(reading time: 49 minutes)
The passage of the next several days revealed both the strengths and weaknesses of their mode of travel. Snaps almost immediately noticed the hidden gyroscopes that kept their rooms upright even when the bag was turned upside down. The adjustment could be felt as a slight loss of weight in one’s bottom and heard as a rattle. Continue reading
(blurb)
A new kind of warfare dawns in the early years of the twentieth century, planned and perpetrated by a mysterious individual known only as the Challenger. Rumor has it this challenger could fit in the palm of your hand.
This won’t do for the residents of Minimil, a city in a barn that has a reputation to keep up. Filled with shoulder angels and devils, fairies, enchanted toys, Lilliputians, and every other kind of small magical creature, they can’t simply stand by and watch as the name of the tiny is smeared.
So they send out an elite team including a gingerbread soldier haunted by battlefield visions of the nutcracker and mouse king, a tiny automaton built by Leonardo da Vinci, and a ghost of a not-really-notable Christmas past to investigate in this novella inspired by Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
(reading time: 52 minutes) (reading time for entire novella: 3 hours, 6 minutes)
The midnight oil had burned, so light poured into his windows and prevented sleep. His peanut brittle curtains were not up to the task of keeping it out, only managing to dye it amber. Still he guessed it was morning, as he heard the bonsai dryads begin to go about their work, pruning and watering the thousand miniature trees that turned Minimil into a land. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 1 minute)
Crash into a Tree
“Yeah can I get two of the…” The woman’s voice stalled as she scanned the menu even though she’d already been in line for ten minutes. Chef Ricky was grinding his teeth and sweating a puddle into his sneakers. He couldn’t, on his life, recall why he thought applying to run the Groadster for a week was a good idea. Every item sold was at a loss, and all the cameras that were supposed to follow him were gone after the first two days. “…churros.”
“Would you like them with vanilla sauce, chocolate, or my special dark cherry syrup?”
“Plain.” He whipped around to take them out of the warmer before she could spot his seething rage. For five years he’d been a god of syrup, formulating ones with less sugar and more flavor. He could turn Amerenas into ambrosia, mangosteens into manna from heaven, and papaya into a god-damned panacea, but she wanted it plain. The same way she kept her graying hair plain. Her expression vacant. Her shriveling toes in sandals. A street eater. Not the kind of customer he ever wanted, but the only ones the world wanted to give him… and he only got them at a loss. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 9 minutes)
President Digz
“Hey Longjump… it’s looking at me,” Digz said with a smile. He waved his hand back and forth and watched the eyes of the little character on screen follow it. “Hey little guy, can you bring me some Seinfeld? Season seven? S-E-V-E-N.” Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 24 minutes)
E-denta
It took three separate sessions across two days, but E-denta finally succeeded in painting all of Maggie’s toe nails. The idea came to her when Jones asked for everyone to search the surrounding area for plants. The Riches around them were getting so thick that Maggie couldn’t find enough to eat without their help. Oddly enough, Braxton had the most talent for rooting around the money and bringing up the flattened bodies of mostly dead bushes. The elephant didn’t care for them, so Jones had to chuck the limp plants into her mouth and order the beast to chew. Occasionally she would chew three or four times and spray the pulpy mess back out, staining his shirt a rotten green. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 4 minutes)
Gronix the Spouse Eater
An angry crowd, that was all talk, gathered outside Bee Tower, keeping their distance from the elephant with its head stuck through the door. They grumbled and whined and milled about, too afraid to organize an actual physical strike against Jones for creating a long burrow of destruction through the city with his robot chum. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 16 minutes)
Jones and Heart
In an almost frightening way, Jones had lightened up. They had traveled for close to two weeks now with a vague destination in mind, stopping here and there when they crossed lush money-free pastures of tall grass and scrub for Maggie to gorge on. After the initial moment of horror and the attempt at forced separation, things had cooled down between the man and robot. The benefits of the connection almost always washed away Jones’s bouts of feeling manipulated. Continue reading
(reading time: 1 hour, 14 minutes)
Jones
After roaming haphazardly for an hour, Jones directed Maggie towards the area where they had found the food store; he still wondered about that glint of robot skin. With no home and no job, the small mystery turned his curiosity into a ravenous school of piranha. It was a ridiculous riddle to waste time on, as if someone died in the middle of a joke and left him no punch line. It was better to investigate that though than pick up where he left off before settling in Brightside. Continue reading
(blurb)
Behold the United States after an economic apocalypse; inflation has run wild. Life is nearly choked out by mountains of coins and dollars in the breeze. Crazed robots, rogues with coin-shooting guns, and many other strange things roam. One man, a rare surviving specimen of optimism, journeys across the wasteland of wealth in search of a place good enough to be his home.
(reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes) (reading time for entire novel: 7 hours, 20 minutes)
An average of thirty six thousand dollars was crushed under his feet with each step. Technically they weren’t feet, just metal imitations which carried him across wastelands of currency with a speed no real feet could. The patented feet were attached to large square pads that acted like snowshoes, preventing their owner from sinking into stacks of money or getting caught in credit card landslides. His imitation heart ran at full capacity, so sincerely that a real heart would be put to shame. Continue reading
Regular Romp is an interactive fiction activity over on our Twitch stream where I ask a regular a series of questions before turning their answers and a corruption of their username into a short story. Stop by twitch.tv/blainearcade if you’d like to participate.
starring
Klskws
(The adolescents and children held in the RVR facility have been there so long that their methods of communication have drifted away from the language practices of the world they were stolen from. At times it can be difficult to catch their meaning, given the preponderance of acronyms in their speech. This record provides helpful notes to clear up the issue.) Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 