Moe Lane's Blog, page 654
October 13, 2021
10/13/21 Snippet, DEATH SENDS A PACKAGE.
I need to increase daily output.
Patreon!“Any of that famous human intuition blooming, Liam?”
“It keeps trying to grow,” I replied, “but somebody’s blocking all the sunlight. Come on, Detective. You know we can’t turn it on and off like that. If it hits, it hits. Until then, I gotta investigate, just like you. Speaking of investigating: anybody see anything?”
“Just the body. It got found by a Mike Harding” — as usual for fae, Sunset made a hash of the ‘K’ sound — “while he was doing a delivery for the restaurant in front. Whoever did for Drowsy dumped him under the trash bags afterward. The restaurant’s supposed to have cameras watching the rear…”
“…But you can’t count on that these days.” Fae don’t like video cameras; they say it’s because of ‘radiation,’ which is the word they use for everything they don’t like about human technology. This close to Faetown, keeping a CCTV security system running was an uphill battle. A lot of places just stop trying. “When’s trash day?”
“Two days from now.” Sunset scratched where an ear would be, if it was my head. “I don’t know why the murderer thought that would help.”
FROZEN DREAMS and TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION are on sale for 99 cents!
Pick them up today! For the benefit of anybody coming in from Twitter or Facebook: FROZEN DREAMS is post-apocalyptic high urban fantasy detective fiction, and TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION is set in the same universe. Check ’em out on Kindle! And check out my Patreon!
Moe Lane
PS: …Sorry, folks. You gotta do your own advertising, these days.
Item Seed: the MID-WEST FLESH Freezer Trailer.
Saw a crate, misread the name on it, and the rest is history. Well, not history.
MID-WEST-FLESH-Freezer-Trailer-Google-DocsDownloadDescription: A fifty-three foot freezer trailer with eight back wheels and two rear doors. The trailer looks normal, on inspection, but there is no record of either the trailer (Baskerville National) or the refrigeration unit (Muñoz Coolant) manufacturers. The tires have the Goodyear logo, but their precise model remains elusive. Needless to say, there is no ‘Mid-West Flesh’ company currently active in the USA or Canada.
When found, the interior refrigeration unit contained: sixteen cases of beef; fourteen cases of pork; fourteen cases of poultry; six long bags, each containing a disarticulated human corpse (missing hands and heads); twelve smaller bags, each containing a similarly disarticulated corpses of what were at first believed to be human children, but are more likely an unidentified species of humanoid; six cases of twenty-four shrink-wrapped corpses of what to be exceedingly small, winged humanoids; and a package of unknown materials that was almost hot to the touch even inside the trailer, and spontaneously combusted five minutes after being removed from it. There was also a six-pack of Eagle Brewery beer, jammed in behind one of the crates of pork. All of the boxes are clearly labeled as ‘beef,’ ‘chicken,’ ‘human,’ ‘pixie,’ and so forth — and have FDA labels.
The Mid-West Flesh freezer trailer just showed up at a Maryland cargo facility, one morning. And that’s literal: eyewitnesses insist that the damned thing appeared in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment. Surveillance camera footage even backs this up: one minute there was nothing, then there was a period of interference, and afterward, there the trailer was. Fortunately for the company, the loading manager decided that this had to be some sort of terrorist-related activity, and immediately called Homeland Security. Well, he did take a little heat for that — but only until the investigators found the first human corpses.
After that, it was only a matter of time until this mess was dropped in our lap.The working hypothesis is ‘alternate dimension,’ but keep an eye out in case that’s disinformation. The primary question here is, Did the rest of the eighteen-wheeler come along for the ride? Because if it did, and somebody was in it at the time, then there’s somebody out there on the roads who presumably casually thinks human meat makes for good brisket. It would behoove everybody to find out if there actually is — and if so, to secure that person before he gets peckish. We can make trailers full of extra-dimensional meat disappear, sure. But cannibalistic rampages are surprisingly hard to cover up.
What’s that? Well, yes, naturally if the trailer came here via a hole in reality or whatever it’d be great to plug that, too. But it’s been several days by now. Generally, stable extra-dimensional portals tend to have enough ongoing traffic to notice.
October 12, 2021
10/12/21 Snippet, DEATH SENDS A PACKAGE.
Meet our hero!
Patreon!The name on my business card says Liam O’Toole, Private Investigator, and that’s barely a lie. ‘O’Toole’ wasn’t the last name I was born with; people expect a bit of the Celtic when it comes to investigators working Faetown. It was either change the last name, or do the brogue, and I can’t do a brogue.
I’ve been caught up in Faetown since there’s been one. Mostly I smooth out beefs between humans and Fae before the beefs start stampeding. The, ah, ‘Fair Folk’ sometimes have trouble remembering that unattended stuff still belongs to somebody, and the humans are… well, you know. Humans. You get problems. But you’re not supposed to get murder. Especially when a cold iron knife’s involved. The Fae were gonna get really pissed off about that, if it wasn’t resolved in a reasonable time.
The “…How? HOW?” ROBIN test footage scene video.
This is going around Facebook. PREPARE FOR GOBSMACKERY.
…I know, right?
Quote of the Day, How To Make All Of You Swear Using Only Twenty-Three Words edition.
…Sorry about that, but you needed to know.
Via Penny Arcade, who also notes the one possible out: the people doing this were also involved with Paddington. I haven’t seen those movies, but Tycho apparently has — and their quality was enough to make him worry about the insidious torment of false hope. I get that worry, I truly do.
The GURPS GIRL GENIUS Kickstarter drops 10/20/21.
I wonder how fast it’ll fund. Depends on the amount, I guess. Anything under twenty grand, blink and you’ll miss it. But if they’re trying to pre-fund a print run, it’ll be higher, and that’ll take longer. Like, say, a day.
GURPS Girl Genius is coming to Kickstarter this fall in physical form! You can click Notify Me to get an alert when the campaign launches so you don't miss out! -HShttps://t.co/f4AXDmhTRo pic.twitter.com/6UbzGx4pmf
— Steve Jackson Games (@SJGames) October 12, 2021
Moe Lane
PS: Of course I’m signed up to be notified.
The ‘Miskatonic Missives: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft’ Kickstarter.
The Miskatonic Missives: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft Kickstarter is a HPL Historical Society project, so that’s promising. What they did in each Missive was take one of HPL’s letters and annotate the heck out of it, with explanations of the cultural references; they also added original artwork and fiction, plus the trademark props that makes HPLHS’s stuff so much fun. The Missives look gorgeous and I wish I could afford the full set of three. I may yet talk myself into getting it.
