Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
Huìhuì Gāo’s homeroom teacher squinted at his roll call. He wore a slight smile that conveyed no joy. After a few seconds, he said, “Ms…?”
Her hand hovered over her desk, hesitant, ready to catch her name. Her teacher squinted and furrowed his brow and looked about the classroom, finally settling his gaze on her. “Here,” she said, her voice cracking a little. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Comedy, Fantasy, High Fantasy, Modern Sci-Fi, Science Fiction
Rain dripped down PoMatic!365’s chassis and occluded its camera. Running its tiny wiper over the lens, it continued the Standard Enticement Protocol.
“Step right up, folks! No visit to Blue Seas Boardwalk is complete without a customized poem from PoMatic! Love poems, haiku, sonnets, sestinas, free verse, all tailored to you, from a simple scan of your identichip! No two poems are ever the same!” (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Comedy, Fairy Tale, Fantasy
Spider was fed up. Fed up, and upside down. She hung from a web in the darkest corner of Witch’s cottage, swinging back and forth in the most fed up manner she could fashion.
Each time she swung she scowled with all eight eyes at the torn open envelope with the Royal crest on the side table below. Witch’s gilt-edged invitation to the Palace Ball, the social spectacular of the year, had arrived that very morning.
Spider knew exactly how things would go. How the annual event always went. Witch would not, of course, RSVP. If pressed, she would say how terribly busy she was, and how she definitely hoped to make it, but she really couldn’t say for certain until much closer to the date. But she wouldn’t RSVP later on, either. Instead, Witch would turn up at the Summer Palace of the King and Queen of Freyen-Noyen, on the night of the Ball, invitation in hand, and claim she’d found herself unexpectedly free of an evening and she trusted her gracious hosts wouldn’t mind her unannounced attendance?
Genres: Comedy, Comedy Sci-Fi, Science Fiction, Steampunk
“Daddy, can I use the atom scramblizer?” Hilde kicked her heels against the metal cabinet she was perched on.
“No, pumpkin.” All she could see of him were his feet sticking out from underneath the giant chassis.
“How about the temporal destabilizer?”
“No, pumpkin.”
“Can I at least graft some new wings onto Spuffy?”
Her father slid out from under the chassis, pushing his goggles up onto his forehead. Dr. Acheron von Phlogiston never went anywhere without his goggles. He’d even convinced them to let him keep them during his jail stints. Not that those ever lasted long before he’d craft an ingenious device from common cutlery and break his way free once more. “Sweet pea, we’re at a critical juncture in this plan and I need to concentrate. Can’t you find something to do in your room?” (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Science Fiction
Thank you for uploading the autonomous guide stream Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town. Through this node we will provide scheduled reminders of your duty roster and update your personal ruleset as required. Cast Member Rules at Old Tech Town may be deleted at the end of the summer when you depart.
1. Old Tech Town, known to indigenous humans as San Francisco, is a protected heritage site. Treat the area with the respect you would show your own root compiler, which in a sense (symbolic/holistic, not literal) it is. (Continue Reading…)
Genres: Horror, Horror Fantasy
Good Girl was first performed as part of Escape Artists Live at PodUK 2020, and released on the EA patreon feed.
Wawa waits in the woods, tongue lolling, ears drooping. She waits in the fern-covered gully beside the dried-up creek. Every now and then she tries to lie down, but then there’ll be a rustle in the trees, the sound of snapping twigs, of scuttling claws, and she’s up again.
But no one comes.
Wawa waits. She would howl, would bark, but Wawa is a good girl. A good dog.
Genres: Superhero
1. Have super powers
Mom and Dad insist I’m too young to consider a career in the hero business, but I’m seventeen and I need to prepare. I figure if I pay attention, I can put it all together. I’ve only got the one piece for the list right now, but I know I’ll add more as we go.
Genres: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
“I don’t know how to find someone like this,” says Priscilla, loudly, over the sudden swell of midnight noise.
“I do,” says Renia, strolling confidently to the edge of the pit and kneeling. Silently we join her. It’s not a message she sends, more like a scent, something more primal than emotion. We always know when she is calling us. Only Jamian, still manning the circle’s rim, remains standing. Renia looks up suddenly, straight into my eyes. I’m surprised to see fear on her face, though I know we all feel it, but there is also certainty. “The killer. I can feel him.”
Genres: Fantasy, Urban Fantasy
When the moon sits high, and our parents have passed out for sure, we gather in the grove to do our business.
We never call it magic. Magic is something magicians do, pulling rabbits out of hats. I guess witches turn princes into toads and sorcerers cruise from kingdom to kingdom, toppling regimes and screwing everything in sight, but we have never been so outrageous. For one thing, we believe in rules.
Genres: Fantasy, Modern Fantasy
Looping the thread over her needle, Kari caught the sun in her knit. It was an old spell: warmth trapped in rows of neatly patterned wool to stave off the winter wind. The first spell her pappa taught her. The only one she knew.
Genres: Science Fiction
Mom’s kind of bizarrely happy for someone with a daughter about to croak, but I don’t mind. She saved my life. When I collapsed, I was still only fourteen: too young to have an imprint taken. If she hadn’t found me in time, I would be dead already, and gone. Now I’m safe, and they’ve pretty much stopped everything but palliative care. I’d like to be corporeal longer, and grow human-wise, but there’s nothing more they can do.
Genres: Weird Western, Western
The wordslinger first came into Lasthope on the back of a scarab the size of a large pony, during the worst flaying-wind storm in a generation.
Mind, we didn’t know then that she was a wordslinger, or even that she was a she. I didn’t witness it direct, but later one of our regulars told me of her, all bundled up in hat and gloves and too-big cloak, on account of them winds, you see. She climbed off her scarab with the stiffness of someone too long in the saddle. But like any rider worth her salt, she saw to her mount afore she came into the saloon, which is where I first saw her myself.