Author: R.

Galad’s Reprieve

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Sorry for sitting on this one for so long, Andrew. Hopefully it hasn’t lost its bite…

Not quite in his padded cell; Galad said a prayer for DPM John Prescott MP. The bloody great row about him and his relationship with AEG did a great job of deflecting unwanted attention from Galad’s latest project. Even the reports of disappearances from Scottish cities had disappeared into the back pages of the newspapers. Yet again, Galad had been saved by the stupidity of others. He wrote his spell in blood on the ancient parchment. It was fortunate that tramp’s blood worked as well as virgin’s. “Nicely done John ole’ boy.” He smirked as he murmured aloud to himself.

Dwarf

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It was when the third henchman died in a cave collapse I really got suspicious.
Our Dwarf is no Dwarf, but a very short human.
Perhaps I should have known before then, like when we’d ask him to parlay with creatures Dwarves are well-known for conversing with.
Instead of talking to them, he’d draw his axe and charge them.
He was also lousy at identifying gemstones.
“Ooh, pretty!” he’d say, stuffing them in his pockets.
“What is it?” would ask the paladin.
“Well, it’s mine now,” he’d say, grinning.
Now I realize the greed was just a cover for ignorance.

Ice Cream Truck

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Explosions are ripping apart the skyline of the city, but the ice cream truck rolls on.
No music is playing, but not because the driver doesn’t want to be targeted. Those who would destroy his truck are hundreds of miles away from hearing it, manning the missile batteries and piloting the drones which unleash the death around him.
No, the music is off because there is no ice cream today.
The coolers are full, sure, but they are packed with the corpses of his neighbors.
He figured as long as the bombs were falling, why not settle a few scores?

Weekly Challenge #13 – Defenestrate

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Welcome to the thirteenth Weekly Challenge, 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 defenestrate.
Six stories were submitted this week, but one was from last week that I had missed. Sorry, Marcus.
We’ve got yet another rookie, plus the usual madness from the planet of insane bards, Planet Z. Go ahead and listen to them by clicking on the grammophone thingy there in the left column and then vote for your favorite:

Who had the best story this week?
Celeste
Elisson of blog d’Elisson
Beck from Incite
Andrew of Dodgeblogium
Kolek from the Kolektive
Caleb from The Black Tie Martini Club
The Mystery Man From Planet Z
  
Free polls from Pollhost.com


Thanks to everyone for sending in their stories, and I look forward to what you’ve got to write (and say) next week.
The theme will be posted shortly.

The Zombietron is not a toy

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Attorneys no longer have to worry about their witnesses turning up dead.
Now you can just stick the witness or victim in one end of the Zombietron, pour in a teaspoon of nanobots, and let them soak in the machine overnight.
Sure, they reek like a latrine pit full of rotten meat, but functional and lucid zombies are admissible as evidence.
The worst part of the process is watching them die again. I wonder if they suffer.
So, what happens when you put a living person in the Zombietron?
I don’t know.
Hey, let’s grab a bum and find out.

Midnight in Munich

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It’s midnight in Munich.
There’s opera singers on every street corner, belting out arias for spare change.
Give ’em five euros and they’ll watch your car all night long.
They say it deters crime. And the tourists dig it, too.
I don’t. All this racket gives me a nasty headache.
Besides, there’s too many streets and not enough opera singers, so they have to deploy understudies and amateurs to fill the gaps.
I liked it better when we had cops.
Now hand over your wallet, American.
Forget the cash… I just want to see if there’s an aspirin in it.

MVP

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What was that about there’s no such thing as bad publicity?
We bid six million dollars on the sponsorship rights for the official truck of baseball. For that, we got to hand the keys of a shiny new truck to the All-Star MVP.
He smiles nice and wide.
I swear, as God as my witness, we didn’t know that the guy didn’t know how to drive.
Five minutes later, we hear screams. He’s run over a kid in the parking lot and smashed the truck into a light pole.
No seatbelt, and the airbags failed.
He smiles, bloody and gap-toothed.

By The Barrel

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“Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel,” slurred Mark Twain, staggering drunkenly in the street.
“Certainly, sir,” said the police officer. “But I think you’ve had too much to drink.”
“That’s because I buy wine by the barrel,” said Mark Twain, falling flat on his face in the dirt.
The officer dragged Twain back to the hotel lobby, and that’s when the newspaper office exploded.
“Great Scot!” shouted the cop.
“I also buy black powder by the barrel,” mumbled Twain. “That’ll teach the son of a bitch to be late paying me for my articles.”

El Tocino-Envuelto

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Where Pizarro failed, Sir Walter swore he’d succeed.
He’d find El Dorado, the legendary City of Gold!
Through all of his expeditions, he never did find El Dorado.
But he was quite fond of a town called El Tocino-Envuelto, which roughly translates to The Bacon-Wrapped One.
Where El Dorado was supposedly paved with gold, the streets of Tocino-Envuelto were paved with pork.
The Spanish outpost of San Thome was rumored to have the best applesauce in the New World. Raleigh craved it for his pork chops.
It would ultimately be his son’s death and, by the headsman’s axe, his undoing.

The Finisher

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They call us Finishers.
When the subject has nothing more of use to give, we finish them off.
Now and then, something of use comes out, like a final drop of lemon juice from a squeezed and pulverized lemon.
We don’t care. We’re there to punish, not interrogate.
Some administrator got it in their head that Finishers should be licensed medical practitioners. Never mind that we have one purpose: to cause harm. We cannot take the Hippocratic Oath.
That administrator vanished the other day.
Want to hear a tape of them screaming, or would you like to see their tongue?