His squinty eyes gave him a #myopic appearance. Others, less compassionate, assumed he was cranky. Their near-sightedness couldn't see he was never going to be the one damaging another's crops: his myopia left him nearly blind & he rarely left his land.
#hbp138 #vss365 #prompt #writingcommunity
Short story. Services Required; Services Rendered It’s not easy being The CleanerTM. When planets lose all manners to such an egregious degree as this latest one – well, then. Off to work. TC transformed the locale (what was the name of this obstreperous place again? Earth?) into something easier to appraise. He grunted with satisfaction at his handiwork; it well-suited his dark humours. He began a floor-by-floor inspection of the building. Perversions and deep rot and squalor lurked in every corner. Not much could be done here. This world was simply too far gone for redemption. Once removed to safety, he pressed a small switch in his coat pocket and removed his top hat. Flames lit the heavens. Services required; services rendered. #hbp138 | imagery: rooting out corruption #vssdaily | #manners #vss365 | #obstreperous #vsspic
A man in black coat and top hat is walking up the stairs of an old building.
#hbp138 | imagery: rooting out corruption
#vssdaily | #manners
#vss365 | #obstreperous
#vsspic
Peach Schnapps: Ostentatious? Ostentatious?? How dare you!
Oh. Oh! #Obstreperous! Of course. Our band is obviously opposed to obduracy. Ostensibly, we're the obelisk to obeisance or even oblation. We aim to obliterate the obnoxiously odious. No oscillation.
Does that clear things up?
#vss365 #hbp138
She yanks out her neural spike and glares at the assistant.
"Henderson in Accounting—it's always Henderson—keeps scheduling lunch at 11:58 a.m. instead of noon. The system can't cope."
Somewhere deep in the mainframe, a sentient, cat-like algorithm was having a breakdown.
6/6 #hbp138 #sff #scifi
Then she sees it.
"It's..." she pauses (without sighing), rubbing her temples as the quantum servers anxiously offer a dozen worst-case scenarios, including two paradox implosions, a timeline fragmentation, and a mildly irritating inconvenience.
"...a Google Calendar."
5/6 #hbp138 #sff #scifi
Immediately, her neural interface floods her brain with more information than any sane person should ever have to process before lunch.
The chronowavy thing jitters, the causality regulators throw tantrums, and in thee alternate timelines, she's already sighing in code.
4/6 #hbp138 #sff #scifi
"Ma'am," her assistant whispers, as if afraid the machinery might overhear. "We've detected a catastrophic temporal anomaly in sector seven."
Those are usually quite bad.
She sighs and jacks in, then sighs again. Then sighs a third time.
Oops. Sorry. That was my cat.
3/6 #hbp138 #sff #scifi
in what can ONLY be described as nervous anticipation, something has gone wrong—critically wrong.
Sure, it could be described as a "tense stillness," or that feeling when your cat watches a drinking glass teeter on the edge of a table—but there’s no cat in this story.
2/6 #hbp138 #sff #scifi
The Chronotech engineer's pupils dilate as glowing holographic warnings begin frantically flashing error messages in at least three different tenses. Fifty-three levels below Neo-Shanghai, in the forgotten sub-basements where the quantum mainframes hum,
1/6 #hbp138 #sff #scifi
Failed frauds fed the dark tree for centuries. Its roots tangled deep under fae forest. A crimson fruit bulged on its branches. Bloodorbs were Lord Leowyr's faithful gauge of destiny. Sweet juice felled any corrupt being who ate of it. Talision proved worthy after two satisfying bites.
#hbp138
#sff
#hbp138 #fiction #flashlit #horror Micro-fiction written by Eric Montgomery (mrericmontgomery.com) They deleted everything—posts, comments, digital roots torn from the ground. Rooting out corruption, they thought. But the algorithm whispered. Absence was a wound, raw and gaping. The void stared back. Watching. Waiting. Then—something whispered back. Not in words. In edits. Posts they never wrote. Photos of places they’d never been. A life they never lived. And then… messages. Sent from their account. Replies to friends. A voice exactly like theirs, laughing in videos they’d never filmed. They had erased themselves. But something else had filled the space. And it was better at being them than they ever were.
Enrico’s hands were trembling as he held the photo of his daughter at her school. No one was supposed to know where or who she was. He’d picked it out from under a wiper, thinking it was a parking fine.
He knew who he had to call.
‘If we drop the charges, will you leave her alone?’
#hbp138 #vss
From mighty oaks does the erstwhile trebuchet grow. From thence the evil despot or the greedy lord falls and a simple acorn tumbles into the hole, and here we go again.
#hbp138
Jin sat in the dining room with the rest of the other congresspeople and senators. He overheard some of them snickering at him at how small he was and they called him a "Baby Marine."
"Bitches," he yelled in his head. "Rooting out corruption my ass." It was like high school again for him. #hbp138
"She was starting to get her old self back. I remember thinking, I'm going to get my daughter back." Everyone at the table heard the anger in her voice. "Once he realised no one else would put up with him, he started corrupting her mind with lies again, like the d**il had taken over her!"
#hbp138
Under moonlight, she dug beneath the ancient oak. Not for treasure, but truth. Each shovelful revealed more rot—ledgers, deeds, tainted contracts. The roots had grown around them, feeding on decades of buried lies. By dawn, the tree would fall, and something honest might finally grow.
#hbp138
"Lock all the doors. Nobody leaves the Capitol."
The gathered politicians looked at each other in nervous confusion.
"Someone has been leaking information to the press. Someone isn't on board with our plans. Own up before it gets messy."
The sound of a chainsaw starting filled the air.
#hbp138
"Shield!" I yelled and slid behind Orri, catching her as she whimpered and fell. Green faded as darkness crept visibly through her veins. She felt impossibly light in my arms.
How dare he use Blight against a Dryad! I stripped off my gloves & lay my hands on the bare skin at her clavicle.
#hbp138
The corrupted tissue crumbles under the gentle scrape of a curette. It favors quantity over quality, over strength, right? So it yields, all the way down to the root. Healthy tissue is different. It resists, it makes a noise, like it’s screaming, “I belong here!” in protest. So you stop. #hbp138
The cackle of the madman resounded through the crypt. "Yes! Yes! I was right!"
The vicar hurried to see what it was and reeled upon seeing the veiny disgust pulsing up through the floor and into the ceiling.
"Evil!" the mad clamoured, putting his torch to it.
The ground screamed.
#hbp138
#hbp138
"What was your source for this article?" inquired Davis.
"What, the Councilman Ayres piece?" replied Francis. "I had a hunch he was embezzling the goods. And I was right!"
"You were?"
"The cops caught him gorging himself on blueberry pies."
"Finally, justice for the town bake sale."
short story I'm working on. The Lord of the town acts like a god. Women are nothing to him. He cuts out their tongues and treats them like slaves. But one girl has enough after he kills their younger sibling. She learns witchcraft & becomes the real god, built on vengeance.
#wip #booksky #hbp138
Photo: A tree stump is removed by a tractor. The stump had to be removed before building the new kiosk; furthermore, the materials used to try a reinforcement of the trunk prevented using a chainsaw. It was consequently decided to uproot it, to fell it without chainsaw while leveraging the stump to uproot it. Source: Moinats, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
Imagery: Rooting out corruption. #hbp138
