Michael S. Atkinson's Blog, page 16

Redshirt Relationship Blues

“Sorry I’m late,” Mel said. “Perimeter scransoms flanged like crazy-”

I held up the ship’s manual. “Been reading Engineering. We don’t have scransoms.”

She sighed. “So you know. Now what?”

“I just got through with the Captain. Requested reassignment. It’s over, Mel.”

Aftermath of Fire

In the city ash

I stand alone, with scorched cape.

I have saved the day.

I have destroyed the bad guys-

And also, everyone else.

***

What choice did I have?

All the other capes were gone.

I was there. Alone.

My powers are atomic.

There was no choice left. Was there?

This is me, experimenting with a tanka. A form so nice, I did it twice. Anyway, this one’s in the Megverse, which includes Between the Fire and the City, A Better Place Than This, Hello There!, and the latest, And Lightning, With Its Rapid Wrath. 

Avast!

He sailed by warp thrusters, not canvas and wind. He had a laser eyeball, not a patch. Still, Brandon Skybeard considered himself a pirate, by jingo.

Enter the Wombat

Previously in the adventures of Gaseous Girl, our heroine was attempting to investigate the origins of Lady Emma Featherson-Cloud when she was suddenly attacked by her nemesis, Hiccup Holly. Holly is now threatening to explode a schoolbus unless Gaseous Girl surrenders. Roll film! 

“I can’t believe you’re threatening to explode a loaded school bus!” Gaseous Girl said. This rather obvious statement had a motive; Gaseous Girl wanted to stall Hiccup Holly as long as possible in hopes that something would develop to break the standoff. Maybe Natalie would swing by with her nigh-invulnerability, or Lucy with her lightning bolts.

“Yeah, and I’ll do it in the next ten seconds unless you surrender, like, now!” Hiccup Holly said. “Ten!”

If there was one thing Madeleine hated, it was a countdown. “But, the children!” she exclaimed desperately. “Their education! The classrooms of America hold the future leaders of tomorrow!”

“Oh, please. That is so cliche,” Hiccup Holly said. “Besides, you know what kids are like these days. Future America will thank me. Nine.”

“Cliche? Cliche?” Gaseous Girl snapped. “What’s more cliche than the Bus Full of Innocents thing you’re doing here? I’m surprised you aren’t setting up a Sadistic Choice by threatening to explode my Love Interest!”

“Funny thing. I would’ve, but I couldn’t find your Love Interest. I’m not even sure you have one. Eight.”

Gaseous Girl smiled. “Well, sucks to you, then, because I do have one. We’ve got a date planned for Saturday night!”

“Oh, sure you do,” Hiccup Holly said. “Sure. Seven.”

Madeleine actually didn’t have a date for Saturday; she hadn’t yet responded to Evan’s request about their next meeting. But she wasn’t about to tell her nemesis that. “Yes, in fact, I do. We’re going to have a nice low-key coffee date at….” With horror she realized she was blanking on the name of the coffee place.

“Liar!” Hiccup Holly said, chortling. “Six!”

“You’re threatening to explode a bus; you’ve hardly got the moral high ground here,” Gaseous Girl commented.

“Oh yeah? Well…..yeah.” Hiccup Holly paused, not sure what to object to that. “Five?”

“Don’t you have any conscience at all? I know you’re not totally messed up. We stopped that apocalypse a while back, didn’t we?”

“Hey, I don’t want the world smashed up because of some stupid collapsing anomaly, ‘kay? I’m still evil. Four.”

“And why not?” Gaseous Girl pressed. “Because if you were really absolutely evil you wouldn’t care if the world got smashed, would you?”

“I still want to, like, live, you know?” Hiccup Holly returned. “Three.”

“”Exactly!” said Gaseous Girl, trying hard to remember the speech and rhetoric class she’d taken in college. “Life! Life is good! Life has…hamsters, and summer rainbows, and shoes, and brown paper packages tied up with strings!”

Hiccup Holly’s eyes narrowed. “Wait a second, I know that line, that’s from the Sound of-”

There was a sudden wham. Hiccup Holly went flat on the ground. The bus rumbled by on its way, entirely unharmed. Gaseous Girl sighed in relief, as a figure in a cape and cowl skidded to a stop beside her. “Ah, good. I was hoping someone would show up. Hey, you’re new.”

“Yeah. I’m the Wombat.”

“The…Wombat.”

“Yep.”

“Oy.”

 

 

Collateral Damage

“Hi, Mom? Yeah, I’m gonna be late comin’ home. I was downtown during the invasion? Some masked dude totally wrecked my car. … I don’t know the guy’s name, Mom. He just grabbed my car and, like, smacked a robot with it. Jerk.”

And Lightning, With Its Rapid Wrath

The bandits had reduced life to basic essentials. Either people who came down the road had stuff, or they did not. If they did, you took their stuff, and killed them. If they didn’t, you killed them anyway on account of the disappointment. You hoped the people carried food, or useful things. Sometimes what they carried was weapons. That complicated things. The bandits had to work out how many weapons the people might have, and judge how good they might be at wielding them. If it looked to be anything more than a short, easily won scrap, the bandits held off, grumbling. They would hit the next group. There was always a next group.

They couldn’t have said why exactly there was always a next group. The bandits were a generation or two past economic principles. They didn’t know that this road was the primary trade route to the south, mainly because it followed the old interstate system. What they knew was that people came regularly down the road during the warm months, less so during the cold. And when the people came, the bandits took their stuff.

The leader of this particular group of bandits, a sturdy man known only as Red Sam, was on watch one cool morning when he saw two people walking down the road. One was a tall woman with white hair, whom he immediately discarded as a threat. The other was a shorter, younger man carrying a sling. Slings were dangerous, Red Sam knew. A sling-holder could shoot rocks at a distance, or use it in close combat to crack heads. Rocks were a ready supply of ammunition. Red Sam hesitated, for a moment. The man looked like he had practice. But he was only one. Red Sam had….a lot more than one.

He gave the signal, a sharp whistle. Immediately his followers charged down the hillside towards the road, waving sticks and yelling like furies. The man with the sling jerked in surprise, but managed to get off a shot towards the bandit in the lead of the descending pack. The bandit went down hard, but his companions kept coming. Red Sam watched safely from his post on the hill. When you were a bandit chief, you didn’t have to be in the front lines.

He had overlooked the woman. All the bandits had. Even the sling-holder wasn’t really watching her as he scooped up another rock and set himself to start whacking at heads. Then, quite suddenly, she spoke. “You had all better back off,” she said. “One chance. That’s it.”

The bandits didn’t listen. They surged forward towards the two companions. The woman sighed. “I didn’t want to do this yet…. ”

“Do what?” her companion asked.

She raised her left hand. It glowed, a bright fiery yellow. The bandits skidded to a collective halt. Red Sam had just enough time to realize that he really should’ve paid attention to both of the potential victims before he and his entire company disappeared in a terrific blast of light.

Merrick, dazed, staggered to his feet, the sling lying forgotten on the ground. “You… you’re her!” he blurted. All this time, and he hadn’t known.

“Yeah,” Margaret said wearily. “I’m her.”

\

I’m working on a Hero’s Journey type serial for Yeah Write. previous entries included Between the Fire and the City, and A Better Place Than This. I think we’ve moved into the Initiation element now. We’ll be here for a bit. 

A Neighborly Request

“May I borrow a cup of sugar?” gurgled Cthulhu.

“Yes!” squeaked the Earthling.

The Return of Hiccup Holly

It is a common mistake of our time to assume that everything worth knowing can be found on the Internet. Madeleine Smith had this same assumption when she set about fulfilling her latest client’s request: look up Lady Emma Featherston-Cloud, and find out what had happened to her after the tragic death of her fiance, who happened to be Madeleine’s client. She thought she’d get by with a simple Google search. At worst, she might have to click through to the second page. She was not at all prepared to find nothing.

Her client, Lord Weston Pembridge, had vaguely insinuated that he had lived fairly recently. Since he spoke English, Madeleine naturally concluded that he had lived in England. But her searches for recently deceased British lords turned up nobody resembling her client. So she went back farther, and farther, and farther. Still nothing. Madeleine had a rising inclination to swear at her computer screen. She suppressed this feeling with difficulty.  Instead, she decided to go to the library.

The librarians were first helpful, than increasingly apologetic. A thorough search turned up a yellowing paper that indicated someone by the name of Featherston-Cloud had owned a vineyard in France. The date was smudged and lost to history. Madeleine hunted up an atlas of France and tried to find the place. She had to hunt up an even older atlas before she found it. The Featherston-Clouds went back a long way, apparently.

She thanked the librarians, left the building, and blasted off into the sky. She flew about two blocks before, without any warning, a thunderous clap of sound smacked her from the air like a Ping-Pong ball. Gaseous Girl flamed up the moment her boots touched the ground. It could only be her nemesis: Hiccup Holly.

Hiccup Holly unleashed a torrent of profanity that, loosely translated, meant, “I intend to inflict serious bodily injury upon your person.”  Gaseous Girl objected to this in the usual way, by burping a barrage of flame-blasts at her. They went upon hiccup-blasting and flame-blasting each other for a while, generally wrecking the street, until Gaseous Girl finally got around to asking, “So what’s your deal this time?”

“I just heard the mayor’s giving you the key to the city!” *hic* *kaboom*.

Gaseous Girl rolled her eyes. “That’s it? Really? Jealous much? They give the award to everyone who does anything remotely decent around here. There’s been zillions of them. You don’t even get an actual key!”

“Well, it’s still stupid!” Hiccup Holly retorted. “And you’re stupid!” *hic* *kaboom*

Gaseous Girl dodged behind a Post Office box, which was promptly smashed to metal fragments by Holly’s latest sound wave. “Am not!” she shouted back. She knew it was a childish response, but she really didn’t know what else to say. Hiccup Holly wasn’t exactly interested in a civilized debate anyway.

“You know what else is stupid?” Hiccup Holly observed. “Buses.”

“What?”

Gaseous Girl whirled. Sure enough, right down the street came a yellow school bus. Worse, as it approached, she realized it was full of underprivileged children who were going on a field trip which would open their minds to the possibilities of education. One kid was waving a plush teddy bear out of a window. Hiccup Holly smiled balefully. Gaseous Girl sighed. “Don’t tell me. If I surrender, you won’t hurt the bus.”

“Exactly.”

“I could just flame-blast you.”

“Yeah,” Hiccup Holly said, “But is flame faster than sound?”

Gaseous Girl paused. “That…is a good question.” She rapidly considered it as the bus came on.

Hello There!

“You know,” Margaret said, “I contacted aliens once?”

Merrick sighed. “Really?”

“When I was ten. Constructed a subspace wave beacon.”

“And…?”

“I accidentally buzzed a Verinian War Cruiser during maneuvers. They very nearly attacked the Earth over it. My mother absolutely flipped.”

A Better Place Than This

The storm surprised Merrick. It came up suddenly, a howling downpour that made the river crossing impossible. He sat by the boat and waited. Margaret sometimes told stories of how people could once tell the weather for days off. But that had been before. There was no telling now.

The rain subsided at last, and Merrick was able to get across the river. He slowly tied up the boat, wondering when he might use it again. This would be the last trading run south for a while. Davis had explained, in his usual languid way, that his camp was buttoning down for the winter. “Nothin’ else we can spare,” he said, apologetically, drawing “spare” out into two syllables. “The salt’s about the last we have extra. And we wouldn’t let it go at that, but the doc needed glasses. Broke his last a while back.”

Merrick had understood. Life worked in cycles now. Summers you spent trading, taking advantage of the good weather to travel. Winters you buttoned down. Spring you took cover from storms, and hoped to survive to the summer. The one constant was that you worked, every single day. Margaret had stories of other times, whole days where people didn’t work at all. Merrick wondered how they had gotten anything done.

He passed the faded yellow bow that marked the road to the camp. Margaret had said that people used to eat meals in the crumbling building beside the bow. The ruin was hardly worth eating in now. Merrick was about to walk past it, when he thought he saw a shadow moving inside. He immediately went for cover.

Someone from before would have called out, demanded to know who was there, but Merrick wasn’t an idiot. Drawing a stranger’s attention to yourself was not a good idea in these days, especially when you were carrying valuable supplies like salt. You could get killed for salt.

He heard shuffling sounds inside, a pause, then a low voice. Merrick couldn’t quite make it out. Something about a number ten, and a drink….something yellow. Recognition dawned, but still Merrick waited. There was another pause. Then out of the ruin emerged Margaret, brushing back her white hair and blinking in the sunset. Merrick rose slowly, not wanting to surprise her. She noticed him. “Merrick. You waited for me. How kind.”

“Ma’am,” Merrick said, “what were you doing in there?”

“Remembering,” Margaret said. “Old habits. But never mind. I wanted to speak to you. I am leaving the camp tomorrow.”

Merrick was startled. It was awfully near winter to think about traveling, and Margaret had never gone on the trading runs anyway. “Where-”

“Merrick,” she said, “This is all wrong.” She waved to the ruins around them, and towards the distant river, and the dead city beyond. “All of it. It should not have been.”

“Can’t change things,” he said, with a stolid shrug.

Margaret smiled. “I once knew people who could. One of them had an idea. He said something about other worlds. Other choices. You walk right, and that’s one world. But if you walk left, everything might change.”

Merrick never quite understood her when she grew philosophical. “You want to go left? There’s nothing that way but forest.”

“Yes. And beyond the forest, somewhere, I knew someone who could change things, make them better. And since I have nothing else to do, I am going to find him. You coming?”

Merrick had no reason to say yes. She wasn’t his mother, or his grandmother, no relation at all. It was too close to winter. He had his own place to button down, and the rest of the camp to look after.It was ridiculous for anyone to just set off by themselves. But Merrick remembered the stories. There had been a better world once. If they could get that back….

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll sort out supplies. As long as we’re back before the first snow.”

This month’s focus on fiction at yeah write involves the hero’s journey. I thought it’d be fun to explore that in my favorite story form: a serial. I hope to make each element properly self-contained, yet keeping up with the broader arc. Margaret’s past, for example, is explored in Between the Fire and the City. This story involves the Departure element. Next up: Initiation!