Teleport

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Professor Blaine had proven that the teleporter worked on inanimate objects and living things many times, but the government had yet to give him approval to test it on humans.
So, one evening, he volunteered himself.
Every atom and quantum-state in his physical body were moved from the first scanner-pad to the second.
But the system failed to transport his soul.
When the professor read the letter from the Defense Department, commandeering his research for weapons research, instead of tossing it into the trash as he’d done to the first letter they’d sent, he shrugged and signed the transfer orders.

Cinco

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We prepare for Cinco de Mayo.
Putting boards over the windows, pulling the cars into the garage and locking it.
We don’t bother gardening in April anymore. It would just get torn up and thrown into our driveway or on the roof.
The press doesn’t call it rioting anymore. They keep saying it’s a peaceful demonstration. A parade.
Say that to our former neighbors, who watched their homes burn down.
We got lucky that year. Only the shed got hit.
The fence had new razor-wire on it.
Pull the gates shut, and load your shotgun.
And happy Cinco de Mayo.

The Werewolf

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Those damn cops had shot at us.
I lucked out, but the Werewolf didn’t.
The angry beast growls and licks his wounds, picking out bullets with his claws and tossing them into the gutter.
“They can’t kill me,” it says. “But it still fuckin’ hurts.”
I nod and watch the wounds.
The bleeding stops, and within a minute they’ve scarred over.
“Drowning is bad, but fire’s the worst.”
“Try taking a stake to your lung,” I say. “They don’t teach anatomy worth a damn anymore.”
He washes the blood off with the rain, and we head back down the alley.

Puppet Regime

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We watch the enemy’s soldiers march into the capital.
Buildings burn. The Resistance is crushed, strung up from the castle walls.
Not by their necks, but by their hands, feet, and joints.
It is one things to be forced to follow the command of a puppet regime, but being told to bow to a marionette regime is even more humiliating.
The old Prime Minister is pranced around the massive stage with a club in his hand.
“WHERE’S THE BABY?” shrieks the enemy from the battlements in his best Punch falsetto.
Fiendish monsters! We will prevail, and make hand-puppets of them.

Weekly Challenge #210 – Easy, Router, Water Under The Bridge, You Broke My Vase, Something Simple

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Welcome to the Weekly Challenge Number Two Hundred and Ten, where I post a topic and then challenge you to come up with a 100 word story based on that topic.
The topic this week was… was…. um…
It’s Easy, Router, Water Under The Bridge, You Broke My Vase, Something Simple!
VOTING

Which were the best stories this week?
Lewis
Zachmann
Guy David
Steven
TJ
Anima
Justin
Norval Joe
Arri
Planet Z
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Go ahead and listen to them and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):


Lewis

“You broke my vase!”
Bob the giant looked down at the screaming little person.
“Why can’t you do something so simple and easy?”
Bob scratched his head. Bob was not bright, but the folks tried to think of odd jobs he could do to make him feel like a part of the community.
The little person started to scream to himself.
“Water under the bridge,” she told me. “He did not mean it,” “it is not his fault.”
Bob pointed at a small pile of crushed electronics and the little person looked.
“What is that?” he asked.
Bob grinned.
“Router!”

Zachmann

I thought getting a wireless router for our board and care would be something simple. First I linked though the website to order router. After three weeks called cable company, who said they didn’t understand why it was not sent and reordered it. Two days later the caregiver called and told me the box had come then the online order not coming was water under the bridge. I arrived with my laptop expecting self installation to be easy. I put installation disk in laptop. Soon I called tech support. Since I’m twelve o’clock flasher hours later there was wireless internet.

Where ever I work, every night the regular staff always tell me ghost stories right before they leave me alone for the rest of the night. One place I worked, I always heard this weird eerie sound every day about three in the morning but soon found it to be the sound of the BART trains returning to station.
One night I heard a voice “I’ll kick your ass, you broke my vase. I’ll kick your ass, you broke my vase.” I shouted “Get off me case, I never touched your vase”. Later, I found a parrot forgotten by owner.

Guy David

They met under the bridge, at the place where the waters run. The meeting was easy to arrange. They used to send out couriers on horses with notes etched in the blood of virgin maidens, but those days all they needed was a modem, a router and an internet connection. Usually, they summoned the spirits through elaborate rituals conducted by the blue mages of Ingens Papilla, but this time it was something much simpler. All they needed to summon was one genie. The leader rubbed the lamp silently and the smoke started rising. “You broke my vase” said the genie.

Steven

Sanson knew it was wrong when he woke to snow on his eyelashes. His memories downloaded across the clone’s brain, restless after being stored in the ship’s routers during the interstellar flight.
Sanson followed sounds of hammering and laughing to the bridge, dodging snowdrifts along the way. The galaxy, stretched by hyperspace dilation, rippled like water beneath the transparent floor of the bridge. A bearded figure sat in the captain’s chair, supervising small aliens making strange toys.
“Have a seat,” it told Sanson with a laugh. “we have to speed up to make it to every house in one night!”

TJ

And it’s Easy, now, coming up close on the outside but can she catch Router no! Router pulls ahead leaving Water Under the Bridge neck and neck to place with You Broke My Vase, You Broke My Vase edging up on Router now ahead of Water Under the Bridge by a nose but what’s this? Something Simple, Something Simple an odds on favorite to lose now overtaking Easy, now passing Water Under the Bridge, passing You Broke My Vase, now coming up on Router, it’s neck and neck, Router and Something Simple, it’s neck and neck and Something Simple WINS!

Anima

It’s nuts how something simple like you breaking my vase years ago still makes me crazy. It ought to be water under the bridge, but it isn’t easy for me to forget that day. It wasn’t that it was a Ming, and it was nice that you vacuumed and cleaned up the mess: It’s that IT WAS MY MAMA! You were hooking up the router; I concede the vase was on the corner of the buffet. You still have the Xbox, but I have nothing. What am I supposed to do for Mother’s Day? Put pink tulips on your joystick?

Justin

“B twelve.”
“You sunk my battlevase!”
“I bet you’ll never want to play me at Battlepottery again. I beat you easy!”
“I don’t keep a grudge, water under the bridge.”
“Did you get your router fixed?”
“Yeah, was a simple fix.”
“Do you ever feel like you are just speaking some, I don’t know, something like scripted dialogue?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like everything we say is based on some random topics of some sick deity.”
“Not sick, he’s brilliant!”
“What? How do you know it’s a he, and if he’s brilliant or not?”
“Weird, where did that come from?”

Norval Joe

She blinked her eyes and turned away to hide the absense of tears. Her back to him she sniffed loudly and said, “sure it’s all water under the bridge, but you broke my vase, I mean, my heart, when you left with that woman.”
The blood drained from his face. He admitted, “She said she was here to change the router, that it was something simple, then she insisted I take her for a drink. It wasn’t easy to deny her”
As he left the room, head bowed, she quickly checked the vase to insure the microfilm was still there.

Arri

“Crap, now how do we target? When you broke my router’s guide fluid vase you made simple intra system duck soup navigations into this cluster frakked heap of Ederbanook computations. I HATE Ederbanookians!”
“Like relax dude. It’s all water under the bridge. It’s easy to out run those fuzzy morons. You just put your holo girlfriend on the vid with that phase filter like we used to at academy. Have her say-”
“But really there’s no problem officer!”
I just wanted to abduct the alien for personal reasons.“
“The dislogic overamps their matrix for long enough.”
“Don’t try weirding me…”

Planet Z

Johnny was in the middle of a championship round deathmatch when the router when down.
He ran to the wiring closet to reset it, but bumped into an antique vase and it broke on the floor.
“Mom’s gonna kill me,” he said.
He thought it would be something simple to glue it back together, but it’s never that easy. He could still see the cracks.
So, when his mother came home, he made it look like she bumped into him and knocked him into the vase, breaking it again.
He cried. She said it’s okay.
All water under the bridge.

The End Of Miss April

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Today is the last day I will see Miss April.
Tomorrow, I will flip the calendar page and bury her against the wall.
Miss May will try to comfort me, but when I stare at her, I will be thinking of Miss April.
However, just as Miss April got me to eventually forget about Miss March, I suppose Miss May will eventually get me to forget about Miss April.
What about Miss February and Miss January?
Haven’t thought about them in months. Really.
Okay, I’m lying. I miss them too.
I knew I should have gotten a calendar with kittens.

Digging To China

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Little Joey’s digging a hole to China in the back yard.
He was watching the historical archives again, found Dennis The Menace, and now he’s digging.
No, he won’t reach China. That’s just silly.
I checked the orbital colony’s schematics for power and communications lines.
Nope. Instead, he’ll reach the drainage and nutrient systems in another meter or so. Then, a bulkhead.
That’s when I noticed the access panel. Leads to a conference room.
Bob Wu found a costume in the theater group’s storage bin.
He’ll welcome Joey to a holographic China, release the sleep-gas, and send him back up.

You’ll fit right in

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The Berkman was a Class Three cruiser, and they needed a new research analyst.
“What happened to the last one?” I asked.
“That’s what our next mission is,” said the captain.
I bought life insurance for the wife and signed on for the mission.
As the ship scanned black holes and missing-matter, I looked through the Berkman’s logs and the researcher’s notes, but as far as I could tell, the crew had killed and eaten him.
There’s a knock on my door.
“You’re needed in the galley,” says the captain.
I suppose this is the end.
Enjoy the cash, dear.

Warning Signs

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My boss handed me an assignment: design a warning sign for nuclear waste that will make sense to anyone digging it up a million years from now.
My first few efforts focused on skulls, crossbones, frowny faces, festering zombies, and other symbols of slow, painful death.
Then, I realized. If these people of the future don’t understand simple English, that means our country’s been conquered by China. Or overwhelmed by those Mexican immigrants.
Well, screw that. This is my country, dammit.
That’s when I started drawing smiley faces and people with shovels, happily digging, and pouring barrels over their heads.

Mother Nature

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It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, but it’s much easier since she slipped on a riverbank and hit her head on a rock.
With a bandage on her forehead and a smile on her face, she nods with contentment from her hospital bed.
There’s no need to bring her new flowers every day. The flowers I brought her the first day are still fresh today, so all you need to do is take them away while she’s asleep and bring them in when she wakes up.
“Look what I have! Flowers!”
She smiles peacefully and looks out the window.