M.P. Fitzgerald's Blog, page 5

Everybody Dies: Cybercelestial

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Today’s short story was guest written by Shaeor, author of Chosen Shackles.

Cybercelestial.

The stratus pouring over the bridge was a solid haze of aerosol ice. Red emergency lights lining the concrete arches above led on into obscurity, their gloom falling on abandoned cars, each one a ghost sheathed in fog. A lone figure moved between them, his pale face lit in a dying glow.

Eyes hidden behind a black bar, his gaze scanned the sea of cars.

Samuel removed the cigarette stub from his lips, flicking it away.  “It’s bloody cold, Aamon. What are we supposed to be seeing here?” he said. The visor showed nothing.

He moved to the bridge’s edge, his vision piercing the fog but finding only black churning waves. The city below had subsided back into the crashing ocean, forming a treacherous rock bed to the horizon. Only this mad floating catwalk to nowhere remained.

It had all been blown to hell a while back. Millions drowned.

A drop in the damn bucket, he thought.

He stared down at the waters, then forward along the swaying bridge, suspended a mile over the Pacific. The Megalopolis was at his back.

“Where the hell are you, you tin can?”  He pressed his finger to his ear, turning his radio off and back on again.

Nothing.

The air stung his eyes as he flipped up his visor. Well below zero and falling and no clear purpose for being here. With his partner run off, Samuel’s mood was turning grim. He clenched his teeth, murmuring a curse.

He was the City’s man on the ground, responsible for reporting in the blindspots, the black zones, and keeping them clean. There were better leads to pursue than some drug den at the far edge of nothingness.

“Yet here I am…”

Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he marched on, flipping his visor back down.

Cars soon ran out as he went, the bridge growing bare. Putting civilization behind him and increasingly open waters beneath, he knew it had to be coming to an end soon. The tensile strengths of the materials could only hang out so far, he reasoned.

Finally, not even with his visor could he make out the Megacity’s light on the sky.

The bridge had barely started to tilt down with the force of gravity. He watched his step on iced asphalt a bit more carefully.

Suddenly, he saw something.

“What the hell…”

Constructed on the end of the bridge was an entire building. Stitched together out of car parts and scrap, it was a madcap den of ragged metal hanging on at the edge of oblivion. It was as if the bridge ran into a tunnel floating over the ocean.

Samuel drew from his holster with a subtle click, biometric light turning green on the handle, lethality set on. He wasn’t waiting for that damned scrap hunk to go in.

The building was massive, two stories tall from high arch to the road below. As he approached the welded behemoth, his visor showed only thermal and radio blackness. Only one explanation. The whole thing was shielded and caged.

He stopped where he was.

There was only one right way in any given scenario, he mused. The only problem is human blindness.

Samuel fished out a softball-sized orb from his coat pocket. As he tossed the ball out it popped open, a set of legs extending to catch itself in a crouch. The little mechanical spider appeared in his visor surrounded by an orb of rapidly forming datapoints. Its scan would carve out the building interior for him.

Assess the situation. Handle threats judiciously.  Always a right way,  he smirked.

The spider bot stopped dead under the crush of a boot.

Standing in the entrance to the metal face of the den was a tall man with long raven hair. He was unarmed, half sheathed in the shadow of the threshold, the jagged metal around him like teeth.

Samuel raised his gun, calling out. “State Inspector, hands up!”

The man didn’t move. He was stoic as he spoke. “Go back to the city, Street Sweeper. This is beyond you.”

“I said hands up!” Samuel stepped forward, both hands on his weapon. His eyes darted, searching for a trap.  This guy was too calm.

“There is only darkness here, and death for you. You still have time to turn back.”

“And I’m giving you one last chance!”

Sam found it. Tucked halfway behind one of the arch’s pillars was an auto turret ready to deploy. It would tear right through any armor he had, turn him into fucking swiss cheese.  With all the cars far behind him he realized,  this is the Killzone.

The situation is inviable.

“Inspector…” They cautioned.

Samuel swiftly holstered his gun and stepped back. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah… You may have a point, friend.”

“You’ve made a wise-”

Gunshots blasted.

Samuel pivoted to the sound’s source.

Aamon came striding out of the mass of cars, firing openly ahead.

Sparks flew in the mouth of the den as the man ducked out of the way.

Samuel heard the auto turret snapping to attention, training in and revving up wildly. He violently cursed his partner, thinking fast as bullets rained towards him.

How typical.

//////////

>earlier that day…

The rebar impaled him. Ribs split apart with a crackle to make its way. His hands grasped at the bloody metal.

Samuel cried out. “Shit! Oh, shit.” He struggled to focus, barely managing to consciously activate the nervous filter and block out the pain.

With that achieved, he forced himself to breathe out the tension, wheezing past the penetrating steel. He glared daggers at the man responsible.

A dusty gaunt man. Toothless and hollow-eyed, they paced around the ruin’s edge where Samuel was pinned. Beside them, a hulk was brimming with rage barely contained. It was a genetically engineered freak, some child roided from youth now bound by an externally visible wreck of a neural implant.

Damn sewer rats.

Samuel promised them, “You’re not going to get away with this.”

“Just you keep talkin’ officer, ain’t a thing we won’t do.”

“You’re already dead.” Samuel’s eyes locked onto his gun, off in the rubble behind the hulk. He’d lost it in the struggle, though several open holes in the beast showed what good it had done anyway. Through the half-wrecked cityscape around them, he could make out the sight of open waters.

They wouldn’t follow me there.

The gaunt man leaned in, pressing his hand down on the Inspector’s chest, compressing.

Samuel groaned.

“Ain’t enough blood… See that, Maurice? You’ve got nice guts, boy.”

“What do you know? There’s no flesh traders this far out.” The hulk presented an anomaly. Samuel was wracking his brain for what tricks he still had up his sleeve. He would ask questions later. After the shooting.

The gaunt man smirked. “I know circulatory redundancies when I see ’em. Probably some other nice upgrades, we go diggin’ round to find ’em, eh?” He spat.

Samuel scowled, taking a handful of the man’s shirt and pulling him in. “Like bio-grade explosives?”

Neither of them said anything after that. They didn’t even try to pull away. The tense silence lingered as the Inspector counted on his opponent to blink.

The man narrowed his bloodshot eyes. “Fuckin’ do it, then.”

They pulled back, grip lost.

“I knew it,” the man sneered. “We get you nice and wrapped up. Got a freezer with yer name on it, boy.”

Samuel checked his neural signal, finding no connection. The hulk moved in, ready to pull him from the rebar and put him on ice.

Right as he was about to panic, a little voice came through his ear.  “Mind the inconvenience.”

The hulk’s head exploded.

Gore showered down as the body fell sideways, crushing the other man. Samuel could actually hear the crackle and scream, then the quiet.

He lay on the rebar with the two men dead at his feet, himself looking around for the shooter. “Aamon?”

After a minute the robot came around a mound of rubble, rifle on his back. “Partner,” he called. “Good work.”

“I got skewered you bastard.”

“I calculated the odds of your survival before returning to the car for higher caliber weaponry. You came out in the better percentiles of projected performance.”

Samuel didn’t like how that sounded. Forget that. “You don’t leave a partner in the middle of a fight, Aamon.”

“The additional equipment was required.” The smooth white face of the robot was expressionless. “I am sorry you sustained injuries in my absence.”

He wiped the spit off his face. “Just get me off this damn thing.”

The robot hauled Samuel off the spike and to his feet. He handed him a small glue gun from his belt.

He sprayed the white foam on his wound. “We’ll replace the lung later.”

Aamon nodded. “Thermal scans are showing the area with heavy hostile presence. Enemy weapons and enhancements are far greater than expected. We have no ability to contact command, which means you are in charge, Samuel. What is your order?” He didn’t miss a beat.

The one thing he can be counted on for.

The noontime sun fell cloudless for once on the wrecked city streets, showing a clear way to their unassuming target. “The usual. We go in, kill everything that moves.”

“Understood.”

The Inspector reached down and picked up his pistol where he found it. “Otherwise, play it smart, rusty.”

//////////

Aamon had opened fire on the den, triggering its security. As the turrets revved up, Samuel acted quickly.

His hand flew out from his belt, brandishing a black box. With a snap, the outer casing exploded and the geometric pattern unfolded into a circular shield.

Bullets shattered against the material as he rapidly backed up. Cracks were forming along the shield, pieces breaking off at the edge.

He dove behind the closest car when the first shots started breaking through, one grazing his arm.

Aamon was there beside him, reloading.

“You nearly got me killed,” Samuel said, throwing away his tattered shield. His partner didn’t acknowledge him. “Is the damn car on its way?”

“Affirmative. Any moment.”

He heard it. Samuel looked to see the engines spitting fire. That shining black figure risen from under the bridge’s edge opened fire with its own gun, trashing the turrets before they could react.  The cop car hovered in the air rumbling, gunfire deadening.

Both of them stood up from cover. Samuel recovered his gun, still wary of traps. “Why the hell didn’t you radio me?”

“Damage from the gunfight disabled my ability. I calculated-”

He cut him off. “Don’t. Just don’t.” The den lay open before them. There was nothing to it but another frontal assault. “I don’t want to hear it. Let’s just finish the job. What equipment do we have left?”

Aamon raised his pistol. “Only what we hold.”

The earlier fight had wiped them out. Samuel checked his ammo. “Then I don’t think I need to hear the odds,” he said. Reckless. But he could see no other way through. Nobody else was coming to help. This was the job. “Nothing for it.”

“Indeed, Samuel.”

With their vehicle falling away into the cloud layer, they entered the black.

//////////

A hail of bullets sprayed out from the building ahead, forcing them behind a taco truck.

“They have detected us!” Aamon observed.

“Just tell me the count!” Samuel barked back.

“Forty-two, not counting quadrupeds!”

Fuck.  This was going to be costly. He made the decision. “Deploy the drones. We’ll see how they like that.”

“DEPLOYING DRONE RESERVE.”

Gunfire carried on, but after only a minute, shouting broke out. There came a terrible buzzing. Everyone knew that noise was  death.

Samuel could see them. Dozens of tiny quad-copters flooding in from around the edge of a far structure. Weapons immediately started firing into them, completely ignoring their truck.

The blinky swarm of death sped up.

Samuel took this moment to jump out of cover. The open street between him and the mall-front was a mad sprint to the next piece of cover.

The swarm honed in. Those that remained were a blur as they dive bombed.

The Inspector braced.  Fire bathed the entire curb, flowing into the mall and around the sides of his cover. The shockwave sprayed him in shards of glass. A deafening cacophony rumbled with each drone. It was over in an instant.

“Status report!?” Aamon called.

Am I dead?  Samuel pulled a grenade off of his belt. No. “How many left?!” He let that speak for itself.

“Twenty-nine!”

He chucked the explosive over. Another boom. Once out of cover he could see what was left of the building’s front. Just open air and charred concrete. There was motion inside, still. He moved in, armed and ready.  Aamon rushed up to the rear, rifle held high.

Samuel heard a faint beeping down the passage. An explosive being primed. “Get the anti-ordinance,” he said.

Aamon threw out a disk. When the blinking pipe bomb was chucked around the corner at them, it shot it out of the air. The detonation, so close to the attackers, brought more screaming. “Area clear,” the robot confirmed.

“Good. Move up.” Samuel took the back as Aamon was the first to clear the corner.  The immediate flash of gunfire had them both jerk backward, several rounds impacting the robot’s metal body.

“Damage sustained. I remain operational.”

“Fuck. I thought it was clear?”

“Clear in the immediate area. I did not predict a ranged shooter.”

Samuel had gotten a glimpse of the walkway. It was a clear line of sight almost a half mile to the mall walkway’s end and a shoe store. The remaining shooters were holed up in there. Racks barricaded the entrance with small cracks for firing out. “We have anything left?” he asked, checking his ammo.

“Four grenades, two scout drones, three magazines-”

“Put the grenades on the scout drone, send it on a path of cover behind the kiosks. Got that?”

Aamon quickly strapped them together and released the spider-like machine. “Chance of success is minimal.”

“Let’s up it, then. Go!”

Samuel pushed out Aamon, both of them ducking behind the first phone-case kiosk they found. Bullets tore down the length of the hallway, sparks and stuffing flying from various sources. They each laid down suppressing fire.

“Now!”

They moved up again. Aamon counted down the dead as he pulled the trigger on his rifle. With perfect aim, he kept them hunkered down.

Samuel moved up even further, keeping a distance to the walking drone up ahead.

“Reloading!” Aamon called.

Shit. The shooters immediately returned fire. With only tables nearby, Samuel dove into the closest storefront.

This time it was Aamon who shouted. Move up.

The drone made it.

Their barricades went up in a blaze and out in a flurry of shrapnel. Samuel was getting to his feet when he saw his partner sprinting by. They only had moments to breach before the remaining shooters recovered. It was a mad dash to beat them.

In frantic seconds, he made it to shoe store’s entrance, Aamon already inside. The lights were blown, only muzzle flashes showing the bullet-hell going on. Samuel quickly pulled down his visor and took the advantage, wading into the fray.

They moved methodically. Two machines, efficient and unhesitating. A burst of carnage quickly burning through.

It was over in minutes.

The two of them met up at the back of the store. Aamon pointed to a door. “Single remaining life-sign,” he said.

Samuel was catching his breath. “Let’s get wrapped up.”

The door flew open with a kick. What they saw within was a single spotlight falling on an occupied chair. The man tied there was bloodied and limp, whimpering quietly.

Some kind of interrogation.

Samuel picked up a crusted hunk of metal from the floor. He turned the brass knuckles over in his hand.

The man in the chair looked up. “Oh, God. You are here to help me?!”

The visor returned a criminal profile from the memory banks. Sam grimaced. “You could use it,” he agreed. “You had some information they were trying to extract? That’s why you’re here?”

They hesitated. “I am innocent. Not like these men.”

“No, not innocent. I’ll tell you what. Just tell me why you’re in this spot and we can all go home. It’s been a long day.”

Only silence.

“What was the information, Yuri? There had to be a reason for this.” The Inspector was slowly slipping on the brass knuckles. He cast a glance at Aamon, who stepped back. This was how things were done.

“There was nothing!” Yuri cried.

“There’s always a reason, Yuri,” he sighed. “For everything.” The first strike sent teeth flying.  “Always.”

//////////

The den was pitch black. As they followed the initial set of passages, there was no rhyme or reason to the layout. It was a labyrinth of rusty metal and wires. Thousands of wires.

“There is a disturbing electrical field contained here…” Aamon said. “It is conscious.”

“What?” Samuel tried to whisper. “Shut up.”

They were hunched over now, practically wading through lines and cables. Aamon suddenly stopped, blocking the way. He looked back. “You must leave and reassess. The risk-”

Samuel grabbed the robot. “I told you not to tell me the odds, goddammit. This is the only option we have. It’s best by that shitty merit alone. Our mission is to clean up. No survivors. No retreat. That’s the damn job.”

“…No, Inspector. I am worried it is more.”

“You have something useful to say, then spit it out.”

Aamon slowly shook his head. He started forward again.

I am not dying tonight. Damn this partner to hell.

The wires were falling away.  They were able to stand up, entering into an open chamber.

Immediately, a blinding flash of light split the darkness. Samuel instinctually ripped off his visor, squinting to adjust his eyes as the chamber came into clarity.

He heard the raven-haired man’s warning. “Drop your weapons. Or else.”

Samuel saw. The circular chamber’s floor was a singular flow of wires. Every colorful line led to the figure at the opposite end. A lone old man surrounded by a halo on the wall behind them; a rainbow of childlike art. With the wires running into his back, the elderly form sat in a contented bliss, his eyes shut.

His guardian spoke again. “I said drop them! Or we all go down.” Their thumb hovered over a radio detonator.

Any amount of explosives could bring this bridge down.

Samuel threw his pistol away. But when he looked, Aamon still had his weapon trained on the Guardian. He raised his hand. “Aamon. Even you’re not that fast. Drop it… Aamon? Aamon… That’s an order!”

They obeyed.

“…Fuck you,” he cursed the machine. Finally, his eyes on the detonator, the Inspector addressed the Guardian. “Now,” he said. “What is this that you’d die to protect it?”

“I swore to defend the Apostle. At any cost.”

“Killing him would achieve that?”

“I cannot let it touch him.” The guardian was looking away.

Samuel followed his line of sight to Aamon. “What the hell?”

“We will prevail…” Aamon charged the Guardian, completely ignoring the detonator.

The raven-haired man dropped it. His arm jutted out, a holographic projector flaring to life, forming a geometric symbol in the air. It glowed white, the image forming in the air like a shield.

It stopped the robot dead in his tracks.

Samuel pushed through his confusion and ran for the man. The Guardian’s hand reached into his jacket, flinging out a black disk. It clung to Samuel, sending pulses of electricity through his flesh. The Inspector collapsed.

Aamon wasn’t making any progress, struggling to move his feet. The hologram had transfixed and frozen him, the hack breaking through his visual systems.

Through his convulsing,  Samuel managed to rip off the taser and pull a knife from his boot. He stood, stretching out locked muscles, and moved in.

This ends now.

The raven-haired man had one hand tied up projecting his rune when he saw Samuel approaching. He couldn’t hold out like that.

As the Inspector went in to stab, the man dropped his projection, redirecting the momentum around. Samuel plowed into Aamon, toppling them both.

The Guardian threw off his coat. Tattoos sleeved his arms, glowing brightly. From his belt, he withdrew and extended a baton, standing ready.

“You will never touch the throne, Demon,” he said.

A lunge from ground level put Samuel into close proximity with him. They locked weapons, Sam’s knife inches from the Guardian’s neck. The baton broke free, swinging back around to disarm him and then again straight for the jaw.

Samuel fell back, head ringing. Just as he was about to be hit again, he watched his attacker’s head jerk.

The gunshot’s echo faded as the man fell dead on the floor.

“Damn,” Samuel swore. “Right in the mouth.” He stood and dusted himself off, spitting blood. He took a look around, at the wires and lights, then to his partner. “Thanks for the-”

Aamon shot him.

Twice through the chest, the impacts staggered him.

Samuel’s eyes widened as his last functional lung filled with blood. He sputtered “…You fucking…  what?”

The fall to his back came with a stabbing sensation. Landing right beside the old man still wired in, his vision spun and his thoughts raced.

“Some things are not for you to know, human.” Aamon leaned down, pulling the transmitter from Samuel’s neck and plugging it into his own. “Cleanup will be here shortly,” he said. “I’m sorry it has to end this way.”

“I’ll kill you,” Samuel hissed.

“We both know you’re not bio-explosive.” The machine was staring at the old man. “Just know, you’re dying for a higher cause. This man must be brought before the choir. With him, we can ascend.”

Choking as he shifted, Samuel tried to prop himself up to work his hand behind his back. He seethed at how ironic his luck was. If there was any other option… he thought. But the truth came in a mantra. There was only one right way, now. “…I guess… I’ll just… have to take your word for it, tin man.”

“Indeed.”

“Damn it all.” His finger found the detonator under his back.

The bridge buckled beneath them and the lights burst.

The deafening snap of steel cables echoed through. All at once the world upended.

Gravity ended as they entered freefall towards the Pacific.

Aamon shot wildly at Samuel as they were tossed around the chamber, some hitting and some missing.

The seconds till impact lasted an eternity. But it all came to an end quickly.

They were dashed against the ocean in the most powerful impact he’d ever felt in his life.  Samuel’s mind slipped into the sound of crashing waves, water rushing in. The chamber had burst apart, the sea now raging around him. His eyes struggled to open in the salt-spray.

What he saw in the dark was an old man, sitting on the waters as if they solid ground. The sight faded like a mirage into the wind and he was alone in the storm again. Aamon had already been swallowed by the deep.

Sam didn’t fight the waves. He knew he’d played as smart as he could. There were no moves left.

This was the game’s end.

He was satisfied with that, sinking into the icy abyss.

He never asked for freedom.

This story was guest written by Shaeor of Chosen Shackles. If you liked this short story leave a comment and consider voting for their serial at The Top Web Fiction. Check in next week for Everybody Dies #4.

The post Everybody Dies: Cybercelestial appeared first on revfitz.com.

Everybody Dies: Scourge

[image error] Today’s short story was guest written by Re’sheet Schultz, author of Codex.

Scourge

 

The research team looked like ants in the scry-screen, crawling around the laboratory as they completed the ritual’s final steps. When the spell was powered on, it let out a brief flash of brilliant orange light that made Tarrel wince and shade his eyes. The ants milled about as if their hill had just been kicked over, swarming this way and that, huddling over the piece of enchanted metal.

Tarrel stood up and left the viewing room. Renna looked up as he entered the laboratory and waved him over, a broad smile on her face. She held out her hand, offering him a bracelet made from some shiny metal; it looked like two flat chains had been woven together into a thin, knotted band. “Is that the eternium?” Tarrel asked. “Why a bracelet, and not a sword or spear?”

Renna stepped away from the five other people as an argument developed over one of the experimental readings. “It’s a gift.” She gave him an impish grin. “You’re allowed to enjoy the fruits of your labor, you know.”

The eternium was slick against his skin, as if it had been greased, and it had a mirror-perfect reflective surface that threw the bright overhead lights back into his eyes. He angled it away from him and stared at the gleaming metal, trying to dredge up the appropriate emotion, as if he could summon it into being by sheer willpower.

Logically, it should have been easy — he had all the pieces: a beautiful girlfriend (if occasionally annoying), a prestigious research position, and a talent for magic that made most other wizards look like fumbling idiots. And of course, he was a Raal, entitled to all the benefits that came with higher civilization: immortality (or a very long life anyway), near-absolute freedom to do as he pleased (as long as that didn’t impinge on others’ freedoms), safety (from physical harm). Any non-Raal would kill to be where he was, and it was a safe bet that most Raal who knew him were at least a little envious of his status. But happiness, like an improperly drawn ritual, refused to manifest… and all Tarrel could feel was a bleak sense of anticlimactic fatigue as he looked into the shiny mirrored surface.

Renna moved closer and touched his arm. “Hey. What is it?”

He forced a smile onto his face and slid the bracelet onto his wrist. “Nothing.” The rest of the team was gathered around an Aether screen. Part of Tarrel wanted to join them, plunge back into the soothing distraction of work, but all at once he couldn’t stand the thought of doing so. He turned back to Renna, forcing the words through numb lips. “Let’s go out together.”

They could have taken a teleportation circle or a flier, but Tarrel wanted to walk so they strolled the floating streets of Ur-Dormoth together. It was nighttime, but the walkways were all lit with bright white mage-bulbs. Aircraft hummed overhead, like gigantic wingless insects, disappearing into the night as they left the city.

“Ever been to a mite city?” Tarrel asked as they walked.

“No.”

“I have,” Tarrel said. He brooded for a moment, staring out at Ur-Dormoth, sprawled across the clouds like a tangled pile of glittering lace. “They’re cramped, and squalid, and they stink of death. It’s like being in a corpse.”

Renna shrugged, seemingly unconcerned by the fate of however many millions of less fortunate people lived on the land below them. “Why do you bring it up?”

“I don’t know,” Tarrel said. “Have you ever wanted something and really worked for it, only to find that once you had it, you didn’t want it anymore?”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Renna said. “Why would you work for something you don’t want?”

Tarrel sighed. “Never mind.”

They went to the Eyrie, where Tarrel tried to look interested in the menu before giving up and ordering at random. The food arrived a few minutes later, looking decadent and delicious: creamy soup, flower-shaped pastries, a platter of fried onions. Tarrel ate mechanically, doing his best to appear as if he was enjoying it, but all he could think about was the emptiness he felt inside.

“How’s the food?” Renna asked.

Tarrel glanced at the pale white soup he was eating and tried to decide what to say. “It’s good.”

Renna leaned back in her chair. “I knew you would like it.”

“How long do you think it’ll be before we can start mass-producing the eternium?”

Renna blinked, caught off guard by the sudden change in topic. “A few more weeks? Once we do, the applications are immense.” Her eyes were practically glowing with excitement. “What would it be like to live in a tower taller than the highest mountain?”

Tarrel stirred his soup, wishing he could share her energetic happiness. “That’s a long way to fall.”

Renna chuckled, a delicate sound like tinkling crystal chimes, and tossed her sleek white hair over her shoulder. “I’m sure they’ll have protective enchantments. It would be quite the scandal, to be the architect responsible for the first death in centuries.”

“They don’t let you Merge,” Tarrel said, only half paying attention to the conversation.

“What?”

“Murder. If it’s deliberate, your thread is cut. No children.” Tarrel made a snipping motion with his free hand. “But if they think you meant to kill, then it’s a life for a life.”

Renna stared at him. “How do you even know that?”

Tarrel shrugged, already losing interest in the topic. “Memory spell.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“It’s too difficult to cast for most people,” Tarrel said. Though that would change, if he ever got the framework functioning.

“What’s the framework?” Renna asked.

Tarrel realized he had spoken out loud. “Just a project I’ve been working on. You speak a command, and the framework casts the appropriate spell for you. All the power of a ritual, none of the difficulty.”

Renna blinked. “That seems pretty useful. How’s it going?”

Tarrel blinked, not sure if he had heard her correctly. “Nobody else seems to think it would be.”

“Are you serious? The applications for research alone would be immense. Imagine never having to cast another scrying spell.”

Tarrel shrugged and tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “They said it would be too inconvenient, or that the magic would lack power, or any of a hundred other excuses.”

Renna reached across the table and put her hand on his. “It sounds amazing to me.” Tarrel met her eyes, searching for any hint of insincerity, but all he found was honest admiration. “Can I see it?”

Tarrel shifted in his seat and looked away. “I, uh, sort of abandoned it. Nobody seemed to want it and I ran into some thorny problems, so it seemed like I was just wasting my time.”

“Well take it out of storage! Don’t worry about them, once they see what it can do they’ll all change their mind. Your legacy would be etched in the stone of history, right up there with Elmar the Great and the Risen Kings.”

Renna frowned and held up a hand to forestall his reply. “One moment. Someone’s trying to talk to me on the Way.”

Tarrel watched, but Renna’s expression gave away little. Half a minute passed before she finished. “What was it?” Tarrel asked.

“The research lab.” Renna’s face twisted in disgust. “Apparently they decided to run another batch of eternium, but someone messed up one of the protective spells.”

“Oh,” Tarrel said. He knew he ought to say something more, but somehow he couldn’t bring himself to care about the fate of the researchers. If they couldn’t even cast a simple set of wards, they deserved what they got.

“They’ll be fine,” Renna said, apparently mistaking his silence for concern. “At least as long as nobody screws up their healing magic too.” She hesitated, then stood up. “I’m sorry to cut this short, but I really ought to be there.”

“It’s fine,” Tarrel said. “I’ll head back to my house. Maybe work on the framework some.”

Renna smiled. “I still want to see it.”

She walked over to the teleportation circle in the corner and activated it, vanishing with a soft pop. Tarrel was left in the deserted restaurant — or not quite deserted. There was a man, washing the tables with a cloth. Tarrel watched him as he worked his way across the room, until he was near enough to talk to.

“Why do you do that?” Tarrel asked.

The man looked up. He had a rough, honest face. “Why not?”

“You could let the golems do it. Or, if you wanted to make sure it was done properly, you could use magic. Why do it by hand?”

“Sure. The golems would probably do it better than me, and a spell could do it faster and better. But that’s not the point. Haven’t you ever found pleasure in work?”

Tarrel was on the point of saying no when he reconsidered, remembering all the times he had thrown himself head-on into inventing a new ritual or improving an old. “I suppose so. But my work isn’t something a golem can do and, when I’m done, I have something at the end.”

The man chuckled. “And when I’m done wiping a table, I have a clean table.”

“Only until someone comes in here and dirties it again,” Tarrel pointed out. He paused, struck by a sudden thought. Was that the problem, the reason for the hollowness all his achievements seemed to have? Even as one of the brightest researchers of the century, his name would inevitably be forgotten, in a hundred years, or a thousand, or ten thousand. But if he was able to create a new paradigm for magic… then he would be remembered.

“If I’m still around, I’ll get to enjoy cleaning it again. If I’m not, well, like you said: the golems can do it better anyways.”

Tarrel blinked, startled by the man’s voice. “Uh, right,” he said. He stood up. “I need to go.”

He took the teleporter back to his house and went down to his private laboratory. White mage-bulbs flared on as he entered the spacious room, illuminating the Aether screen set into one wall and the stone floor, still etched with an old circle. He cleared it, resetting the solid granite slab to its original, perfectly smooth, state.

Tarrel spent the rest of the night hunched over the Aether’s display, tweaking and changing the framework. Every so often, he would stand up and etch it into the granite floor with an eye-searing burst of brilliant orange light. Each time, the spell failed in a new, unexpected way, and Tarrel was sent back to the Aether to try to find the source of the problem.

The days merged into weeks, which flowed into months. Tarrel enchanted himself with restorative spells so he didn’t have to eat or sleep. Such behavior was considered unhealthy by most people, but it wasn’t the first time Tarrel had lost himself to the grip of work, and he no longer cared if his friends whispered behind his back or shook his head when he wasn’t looking. Like Renna had said, they would change their mind soon enough.

Renna knew enough to recognize the signs of Tarrel’s obsession, but she didn’t stop coming over to visit him. The door chimed regularly at noon every third day. They sat on one of Tarrel’s couches for ten or twenty minutes, talking until Tarrel could no longer keep himself away from the laboratory and made his excuses. For him, the time seemed one long hazy blur, interspersed only by slight, inching progress as obstacle after obstacle rose up to meet him and was defeated.

Eight months later, Tarrel stood before the granite slab and powered up the latest spell. “Fire,” he said, envisioning the unlit torch in the corner igniting. He didn’t really expect anything to happen and was thus shocked when it erupted into orange flame. His hands trembled with excitement as he stood up and approached the crackling brand. Magic! By talking! At last, it was working.

“Freeze,” Tarrel said. A chill swept over him as the torch’s flames guttered out. Water condensed on the blackened stump, then froze solid into a glittering sheen. A smile spread across his face and something warm and… happy rose inside him, like winter ice cracking and melting as summer approached. Renna’s words came back to him: Your legacy would be etched in the stone of history and he threw his head back, laughing.

Further experimentation revealed that the framework had exceeded his wildest expectations. He refined the spell, reducing the energy it consumed and increasing its potency until at last, it was fit for use in a globalization ritual. Everyone in the world, if they had the basic training necessary to use magic at all, could now access the framework.

Tarrel reached into the Way, calling for Renna. She responded at once, as if she had been waiting for him. What is it?

Come to my house, Tarrel sent back. I have something to show you.

He severed the telepathic link and stood up, unable to stop grinning. The eternium bracelet gleamed in the corner of the laboratory where he had tossed it and he went over and picked it up, turning it over in his hands. General Yenja had been excited about the eternium project. What would she think of the framework? But that was a matter for another time — right now, he wanted to see Renna’s face when she saw what he had built. Tarrel slipped the bracelet onto his wrist and hurried up the stairs. Behind him, the mage-bulbs blinked out and the laboratory plunged into darkness.

Renna knocked on the door several minutes later. Tarrel glanced at it. “Open the door,” he said.

It swung aside, revealing a harried-looking Renna. “What is it?” she asked as she came inside.

Tarrel grinned and pointed at a glass of water sitting on the table. “Watch this,” he said. “Freeze the water in that cup.”

The surface of the water turned frosty and opaque, spreading downwards with a deep cracking sound. All at once, the glass shattered, spraying shards and chips everywhere. Tarrel jerked, surprised, then broke out into a laugh. “Sorry,” he said. “I should have been more specific in my wording.”

Renna touched the solid cylinder of ice, setting it off into a lazy spin. It twirled across the table until Tarrel caught it with one hand. “How do you like it?” he said.

“Impressive. Can I try?”

“Sure. I put it in the Way, so you should be able to access it just by thinking about it.”

Renna gestured at the ice in Tarrel’s hand. “Melt.”

Nothing happened and Tarrel chuckled. “It takes some getting used to. Try starting to cast the spell normally, then use the framework.”

“Melt.”

This time, the frozen water turned warm and started to dissolve, gushing all over Tarrel’s hands. He tossed it back onto the table before it could soak his clothes. “Freeze.”

Nothing happened and he gave Renna a rueful smile. “My mana cache is empty.”

“Here.” Renna withdrew a fat diamond pendant from beneath her shirt and held it out to him. “Use mine.”

“No,” Tarrel said. “I have a better idea.”

He reached out with his mind, drawing on the inert mana present all around and concentrating a small amount of it, refining it into the potent stuff that was normally used for spells. Only a drop, just enough to kickstart the spell he had in mind. “Refine one nex’s worth of mana. Put it into my cache, then cast two copies of this spell, using mana from the cache.”

It was the longest framework-boosted spell he had cast, but it went off without so much as a tug of mental effort. A thin trickle of mana pulsed through him, then died off as the spell became self-sustaining.

“Did you just — ”

“That’s right,” Tarrel said. “I just revolutionized the mana collection industry.”

Renna frowned. “Maybe you ought to slow down.”

“Slow down? Why? I feel great.”

“That’s because you’re using those invigoration spells.” Renna looked around, frowning. “Do you feel that?”

It was a tingle, like an electric wind brushing over Tarrel’s skin. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the diamond cache, shielding his eyes as it began to glow an intense white. “Behold,” he said. “The future of the Raal.”

Renna stared at the diamond. “That doesn’t look right. Your new spell — ”

“Not a new spell — a new paradigm. For centuries, we have cast magic in essentially the same way. Spells have gotten better, thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of researchers like you, but it’s time for something different. Instead of engaging in a mental wrestling match, we shall simply give an order as if the magic is a servant.”

“Your refinement spell has a — ”

Tarrel slammed his fist on the table. “Shut up!” The framework turned his order from wish into reality and he felt a sudden spike of shame. Using magic on a fellow Raal? What was he doing? But she wouldn’t see. He continued in a calmer voice. “It’s people like you who delayed this project by almost fifteen years. All that time, wasted.”

He felt the pulse of magic as Renna broke through the framework’s silencing spell. “Listen to me,” she said. The urgency in her tone gave Tarrel pause. “That diamond is about to overload. It’s the same mistake you made with the ice.”

Tarrel glanced at the incandescent diamond cube, mentally going over the wording he had used with the super-refinement spell. The same mistake he had made with the ice? The air around him felt… thin and weak, while the space around the cube seemed to shimmer and warp. What was going on? And then he got it.

He stared at Renna, horrified. “Quick. Give me your cache.”

He began the transfer spell, reverting to the more familiar mental casting in the moment of crisis. It was still incomplete when the cube exploded with a chiming sound that reverberated through his bones. Pain stabbed up Tarrel’s hand and he screamed, flailing around and spraying blood from his two missing fingers. Threads of orange refined mana flickered all around him like a hazy fog and the room dissolved into panic as the magic ran wild.

Renna’s hair stood straight up. She had time for a single terrified scream before lightning discharged from her body. Bolts radiated out in every direction, crackling and splitting the air apart, disintegrating her body into hot black flakes. Some of them landed on Tarrel’s face and he stumbled back, staring at the black scorch marks on the floor.

Tarrel’s weight vanished all at once and he floated off the ground, crashing into the ceiling before gravity reasserted itself and threw him back to the floor. The awful ringing of the broken cube continued to echo through the room, growing in strength instead of fading. It tore through his head as he wrapped his ruined hand in his shirt and sprinted for the door — only to have the space in front of him warp and elongate. The door receded away, until it was like he was looking down a long corridor.

The first rips began to appear, fuelled by the still-continuing refinement spell as it pumped refined mana into the shards of the diamond cube. It was as if reality was a sheet of glass, fracturing and splitting. Black cracks shot through the room as the chiming hammered through Tarrel’s body. They began to glow, dim white at first, then growing in strength. They pulsed. Flickered. And as Tarrel’s hand reached for the door handle, they exploded.

Pure, white light washed out into the city, spilling from the research laboratory where Tarrel had conducted his fatal experiments. People screamed and fled. Some tried to cast spells, only to have their magic go awry in a wash of strange effects. Teleportation spells transported heads without their bodies. Flight enchantments sent their users hurtling into buildings. Wards imploded, crushing that which they were meant to protect.

Ur-Dormoth was just one city out of hundreds, but the Way, a global telepathic link which united all Raal, was irreversibly tainted. Less than a year passed before Tarrel’s name was forgotten, but in the end he got his wish: an eternal, undying legacy — in form of a vast, magical wasteland sprawling across a quarter of the continent.

This story was guest written by Re’sheet Schultz of Codex. If you liked this short story leave a comment. Check in next week for Everybody Dies #3.

The post Everybody Dies: Scourge appeared first on revfitz.com.

Everybody Dies: Rainy Days

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Today’s short story was guest written by Rhythm, author of Touch.

Rainy Days.

Pre-school, her:

The boy was crying again. Why did he always do that? It wasn’t like it was that bad. She watched from the sand pit, interested, as the biggest of the trio around him gave him a shove. Not a hard shove, but it unbalanced him, nonetheless; sent him stumbling back into one of the others, overbalancing and falling on his hindquarters with a thump. He dropped his ball, the little sphere of it bouncing a few times on the dusty ground. He didn’t try to pick it up, too busy raising an arm to wipe a sleeve across his eyes. The older boy stooped for the ball and grabbed it, saying a quiet word to the other two before stepping away. They didn’t care about him. They just wanted the ball.

She watched him a moment longer as he sat there, seemingly lost to the world around him, before he raised his face towards the cloudy sky, closed his eyes, and began to wail. She rolled her eyes. Why were boys so lame? She let out a huff, then pulled herself to her feet.

Right. Time to deal with this.

She made no effort to be quiet as she stomped over to the boy; it wasn’t as if he’d have noticed either way, with all the noise he was making. Once there, she squatted down beside him, thought for a second, and came up with the perfect plan. She extended an arm towards him, one finger outstretched from the rest, and pressed the tip of it against his cheek, pushing him sideways hard enough to unbalance him again.

“Poooooke!”

The boy stopped his mewling, more out of surprise really than because he felt any better. He opened his eyes and gazed across at her in a bleary sort of confusion.

“Hi!” She smiled. “I’m Kayley. Wanna come make sandcastles?”

“W-wha?” The boy began, but he didn’t really get any further; she’d already taken hold of his wrist, tugging him back towards the sandpit. Kayley had learned one vital lesson in her short life, and that was that to get what you want, you don’t wait for people to agree with you before you start doing things.

“What’s your name?” She asked, glancing back at the boy as he stumbled along in her wake, bobbing like a heavier than average balloon.

“Uhh… Liam? I-I’m Lia-”

“Nice ta meetcha, Liam!” She interrupted, grinning widely at him as they reached their destination, taking him by the shoulders and pivoting around on the spot to half shove, half throw the boy into the sandpit. “Now, we’re gonna make the best sandcastle that’s ever happened ever, kay?”

For a moment or two, the boy simply stared at her; then, tremulously, he allowed himself a smile.

“… Kay.”

She nodded approvingly as she plopped herself down in the sand alongside him, passing the quiet boy her spare spade. She gave him the brown one. The yellow one was hers, because yellow was better. It didn’t bother her when the clouds built up overhead, covering their sand pit with a light sprinkling of rain. It didn’t bother Liam, either. Sand was easier to work with in the rain.

Middle school, him:

“I don’t care what you say, the old Blade Runner was way better,” Liam said lightly, popping a chip into his mouth from the bag between them. “It had cooler fights and better detective stuff. Plus? Harrison Ford.” Kayley opened her mouth to reply, but he cut her off. “Before you say it, Harrison Ford, when he was cool and hot. Girls like that, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Kayley admitted grudgingly. “But so what? The new one’s got cute guys too, you know. Plus there’s way more stuff going on and the fight scenes are cooler to watch!” She paused there to shove a fistful of his chips into her mouth, munching loudly on them while looking him dead in the eye, daring him to comment. He didn’t. He knew a losing game when he saw one.

“Yeah, but it’s not just about cool fight scenes, though.” He muttered, reaching into the packet, his fingers searching for a moment, only to find it empty. He scowled at her and she gave him a sly grin, her lips parting to show a couple of chip fragments still stuck to her teeth. He shook his head. There were some times, just some, when he felt that she did these things just to annoy him. “And come on. You gotta admit you can’t beat the first one’s lines.” He pulled back for a moment, clearing his throat, then gave her his best android impression, gazing at the wall behind her to keep his performance pure. “All those… moments… will be lost in time. Like… tears… in… rain.”

He returned his gaze to her, grinning, only for the empty chip packet to hit him lightly in the face.

“You’re such a doooork,” she groaned, rolling her eyes. “Why do you even know that speech? It’s laaaame!”

Liam wasn’t looking at her. He was too busy staring at the empty chip packet. Kayley had been getting… frustrating, recently. He took a deep breath and stood up, snatching the packet off of the table. The snack theft was nothing new, but the teasing? That had amped up a notch recently.

“… I’m gonna get more chips.” He muttered, still not looking at her.

He walked away, crushing the chip packet into a ball in his fist and trying his best to ignore the call of: “Oh, come on, baby boo! Don’t be like that!” That echoed out into the hallway after him.

He stomped down the barely filled hallways towards his locker, fuming, and tossed the crumpled up chip packet into a bin on the way past. Why did she always do stuff to make him mad lately? It was infuriating. Why was she like this? It was like everything she ever did was planned to be just as annoying to him as she could make it. He checked his surroundings for teachers, before grumbling a few of his favorite curses under his breath.

He made it to his locker and put in the code on his lock, before giving it a tug. Nothing. Of course not. He always got it wrong when he was angry. He tried again. Nope. He had to mentally restrain himself from headbutting the locker out of sheer frustration. He forced himself to breathe deep, then very, very carefully, he entered the code. It clicked open. Finally.

He pulled his bag forwards and opened the lip, half-heartedly digging around inside it for the second chip packet. He always brought two along just in case Kayley decided to act like a thief again. He didn’t even know why he bothered acting surprised anym-

His thoughts were cut short when a finger flicked him hard in the back of the head, a pointed nail digging for a short moment against the skin. He let out a grunt of pain and turned to face whoever it was, ready to kill someone, when Kayley stepped forward and gently pressed her lips to his.

It tasted of salt. Salt and potatoes. His eyes went wide. His cheeks red. This… this was new. She pulled away, smiling impishly at him.

“Still mad?” She asked. Had he been mad before? He couldn’t remember. He didn’t think he’d been mad. There wasn’t any reason to be. Why did everything feel so warm all of a sudden?

“I-I uhh… you… Wha?” He tried, four or five distinct questions all fighting a losing battle for control of his shock-paralyzed tongue.

She giggled at him.

“Yeah. That’s pretty much what I was going for. Come on, nerd!” She grabbed his hand, pulling him back towards the cafeteria. “Keep telling me why I’m wrong about stuff.”

Highschool, her:

Kayley was laughing. She couldn’t help it. Liam was just too funny sometimes.

“Aww, C’mon, buddy,” she giggled, shifting forwards on the bed a little to wrap her arms around his shoulders. “I’m not even mad!”

“Please don’t,” he whined, still refusing to look at her. “Please? I… Look. It was the first time a-and I swear it doesn’t normally do that, and-” He was cut off there by another burst of laughter that, try as she might, Kayley just didn’t have the constitution to hold back. He stared at the bedsheets clumped pointlessly over his still mostly clad legs, his face glowing with the heat and intensity of a dying star.

After a few moments, she managed to force herself to stop and pressed her lips against his cheek.

“It’s okay, dude,” she murmured. “I guess I came on a bit too hard. Was I going too fast for you again?”

“… W-well,” he mumbled. “Turning up naked on my bed didn’t help, okay? I got… excited.”

This time, through an immense force of will, Kayley managed to keep a straight face as he spoke, even managing to look a little sympathetic.

“Well, that’s understandable,” she chuckled. “We both know I can be pretty exciting… Does that mean you’re giving up on me?”

“… No.” He grumbled eventually, grinning slightly in spite of himself.

“… And are you gonna just sit there and feel sorry for yourself when I’m right here and ready to go?” She asked, leaning forwards slightly to make him as aware as she could of her chest against his back. “Or are you gonna let loose for once and take me on an adventure?”

She hadn’t realized it was possible a moment ago, but if anything, Liam blushed even harder at that. It did the trick, though, because the boy laughed as he turned to face her, a hand settling lightly on her waist. He was shaking far less this time.

“I think I’mma go with an adventure.” He murmured, his eyes glittering slightly.

“Heh,” she chuckled, leaning in and resting her forehead on his. “There we go.”

College, him:

Liam prodded at the bag of pills on the small kitchen table of their two-person dorm room. Of course she’d gotten drugs. Why was he even surprised? What part of his best friend, girlfriend, and semi-acceptable roommate would not be the sort of person to wanna try these? She was an arts student, for fuck’s sake.

“… Are you asking my permission?” He asked, looking across at the couch on which she lay. “Cuz this’d kinda be the first time you did that, you know.”

Kayley shrugged, her external calm undershot slightly by the consistency with which she continued to avoid his gaze.

“Well, not permission,” she started, pulling at the edge of a second-hand cushion for something to do. “More like… well, I know you can get kinda uptight about this sort of stuff, and I… I wanted you to know, you know? I didn’t want to have to keep it a secret. So, are you okay with it?”

Liam thought about it for a long moment, then sighed.

“You said you got these at a party?” He asked.

“Yeah,” she replied, defensive. “But the guy I took ‘em from was on them, and he seemed fine the whole night, so I figured they’d be okay, right?”

“… I have two conditions to be okay with it,” he said slowly, lifting the pill bag up between them. She opened her mouth to say something, but he cut her off. “You stay with me the whole time… and you let me take two of them.”

Kayley was silent for a long moment at that, staring at him.

“You wanna try these?” She asked, cocking an eyebrow. “Since when?”

Liam shrugged.

“You always told me I should be more adventurous. Maybe I just feel like going on an adventure.”

“… Liar,” she grinned. “You just don’t wanna let me take all four of em, do you?”

“Do we have a deal?” He asked, ignoring her.

It was raining when the two of them stepped out of their dorm. Not a heavy rain, just a light pattering of droplets falling all around, ensuring that everything within the purview of the clouds would forever be slightly damp. His favorite kind of weather, to be honest.

They made their way across the campus in the dim light of the moon, heading towards their special place: a small grassy spot with a couple of benches, placed just between both of their respective faculty buildings. Lunches here were a little magical in a way, he thought.

“You really gonna do this with me?” Kayley asked when they finally reached the place, brushing wet hair out of her eyes with a hand. “Cuz I promise not to judge if you back out. It’s no fun if you don’t wanna do i-”

That was as far as she made it before he kissed her, enjoying one of the few moments in their time together when he actually had the chance to take the lead.

“You know your problem?” He smirked. “You think too much.” Then, without another word, he fished his half of the pills from his pocket and popped them in his mouth, tilting his head back in the rain for some water to swallow them with. He looked back at her. “You gonna pussy out on me?”

“… You’re so damn hot right now.” She grinned, following suit.

They lay together on the grass for a time, just holding hands, looking up at the moon and the stars through breaks in the clouds. When the pills kicked in, they were subtle. The lights were a little brighter now, the feeling of her hand in his infinitely warmer in the rain. In the back of his mind, he knew she was talking. Some half understood line of thought about wishing she could paint it all. He just gripped her hand a little tighter and gazed up at the stars, wondering if anything had ever been so beautiful.

One year, her:

Kayley awoke with a groan to the sound of Liam’s alarm. God damn it. Another fucking morning. Beside her, she heard her boyfriend sigh, accompanied by the faint clinking noise of his hand searching blindly at his bedside for the off switch. After a few moments, the awful beeping stopped, the two of them breathing a collective sigh of relief. They lay there for a minute, neither wanting to admit they had to rise, before Liam spoke in a quiet murmur.

“…You take first shower, I make coffee?”

Kayley sighed.

“You’re the best boyfriend ever, you know that?”

“Eh,” he grumbled, his voice muffled for a moment by his pillow as he began attempting to climb out of bed using only his legs. “Special treatment today. New interview. You get all the good juju.”

“Ah, fuck,” she groaned, pushing herself upright and leaning down for a moment to plant a kiss against his neck. “You had to remind me.”

“Heh. Sorry.”

“Too late,” she muttered as she climbed out of bed. “Showering. Apologize with coffee.”

The water was cold. Of course the water was cold. Why wouldn’t it be, the way her life worked right now? The pilot light must have gone out in the storm. A part of her wished Liam earned enough to afford a better boiler. A bigger part of her felt bad for wishing that when he’d supported her so far in the year since graduation with his boring ass job. As it turned out, getting work in animation was hard. Really, really hard. This new place was the first one to even reply to her portfolio in months.

She finished her shower quickly, not wanting to spend too long in the chill, and toweled the important parts of herself dry, mooching back into the bedroom for a shirt big enough to throw on for breakfast. The interview was late, she had time.

She wandered her way through to their kitchen and frowned slightly as the scent of bacon met her nose. It wasn’t the usual bacon smell. The budget bacon packs they tended to subsist on gave off very little of their aroma as they cooked, shaved clean of all the juiciest bits of fat and meat. This was stronger. Mouthwatering.

“Liam,” she murmured, approaching her equally poorly dressed companion as he worked the stove. “Why do I smell expensive food?”

“I thought I said before,” he replied, flashing her that same boyish smile he’d had as a kid. “You get good juju today, so don’t complain. Just sit down, drink your coffee, and wait while I cook your damn bacon, kay?”

“… Fine,” she agreed, giving him a peck on the cheek before making her way to the coffee pot. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“Yeah yeah,” he chuckled, flicking the meat onto a plate with his spatula, accompanied by a couple of eggs. “You don’t have to thank me till after you get the job, kay?” He passed her the plate. “But afterwards? All the blowjobs. We agreed?”

Kayley didn’t bother dignifying that one with a response as she took her seat. Instead, she took a bite of her bacon, and genuinely tried to suppress a moan, letting her eyes drift closed as she savored the flavor. She felt him place a peck against her forehead on his way towards the shower.

“I believe in you, okay? You got this!”

She shook her head at that, trying to hide a smile. Such a dork.

One and a half years, him:

Liam strummed at the guitar strings for a few moments, trying desperately to remember the shape his teacher had shown him to make a chord with. The sounds it was producing could charitably be called music, he thought. Maybe he was making progress. Kayley hadn’t said it sounded like a castrated beaver for a while. To be honest, she hadn’t passed any comment at all, these last few nights. Or said much in the mornings, for that matter. She’d been quiet. Kayley was never quiet.

He pushed the thought from his mind. She was just tired. Ever since she’d scored that job, she’d been spending half her life at the studio. He chuckled. That was why he’d started learning the guitar to start with. She was away so much these days, that for the first time in his life, he actually needed something to do when she wasn’t around to hang with. It was… new, being home alone so much. He didn’t judge her for it, though. She was living her dream. He strummed another chord, and this one, to his surprise, actually sounded like it had when his teacher had shown it to him.

He liked his guitar. Maybe he’d have something to play for her someday. Probably a weekend, though. Or at least on a day when she didn’t just go straight to bed. She’d been so tired recently.

Two years, her:

Kayley stared at her monitor, unmoving, trying to will her hand to move the stylus across the trackpad. She needed to draw something. She needed a starting point. It was meant to be a forest backdrop, right? Then go with green. Go.

With what felt like a herculean effort, she pushed the stylus across the pad, selected a color, and used the brush app to dab a blot of it into the middle of the screen. Then, she kept staring at it. Nothing moved. There was no spark. No forests sprang to life around it in her mind. No great vistas like the ones that had gotten her the damn job. Everything felt grey and cold in her mind right now, and she lacked even the energy to find it weird. Belatedly, she realized the blot she’d been staring at wasn’t even green. It was blue.

She knew what this was, of course. She’d dealt with stuff like this before; on and off since high school, really. Her doctor at the time had given her meds, and they’d helped, in their way, but they made things weird for a while; made it hard to think, to draw. She couldn’t take that time right now. Not with deadlines looming this close. She moved her stylus and slowly changed the blot to green.

Her monitor pinged, chiming an alert from the office email client. She tore her eyes gratefully from that damned splot and opened the new window.

The message was short and clear. It brooked no arguments.

‘Kayley. You’ve been staring at that screen for two days. I’ve seen this before, and powering through doesn’t work. Take some time off. Come back when you’re together. Alan.’

She had to read it three times before the meaning finally began to seep its way into her mind. God, she was tired. She wondered if it should have made her sad to read it. It felt like being called a failure, and being called a failure was supposed to make people sad, right? She tried for a while to be sad about it, then went back to staring at the dot. Why not? There was nothing else to do.

Three years, him:

It had been a long drive to get back to the old college campus. Worth it, though. His car had nearly given up the ghost on the ride across, but he didn’t mind. He stepped out of the open door, and looked up towards the cloudy sky. It looked like rain. He smiled.

Perfect.

It was a long walk to get back to their picnic spot and along the way, it did indeed begin to rain. The same light drizzle that had highlighted all of their better days. He stood under the light patter for a moment, scratching at the scraggly beard that had grown unevenly along his chin. He really should have shaved, he thought. It would be far better if he’d shaved. He shrugged off his coat and dropped it on the ground behind him, letting the water tap gently over his back. It was better that he could feel it.

He reached the grassy spot after a time, and took a deep breath through his nose. The same smell of fresh grass and pine that he remembered filled his mind, radiating something warm through every inch of him. He liked the memories it evoked. They helped to keep him calm.

In his pocket, he heard his phone chime, and dug it out, curious. It was a text.

‘Liam. Please call. You don’t have to handle this alone. Where are you?’

His mother. He flicked the message aside with his thumb and, for a moment, caught sight of his mobile’s wallpaper.

He could still remember the day he’d taken that picture of her. Good god, had she always been that beautiful? He smiled, slipping his phone back into his pocket and taking a seat on one of the moisture clad benches that lined the grass.

He craned his neck to look up at the night sky, looking for a trace of stars among the clouds.

Nothing.

He laughed. Of course not. Kayley had never let him get exactly what he wanted. Why break the habit now? He dug his hand in his other pocket, and pulled out the pill bottle.

It wasn’t an act done with ceremony. He simply flicked the lid off with a thumb and brought the opening to his lips. They tasted foul. Covered in that ashy sugar stuff that was so often used to coat pills these days. He dropped the bottle to the ground and reclined back in his seat, gazing up at the sky.

It happened just as he felt himself drifting off; a break in the clouds through which he could catch just the barest glimpse of the moon, sitting against a backdrop of a half dozen stars. He felt something run down from the corner of his eye at the sight of them shining so bright up there, and remembered an argument from years ago. Blade Runner.

“All those moments will fade in time,” he murmured, feeling another faint touch trickling down his cheek. “Like tears in rain.”

This story was guest written by Rhythm of Touch. If you liked this short story leave a comment and consider voting for their serial at The Top Web Fiction. Check in next week for Everybody Dies #2.

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Existential Terror and breakfast: Baked Florentine

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Malcolm Steadman will dial the suicide hotline in 90 days.

A man drowning in his own mind. Also pancakes. Malcolm Steadman is a completely average everyman whose life goal is to fit in. This, of course, is too much to ask for. Especially considering that he is also prone to paralyzing panic attacks triggered by everything from burnt toast to boredom. Can he win out against the mundane? Can he face the absurd? Bleakly funny in all of the wrong places, Season One of the serial pits Malcolm against his worst enemy: his own eccentricities. Will Malcolm prevail against himself?

…Well, you know what happens in 90 days…

Get the eBook and follow his descent into madness!

Existential Terror and Breakfast was written by M.P. Fitzgerald, an author and amateur mad scientist based in Seattle, WA. Originally published as a weekly serial (and told “in real-time”), Season One contains the first 90 days of Malcolm’s plight against himself.

Get the first book here!

…and you can get its companion book, The Nihilist’s Horoscope, a bleakly funny horoscope parody for free when you agree to receive his newsletter and join his mailing list.

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Existential Terror and Breakfast: Nostalgia

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Malcolm Steadman will dial the suicide hotline in 90 days.

A man drowning in his own mind. Also pancakes. Malcolm Steadman is a completely average everyman whose life goal is to fit in. This, of course, is too much to ask for. Especially considering that he is also prone to paralyzing panic attacks triggered by everything from burnt toast to boredom. Can he win out against the mundane? Can he face the absurd? Bleakly funny in all of the wrong places, Season One of the serial pits Malcolm against his worst enemy: his own eccentricities. Will Malcolm prevail against himself?

…Well, you know what happens in 90 days…

Get the eBook and follow his descent into madness!

Existential Terror and Breakfast was written by M.P. Fitzgerald, an author and amateur mad scientist based in Seattle, WA. Originally published as a weekly serial (and told “in real-time”), Season One contains the first 90 days of Malcolm’s plight against himself.

Get the first book from Amazon here!

…or you can get its companion book, The Nihilist’s Horoscope, a bleakly funny horoscope parody for free when you agree to receive his newsletter and join his mailing list.

Get The Nihilist’s Horoscope! [image error]

To receive your free copy just tell us where to send it:

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How to get Readers and Become Famous on Royal Road Legends

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This article was guest written by Unice5656, author of Fantasia.

Why I’m somewhat qualified to write this

I write Fantasia, an ongoing webserial that has managed to more or less stay in the top 10 Best Rated for almost five years (sometimes it sinks to #11 or 12 but it usually goes back up). In this time period, it has amassed approximately 3500 registered followers and 904 ratings. I also have a completed novella hanging around #35 on the Best Rated list and a secondary project that hasn’t been updated in months hanging around #50 (it was around 35 back when it was actively updating). I was also a moderator on the site for two years and in that time read a lot of the submissions as well as all the forum chatter posted during my tenure.

So you’ve started writing and think your story is as cool as an Emperor penguin in Antarctica. Now what?

Basically, there are two steps to this. One is attracting readers to find your story, the second is getting them to read it and click Follow. This guide will mostly focus on step one, with a few tips for step two.

How readers find new stories on RRL

There are two main ways people look for new stories on RRL

Browsing the lists generated by the site (By far the most popular)

Best Rated: This list uses a fancy algorithm to determine the highest rated stories on the site. More high ratings gets you higher on the list.
Active-only ranking: This is the same algorithm as the best rated list but only includes stories updated in the last 30 days. To stay on it, update at least once every 30 days.
Complete: This is the same algorithm as the best rated list but only includes stories that are marked complete. At this point in time, you have to submit a support ticket to get someone to manually change a story’s status to complete, and it’s worth doing so if your story is done. However, this list tends to be pretty stagnant and gets browsed less often than the Active-only ranking, so there’s no hurry to upload your entire novel if you happen to have it completed.
Popular this week: This list features fictions that have had a lot of high ratings in the past 7 days. In order to be ranked high on this list, you pretty much have to update every day, maybe twice a day, and your story has to fit into the typical wheelhouse of the typical RRL reader. I’ve never been high on this list and it only gets you transient visibility compared to the more permanent ranking gains of the lists above, but it’s popularly browsed by people looking for new stuff, so worth getting onto when first starting out.
Latest Updates: This list adds stories with newly-added chapters to the top of the list and pushes older updates downwards. It takes anywhere from an hour to several hours for a story to get pushed out of visibility on the list, depending on the time of day (the site is weighted towards North American users). There’s no point in timing your updates to high-traffic times on the site, as this is also when most people update chapters, so your story will get proportionately less time and the list and it works out to around the same amount of visibility.
Newest stories: This list works the same way as Latest Updates except it only includes newly approved fictions. I’m not sure how many people actually browse this list, as the stories only have one chapter up. You have no control over when your story will show up on the list, as it depends on when it’s approved and not when you submit it.


The Search function: This is probably less known and less popular than browsing the lists, but I have had several readers tell me they found my story by looking up specific tags. If you go to the Search page and click Advanced Search, you can see how it works. People can choose to look for certain tags, look for stories without certain tags (click twice on any of the tags and it will go to a red minus sign), look for stories with a minimum length (1 page is approximately 275 words), look for a minimum average rating, sort by completed/active/hiatus, and order their search results by different measures. The bottom line is to properly tag your story with all the tags that apply. Do not apply tags that aren’t really in your story; for instance, don’t go ‘oh, well my MC isn’t female but I have a strong female character in the cast’ and tag it ‘Female Lead’. This will only annoy readers who find your story through the search function and don’t get what they’re expecting.

People additionally get stories by recommendation/word of mouth. Not a lot you can do about that except to encourage your readers to do so. People also find RRL stories from offsite (such as NovelUpdates and Top Web Fiction) but I have no idea how much traffic comes from different places and no expertise on other sites.

I did a poll of my readers on Chapter 40 of Fantasia to see how they found the story.

(As far as I can tell, most of the “Other” chosen is the Advanced Search function)

As you can see, the best way to get readers is to be high on the Best Rated list. I haven’t done anything magical to maintain my ranking except to continue to write the same story for all this time while other projects have been completed or dropped. The second most popular method is being found on the Latest Updates list, so as a newbie, updates are king.

Ways people do not find stories on RRL

Browsing the forums. 99% of the readers on RRL don’t go on the forums. On them, you with find the same 6 people discussing repetitive subjects with people who post newbie questions. There is a Promote Your Webnovel subforum that you can post on that nobody looks at. Of slightly more use is the Recommendations subforum, where people ask for recommendations for specific kinds of stories, so if you’re willing to creep that forum and get one reader at a time, go for it. Keep in mind that people tend to be leery of people recommending their own writing. Conventional advice also states that you should put a link to your fictions in your forum signature and then participate in conversations there; if you do this, you will at most gain the 6 users who actually use the forums.
Getting featured on Facebook. What? RRL has a Facebook page? Exactly. 99% of the readers on RRL don’t follow its Facebook or Twitter. A while back, while I was a moderator, I attempted to feature stories with some objective measure of writing quality, but at this point it appears they are randomly pasting story synopses onto the page with no application process to get featured, so even if you wanted to be featured, there’s nothing you can do to increase your chances.
Promoting yourself on the Discord chat. I believe this is actually explicitly against the rules of the chat and you will get in trouble for spamming.
Joining a group on the RRL forums. The main thing goes back to the fact that 99% of readers don’t use the forums. As well, if you belong to a group of writers, the group’s reputation is only as good as its worst writer. Don’t bother and it will save you a lot of time and melodrama.
Paying RRL to feature your fiction. Seriously, save your money, especially if your story doesn’t fall into the typical wheelhouse of popular stories on RRL (see below)

What readers like on RRL

In order to understand what becomes popular on RRL, you have to understand the origin of the site and the typical reader demographics. RRL started out as a website posting translations of the Korean light novel Legendary Moonlight Sculptor, a story involving a guy who finds a secret class in a virtual reality video game and becomes super powerful while becoming rich and famous in real life and getting the most beautiful girl in the world (literally #1 as appraised by the supercomputer AI in the story) as his girlfriend. (This may sound disparaging, but I was actually one of the original users at this point in time and find the story hilarious.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, the main demographic on the site is teenage boys. A lot of the guys on the site are actually over the age of 20 but continue to act like teenage boys, so I just lump them all together as teenage boys. The last time I had access to demographics, male users outnumbered female users of the site 9:1.

I did a poll on the age of my readers in Chapter 52.

The largest group there is actually in their mid twenties, but this may be just a reflection of my own age and the number of “clearly born in the 1990s” references I have in my story. Again, just imagine them as still teenagers.

I did a poll of the male: female ratio of my readers in Chapter 35.

Keep in mind that as a female writer with a female MC, I likely have a higher proportion of female readers than most stories do.

I did a poll of the continent my readers are from in Chapter 45.

As you can see, people are from places that would enjoy reading stories written in English, a lot from North America but a significant amount from Europe as well. I’m not sure how this would affect your writing strategy unless you were planning on posting stories in another language on RRL. RRL currently doesn’t have much of a reader base to support other language stories.

The long and the short of it is, the typical reader on the site is a teenage boy who enjoys Asian story elements. Tropes that are common in manga, anime, and light novels abound on the site. Stories set in games, harems, wuxia/xianxia cultivation stories, stories randomly set in Japan for no reason, reincarnation stories, all super common and super popular.

That being said, by no means should you compromise your writing by going for what’s popular if you weren’t intending on writing something of that nature in the first place. Additionally, many readers complain of being tired of the generic plots so common on the site and are actively looking for more unique stories, which gives you an opportunity.

Some elements that you should go for, regardless of kind of story:

A strong main character. Teenage boys don’t like it when their MC gets beaten up or constantly loses. Your MC doesn’t have to be overpowered and float through life like a blessed butterfly, but if they’re constantly being bullied and/or ruminating about their insecurities, it’s not going to go over well. Give your MC a little badass confidence.
Humour. Even if your story touches on darker subjects, have moments of lightness. People go on RRL to relax and escape the drudgery of real life.
Action. Fight scenes, danger, excitement, levelling up, these things are what teenage boys enjoy. If your story has 10 chapters of build-up before anything happens, it’s going to flop. Restructure your story to flash forward to something happening or get rid of the build-up or something.
Romance. Not the super sappy romance-novel type of romance. Teenage boys don’t like that. They do enjoy when the guy gets the girl in the end (or the beginning, and then starts collecting more girls but that’s another discussion).

TLDR; just tell me what to do to get readers already!

Write a good story that will appeal to teenage boys. Give them a mix of the stuff they’re used to and a unique element that will make them click on your story rather than the ten thousand other ones they have to choose from. Give your story an interesting title. Make sure you have at least 7-10 chapters of content ready, enough to get into the action and have readers invested in the story.
Submit the story with an attractive cover (keep in mind that the image size is pretty small, so complex images will not work too well), a good blurb (no more than two short paragraphs, describe your premise without being vague, introduce your MC in an appealing way), and the correct tags. Your title, cover, and blurb are of the utmost importance to attract browsing readers.
Once your story is approved, update, update, update. There is no better way to gain visibility as a complete newcomer to the site. I recommend daily updates as a good way to launch a new story, even if you’re sure you won’t be able to keep it up (which is why you should have 7-10 chapters ready from step 1). Rather than trying to update during the highest traffic times of the site, I recommend updating at random times throughout the day to capture audience from different time zones. Don’t update again until your fiction has been pushed off the first page of the Latest Updates list. If your story is from your own website and you have a lot of content, I wouldn’t go faster than updating twice a day. If you have long chapters, consider splitting them into smaller chunks to increase the number of updates (only if it works for the story).
Interact with your readers. Teenage boys (and also other people) enjoy feeling important, so take the time to reply to comments and PMs from your readers. Thank them for taking the time to comment and answer their questions to the best of your ability. Check the site on a daily basis or get it to email you when you get a PM or story comment. In my experience, people also enjoy voting on polls, so you can ask a poll question with each chapter (I wouldn’t recommend doing this on the first chapter, but more at the point where uninterested people have already left and you only have the dedicated readers left. Also wait until you have a decent number of followers, as in my experience, less than half of them actually vote). Polls can give you valuable information about your readers and what they want, or they can be completely random, fun questions. Encouraging comment activity also has the benefit if reassuring you that someone is indeed reading the story. Tell the readers what’s been going on with the story writing, let them get to know you a little bit in your author’s notes. Be silly. Use exclamation marks! Post pictures of cute animals (okay, that last one may be specific to my own fiction).
Get people to rate or review your story. Brace yourself. It’s time to be obnoxious. But charmingly obnoxious. You are going to ask people to review your story if they liked it. If you’re feeling really bold, ask them to rate it 5 stars. Let them know that their rating is weighted more if they leave a review and even higher if they leave an advanced review. Thank them and give them a virtual cookie. Promise that you’ll update if they leave reviews. Use the boxes available for author’s notes every chapter, and ask every chapter. Turn it into an ongoing joke. Make a poll asking people if they’ve left a review (I did this in chapter 46 and got an extra 10 ratings that update). You NEED those reviews to make lasting gains on the Best Rated list. There will be people who are annoyed by your constant badgering for reviews, but most people will just humour you or learn to ignore it. Remember, the tone you’re going for is “cheerfully obnoxious”. Don’t go into “desperate” territory. The same rules that apply to your MC apply to your persona as an author on RRL. Give yourself a little badass confidence. Teenage boys don’t like desperate authors.
Keep on grinding. Update regularly. At the bare minimum, update every 30 days so that your story’s status isn’t moved into “hiatus” from “ongoing”. People are very afraid of dropped stories on RRL as they are so common and will not try a story with a hiatus status. Most people find weekly updates manageable. Contrary to updating on your own website, updating at the exact same time/day each week might not be the best strategy to capture an international audience.
Remember that all of this will only work if people are interested in continuing to read your story. My first chapter has 80,000 views, which drops to 50,000 views for Chapter 2 and 35,000 views for Chapter 3 and around 3,000 views for the latest chapter. That’s a pretty decent retention rate (keeping in mind that 1 view is not 1 reader and if they visit multiple times, like to answer comments, the view count will go up). If you find that your view count (Under the Chapters tab of your story dashboard) from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 goes down more than 90%, it’s a sign that people are clicking on the story but not interested in continuing to read and you may need to do something to fix that rather than continuing to try to gain visibility.
Don’t beat yourself up if you don’t have a meteoric rise to fame. There’s a huge element of luck to all of this. There are stories on the Best Rated list that don’t have all the tropes I mentioned, but they are definitely outnumbered, so if your story doesn’t fall into the typical popular categories, don’t expect a huge number of followers. That being said, you can still have a high ranking on the Best Rated list with a relatively small number of followers and ratings as long as you’re consistently rated 5-stars, so focus on the quality of your writing.
Recommend your other works to your readers. There’s already a link to your other works in the About the Author section under each chapter, but it doesn’t hurt to occasionally mention the existence if your other stories in your author’s notes or recommend them in replies to comments if the reader mentions some aspect of your writing they enjoyed that is also present in the other story. Building your first large audience is the hardest; after that, subsequent stories can bask in the reflected glory.
Report inappropriate reviews. These are usually accompanied by low ratings, so getting them deleted can significantly improve your average rating. Things that are against the reviewing rules include threats, personal attacks on the author, hate speech, discrimination, spam, recommendations to read a different fiction without mention of the actual fiction being reviewed, and basically anything that’s not a review of the story. Things that are not against the rules include low ratings where people write “I didn’t like it because it was boring”. There is no rule that states that criticism has to be constructive.

Things you should not do

Try to attract everyone. RRL is not a game of more views = better. Remember your ultimate goal is to climb the Best Rated list. Having your first review be a low score can be a devastating blow to your audience building. As the number of ratings increase, the algorithm takes into account that you’ll get random hate low ratings, but you need your early ratings to be all 4 and 5 stars. Tag your story and write your blurb to attract your specific audience and nobody else.
Go for quantity over quality. You can flood the Latest Updates list with your new chapters all day long, maybe even get on the Popular this week list, but it’s a lot of effort for transient visibility and will hurt your long-term growth if you start getting low ratings.
Redirect everyone immediately to your independent website. Like I said multiple times, your long-term visibility and regular gain of new readers from RRL is excruciatingly dependent on getting high numbers of high ratings. If you write in your story blurb “This fiction will have the latest chapter post on [link] and updates will be delayed for one week on RRL”, interested readers might click away to your site (or not; there is definitely a segment of readers who aren’t interested in reading off of other sites). Then they read the story on your site and yay you’ve gained a reader. The problem is, they’re no longer on RRL and will never leave you a review. I recommend not linking to your independent website anywhere in the blurb or your author bio. Wait until you’ve caught up your updates to what’s posted on your website and then include the link to your website in the author’s note at the end of that chapter. It is also a good idea to have a link on your website back to RRL and encourage the readers from your website to leave a review on RRL.
Delete chapters that have comments on them. Really, since you can edit chapters, there’s no real reason to delete them. Remember that comments spawn other comments. People are herd animals.
Give other fictions low ratings in order to raise your rank. Mainly because this makes you an asshole but also because it’s not very effective. The site also periodically deletes spam ratings and bans people who make multiple accounts for this purpose.
Make multiple accounts to give yourself high ratings. This will get you banned.
Obsessively check your view count and statistics page. This is not good for your mental health and will not help you grow faster.
Be rude to anyone. Remember, even if someone leaves a comment that is completely rude, you in your author persona must be pleasant and polite (but also not a wimpy pushover because teenage boys don’t like that). Alternatively, you have the power to delete all comments that annoy you in your fictions and you can take full advantage of this.

Other things people have done

Review swaps. Trading 5/5 ratings with other users is explicitly against the rules but it is allowed to trade reviews if you don’t guarantee rating the other person 5/5 and write explicitly in the review that it’s part of a swap. This may help get you the initial ratings that you need but keep in mind that people do browse the reviews when deciding on whether or not to read your fiction and nobody takes review swap opinions seriously. It also takes quite a bit of time to read someone’s fiction and write a decent review, so you’re probably better off just writing more of your own fiction in order to have more updates. There’s a section in the forums with people looking to do review swaps if you really think it’s a good idea.
Guest chapters. This is traditionally done on Web Fiction Guide as part of the April Fool’s swap but can really be at any time in the year and doesn’t necessarily have to be reciprocal. It’s a lot of work because you have to read the other person’s fiction and then write a chapter for it. It may be worth it if the story is something you would have read anyways for enjoyment, the other author has a large following, and the other story’s audience is exactly the one you want for your fiction. For instance, even if the other author has 10,000 followers, if they write hard-core sci-fi and you’re writing historical murder mystery, you probably won’t get a lot of readers out of it. I have personally featured two talented guest writers on my own fiction but you would have to ask them if they thought it was worth it.

Unice5656 writes Fantasia, one of the largest and most popular serials on Royal Road Legends. She likes pictures of baby ducks.

Join us next week for The Ultimate Guide to Promoting Web Fiction!

The post How to get Readers and Become Famous on Royal Road Legends appeared first on revfitz.com.

Existential Terror and Breakfast: Ocean of Wednesdays

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Malcolm Steadman will dial the suicide hotline in 90 days.

A man drowning in his own mind. Also pancakes. Malcolm Steadman is a completely average everyman whose life goal is to fit in. This, of course, is too much to ask for. Especially considering that he is also prone to paralyzing panic attacks triggered by everything from burnt toast to boredom. Can he win out against the mundane? Can he face the absurd? Bleakly funny in all of the wrong places, Season One of the serial pits Malcolm against his worst enemy: his own eccentricities. Will Malcolm prevail against himself?

…Well, you know what happens in 90 days…

Get the eBook and follow his descent into madness!

Existential Terror and Breakfast was written by M.P. Fitzgerald, an author and amateur mad scientist based in Seattle, WA. Originally published as a weekly serial (and told “in real-time”), Season One contains the first 90 days of Malcolm’s plight against himself.

Get the first book from Amazon here!

…or you can get its companion book, The Nihilist’s Horoscope, a bleakly funny horoscope parody for free when you agree to receive his newsletter and join his mailing list.

 Get The Nihilist’s Horoscope![image error]

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Net Neutrality is important for indie authors.

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Net Neutrality is important to indie authors such as myself. The internet was built on a principal of non-bias and openness. The ability to build your own platform, be it a soapbox, small business, or even a small blog for your hobby has been instrumental in making the internet what it is today. Without an open internet, independent artists and small businesses will suffer to a playground that only the richest of companies can afford.

Authors and readers alike need to stand together and say no to this. There is still time. Please, take a moment and visit Battle for the Net. The House will vote on Net Neutrality, do your part to make sure that your own stands with you.

Thank you.

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How to Promote your Web Fiction 3: Resources

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Welcome to the third part of my series on how to promote your web fiction! In this series, I will be going over the paths that an author can take to generate traffic to their web fiction or serial. In this part: online resources!

This will be the “miscellaneous” part of my series. I have listed these resources in order of importance with the most important one at the bottom.

Before we begin, I just want to reiterate (yes, again) that the cornerstone of a successful promotion is outreach. I have also written up an article on how to implement that concept on social media.

TV Tropes:

TV Tropes is an open wiki dedicated to listing every single trope in every instance of media ever. As such, it is a good place to have a page dedicated to your creative works. This you might want to have grow organically, but there is nothing wrong with dropping your serial in for an example of a trope. Make a list of the tropes that you employ (purposefully or accidentally) and then go to those trope’s pages. For example: if you have a damsel in distress (because you are presumably a time traveler from the nineteenth century) you can list an example of your character on this page and then leave a link to your site.

TV Tropes generates a constant trickle of traffic to my site, with twenty being the most I have seen in a single day. I have never created a page for my works, however, that came organically and was done by fans.

Get Free eBooks:

You can submit your serial’s page to https://www.getfreeebooks.com/submit-your-ebooks/ This has only given me a few views every once in a while.

Tuesday Serial:

Tuesday Serial is a site dedicated to growing visibility to online serial writers. It allows you to submit a link to a chapter once a week and can be a decent resource in your arsenal. This site is designed to work best with twitter (of which I do not use) but it can be good exposure for new serials as they do take the time to highlight newcomers. The site opens their submissions for links to chapters every Tuesday, which can be found here: http://tuesdayserial.com/collector/ They also accept guest posts!

The Top Web Fiction:

The Top Web Fiction is a sister site to The Web Fiction Guide and lists serials by popularity according to reader votes. You can join the list by submitting your web fiction to the Web Fiction Guide. Adding a voting link with a “Call to Action” at the end of each of your chapters can help you climb the list, however, I have had more consistent success by asking my mailing list subscribers to vote in my newsletters. Once a week (when I update) I add a CTA (Call to Action) for a vote at the end of my newsletter. Those that do not vote in the newsletter already have it in mind when they go to read my new chapter and are way more likely to vote with the chapter’s CTA having seen it once already. This kept me on the list for almost a year, landing between #45 and #20 easily. Just being on the list brings in people daily for me.

Web Fiction Guide Reviews:

Being on the front page of The Web Fiction Guide is good, and you can achieve that by either having your serial reviewed or by reviewing others. Keep in mind though: reviews are for the readers. Though a review swap can be a good promotional tactic, it does the reader a disservice if you are only doing it for the sake of promotion. Write compelling and thorough reviews that are fair and have something to say. Keep the readers in mind and write it for the sake of reviewing something first. The exposure it brings is just an added benefit. (Also: I have never seen a giant flux of traffic, just a trickle, so don’t think that the exposure is worth doing it just for promotional reasons). There is a whole discussion of reviews here.

MAILING LISTS

By far my most prized and useful tool in promotion has been the audience that I have already captured and turned into fans. Energizing and fostering my fans is by far the most effective thing I have found to do. All of the traffic generating would also be for naught if I did not have a way to keep them coming back. What use is a 10,000-view spike in a day if it bottoms back out to just ten the next? Get your reader’s email addresses, it is a direct line of communication to them that you cannot get on any social media.

Building a mailing list is simpler than you think, and it is something that the self-publishing community has been doing and championing for years. Set up an account with a service like MailChimp (the first 1000 subscribers or so is free) or Converter Kit (a service created by and for authors) and create an opt-in form for your readers to join your mailing list (there is a link to a tutorial on that at the bottom). Then, and this is important, offer and deliver something of high value upon sign up (your reader magnet). This can be a short story, a book you wrote, or even a highly detailed world map of your setting. The better and the more tempting the offer the more likely your readers are to sign up.

I did not have anything off of the bat when I started my serial to offer. So, I offered a weekly “Nihilist’s Horoscope” that only subscribers could see. Once some time had passed I was able to offer ALL of the horoscopes compiled into a book. Sign-ups nearly tripled with the better offer.

Now, each time you update have a link in your newsletter to your chapter, which ensures that it will be read by your audience. Further, you can then leave a link to your Facebook page, guest-post, or voting page on The Top Web Fiction. It also allows you to build a rapport and relationship with your audience that is incredibly valuable. You can turn a reader into a FAN, and a fan will proselytize their friends for you. Learn how to build one here.

Bottom Line:

However you generate traffic to your story, be it through outreach, social media, or the methods outlined above, it is important that you keep it, and the best way I have found to do that is through a mailing list.

Come back next week as Unice5656 describes in detail how you can build and audience and be famous on Royal Road Legends!

The post How to Promote your Web Fiction 3: Resources appeared first on revfitz.com.

How to Promote your Web Fiction 2: Social Media

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Welcome to the second part of my series on how to promote your web fiction! In this series, I will be going over the paths that an author can take to generate traffic to their web fiction or serial. In this part: how to utilize social media!

Before we begin, I just want to reiterate that the cornerstone of a successful promotion is outreach. This will be an important concept throughout this article.

Reddit:

Reddit is a great place to generate traffic to your site, however, Reddit abhors self-promotion. Thus, there are few places that you can actually post to that will be aligned with your serial that has any weight or worth. There are places like https://www.reddit.com/r/shamelessplug/ that you can post to without worrying about backlash, but it is unlikely to get you any kind of momentum. Below is a few subreddits that you can post to and a few thoughts about how to post there successfully.

r/writing:

r/writing is a community of writers who post about the craft in general. Self-promotion is only allowed on a specific forum thread (listed as “[Check In] Off-Topic Discussion and Self-Promotion”) and it is replaced and renewed once a week. This is a good place to post links to your serial, but don’t expect more than 6 or seven views from it per day, even if you are upvoted to the top. Instead, the best way to post on r/writing for promoting is by answering people’s questions on the main subreddit forum. Keep an eye out for topics that are about your genre, or specific tropes (or clichés) that you employ. Make sure that you add a link to your serial as an example to their questions, but only after you craft a thoughtful answer with value.

Keep in mind that though you can generate traffic from here that you will be doing so from other writers. Though writers are readers they may not be the best people for your audience as writers tend to care about things in the craft (tropes, story structure, prose) that readers don’t.

r/nosleep:

This is a horror story subreddit where “stories are true, even if they are not”. It is also one of the most trafficked and popular fiction subreddits on Reddit. Getting the number one spot in this forum can mean THOUSANDS of views on your page, but it is only worth posting there if you genuinely enjoy writing in the horror genre and if it is aligned to your story. So if you scare easily and your serial is a superhero story I would not post here, It is VERY unlikely that you will retain the people who come to your site from there, and it is more likely that you will see a spike in traffic only to see it fall back off to where it was the previous day. If, however, your serial is a horror story or very dark in nature THIS IS YOUR PLACE!

Before you write on /nosleep you should know its specific rules. All stories are supposed to be told in the first person and by someone experiencing something creepy. You must also never comment “out of character” in your post and the link to your serial must be discrete. Stories must be at least 500 words long and at least 1000 words long if you plan on doing multiple parts. Further, if someone can look out their window to disprove your story it will get deleted. /nosleep enforces their rules with an iron fist. I would read the most popular stories for a week or so to get an idea and feel for what the audiences like and do not like before posting.

I have also had some YouTube narrators approach me to narrate my stories that have done well on the subreddit (you can find some of those in the “fan stuff” section of my site). I did see an additional boost of traffic from one, but the conversion to reader was small. These narrations can be shared as promotional material on your social media profiles, however, as video tends to do better than text.

r/cryosleep:

Like r/nosleep but for sci-fi, not as popular but FAR more aligned for sci-fi authors! The audience still assumes that all stories are “true”, but the restrictions are more flexible.

r/shortscifistories:

Stories must be science-fiction; this includes: hard SF, soft SF, 4-, cyberpunk, time travel, space opera, apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, dystopian and others under the sci-fi umbrella. Stories must also be 1000 words or less. Links to your site must not be in the body of the post, however, but can be added as a comment.

r/SexyShortStories (NSFW):

This is most aligned for erotica, and possibly good for certain romance stories. The community does not seem to be thriving, however.

r/shortstories:

A good place to post and cross-post your stuff from the other subreddits. Stories must be at least 1000 words, a link to your site is allowed in the post, and any genre is allowed (except for erotica).

r/webfiction:

As of right now, the community here is not very large and most people posting are writers (and not readers). This might change in the future but I have not seen more than a couple of views trickle in from here.

DeviantArt:

DeviantArt took a giant hit once Instagram became popular. This is not to say that the social media page is not still thriving, but as 90% of its users are all artists starving for attention, it was only natural that most of them left to where their audience was gathering. With that said, the writing community is even smaller and EVEN MORE STARVING. It is, however, an INCREDIBLY passionate community. This is where you will find most of the poets online and short story writers. Make sure that whatever you post has a link to your site, but do not expect great results. I have tried to post “previews” of my chapters here with a link to the full thing at the end, and though I have attracted a couple of very vocal and active readers to my site, it was not worth my time to put in the energy to really build an audience there. I would not suggest using DeviantArt if you do not already have an account there, and I would not expect those who follow you to go off-site. With that said, if you are going to try it aim for a “Daily Deviation”. This is a daily feature of artists that administrators hand pick and it is the most prized feature on the site. You can suggest your writing pieces to the following moderators:

https://doughboycafe.deviantart.com/

https://beccajs.deviantart.com/

Tumblr:

Tumblr is generally not a good platform for your actual chapters but can be good for quotes, poetry, or memes related to your genre. I have not seen somebody use this space to effectively promote their writing pieces AS POSTS, but I have seen it used (and have used it) to generate traffic indirectly. If you are going to use Tumblr use it like Pinterest with blogger outreach in mind. Do not promote directly here, instead post memes, comics, and “shitposts” (I actively hate this term) that your audience would enjoy and then mix it in with a few pieces of your work. It is best if you can find an already popular group Tumblr to suggest your stuff to. As an example: I created samples of my “Nihilist’s Horoscope” (my reader magnet) in a graphic format and then joined a Tumblr blog that posts philosophy-based memes and shitposts as a contributor. I would post my graphics on my Tumblr first, then reblog them in the group Tumblr. This audience could not be more aligned with my work and I saw a sharp uptick in follows on my Tumblr and a sharp uptick in readers on my site. The best part was that because they were so aligned they were reading through my serial more than dropping off. (Note: these graphics linked DIRECTLY to my mailing list opt-in with an offer for my reader magnet, I do not think it would be half as effective if I did not have a way to capture them).

If you can’t find a group Tumblr that fits your needs, you can also “suggest” posts to more popular blogs. Don’t be afraid to do this but you might want to be a part of that blog’s audience for a time before doing so as it will be perceived as spam.

Facebook:

Facebook is “the must place” that most people advise that you go to if you want to be serious about promoting your work. The reality? Skip it if you hate it. Facebook is AWESOME if you can afford to advertise on it, but not so much for organic reach (more on advertising there in a later article). No one likes self-promotion, not even your friends, and if you post your stuff on your normal profile you are going to get a very apathetic return. Instead, you can create a page and gather followers, but Facebook will only put your posts in front of a very small percentage of your followers unless you pay them to “boost it”, which means that you must have a ridiculously high number of followers to see any kind of organic return. Joining groups and trying outreach there might be your best bet, but the groups for serials are small. Only put the time and energy into Facebook if it is intuitive to you and if you LOVE it. Otherwise: pass.

Twitter:

This is the second “must have” that people insist you have. I have never used it, and I have only ever seen extroverts who genuinely love the platform use it effectively. Mathtans of Time and Tied had this to say about it:

The main thing with this aspect of social media is being SOCIAL. People won’t follow you for what you do, but rather who you are/why you do it. Don’t keep the default as your avatar (you’ll be considered a bot), don’t use auto responders (Direct Messaging people about checking out your stories when they follow is a sure way to be unfollowed), and don’t over-promote yourself. Stick to a 10:1 ratio at best, meaning for every 10 non-promotional tweets you send, allow yourself a promo. Related, don’t string all your promo tweets back to back. What are the other things you’re tweeting then? Simple, RT (ReTweets) of the work of others, responding to questions, or just humanizing yourself by talking about the chapter you’re working on or your writing struggles.

Pinterest:

Pinterest is possibly the best place to post if you have an outreach strategy. The half-life of pins is much greater than that of anything else in social media, and it is one of the few places that doubles as a search engine. Pinterest, however, is a long game. If you are going to use it for your web fiction you have to be creating useful and beautiful pins that solve your audiences’ problems. A great and free resource on how to do exactly that can be found here.

Pinterest should be used side-by-side with a blogging strategy. Write articles with beautiful pins attached to them that solves your reader’s problems in a related niche to your story. The most obvious topic that a writer can blog about is writing, but this can differ by genre. As an example: a fantasy writer might find success in writing blog posts about D&D Campaigns. Ask yourself what problems your readers face and make sure that you are the go-to authority to solve those problems. This will take time. You can read more about this outreach strategy in a previous post.

The Bottom Line:

Social Media can be a powerful tool in your promotion arsenal. It is not the end all be all, however. Most promotional guides like to throw in advice like “make a viral video and post it on Facebook!” as if it was that easy. If you are going to spend time on a social media platform, spend time on the ones that you like, and remember that simply self-promoting will give you very little traction.

Join me next week as I show you how to promote your web fiction with specific websites aimed at readers and the web fiction community!

The post How to Promote your Web Fiction 2: Social Media appeared first on revfitz.com.