Author: J Dark

1000 word challenge

Hi!  It’s been a while.  A really really long while, eh?  Anyways, it’s been very hard to get back into writing, and a friend suggested this challenge to spark me.  It worked so I wanted to share this story and see how well a first attempt after four years of pretty much nothing creative happening. The idea was to craft a 1000 word story from a picture.  Below is the picture in question, and below that is the story.  I hope it entertains.

 

Snow fell lightly upon the wooded rocky terrain as David Jacks fell backward from the impact of blade on wood. The thick branch was half cut through from the attack. The blade stuck, and a powerful tug ripped his club from his hands. Landing on his back in the thick snow, he watched the warrior woman, grab the stuck branch and yank it free of her blade. She tossed the branch aside and strode slowly forward, a predator focusing on her prey.

The fur armor covered all of her excepting her muscular long legs, which were clad in fur boots held in place with leather cord wrapped to mid-calf. Her wrists were covered with hard leather bracers with silvery glowing knotwork. Runes etched in the sword glowed red, black smoke curling ominously into the air. David looked up at Joris Khell. She towered over him and raised the sword high… “CUT!”

Joris ground to a halt, freezing in place. Servos whirred in protest to stop the weapon’s momentum. The blade stopped at a forty-five degree angle. David watched the blade and the woman for a moment, then relaxed mentally with a sigh of relief. He held his position as the crew scrambled to get the next part of the shot ready. He shifted slightly, careful not to touch the snow or expand his print in it. Through the canvas and fur pants the first trickle of ice water touched his thigh. He hoped that filing would continue so he wouldn’t be sitting in ice water. He also hoped Joris wouldn’t fall on him. Four hundred pounds of android would hurt.

“All right, set up!” Cavalier Hansen shouted. Clad in blue jeans and a bright orange “Live Wire” T-shirt, he looked the part of the harried dedicated director with black hair sticking out in all directions like the man who’s stuck a finger in a live light socket. “We’ve got only two more hours of proper light and we’re behind schedule! Let’s get the fight scene done. Joris, you ready? “

“I am compromised, Director Hansen. My right shoulder servo is frozen.” replied the statuesque android, her voice tinged with an apologetic cadence. Chris ran a hand theatrically down his face. Taking a deep sigh and slowly nodding as he counted to ten before speaking.

“How long to fix?” he asked with exaggerated politeness.

“For this take, I can force movement, and take fifteen minutes to have a new one inserted, but I will only get one swing and it must miss as I cannot control it once I force movement.”

Chris nodded, then finally turned his gaze to the sitting David Jacks.

“How about it, Dave? Can you dodge a wild swing from there?”

“I can”, he said, still staying frozen as the ice water from the melting snow began to soak his costume, making him uncomfortably cold. “As an idea, what if she shifted her sword to a reverse grip and stabbed down? A stab is easier to dodge than a swing, plus she can aim off to my left and the camera will still see it as going for me.”

“I concur with this idea”, Joris said with a warm smile. “My hand and wrist are unaffected. It would be a simple and direct move to create. The range of motion is identical to the swing, but more interesting. Joris sees him as both a lover, and a betrayer. I think the stab evokes that opposing emotions.”

Cavalier nodded, his eyes lighting up as he listened.

“Good job both of you. Keep to the script and use the stab. Okay people! Two minutes to set up, call out when ready…”

“Lights ready!” ‘Mirrors ready!” “Fogger ready!” “Camera ready!” “Extras ready!” Cavalier nodded with each ‘ready!’ and when the last one, the safety officer reported ‘ready!’ he shouted, “Clapper! Go scene – shot – take” The woman dressed in camo pants and a black T-shirt said “Scene thirty-nine, shot eight, take three.” She closed the clapper and ducked back as Cavalier shouted “Action”.

The shot went well with the brokenhearted Joris beginning the final climactic battle with David, her equally brokenhearted opponent locked in a duel where only one could walk away. After “Cut! Print!”, time was called so Joris could repair her servo. David followed her to the special effects shed. She was six and a half feet tall and perfectly proportioned. Her right arm swayed awkwardly still holding the longsword point down as she strode purposefully to the shed.

“Nunez! You in there?”, David called pronouncing Nunez as ‘Noo-nez’. “Lady here has a shoulder needs looking at.”

“I’ll be right out, I’m cleaning some water outta a ground strobe. Be a moment.” Tomas Nunez replied, his voice originating behind a thick canvas curtain. The shed was actually a twelve by twenty-four foot Army tent. The eight foot walls made for decent open space inside…if Tomas hadn’t spread all the SFX gear on the floor. David walked to the tent flap and pulled it back to peek inside.

Nunez was wrestling with a large boxy strobe light in his laps in the middle of a small bare space surrounded by what David guessed were parts of the strobe light. A gray-striped tabby sniffed at the light as Tomas dried off another piece and set it aside. He glanced up at the sound of the canvas movement and grinned at David.

“You’ll never guess who wiped out this one.”

David snuck a quick peek to the dry-erase board and spotted the new name on the list Tomas kept. “The director? He’s always in that overhead chair watching the scenes. “

Tomas chuckled. “He dropped his cola and bullseyed the strobe while they were shooting Grace and Matthew’s scene. The cola, which he shouldn’t have had by the way, caused a cascade short that took out the whole array. The lighting crew about blew their collective gasket replacing all the shorted lights in fifteen minutes.”

Joris grimaced as she stepped past David and entered the tent, carefully picking her way past the random pieces of equipment.

“The story id definitely amusing, Tomas, but we’re due back on set. Can you put that light aside for a moment? “ She gestured at her arm. “I could use your help with this arm problem.”

Tomas stared at her arm, still bent holding the weapon point down. He sat back and looked down at the light, then to Joris. He stood up and dusted himself off, and gingerly stepped through the circle of cleaned parts over to David and Joris.

Tomas sighed as he moved towards the two. It surprised him how close the two of them had gotten so quickly, and how each of them was hiding what they were. He’d introduced them the first day of the shoot. Four days later they were nearly a couple. Though they were both actors, each had a secret.

In Joris case she was not an AI android, but a true cyborg. AI were often used on movie sets as there was something about realism that even the best CGI couldn’t quite capture. Androids were not considered human so the studios were not required to pay them SAG/AFTRA minimum wage. A cyborg would require minimum wage which was twelve times what the law required androids received as they were considered human for wage scale.

David was another case entirely. Tomas and David were an item until the car crash. Now two years later and a lot of work Tomas had paid for, David was a bonafide star and commanded a huge sum to work in films, and Tomas was a forgotten piece of history.

Only he knew how David, dying from internal damage, had paid for a complete braintap, moving his consciousness from his mangled and dying body to an artificial one that mimicked human function. He was an android masquerading as a human, and so far no one questioned it. Tomas however was a part lost in the transfer.

There’d been a surge in the system during the last moments of the tap, and the last two years of David’s life had failed to load. So had David’s sexual preferences. It was heartbreaking for Tomas, but he’d put it away, feeling it was better seeing David still alive than mourning his passing and losing the condo they shared. It took a while to get the new David up to speed, but Tomas helped him fill in the gaps.

Now two years later they were more brothers than lovers, and Tomas had made peace with losing David. He theatrically bowed and gestured to the one clean section of floor off the Joris left.

“Let’s go to the office and I’ll fix you right up, Doctor Nunez as your service.”

Both David and Joris smiled and chuckled in sync, which made Tomas join in. Joris moved to the center of the open space as Tomas got the repair kit out from under the portable bench.

“Let’s work a little magic shall we?”

Dragon Zombies of the Kuiper Belt – Opening

The tribes and races of man believe the god Kuiper created the cosmos and the stars. The material left behind became the belt that surrounded the solar system of Trine, protecting it from the fiends of the dark. The god Kuiper supposedly created the Belt, the wall of moving glittering rock seen as a line of white in the Dark. He created dragons, immortal guardians of the belt to protect Trine, cradle and home to the races. It was the dragons who were there to destroy any of the outer dark that found its way through Kuiper’s belt. Dragons are immortal, but immortal doesn’t mean unkillable.

* * * * *

“How long until we get there?” Anvresus growled irritably. “And don’t say soon. I’m tired to death of ‘soon’.” General Anvresus was the overall leader of the expedition, but he knew that their very lives were in the hands of the wizards that kept them safe from the emptiness of the dark. Dressed in a peacock display of aqua, yellow, red, and black, Wizard Secundus Perrin Nott smiled irritatingly at the General.

“We’ll get there … soon enough …”, he said with quiet superiority. “Nordaadan knows her way. We’ve seen it and she knows her destination. She can’t do anything else.”

Nordaadan soared through the Void oblivious to the frayed tempers within her. Her huge ivory wings beat against the aether, their tireless movement propelling her towards the Kuiper belt. The faint light of the stars gave her scales an iridescence at odds with her tattered skin that barely covered her oddly sprung ribs and stomach. In this distorted portion of her body protruded a clear crystal tube rounded on each end. The tube occupied the entire space from her ribs to to her pelvis.

All internal organs were removed excepting the brain and the heart to hold the spells required to animate her corpse. Inside the crystal cylinder were spheres of darker glass where her ‘passengers’ survived safe from the cold of the Void. They rustled about in their crystal pressure hull walking from one greenish sphere to another. All told there were forty men and women who maintained the spells to the brain to coordinate the body and the heart to recycle the air in the crystal and spread magic through the body to allow animation. Also on board were one hundred of the Banoor Empire’s best soldiers. Their destination was the Kuiper’s belt – the rumored protection of the world and Nordaadan’s original lair.

General Anvresus’ scowl deepened.

“How. Long. Willuk.”

The Wizardus sighed dramatically, irritated by the deliberate omission of his title.. He turned with a swirl of his robe and then turned back to face Anvresus. “I don’t know. The dragon’s memories do not count exact bits of time. Those who are keeping the brain know we are close, but how close is measured in draconian considerations, not human.” He paused and presented a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “So, please, stop asking.”

Maybe a revelation?

I got to thinking about light speed and came to perhaps a different conclusion than the accepted norm. As something approaches the speed of light, time slows down around it. The limiting factor might not be speed but time. If you exceed the speed of light, would time stop? Would it reverse itself? I doubt the latter but the first may be possible. There is a speed barrier at the speed of light, much like how there was a barrier to the speed of sound for aircraft flight. I don’t know what it will take to exceed it, but I do believe (without solid science to back me) the speed of light can be exceeded. It make take doing a lot of experimentation with time as the barrier due to the changes occurring in and around an object that approaches light speed.

Review of ‘Choose Your Truth’ by Jo Miles

‘Choose Your Truth’ by Jo Miles is a very dystopian look at ‘market share’ of the viewing public. The story begins with a look inside one of these companies and a meeting on how to decide to regain their lost market share to rival companies and how they are influencing the public with lurid bits of information that may or may not be factual.

The pacing is steady with an undercurrent of insecurity because no one’s job is truly safe unless the market share increases. There is a small group that opposes the large conglomerates of media distribution, but they are too marginalized to be effective at pushing the truth, or are they?

This is well-written and offers a fascinating look at what might be if media actually became the primary source for all information and entertainment. 1984 anyone?

Review of ‘Snail’s Pace’ by Susan McDonough-Wachtman

‘Snail’s Pace’ by Susan McDonough-Wachtman has two interesting adages which define it. The first being ‘Be careful what you wish for because it could come true’ and ‘In any situation, endeavor to keep an open mind’. The first comes true very quickly, and the latter is a constant struggle for the protagonist Susannah Maureen Chambers McKay, as she learns that her new employers are aliens. Not foreigners with a different language but ALIENS, from another world. The governer is intent on having her teach diplomacy to his son and this is where keeping an open mind continues to be a struggle for the heroine. It is a fun thoughtful story nearly devoid of combat which I found to be a refreshing change from the norm. This is a well-crafted thought-provoking story that has lessons that could be used by today’s society. I heartily recommend this book.

Review – The True Son by Vanessa McLaren-Wray

‘The True Son’ by Vanessa McLaren-Wray is definitely a teaser, a short story that directly points to her novel ‘Shadows of Insurrection’. It is also a good short standalone story that sets the stage for your imagination to wonder at the world of Jeska and what else might go on beyond the small glimpse of the life of a purchased ‘son of the king’. The main character is a son purchased from a father who struggled after his wife died to care for his son. In order to provide a better chance in life, he sold the child to the crown as one of a number of similar children who, if they work hard in both physical and mental exercises, could replace the king’s own son as the new king.

The story follows the main character and how he grows and learns to deal with the growing hatred between him and the ‘True’ son of the king. It is well written and the story leaves you right at a point where you ask yourself ‘what happens next’.

Review of ‘A Classic Beginner’s Mistake’ by Philip Brewer

‘A Classic Beginner’s Mistake’ is an interesting title in the sense it’s about a situation that is minor to the story but does encompass the entirety of the story. The main character is a fencer, currently closer to a beginner than a master swordsman. Asking a question prompted by his instructor Odessa Rae Clover, to swordmaster Vergil whom he was reporting to in order to correct a problem, Trevo was told by Vergil that if he wanted the answer he would have to fight for it.

The story is well crafted and detailed enough to help the reader through the action scenes without slowing down the pace. The world and the reason for Trevo’s assignment to well described in a unique setting that adds a detailed background that does an excellent job of supporting and coloring the main story. I enjoyed this story and would recommend for the swordplay and the unique magical realm that the story is centered in.

Review of Dangerous Inspiration by Greg Stone

Dangerous Inspiration is very much a nuanced statement for the title and the novel itself. it describes the situation all the artists that are accepted at the art colony ‘Interlude’ only to be trapped by a Nor’easter storm that traps them in the colony where an exotic series of murders occur. Interestingly, every member of the colony has a situation where violence and/or death occurred in their past life that they may or may not have deliberately taken part in.

The protagonist, Ronan Mezini, also has his own brush with death, being the detective that solved a notorious serial killer case. But there was a scandal involving brutal interrogation techniques in his past that he may or may not have taken part in. All of it combines to create an atmosphere of misdirection where more than one artist could be linked to a murder that occurs.

The writing is a little jerky at the beginning, but smooths out quickly and is very entertaining. The occurrences at the colony are like half-seen through rippled glass. There’s enough description to give you an idea of who and how something happens, but not enough for you to really grasp what the reason was and who might have been involved.

For me, when the group of artists switches location to another hotel, does the story shift to a higher gear. The activity is more sparse, but the dialog and flow more than make up for the shift in perspective. It was my favorite part of the story. The ending felt a little overcomplicated, but the information did connect together logically and the deductions and reveal do allow you to look back and see in the earlier parts where those clues surface.

This is an intriguing and fun read, especially in the second half of the book. I plan on getting a copy to enjoy.

Dragon Zombies of the Kuiper Belt

You have @BraveLittleTeapot to blame for this. She had started talking about wanting to do an anthology, and in my own snarky way, suggested I might think about joining such an endeavor. Well, all the chat on Discord convinced me that it might be fun to see what happens.

The biggest hurdle at the beginning of everything is actually beginning. Therefor, I have begun with this forward so that you can properly praise or otherwise inform the person(s) responsible. I include you @Ryan Southwick and you @Steven Radecki for assisting @BraveLittleTeapot in making me get off my lazy rear and get in gear trying to make a story of the title.

The first obvious choice is what kind of voice will the story have: humor, horror, suspense, etc? The focus on the voice creates the path of the story. I have no idea where it’s going to go yet. All I’ve done is write this forward to give proper due to those who encouraged the generation of the story.

The basis of the writing is Dragons and Horror, so there will be elements of this in the story. I’ve been on a humor kick also, soooo….there might be some of that in the horror and Dragon requirement. That being said, I will take a day to think about ideas then start writing.

As said earlier, the hardest thing about stories is beginning them. Now, let us travel into a different place, where space travel is possible, dragons exist, and the unknown is the greatest fear and question for all sentient species.

We now join the DKS (Dual Kingdoms ship) Herken to see where this story goes.

Here are a few articles adding to the story

https://phys.org/news/2022-12-particles-fluid-data-theory-comparison.html