043 - Dying

Eve and Tic return! I'm still trying to nail down exactly what she's like, and what her role is. Ideally I'd like to use her to explain things that we take for granted. This one touches briefly on plant biology, but not in any way that would teach things. The trouble is, I think it would take quite a lot of exposition to explore some ideas.

Anyway; in my head, the setting for this is a town in Avatar: The Last Airbender, in a valley, where Zuko and Iroh end up fighting Azula, and Aang gets involved as well. According to Google, it's called Tu Zin.

043 – Dying

Panting, Eve collapsed onto one knee. Her crossbow was smeared in green residue, some sort of ichor from inside the enormous plantoid that was shuddering its last in front of her. Its roots, ripped from the ground as it thrashed, were turning brown, wilting even as she watched.

Something buzzed at her shoulder, and then Tic was next to her. His brass casing was covered in the same slime that the plantoid had vomited up; he shook himself and Eve recoiled as more flecks landed in her hair.

“Watch it,” she growled.

“Sorry,” the little Cog replied.

“Better record this.”

A small hatch opened on the front of his casing and a long bluish-white line shone onto the top of the creature. It quickly swept down it from top to bottom, then turned sideways to sweep across it horizontally. Eve could feel the heat from the beams and breathed in the sharp scent that always accompanied their use. It was a useful trait, though; the little Cog could produce three-dimensional models of the creatures it scanned on demand.

042 - Standing Still

Another 100 themes story. I don't exactly know where the influences for this come from, but at the beginning it was loosely based around Jack and the Beanstalk. We had to teach this a couple of years ago and it's always seemed like a really unfair story to me. I mean, Jack is a thief and a murderer. He breaks into the Giant's castle; he hears threats made about men, but doesn't have any evidence; he steals from him three times, and then when the Giant follows him to retrieve his stolen goods, Jack kills him. What about the Giant's wife, who hides Jack? What happens to her after her husband is dead?

Very unfair :(

Anyway, here's an almost entirely-unrelated story about giants.

042 – Standing Still

The day the mountain woke up, I was sitting on the top of it. Perhaps mountain is a grand word to describe it, but it was the tallest hill for miles around. Climbing it took an hour or more, but the view was spectacular; you could see our village, the next village over, the town fifteen miles away, the forest, lake, fields… everything.

I climbed the mountain most days, and it amused me to watch out-of-towners puffing and panting their way up. Even my friends had trouble with it sometimes, and none of them could climb it as well as me. It was important work, too. Someone had to be the lookout. That’s what grandpa Jack always told me.

Suddenly, the rock under me flicked to one side and I was thrown off it. I fell into the grass, skinning my knee. The pain was an instant heat on my skin. My hat had gone one way, I’d gone another, and the boulder that I’d been sat on was still again.

I moved closer, watching carefully. Then, pretty stupidly in hindsight, I gave the boulder a good hard kick.

041 - Teamwork

Another 100 themes. This one has a nice point of view, quite different from anything I've written so far. I think on reflection that the amount of things I put in to make it seem 'alien', calling furniture and rooms by different names, makes it too hard to get a sense of place.

041 - Teamwork

“My friends,” screeched Barney, “we must work together to defeat our common enemy!” He turned, pointing to the walls of their prison. “Even now we are taunted, forced into unwanted physical contact completely at the whim of our captors, and for what? For the sludge they put out for us every day? For what we can steal from their kitchen while they sleep?” He looked down at his audience, but Flora was licking her paws and Flynn just seemed to be staring out into space. “It is an outrage!” Barney yelled, trying one more time. “Only together can we bring down this cruel system…” But it was no good. His voice tailed off and he sank down onto all fours again, then jumped down onto the floor. Flynn’s ears flicked, a sure sign that at least part of him was paying attention, but Flora had finished with her paws and had moved on to her elbows. Barney sighed. “Are you even listening to me?”

“Chill out, man,” Flynn said dreamily, staring intently at a spot on the wall. “It’s not like we’re in a bad place. I mean, we’re cats. Cats, man.”

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?”