Jackscream & Typhoonator
Designation: the STYMPHALIAN BIRD & SWORD OF DAMOCLES cillimorphs
Group: BIRDISH
Native Biomes: PLANET URBANIAK & OUTER SPACE
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Their feathers have a metallic coating for streamlining and defense. Jackscreams often engage in dogfights with their spiky pinions and spark-spitting wing engines. Typhoonators never land and use their single tail feather as a targeting lens for long range attacks.
Ggeeet & Furnagasp
Designation: the EGG EATER SNAKE & CHIMNEY cillimorphs
Group: REPTOPHIBIAN
Native Biomes: PLANET BRRR & PLANET URBANIAK
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Ggeeet both remains in its eggshell and endlessly bites its base, using the shape to roll everywhere. Furnagasp unhinges its jaw and swallows any sources of heat it can to cope with its cold environment, often human things like fireplaces and grills that wind up shown on its external patterns.
Clacklaw & Lynxball
Designation: the CAT EYE MARBLE cillimorphs
Group: SPINELESS
Native Biomes: PLANET WOODZY & PLANET BRRR
Size: SMALL
Interesting Facts: Clacklaw and Lynxball have worm-like bodies that have become so stunted they are spherical. Excretions freeze into a glass-like shell to aid in rolling locomotion, and they can also use them like prisms to redirect energy into attacks and, in Lynxball’s case, goofy ear-paw projections.
Chucky Brook can’t stop staring at the newly announced cybertr- I mean Gigaterra ultra-modern Atlas smart truck. He has to have it. It has to have him. They must be together. What follows is a horror comedy short story of one CEO’s dream and everyone else’s struggle to deal with it.
(estimated reading time: 15 minutes)
I Still Love the Truck
by
Blaine Arcade
“It doesn’t look like anything else. It’s not thin-skinned- all stainless steel. You’re welcome. The windows too, let’s show the glass demo. Now take that ball, don’t hold back, really wind up and nail it… Oh my f$$$ing god. That was too hard; nobody told you to throw it that hard. We threw the world at this thing and it didn’t break. For some reason it broke now. We’ll fix it in post.”
-Clive Murger, CEO of Gigaterra
-excerpt of Gigaterra ultra-modern smart truck ‘Atlas’ unveiling event
Chucky Brook’s memory echoed when he accidentally repeated a phrase he’d used hundreds of times throughout middle school: I’m not gay. This time no one was challenging his masculinity via the avenue of the gaping hole where a girlfriend could’ve stood. No, this time he was offering it up unprompted as an addendum to his comment on his first look at the Atlas truck he was currently sweating up the courage to buy.
“Oh man, look at those arms. They look super strong.” Addendum: something something not gay something.
“As if anybody could blame you,” laughed the dealer, pairing it with a smack on Brook’s back. “Those are the patented Atlas arms, an unstoppable vice that can secure any payload in the bed. Cords are a thing of the past. Even at their widest they only block a couple thirds of the side-views.” Continue reading
Burgulp & Lungrand
Designation: the LUNGFISH cillimorphs
Group: FISHY
Native Biomes: PLANET WOODZY & PLANET SCORCHER
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Burgulp encases itself in slime and buries itself deep underground whenever there’s a drought, sometimes not emerging until after it has matured into Lungrand, which produces bigger more beautiful bubbles and leaps out of the water energetically in high-oxygen environments.
Crumf & Labrytaur
Designation: the BREADCRUMB TRAIL & MINOTAUR cillimorphs
Group: MAMMALISH
Native Biomes: PLANET SCORCHER & PLANET BOLDERO
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Haughty little Crumf’s silliness field has mutated a plant into a symbiotic nose ring bread-berry that constantly drops crumbs so it never loses its way. It drops off as an adult, which is now mature enough to use its tail fibers for trails and the rearranging map on its chest as it navigates the tunnels and labyrinths it builds and guards.
Duqoya & Navigoss
Designation: the DUCK DECOY & HELIPAD cillimorphs
Group: GROWER
Native Biomes: PLANET BOLDERO & PLANET SPLISHY
Size: SMALL & MEDIUM
Interesting Facts: Buoyed by a hollow sphere of wood, Duqoya hangs out with waterfowlish morphs despite its awkward silence. Maturing into Navigoss splits it into two parts: a home base female and a flying male adapted to maximize reproductive opportunities.
In a dystopian near future, a chef who prepares only the final meals of the condemned takes it one order at a time…
(estimated reading time: 22 minutes)
Last Meal Ticket
by
Blaine Arcade
For once, the Republicans decided to pay for something. Stranger still, they were paying for public luxury, welfare class. Rather than a renovation it was more fitting to call it a metamorphosis when the workhorse building that had served a dozen governmental purposes got new paint, burgundy and charcoal, big curtains everywhere like a theater, crowned with three additional floors, and soundproofing that made the interior absorb anxiety.
Big rooms full of people still granted a sense of solitude in the weak lighting, turning others into shadows and props. Elegant, always fading and sinking like dusk in a sand tunnel, the Hall of Corrective Reduction had become an admired fixture of the city almost immediately after its transformative surgery.
Where did Republicans find the money for a public service? After the moral revolution of January 6th, 2025 and the elimination of the Demon-rats all public funds were successfully moved from the deep state and into less leaky deep pockets, safe and secure. Those pockets didn’t open very often; congress under the supreme president insisted it was earmarked for investment, and once those investments paid out the American people would see ten thousand times what they put in. Continue reading
(estimated reading time: 53 minutes)
Where!?
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Wagonher encompassed a pointy all-in belt, wagnered Knowrth the way to tavendor’s keyp, iffin it haddocked otherplatz on staggburred drunk ledggs. Theire might be founded and won ormbinous avoid: hole filled with punch that used to were the bodd of Hamsandcans Glammount. Asquerying locales how two reconvict themtwain was her gaol, a seedcret to be retilled in Pursuit of grown pease. Continue reading
(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 13 minutes)
Eviction Declaration
The coerced accord was signed, and in it a plan of attack. What none of them were prepared for was the degree to which mobilization of their military machine would make it clear that the experiment of Pilgrim’s Anchor was coming to an end. Should they succeed, in erasing the Bickyplots’ claims on Pursuitia and its inhabitants, the remaining Founders would then be free to attempt their Second Declaration, intended to return them not only to the American colonies, but to the exact moment they had left so they could resume their plans for a true revolution in a world they at least thought they understood.
If that happened, nothing needed left behind. So it could all come down, apart, and then alight on the wheels of war if it would be of any help in this singular assault. Everyone began to strip the stores, the walls, the cabinets and cupboards. They entered a kind of mania where they couldn’t stand to see anything with hinges closed. Anchor needed to spit up its contents, disgorge its secrets, and splinter inside out to make sure no rusty nail bent away from Bickering Hall. Continue reading
Blaine Arcade 