten her.

Eve and Tic again - The Ten Thousand Year Clock

I've been listening to Stuff You Should Know Podcast through from the beginning, so I'm somewhat behind. There's a good one though, on the 10,000 year clock. It's a lovely idea, essentially that we might one day not be here as a civilisation but there will definitely be something left behind to prove that we were here.

It helped crystallise a thought I've been having recently with both the world of Poisonroot and the Eve and Tic stories, and my wonderful wife helpfully added another facet to it: what if the continent of Ehrian is something like a Pangaea continent, ten thousand years in the future? I appreciate that it wouldn't be time for the continents to actually move, but certainly time for a mass extinction event to have forever changed the face of the planet and for technology to have changed, evolved, moved on from its current wasteful ways. And then Sue suggested that I could use this as a way of including real scientific fact, or inventions, from now as seen through the eyes of Eve and Tic.

So I got straight to it and wrote this. I'd love to submit it to the guys at Stuff You Should Know; they seem like awesome people and it'd be just amazing to get a mention.

Eve and the 10,000 Year Clock

The ticking echoed through the shaft, bouncing off the smooth rock. It was a massive noise, metal and stone clicking together with each shuddering second, and the entire effect was unsettling.

“I don’t like it,” Tic murmured. He was floating as close to Eve’s ear as he could, the tiny purring of his flight barely audible over the clock’s slow heartbeat.

Eve put her hand out flat at about shoulder height and Tic quickly settled on it. Still looking carefully at the mural in front of her, she transferred him to the top of her backpack, leant against the wall.

“This is some sort of blueprint,” Eve said. “Look, here; some of the things we would recognise from clockwork are right here.” She started to point at parts of the diagram. “There are chimes, a winding mechanism, weights for powering it… but if I’m reading this right, it’s massive.”

“It sounds massive,” Tic said. “But why is it here?”