Prompt-of-the-Week Club

[Sporty]

Thanks so much for the compliments! I'm glad you were able to enjoy it without having to be familiar with the work it serves as backstory to ^^ I've actually seen a couple other stories about societies that had existed in the spot where Faerieland fell, and though none of the characters in those reacted in the same way Hirok did (as far as I know, at least), the idea did sort of inspire his character.

Your story and the information regarding it are so cool! I especially enjoyed the vivid imagery and the pervading sense of "wrongness" in regards to the written words and the legends behind them. The ending left us on just the right note as well. The mythos sounds pretty well thought-out too Major props to both you and your friend, I'd like to hear more about this novel of yours sometime!

[Deleted]

Nice! I'm reading through back issues of the NT right now, trying to catch up on what I missed during my hiatus, so I'll definitely keep an eye out for your story.

Thank you! I tried to make it kind of creepy but I'm not well-versed in intentional creepiness. Good to know the mood got across well, though. (Although I guess it's kind of hard to make insanity-inducing writing anything but creepy.)

Yeah, the mythos has actually been developed quite a good deal. My co-author started working with the characters and their surrounding concepts about fifteen years ago, and we met and started working on this project together about three years ago. It's been an amazing process.

And the two of us could talk for ages about the novel, honestly. xD But if you want a synopsis, it's about a young woman from our present day who enters into experimental medical stasis, and wakes up roughly 4300 years in the future, in a time when the gods, spirits, and demons of ancient lore have returned to Earth. She meets one of the aforementioned half-gods and becomes his traveling companion, and then ends up entangled in his and his brothers' bid to become full gods by instigating a global war. It's really quite exciting stuff.

[M is for Morphine]

Sept 16, 2013 13:12:51 GMT -5 @surfersquid said:

And here's mine for this week!

SPOILER: Click to show

the burning words

“I’ve located another burial site,” Ritter mentioned to me as I swung into his dust-brown Jeep.

“Oh?” I hoped my tone conveyed enough interest, but out here I felt like the wind could snatch away every molecule of water in your body if you left your mouth open too long. Already I needed a swig from my water bottle.

The pause gave him time to continue. “Yeah. It’s pretty distant, up against the northern basin rim.”

My lips and the bottle parted sorrowfully. “Uh-huh?” The high desert sun beat down on us without mercy as we drove, the wind wasn’t much cooler, and I wondered how we hadn’t been baked alive or melted into the sand by now. But humanity was apparently at least a little hardier than that, judging by the people who’d endured this weather every day of their lives for millennia. We passed by a few of them, long-robed and head-wrapped, urging their goats out of our way.

“I didn’t even know it existed until yesterday. The locals don’t like to talk about it. They say…” He gripped the steering wheel with his leathered, freckled hands, skin that looked like my own pale complexion would in a few years if I persisted in wearing short sleeves to these digs. “They say every so often, somebody wanders out there looking for a lost animal. When they come back, they’re not quite themselves. They’re sick. Sometimes they die soon after.”

I scoffed, as any reasonable scientist would, and tossed my chocolate braid over my shoulder. “The sort of thing that would happen to anyone who walked around a desert for days on end.”

“Heh, yeah.” It was hard to miss the catch in his voice. “It’s… kind of developed into an old wives’ tale. Those who survive, when they’re coherent, babble something about ‘burning words’.”

I glanced over at his earthy features, hidden in the shade of an old baseball cap. “Come on. It’s like King Tut’s tomb all over again. I’ll tell you what, if we get a flat tire we can blame it on the ‘burning words’.”

Ritter rolled his eyes exaggeratedly, the motion extending to his entire head. “Just… be careful out there, Charlotte.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

An hour later and we were far out into the sands. The jagged, ancient mountains crowded around us like children clamoring for attention, but we were more interested in what apparently lay at their base.

“Where’s everyone else?” I asked, vaulting out of the Jeep, my hiking boots sinking into fine grain. I held my hand to my sweaty forehead as a makeshift visor, scanning the monotone terrain for any deviation. It was hard to make out landmarks when the sun had bleached everything the same pale gold.

“On their way,” Ritter explained, leaning against the hood of the car but taking off his hand a moment later, muttering angrily at the hot metal. “Thought we could do some preemptive looking around.”

I shrugged. “Fair enough. Let’s start at those—I think they’re cliffs.” The two of us began hiking through the sands, glancing at every dark rock and scrubby weed we passed by, like beachcombers on an endless shore where the ocean was on vacation.

Suddenly I noticed a slight change in ground texture, nearly hidden in the shadow of a scraggly bush. “Hold up. I think I’ve found something. Looks like it’s wood.” There were no trees around here, that was for sure.

Gently, I tried to nudge it out of its resting place and into the sun. It was, indeed, a piece of wood about as long as my forearm and twice as wide, weathered and worn. And blank.

“Flip it over?” Ritter suggested over my shoulder.

“Yeah.” I let the irritation come through in my voice—I was just about to get to that. Crouching down, steeling myself for the heat, I gently reached out with my fingertips and flipped it with as much finesse as a master chef cooking a pancake.

The other side wasn’t blank—it was engraved and painted in red with symbols of some kind, although they were cut off where the wood had snapped in half probably ages ago. “Well, this is a good…” I began, although for some reason words suddenly seemed slippery. I blinked to clear my mind, wondering where the sudden eye strain had come from. I was more used to the sun than this, I thought.

“Yeah,” Ritter said, although his voice was a little slurred, as I realized mine had been. “What does it look like to you? Tocharian?”

“No… no.” I blinked again, unconsciously standing up to distance myself from the artifact. I didn’t need reading glasses, and certainly not for letters two inches across. “Stroke shape is all wrong. It looks more like…” It didn’t look like anything, I realized as I ran through my mental roster of writing systems. “It’s not Tocharian,” I could at least affirm. Somehow that made me more uneasy than excited.

“Should we dig here?”

“No.” The words came out unbidden and I turned away from our little find, shuffling uncomfortably. That was when I saw it, cut into the crumbling rock face ahead: a stone doorway.

Ritter had followed my gaze. “There?”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s try there.” My colleague began loping toward the cliffside, and I followed, after committing an archaeological cardinal sin and surreptitiously using the side of my foot to cover the wood fragment with sand. I’d come back for it, I decided vehemently. I’d make myself look at it again.

The thick relief pillars supporting a faux lintel were only worn-down shadows of their former glory, cut down by long years of ceaseless grit-filled winds. The stone door itself was taller than even Ritter by a good eighteen inches at least, cracked and crumbly. Any engravings on it were long gone, I noticed, and I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

“Say, think we can get this open ourselves?” Ritter wondered, going up to it and pushing tentatively on fragments.

“Maybe…” I caught myself and snorted. I was being stupid. Where was my explorer’s spirit? Since when was I superstitious? I balled my fists and marched up next to him. “Yeah. Let’s give it a try. Maybe if we can take out the top fragments first, we can prevent the entire thing from collapsing on us…”

The process seemed to take hours, especially since my back was itchy with sweat and Ritter wouldn’t stop whistling songs I think my grandma listens to. “See anything?” I asked when we’d removed down to Ritter’s eye height.

“Nope, still too dark. Let’s keep going.”

After that it was easier, and we left the last two feet of rock intact mostly because we were exhausted by that point and we could simply step over it. In front of us was a tall, narrow tunnel sloping downward.

“After you, my good sir.” I gestured like a butler.

Ritter bowed with a flourish. “No, after you, I insist. Doctorates first.”

I laughed and produced a flashlight from my shoulder bag. “Fair enough. Let’s go.” The walls were blank and rough-hewn

“Unusual that there’s no inner door,” I murmured as we walked—mostly to drown out Ritter’s whistling. “Although I suppose that outer gate would have sufficed to keep out scavengers and tomb robbers, in most cultures it’s the norm to—what’s this?“ Twenty feet down, the tunnel had suddenly opened up.

I scanned the area with my flashlight. The vault in front of us was a burial chamber, no mistake about it, but everything the light touched – tapestries, carvings, painted pottery, and the stone dais supporting a giant of a time-blackened mummy with a mane of long, bright orange hair – was covered in what appeared to be the full, unbroken forms of the type of lettering we’d found out in the sand.

And they hurt. There’s just no other way to describe it except that every time I looked at them my head and chest would start to squeeze and swim, I’d feel like flames were dancing at the edges of my vision, and coherent thought escaped my grasp. I didn’t understand, but understanding wasn’t a priority right now. I turned and leaned against the wall, shutting my eyes tight and trying to forget the sight—and that’s when I heard echoing footsteps retreating and a bloodcurdling yell fill the air. “Ritter! RITTER!” I shouted desperately.

I sprinted out into the sun behind him, my legs threatening to collapse with each footfall, barely able to launch myself over the remnants of the door. There was no way to explain what I had seen. The very shape of the characters somehow felt mind-bendingly impossible, like they were drawn in more dimensions than my brain could fathom. Even thinking about them brought back a lingering headache.

Ritter was outside, cavorting on the sands like a madman. “Make it stop!” he screamed, slamming his fists into his head as tears rolled down his cheeks. “Make it stop!!”

I reached out and hooked him with my elbow around the middle, pulling him to the ground. As he hit the sand, I splashed water in his face and he coughed and sputtered, finally growing quiet although his chest was still heaving and his limbs twitched occasionally.

“Ch… Charlotte…” he panted haggardly.

“It’s okay. I’m here. We’re outside. We’re away from the… from the writing.”

He swallowed hard. “Is that what going insane feels like?” he whispered.

I looked down at his hazel eyes, wide with fright like a hunted animal’s. If that was what losing your mind was, I felt so bad for everyone who’d ever permanently snapped.

Presently Ritter sat up, dusting his hands on his knees and tilting his head away from the tomb. “What was that.” His inflection was flat, hollow.

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know.”

He looked over at me, seemingly aged twenty years. His easy smile was gone, replaced by solemn wrinkles. “Some things are better left undiscovered.”

We trudged back to the Jeep, taking a roundabout path over a dune to avoid the wood fragment. I didn’t want to approach the thing again. Just knowing it was there was giving me the creeps even though I could no longer see it, like it was going to suddenly emerge from the sand zombie-style and drag me down to the abyss.

“It was a false alarm,” I decided as we climbed numbly into the car.

“Mistaken information from the locals,” Ritter agreed, his eyes fixed longingly on the horizon. “They were actually talking about one of the other sites we’ve been working on.”

“Yep. Nothing out here.” Nothing, I reminded myself, trying to shove the memories out of my mind and replace them with the sight of infinite sand and sun.

Nothing but the burning words.

Yes, I know the two protagonists are stupid. They're supposed to be. <.<

You do a very nice job of setting up an exciting and scary situation. There is something about the piece that does bother me, though. I hope I can outline this without coming off like a jerk. It's going to be long so I'm putting it under the cut.

SPOILER: Click to show

To start, I recognize that this group is an offshoot of the Turim basin people and that there are going to be some differences. That said, there are some parts that really made me stop and go "Huh?".

In order of me noticing:

It is super strange that someone who has studied the region would find the presence of wood at the burial site odd, considering previously discovered sites were found because there are covered with hundreds of wooden pillars (also the northern part of the basin is a part where there are trees, including the Tarim Poplar Forest Preserve). Even stranger is what she doesn't notice, namely a huge stone tomb for a culture where the dead are buried in wooden, boat-shaped coffins under burial mounds. Between the pillars, the carvings, the stone, and the elaborate funerary offerings (as opposed to the practical gifts of food and tools found in Tocharian graves), this is coming off a little more like 'Egypt in China' than carrying the unique culture and traditions displayed at the Xiaohe cemetery and other grave sites.


The Xiaohe grave site.

The other thing that readers might have a problem with is the mummy having turned black. The most famous of the mummies, such as the "Xiaohe beauty" (below), the infant mummy, and a number of exceptionally well preserved men, are so naturally colored that they look like they are sleeping. They were not embalmed at all, and are a natural product of the weather. Egyptian mummies were routinely black due to the bitumen in the embalming process. Yeah, I know the bog mummies are black as well but that's also a chemical reaction.



I'm not sure that the natural embalming process could even occur with a body on a dias, since it was caused in part by the salty earth and conditions had to be a perfect for the accidental mummification to occur. It only happened to about 1/10th of the buried bodies.

A good source is Nova's Mysterious Mummies of China, though it is a bit old. Bowers Museum published a catalog for the silk road exhibit that is a huge wealth of information. It's out of print and quite expensive but I could transcribe or photograph some as needed. They both talk about wool textiles a LOT (they had tartans!) as that was the culture's area of artistic expertise.

I know that I'm coming down a bit hard, and I do apologize. It's just that I find the Tarim basin mummies to be incredibly interesting. I was lucky enough to visit one of the stops of the 'Secrets of the Silk Road' exhibit, to walk through the recreation of the graveyard, see the grave offerings, and view the beautiful mummies.

So please don't take this as a dig or an insult, I just was stoked after reading the notes explaining they were the Tarim mummy people and kinda disappointed that nothing really reflected that other than having red hair.

[Deleted]

Thanks for pointing out those inaccuracies. I have to mention, though, that this piece isn't about the Tarim mummy people, just inspired by them. The culture depicted is fictitious and I didn't mean it to be identified with the Tarim mummies, hence why I purposely included cultural and preservational differences between this mummy and the Tarim mummies (not to mention the inclusion of supernatural elements).

I apologize for not making that more clear in my explanation of the piece, and I am sorry my intentions did not meet your expectations. I edited my original explanation to make things a little more clear.

[Sporty]

Just as a quick heads-up, I think I'm gonna have to postpone posting my story for this week until tomorrow morning. I've got most of it written out, but still need to figure out how to end it and I'm about to go to a concert that'll probably last until late tonight ^^;

[Deleted]

No worries! Take your time and have fun at the concert!

Here's mine for this week. It's really short, but sometimes you just gotta write something short.

SPOILER: Click to show

“Humans call these ‘periwinkles’.” Morh picked one of the small, pale purple-blue flowers from its trailing stem and examined it.

Iramick stretched out her legs, leaning back on her hands, and wrinkled her scute-covered nose. “Humies have strange words for things.”

The other orc laughed absently. “Yeah.”

A gust of warm spring wind sent the aroma of wildflowers into his nostrils, and he breathed deeply, watching the clouds pass over the river valley. He would take peaceful days when he could.

Iramick’s voice temporarily interrupted his peace. “Do humies name ‘em all?”

Morh looked over at her. “What?”

“All the flowers.” She looked down at the multicolored living carpet spread beneath her armor and boots. “Like… what’s this yellow one?” She plucked it, sniffed it, then popped it in her mouth and chewed it thoughtfully.

“They call it ‘buttercup’,” Morh explained.

“Huh.” Silence. “… It doesn’t taste like butter, brodda.”

Morh and Iramick are proving really fun to write and I think I'm going to have them be two of the main characters in the book I'm conceptualizing. The little vignettes I've been doing for Prompt-of-the-Week probably take place when the two of them are a little younger, while by the time of the book, Morh's become the leader of his own mercenary clan and Iramick is his second-in-command. And then they get hired by an expansionist king to help his army take over a neighboring kingdom and stuff happens. I imagine Morh's quite a bit of a sentimental dreamer, while Iramick is good-natured, but more pragmatic, so they balance each other out well.

So, anyone got a prompt for this week?

[Twillie]

A person has to take last-minute measures to successfully fulfill a task.

...Maybe? I don't know. I've been checking this thread out for a while, so I thought I might contribute

I don't know if I'll be able to write for this (omg I have five tests tomorrow), as I am busy with schoolwork, sports, and my NT short story. We'll see.

Hope I can contribute to this thread more often in the future

[Deleted]

Ooh, thanks for the prompt! I really appreciate you providing one!

Well, good luck with everything you're doing! If you manage to write for this, awesome, but if not, don't worry about it! I hope those tests go well!

[Sporty]

Heehee, that story was really cute, Squid I really like those two characters, and I liked the bit about Iramick sniffing and then eating the buttercup XD

Aaand here's mine! (I think they're getting progressively shorter, hopefully this doesn't become too much of a pattern or I won't have any story left XD)

SPOILER: Click to show

The little bird twittered happily as it hopped from perch to perch. Marlene, it seemed, had gone all-out in trying to make her new pet as happy and comfortable as possible – massive flight cage, ample food, lots of colorful toys, and a number of fancy little perches that Max was pretty sure were made from real branches.

Marlene stood in front of it all, hands clasped together in glee and grinning like a small child who had just been introduced to Disneyland as she admired her handiwork. Max grinned as well and clapped his sister on the shoulder.


“Good job! It looks like the little guy’s gonna do just fine with you,” he said.

“Girl, you mean,” Marlene replied without turning her eyes away from the bird.

Max shrugged. “Okay, girl. Speaking of which, have you given her a name yet? Or were you too busy setting up birdy paradise?”

Marlene turned toward her brother and nodded. “Her name is Periwinkle.”

Max paused, and his brow furrowed. The smile disappeared from Marlene’s face.

“…What?”

“Periwinkle?”

“It’s a lovely name!”

Max looked back and forth between his sister and her pet. “Marlene, that’s a canary.”

Marlene raised an eyebrow. “Yeah…”

“She’s bright yellow!”

“Oh, really? I hadn’t noticed,” Marlene replied flatly.

“You do know periwinkle is, like, a bluish-purple color, right?” Max pressed.

Marlene rolled her eyes. “So? It’s just a name! I seem to recall that you have a bulldog named Jack Sparrow. Are you telling me he’s suddenly turned into a famous fictional pirate captain, or perhaps a cute little songbird?”

Max snorted. “That’s completely different.”

Marlene crossed her arms. “How?”

“Well… At least Jack has a proper name, not just a color.”

“You mean like the goldfish we had as kids that you insisted on calling ‘Goldy?’”

“And it’s not a completely improper fit. At least a bulldog isn’t the complete opposite of a pirate. And that goes double for Goldy.”

“Well then we’ll call it poetic irony. Admit it: you’re just jealous of my superior naming skills.”

“Now you’re just sounding like a child.”

“Mmm, and you aren’t, Mr. I-like-arguing-over-pet-names?”

At that moment, a trilling voice called out, “I like it!”

Max’s train of thought halted as he turned to stare at Periwinkle. “Uhh…” he said, his voice distant, “Did your canary just –”

Marlene waved a dismissive hand. “Don’t be silly, canaries aren’t a talking species. That was my roommate’s African grey, Rainbow.”

You give me a flower/color/some kind of snail apparently prompt, I give you a story about two siblings arguing over pet names 8D

So, yeah! This is probably a little corny (especially the ending, I couldn't resist heehee), but it was so fun to write  It was weird, though - usually I have a bit of trouble naming new characters, but as soon as I got ready to set this story down and actually thinking of the names, Max and Marlene just sort of chose theirs on their own. They're actually pretty demanding characters - I also originally had them written as Max being older, but he and Marlene insisted on being twins (this isn't mentioned in the story, but still).

Fun fact: While I technically don't know of any pets with any of these names (except I've probably heard of a goldfish named Goldy somewhere before), I actually do have a family dog named Captain Jack. He's nothing like the pirate captain or the bulldog in the story though - he's some sort of crazy mix (a mutt basically) and a complete lazy bum who just wants to lay around and be petted all day unless he's going for a walk :I Also, this story was partially inspired by the fact that I really want a pet bird (specifically an African grey), but I need to find a job and my own place before I can actually get one. Le sigh.

[Deleted]

Thanks! Iramick, for all her common sense, is also... a touch eccentric. But I feel like most orcs in this universe are, and that's why humans tend to look down on them in this time period (aside from lingering animosity and racial prejudice from conflicts that ended a few centuries ago). (Also, I have succeeded in making a cute story about orcs. Muwahahaha. I'm such a disgrace.)

xD That story was adorable/hilarious! The characters were very vivid. And I like poetic-irony names. And nice twist at the end, that caught me off guard and then made me laugh. Isn't it awesome when characters write themselves like that? Don't worry about length, I never intended for these to get very long to begin with. They're just supposed to be fun little writing exercises.

I hope you're able to get your own African grey someday!

[Sporty]

Pfft, a disgrace? Naw, cute stories about eccentric orcs are great It sounds like this book of yours is going to be great fun!

Thank you! Yeah, but it was also weird that they managed to pick their own names so quickly. Normally I have to poke around in this naming website or wrack my brain for something that sounds good (if it's a fantasy name) when I sit down to write about the characters... And that often doesn't happen until ages after I think up the story/situation in the first place. A few of the OC's that I've been playing with for several months or more still only get to be referred to by my mental image of them, or in some cases a placeholder name XD (though to be fair, I usually eventually get around to naming characters that have been bouncing around my head for long enough). And haha, I know about the length thing, I was mostly just joking that if they keep getting shorter I'll end up writing 10-word stories or something XD

[Deleted]

Haha, thanks. xD We'll see. I have strange ideas when it comes to plotlines. And I should write the first story first, otherwise the history in the second makes less sense.

Heh, naming is a complex process. I actually keep a list of fantasy(-ish) names that I pull from whenever I need a name. It's quite handy.

I haven't started on anything for this week's prompt yet, but my brain is still fried from school. @_@ I'll give it a few days to recuperate and then I should be able to whip something out.

[Deleted]

Happy Monday, everyone!

SPOILER: Click to show

Terra and the Best Birthday Ever

“Jlinx!”

Jlinx was interrupted from his several hours of remaining completely motionless by Terra bursting through the doors of her Albonon apartment’s bedroom. The synthro had been expecting this to happen eventually and had one of his five arms fixed on the doors so he could see her coming. “Yes, Terra Fullmer?”

She skidded to a stop in front of him. “Do you know when Markus’s birthday is?!”

“I do not think even Markus Rostman knows when his birthday is, Terra Fullmer.”

“Oh, man!” Terra hissed. “What if his birthday’s already passed and I didn’t even know it?! What if, what if it’s today?!”

“The chances of it being today are approximately three hundred sixty-five to one. Somewhat unlikely.”

“But still!” she whined, pulling at her unbraided brown hair. “The thought just came to me while I was lying there, so maybe it’s a sign or something!”

“Or maybe you think too much about too little, Terra Fullmer.”

She ignored him, her blue eyes lighting up dangerously. “Ah-ha! We’ll throw him a birthday party!”

“Master Rostman does enjoy parties,” Jlinx agreed flatly. An understatement if ever there was one.

Terra giggled. “Great, it’s settled, then!” She grabbed the arm currently looking at her and began to walk toward the front door. “This will be the best birthday party he’s ever had! C’mon, help me out!”

“Your inane whim is my command, Princess,” Jlinx stated, beginning to trundle after her.

***

“Ooh, streamers, let’s have streamers! And lights!” The two were in one of the abandoned city’s many immaculate shops, and Terra was gleefully tossing party supplies into a box she’d made Jlinx carry. “What do you think Markus’s favorite color is?”

“It is difficult to assume anything about Master Rostman, and he has never told me.” Jlinx was holding the box with two arms, watching Terra with a third, and using the other two to survey the store, looking for things he could come back to later and break to give the other synthros something to do.

“I bet it’s green,” Terra decided, inspecting some packaged balloons of the aforementioned color. “After all, he wears that green jacket. And his eyes are so marvelously green…” She paused to sigh. “Yep, definitely green.”

“Barium nitrate lends a green color to flame,” Jlinx pointed out helpfully. “It is also highly toxic when inhaled or ingested.”

***

They set up the decorations in Hundiri’s bar, much to the delight of the synthro barkeep. “Oh, a party, how splendid,” he mused as he polished an already-clean countertop. “I do hope there will be plenty of guests. But not those nasty surface ruffians,” he added quickly. “Think they can come in here and destroy synthros, and steal weapons, all in such casual attire!”

He moved on to wiping down glasses on the shelf that were already crystal clear—one of them shattered in his mechanical hand as he scrubbed it down too vigorously, but he ignored it and continued to the next one. “Their lack of decorum is simply appalling. I shan’t have them in here. Unless they are guests,” he then concluded, not seeming to notice the circular way in which he had contradicted himself.

At his words, Terra gasped, dropping a roll of streamer paper on top of Jlinx. It draped gracefully over his chassis, arms, and legs, bestowing upon him all the grandeur and poignancy of a TPed tree. “Oh no!” she wailed. “We don’t have any guests!”

“I should have hoped that would be obvious to you by now, Terra Fullmer,” Jlinx stated, twisting his arms to try to get the streamer off but only becoming more hopelessly tangled in it.

“Ohhh, what are we going to do?!” She scrambled off of the table she was standing on and poked her head out into the hallway as though she expected the dead city’s long-gone inhabitants to somehow suddenly return. “It’s not much of a party with just the three of us, is it?!”

“Would you like me to summon the spacefleet?” Jlinx asked dryly.

“They’d never get here in time,” Terra muttered in a tone of voice that suggested she’d probably given the idea serious thought. She turned from the door, cradling her chin in her fingers.

“Quite right, there is nothing more embarrassing than being late to a party,” Hundiri observed, using his third arm to reach behind himself and methodically open several cabinets, which he then closed again after a few seconds’ pause. “And I will not have those battleships tearing up my establishment! They’re rather uncouth.”

“’Tearing up?’” Jlinx turned an arm to his fellow synthro. “They’d crush it.”

“And then I would have to polish these counters all over again!” Hundiri let out a mechanical sniff. He grabbed a broom and dustpan, swept up the remains of the shattered glass, and carefully deposited the pile of shards onto the shelf between two other of its intact brethren.

Terra snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it!” She paused for dramatic effect, looking from one nonresponsive synthro to the other, before laughing. “It’s so simple, why didn’t I think of it before?! Of course we’ll have guests! We’ll have more guests than any party, ever!”

***

Markus Rostman strolled through the enclosed hallways of the lost city of Albonon, his hands in the pockets of his old green army jacket, whistling a melancholy tune. Terra had (once again) sent his dataslate a message asking him to meet her in the city, at Hundiri’s, and since Markus was in the area he thought he might as well stop by.

As he rounded a corner, he quirked a shaggy orange eyebrow at the sight before him. “Well, this is interesting,” he chuckled to himself. All down the hallway was a jumbled collection of synthros of all sizes and models, clumped together and piled on top of each other like someone had turned on a robot-attracting supermagnet.

Markus shook his head with an amused grin. “Terra, what have you done this time…” As he approached the synthros, their gangly limbs and sturdy bodies shifted to let him pass, ensconcing him in an ever-moving tunnel of machinery whose walls and ceiling were studded with the multicolored lights of the constructs.

Finally, the tunnel dropped him off at the door to Hundiri’s, which synthros were still clustered around, their arms and legs clinging to the doorframe. He heard an excited whisper from inside, “Ooh, here he comes, here he comes! Stay quiet!” The bar was dark, but tiny lights still bobbed everywhere. Markus stepped in, stood still, and waited.

A few moments later, the lights flicked back on. “Surprise!” Terra shouted joyfully. “Happy birthday, whenever it is!”

She was seated at a table with Jlinx and Hundiri nearby. Crowded around them, packing the bar like mechanical sardines, were the synthros whose size allowed them to actually fit in the canteen. Most of them were watching Markus for his reaction, but they were all shifting and twitching like they weren’t sure if they were supposed to be here. On the table was a simple white sheet cake with a cartoonish picture of Markus drawn on it in green and orange frosting, surrounded by lit candles.

Markus threw his arms out and smiled widely, flashing his broad white teeth. “Terra! Jlinx, Hundiri! You should not have!”

Terra jumped up and hugged him. “Do you like it? I wanted to throw you a party really bad because I don’t know when your birthday is and I was worried I might have missed it, but we didn’t have any guests, so I improvised!” She looked up at him worriedly. “Is it okay? I didn’t mess anything up, did I?”

The flame-haired man smiled and patted her head. “No, no, it is wonderful! Thank you! This is the best birthday party I have ever had!”

“It is, in all likelihood, the only birthday party you have ever had, Master Rostman,” Jlinx pointed out.

“Now, now, Mister Jlinx,” Markus clucked, wagging a finger at the synthro. “You do not know that for certain. Although neither do I, really. Anyway!” He strode over to the table. “Let us eat cake!” he proclaimed, making Terra laugh as he picked up the knife. “We must be sure to cut around my striking features,” he mentioned as he sliced into the edge of the frosting. “It is a perfect likeness, if I do say so myself…”

A mile away, in the great spaceport of Albonon, where synthros had been hard at work on preservation efforts before they were called away to attend a birthday party, a large chunk of the great ornamental glass dome sloughed off from its position against hard-packed earth and fell to the floor, shattering into a million tiny pieces.

Notes:

SPOILER: Click to show

This one, amusingly enough, was actually a birthday present for the creator and writer of all of these characters except for Terra (who is mine)! I was having a hard time coming up with something for the prompt, and then his birthday was on Friday and I wanted to make something for him, and the two collided wonderfully. This was my first time writing any of these characters besides Terra, and they were really enjoyable. Jlinx pretty much wrote himself--the banter between him and Terra is one of my most favorite things in the book these characters are from and I wanted to do it justice here. I love that guy. And Hundiri isn't very fleshed out in our current draft, so I tried to explore him a little more and show what the life of a slightly insane robot bartender is like. And Markus, of course, is his usual wonderful self (he's the progenitor of that extinct race in one of my earlier pieces, by the way).

Oh yes, we need a prompt for this week!

Let's get seasonal:

The first of autumn

[Sporty]

...I couldn't think of anything for the past week's prompt without writing something incredibly meta. I'm still fighting with myself over whether to actually write such a thing XD

That story was fun Squid! The characters all really seem like something fun X) So these are some of the guys from your collab story about the world with the crazy supernatural-language, right?

[Deleted]

This piece was kind of meta for me, too.

Thanks! I'm glad the funness came across--I've really been enjoying this project, not the least because of the marvelous characters. And yep, that's right! Even though this takes place thousands of years after that first piece I put up (as evidenced by the intelligent robots and city with a spaceport), Terra, Markus, and Jlinx are some of the main characters in the story. (Markus is also the something-great grandfather of the mummy in the previous story--he is very, very old.)