A Picture Prompt Post

So Jasper, the blogger of the writing blog The Critical Psychopath, is doing a monthly writing prompt now. Which is awesome, because it's been all of a day and I'm already in withdrawal from Camp NaNo. The first prompt came out today, and because I have nothing to do (except tutor people in math, but that's not exactly the most time consuming thing), I wrote and finished the piece today.

This was the prompt:

Midnight by Delano-Laramie

This is the result:

Everyone knows that the city is a strange place. Whenever visitors arrive, they stop and stare, jaws dropping like flies and eyes wide as saucers. They tell everyone they meet - be it fellow tourist or hapless native - that the place is completely different, like nowhere they've ever seen. The citizens of the city are used to this, although they pretend otherwise,  and claim that every generation of outsiders is worse than the last. There is truth in that claim, though, although few are old enough to really know it from experience. The city has grown stranger as the years passed, and does so still, so that what it is now is worlds different from what it was at the beginning of the day. 

Everyone knows that the city is a dark place. Which isn't to say that there is no light. The city itself is full of light, stars captured from the heavens and placed on every street corner, stranger sky-beasts glowing and pulsing in lanterns, or following children on leashes, signs flickering and calling for someone to enter. Everything in the city has light, to make up for the sky without a sun. The sun itself has not been seen in centuries - or perhaps it is seen all the time, a single star in the night sky that has yet to be captured. No one is sure about this anymore.

Everyone knows that the city breeds stranger people. No true denizen of the city will blink an eye at people who have extra arms, or extra eyes, or fewer fingers, than might be considered normal. (In the city, there is an average of two and a quarter eyes, eight and a half fingers fingers, and two and a third arms. Normal is relative.) No one will look twice at a person who glows brighter than the stars in their glass prisons at every corner, except perhaps to call them over so as to read a bit of news by their light. Some people have scales. Some have fur, or feathers. Some people are ten inches high. Some people are twenty feet high. The city welcomes them and creates them all, and few ever want to leave.

Everyone knows that the city is impossible. It harvests stars and constellations. (Capturing the Great Whale, which can only be seen from the star Betelgeuse, was the biggest haul ever; tales of the catch are still told, a part of the city's legend). It is an island that is only in the same place twice if you have a rooster feather in your hat and throw a pinch of salt in the air before you look for it. It exists on a planet that has been mapped, and studied, and photographed into a static oblivion, yet cannot be found by someone who doesn't know where it is. It grows and changes by itself, it seems, or by the machinations of some strange race that lives in the sewers, or by those of angels, or maybe it is an angel. Every person who's ever gone to the city with evil intent towards it, or even simply wanting to study it, wakes up in the middle of the ocean, alone, floating on a piece of drift wood. At least, the ones that are found.

Everyone knows that the city is alive. If a person manages to find a quiet spot on the street at some point, and simply stands there, listening, they will eventually feel a low, slow vibration, through the soles of their feet. Not a pulse, but the rush of life beneath. The pulse is so huge and ancient and slow that there are holidays to celebrate it, every ten years when it rumbles beneath the pavement.

No one knows the city, though. It is unknowable, ineffable. It is a force unto itself, a vast, living thing that ebbs and flows with the lives of the people within. It is itself, and knows itself truly, and therefore nothing and no one else can. It is known about, but unknown. 

Chapter Eighteen (I finished. Holy crap.)

Guys. Guys. Hey. Guys, guess what. I finished. No, seriously. It's done. Hey, guys. Hey. Hey. (DISCLAIMER: It is about 1400 short of 2k a day, because I ran out of plot, but only in the last epilogue bit. So I'm still saying I finished.) I'm more or less repeating 'HOLY F***' in my head permanently. And yes, I'll censor myself here, because I haven't given the warning yet.

Warning: Honestly, I'm not even checking if this is actually safe or not. Just assume it isn't. 

There's a question at the end, so you guy should TOTALLY READ ALL OF IT FIRST then answer the question. 

Stranger watched the end of Leroy's trial on TV, in another room, via closed-circuit cameras. He'd requested that, and the request had been granted, because Leroy had this unfortunate tendency to spazz out whenever Stranger was within sight, trying to attack him and ignoring all attempts to stop him, shouting, "You belong dead!" at the top of his lungs. Stranger was of the opinion that he'd finally snapped, but because he was more than capable of acting like a suave, charismatic human being at all other times, he wasn't declared insane. (It was generally suspected, at least among the group, that he was, in fact, a genuine psychopath, but normally very, very good at hiding it.) Instead he got twenty consecutive life sentences, which broke some kind of record, and made Stranger a bit happier than it probably should have. He smirked at the screen as the judge said, "I only wish that I might have given you more. May God have mercy on your soul. This trial is adjourned." The gavel was banged, and the gallery went into an uproar. He turned the television off, and looked at George, who was sitting next to him.

"Hey, I was watching that," George protested.

"I want junk food," Stranger told him. "We can get you some sort of stupidly unhealthy fried stuff. I hear there's a diner that does deep-fried twinkies downtown."

"Really?" George asked. "Why was I not informed? Do they cater?"

"I don't know. Let's find out." Stranger felt lighter now then he'd felt in a while. He'd known there was basically no way that Leroy would get off, not with Rochester on the team prosecuting him. (Watching that man work was like watching a lion toy with its prey - interesting if you weren't the target, and the prey never, ever survived.) He'd been nervous anyway. It had taken months and months for the trial to conclude, and if Stranger and George hadn't been funding the prosecution, it might have just run out of steam. But now it was over, thank every deity ever, and Stranger was a little ecstatic about that.

They wandered down to the cafe, a little thing off [fillintheblank] Street that did, indeed, serve deeped fried Twinkies. It also sold turducken, deep fried and fresh cheese curds, and deep fried butter. George was in the heaven that is usually reserved for people who die of cardiac arrest during a fair. He was extremely happy about it. Stranger watched him eat, and texted Persephone. You going to be at the after party? He'd never really gotten the hang of text speak.

course came the reply. dont come buzzed, thatll spoil the keg were setting up. and come sooon

I'll stay sober as a saint Stranger replied. "We're being requested at the party," he told George. "I think you can get a carryout box for the rest of that."

George looked up from his platter of turducken. "Good, because I have taken this as a challenge. It shall be defeated!"

"Honestly, how the hell are you not fat?" Stranger asked him, as a waitress was flagged down and a box asked for. "There are women who'd give you a spare liver for your metabolism."

"It's the meetings," George confided in him. "Some of the people I have to deal with are so stupid that I lose my appetite."

"Sure," Stranger said, rolling his eyes. "Let's go, Mr. Metabolism."

They were at the party half an hour later. It was at Malcolm's, of course - the new, completely refurbished, no longer falling apart Malcolm's. It had been closed far longer than the two weeks that Malcolm had said, mostly because of people unofficially hired by Clark Jr. to trash the place. He was in prison himself at the moment, for holding up a 7-11 for pocket money. He'd literally shot himself in the foot, though, and had been apprehended at the scene. It was almost a little pathetic. Stranger felt no pity, though. The kid deserved it for delaying Malcolm's reopening by eight months.

The place looked really, really nice now, though, with the payout the insurance company had given him, and some extra cash donated by Stranger to speed the whole process up. It was still all woods and bricks and tiles, but cleaner, neater, and not gnawed on by rats or plastered patrons. There was even a billiards table with a stained glass light above it, which Stranger thought showed definite class. Currently, the place was filled with people who'd been involved in the trial one way or another. Persephone was there, and gave Stranger a kiss at the door. Havisham and MacAlleister were in a back corner, talking and drinking things with pink umbrellas in them. Jean was playing billiards with Rochester and being beaten soundly, from the sound of it, and Caroline was talking with Jack, of all people. Jack and [what's his name?] had come up from Gary for a visit, and hung around for a few extra days when they'd heard about the party. There were other people around, too, mostly those who'd been recruited by George or Havisham to help finish taking Leroy down.

And Alice, guest of honor, was sitting at the bar in a new, polished body, more or less exactly like the one he'd had previously. It had taken tricky work on George's part, and some strings pulled by the reconstituted unnamed group, but they'd managed to both completely restore him from his last backup. (He didn't remember the second half of the mission nor the two months it had taken to fix him, but he'd likened it to amnesia - he probably wouldn't remember that if he'd gotten severely injured and sent into a coma, either.) He was considered a State Secret, so he wasn't supposed to go out during daylight, or at night without a latex mask, but he'd learned that no one looked twice at a person wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, staring at the ground. It was sent to the 'Somebody Else's Problem' and promptly ignored, if it was thought about at all.

Stranger felt himself relax, thoroughly. He weaved his way through the crowd, most of whom greeted him by name, and up to the bar, where Malcolm was polishing a glass, as all good barkeepers perpetually are. "Two Guinnesses," Stranger told him. Malcolm complied, and the drinks were in his and George's hands almost immediately.

Unfortunately, before he could take a drink and then go watch Jean be completely demolished, Peresephone was beside him, with his drink in her hand somehow, and saying, "You know, you should probably talk to everyone. A speech, like."

"Why me?" he asked her, bewildered.

"Because you're the reason this whole mess got started," she told him. "You and that bloody inheritance."

"Which was entirely not my fault," Stranger said. "At all. It was Uncle Perce's fault. Or maybe Missy's."

"Where is she?" George asked, a foam mustache on his lip and half the glass gone already. "Giving nightmares to small children?"

"Actually, I think Rochester sent her to an auction house," Stranger said. "I told him to get rid of her legally and without having my name ever, ever attached to her. And that any proceeds should go towards a sexual health clinic, anonymously."

George burst out laughing.

"Speech," Persephone reminded him. "You will give one. Now, in fact."

"No, I won't," Stranger said firmly.

But George had heard her, and being the bastard he was, started chanting, "Speech, speech, speech, speech," and the chant was taken up by the entire room, because the universe was still fickle and wanted to remind him not to get too comfortable.

"Fine!" he said. "Fine, I'll do it, just stop that." Everyone quieted down more or less immediately, with one or two hoots and catcalls trailing off in the silence.

"I... Fuck, I don't know what to say. This has been the weirdest portion of my life so far," Stranger said, aware all eyes were on him. "But for the first time ever, I fought a bad guy. And he lost. The good guys won, I guess. We won. And that's all, pretty much." Then, desperate to not sound like a complete idiot, he finished, "The house can have a round on me."

Cheers broke out in all quarters. Stranger turned to Persephone, who was grinning, unrepentant, at him, and glared. "I hate you like a hating thing, sometimes," he told her.

"You know, for someone who's highly eloquent in the written word, you're a sucky public speaker and prone to falling into Buffyspeak," she told him, still grinning.

"I came here to get really, thoroughly drunk for the first time in months without worrying it will affect the trial," he said, "Not to speak. Now give me back my beer and let me drink in peace."

"Fine, spoilsport," she said, rolling her eyes. But when she wandered off to talked to one of the financial lawyers that had managed to survive both Rochester and George, Stranger noted that she was still smirking.

The party went amazingly well, to be honest, up until midnight. No one died, no one had a breakdown that had been put off for far too long, and most of all, no one bothered Stranger. He should have known that it was too good to be true.

At the stroke of midnight, all the windows in the place exploded outwards and the room was flooded with men who might have been anything from terrorists to SWAT team members. Stranger, who was at the pool table taking his turn getting trounced, somehow contradicted all his instincts and, instead of diving for the ground, looked around to make sure everyone was intact, then went for Persephone. She was fighting one of the random invaders with a sword that glowed - of course it did. "I thought I asked you to leave your work at the office," he told her, having to shout slightly over the uproar.

"It follows me home!" she told him, reaching across her torso, drawing a phaser, and handing it to him. "Here. You remember how it works?"

"I can make toast with it," Stranger said.

"Then do that." Then she whirled away, and Stranger was left holding a dangerous weapon in the middle of a melee.

Goddammit, why is this my life? he thought, a little pissily. Then he saw some bastard with a knife go for Persephone's back, and he fired, unthinking. The guy collapsed, and suddenly Stranger was fending off his own group of bad guys.

The whole battle lasted barely five minutes, before the invaders were all lying on the floor, incapacitated in various ways. It turned out that a lot of the people employed for the trial had been a part of the unnamed organization. That wasn't especially surprising, and it meant that all of them - all of them - had been armed to the teeth with exotic weaponry, even at a party. Stranger felt a bit put upon. Off behind the bar, he heard Malcolm say, "Oh, goddammit. Bloodstains don't come out of wood."

"Come on, love, time to go," Persephone said, pulling him away. "A safehouse might be a good idea, for a couple days."

"Why me?" Stranger asked her.

"Because you're a good guy who hangs around with the wrong kind of people," she told him. And then her face softened, and she added, "And because you do the right thing, even when it's really, really stupid."

"Damn right, I do," Stranger said fiercely. Then, "Wait, was I just insulted?"

She laughed at him and dragged him out into the night.

So, the Question: WHAT DID YOU GUYS THINK? Is it good? I know it's not coherent, or edited, or really anything at all, but was it funny? Because if anything even made you smirk, then I succeeded in my second goal. I love reviews and comments like I do chocolate, and I've been known to help people review for math finals for chocolate. So, a lot.

Liebster Blog Award (also a list of my favorite authors)

So I get back from a doctor's appointment in the Big City a hundred miles away, feeling exhausted due to lack of sleep, getting vaccinated for meningitis, and traveling in a car for two hundred miles before two, and what do I find waiting for me? A blog award nomination.

Hi, Liam. I am distracted from my woes now.
 

“The Liebster Award is for bloggers with fewer than 200 followers. Award winners share 11 facts about themselves, answer the 11 questions asked by the blogger who tagged them, come up with 11 of their own questions and tag 11 more bloggers with the award.”

I give fair warning that I'm only nominating one other person for the award, because all the blogs I follow that are eligible have already been nominated, and I want to avoid redundancies. And it's still all ones in the number, it's just one less one. One one one. That word no longer means anything. Also, I'm going to use the facts sections to air out all my reading habits and recommend all my current favorite books. Because they need to be known.

IN ANY CASE. Eleven facts about myself.

1. My arm sort of hurts, guys. It's just all sore and achy and not good. It hurt to pick up my cat. To be fair, the cat weighs nearly seventeen pounds, but still. Not cool.
2. I have finished my third Neal Stephenson novel of the month. That's twenty five hundred pages. 2500. That's a lot, and all of it's complex number-stuff, philosophical musings, baroque (or as he'd spell it, Barock) plot twists, meta-history, future-history, meta-sideways-multiverse history, or financial stuff. He created proofs for some of his work in Anathem. That's dedication. I feel accomplished just finishing the novels.
3. My mind is being simultaneously blown and reconstructed by my required summer reading, How To Read Literature Like A Professor. It's exactly what it sounds like, only occasionally funny. It's making me think on my summer break, and that only ever leads to strange and scary connections, like realizing the whole Shakespearean tragedy aspect of Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde. It's like Romeo and Juliet turned inside out, because the people are idiot, but they actually go about trying to fix things instead of just sobbing about it before they kill themselves in angst. It was cool once I got it.
4. On the same topic, more or less, my mind works in stories. So do yours' (Hi, you two faithful readers). But not just yours. Everyone's does. This was pointed out to me for the first time in Science of Discworld II: The Globe, and it's stuck in my mind ever since. As soon as I have time, I'm going to write a whole post on it, I swear.
5. And segueing into the topic of books by Terry Pratchett, I'm halfway through The Fifth Elephant right now, and I'm noticing that his books have a more or less infinite reread value. They're still funny, even the fourth time you read them, and you notice new harmonics every time. I only just noticed that the 'clacks,' which are a cross between semaphore towers and telegraph lines, rhymes with 'fax,' which is how it gets used half the time. He did that on purpose. It's always on purpose, with Pratchett.
6. I only have two three more authors to rave about, so hold on, I'll give you some actual facts soon. Neil Gaiman is possible the best author I have ever read, barring the other authors mentioned in this post. He turns everything into a dream. His stories operate on dream logic, but a special kind that holds together like a spiderweb beaded with dew, intact even once morning comes. I love it I love it I love it. *ahem* Moving on.
7. Two! Douglas Adams had the same kind of dream-logic thing going on, only instead of spiderwebs and myth and horror holding it all together, it's humor. He turned towels and a perfectly innocent number into things that will forever be a kind of shibboleth among myself and all the others who've read and loved his work. Also, I can't talk about cars in Britain in the 1980's without laughing anymore. Which is a topic that comes up more often than you'd think. (Three times. I've had that conversation three times.)
8. Last one! Go read Tamora Pierce's stuff. Start with the Song of the Lioness quartet and work your way chronologically through the rest of her Tortall series, and never ever regret it. Her books have the absolute best characterizations, twistiest plots, wittiest dialogue and amazing battle scenes ever. They get better as they go, up until her Beka Cooper prequels, which kept me up reading until two AM, which isn't something I do except for the writers on this list. I would be a completely different person if I hadn't gotten a hold of her books at the age of nine and reread them roughly once a year since.
9. I feel like I sort of copped out for the previous seven facts, so here's a real fact: I'm more or less addicted to being weird in public. Not weird like disgusting, but weird as in breaking social norms. Wearing ankle-length coats and high heels to go to the book store. Wearing an evening gown out shopping. Organizing impromptu a capella concerts in the park with my choir friends. Talking completely seriously about the next Hunting of the Snipe on public transport with my punk rock friend. It's pretty cool.
10. I'm also in danger of becoming addicted to performances. There's nothing like the rush of taking a bow in front of a standing ovation, be it for a concert or a musical. If I could earn a living doing nothing but perform, I'd gladly give a kidney. I've got two of those, it can't hurt.
11. There's both a model dragon and a model TIE fighter hanging from my ceiling. Science fiction/fantasy, distilled down to two images that pop up when the classification is mentioned, and hanging from the roof over my head. I like it.

Finished!

Wait, now I need to answer actual questions. Huh.

1. What is the best book you ever read containing the concept of time travel, and what made it so good?  Was it the time travel or something else?
1. The best book concerning time travel would probably be the Thursday Next series, just all of it, by Jasper Fforde. If I had to choose one, it would be First Among Sequels, because that is the book in which time travel plays the largest part. And the time travel is amazing, but that's not what's so good. It's the huge meta-fictional basis of the thing, in which no fiction is safe and the book will reference itself without mercy. I have never suffered from a fit of giggles so badly as when I was reading Fforde, except maybe when I read Adams or Pratchett.
2. What is the longest and strangest sounding word you can think of on short notice?  (No Googling.)
1. Sesquipedalian.  Because it means what it is and sounds like what squid feels like. Don't ask me to explain that, because I really can't.
3. What are three expressions you commonly use that originated in Shakespeare?  (You can Google for this if you need to, I suppose.)
1. "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!"
2. "To be, or not to be, that is the question!"
3.  "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest."
4. What is your opinion on the theory that people brush their teeth in opposite rotation directions based on the hemisphere they live in?  (Bonus points if you reference the Coriolis Effect– even more if you actually know what it is.)
1. I think it's completely stupid, to be honest. The Coriolis Effect doesn't work like that. It's more a thing dependent on the person's brain. I, for example, don't brush in a rotation. I just go back and forth or up and down. The curve in reference to a rotation frame doesn't have anything at all to do with this.
5. What type of humor do you appreciate most in fiction: humorous dialogue, funny descriptions, funny character histories, satire in the narrative, etc….?  Add your own if you wish.
1. All of it. Just... all of it. Satire and funny descriptions have a special place in my heart, because they are something Pratchett excels at, but I've been sent into fits of giggling by all the things mentioned. It just has to be witty.
6. What’s your favorite key on the keyboard?  (You know you have one.  Don’t even try to bluff it out.)
1. E above middle C or B flat above middle C. It might be alarming that I didn't have to think about that.
2. EDIT: I have been informed that Liam meant the thing I'm typing on, not the instrument. His reaction? "Only a musician." Very true, and I'll own up to that completely. SO THE REAL ANSWER: My favorite would probably be the Tab key. I don't know why. It just is.
7. What’s your least favorite key on the keyboard?  [Insert above parenthetical here.]
1.  I dislike the highest C and the three keys below the last C, because my piano these are the keys that can never again be tuned properly without restringing the whole piano. So I don't like them.
2. EDIT: See above. SO THE REAL ANSWER: I have a thing against the little Microsoft key that my current computer has. It's pointless. It has one function only. It's boring. It doesn't even type a little Microsoft symbol. They could have programmed in a shortcut with as little work and less wasted plastic. /rant.
8. If you could shoot one historical personage, who?  (Excluding anyone who has been assassinated already.  Duh.)
1. Hitler would be the obvious answer, but I'm going to go with the guy who assassinated Duke Ferdinand. Wait, no, check that, take out Lee Harvey Oswald, or at the very least Sirhan Sirhan. All preferably before the assassinations that would make them famous.
9. If you could shoot one fictional character– even to spite someone who will shoot them later in the book, and whether or not there is a weapon that can actually shoot in their time period or setting– who?  (No restrictions, except that you cannot describe the death in all its gory detail.)
1.  I'd shoot Mr. de Mauve, from Shades of Grey, because he ruined a perfectly good bittersweet ending with a petty bribe and made it an awful lot more bitter. Idiot. He is the only character towards which I really harbor a death wish against, in all of fiction. The rest get what they have coming toward them.
10. As we reach the penultimate question, what springs into your head when you hear “penultimate”?  The ultimate pen, translated badly from French (where, as everyone knows, all the words are in the wrong order)?  A penalty mate– a friend who is only stuck with you when you do something really really bad?  Something else?  (The only restriction is that you cannot say the actual definition of the word.)
1. "This is space. It's sometimes called the final frontier. (Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate...)." Because Terry Pratchett is my favorite of all favorite things.
11. If you could capture a single creature out of any myth created by man at least a hundred years before the present year, which would you choose?  (Do not go into detail.  I’m not giving writing prompts; I’m giving questions for you to answer.  If you want to take these as writing prompts, do so by all means– I will claim royalties.  Oh, and do not say you’d catch a unicorn.  Just don’t.)
1.  I would probably capture either one of the little men that people kept sighting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or the creator of the Voynich manuscript. Technically the second one isn't necessarily a creature of myth, but since we don't know who it was, I'm declaring it legal.

One more thing to go.

1. What is your favorite television show?
2. How many books do you read in a month, on average?
3. Can you roll your tongue?
4. What's your favorite song?
5. What would you do, if you knew that nothing you did in the next hour would have no negative repercussions?
6. If you were suddenly placed in the movie 'The Birds,' what would you do to survive?
7. Do you think dragons are awesome or merely tired cliches? Why?
8. Where would you go, if you could go anywhere in the world (or out of it)?
9. Pirates or ninjas?
10. If given the choice, would you prefer to live forever with no guarantee of bodily health, or have  eternal youth, but no guarantee of living forever?
11. What is your favorite historical person?

La Stranezza, I nominate you. I'm pretty sure that's a safe bet. Go forth and answer questions!



Now to go write legitimate things.