Welcome to the Weekly Challenge Number One Hundred And Forty-Three 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 Tidal Wave
The excellent theme music is by Guy David
VOTING
Go ahead and listen to them and then vote for your favorites (multiple selections are allowed):
Norval Joe
he stalker followed his prey across the university campus, keeping enough distance behind her to avoid detection. She was young and slender and he ached to hold her in his arms, to wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze the life from her.
He had followed her before and knew her schedule, her routine. Tuesday and Thursday nights, her class would begin in daylight, but would be fully dark when it let out.
A tidal wave of urgency washed over him. Crouching, ready to attack, he saw her, alone, unaware, last to leave Phys Ed 203, advanced kick boxing.
Michael
You walk in.
They suit you up.
There’s all kinds of wires and buttons and lights.
The countdown starts and before you know it ………….
Well, I can only describe it as a virtual tidal wave of pleasure.
I tell you it’s the best government project yet and my wife loves it now that I quit chasing her all the time.
Problem is their stats for a man my age say only 2.6 times a week.
Damn!!
But hey, I’ll take it – whatever they’ll give me.
Tom
Edgar was a Platonic Physicist. If the ocean could product tidal waves, why couldn’t local causality product a time tsunami. Edgar figured a Neutrino event horizon would do the trick. He reverse engineered the dry cleaning tank process by setting up tiny collectors in every dry cleaning business on the planet. After 15 years Edgar located the most likely place the Tsunami would occur The sandstone building on Fourth and Drucker. With thoughts of Nobles dancing through his head artifacts in the tsunami’s wake squarely opened up his head, Edgar was done-in by a Rubik’s cube and a pet rock.
Ashley
As usual, young Poseidon entered the Olympus school bus like a tidal wave, literally.
“Get to a seat, “spat the now wet driver, Lachesis the fate.
First was Aphrodite, Goddess of love, frowning with mascara smeared.
Next was Apollo, sun God, pointing a poison arrow as Poseidon passed grinning with teeth the color of sea foam.
Then past Hephaestus, God of fire, smoldering and smoking.
No young God made room for Poseidon to sit.
Hermes, God of eloquence, stood suddenly and spake, “Go to the back of the bus. You smell of fish.”
Dionysus, God of wine, hiccuped in agreement.
Anima
I stood in the library, consoling Aunt Lois. Uncle Nemo’s legs jutted from beneath the toppled bookcase.
“Poor Nemo, he always had a distant look, like he was scanning the horizon for giant squid. He was fascinated with the ocean, even though he never left Colorado. It made him a little nutty, to be drydocked by mountains; all he dreamed about was sailing the seven seas. This library was filled with charts and tales of pirates, ships and nautical adventure.
Do you think the coroner might be so kind as to put down the cause of death as Title Wave?”
Justin
When the giant wave hit the city, a few crazy surfers rode it through the streets. I’m more crazy, I rode it under the streets. I set my board in the sludge and waited for the wave. I heard it first, crashing through the sewer tunnels. When it hit, I rode it, going from side to side to avoid crashing. I avoided pipes and gratings sometimes by inches. The rush was amazing. It became the best ride ever when four Turtles showed up surfing right beside me. No villains around, the only shredders were us shredding the wave. Cowabunga dudes!
Guy David
The waters where gradually rising. I watched as the tide started licking the shore greedily. A tidal wave was rising in me. It has been rising for a while now, giving me a stream of sleepless nights. I took out the pills and started swallowing them one by one, then I waited. I waited for a very long time. Nothing happened.
Later, when I got home, I checked out the label on the packet of pills. It turned out they where manufactured using all natural ingredients. Braving the tide, now I have reached dry land. Went all naturalistic after that.
Almo
Roger swiveled in his chair when he heard the satisfying kerplunk of new e-mail. He enjoyed the sound of the water droplet.
This time it was even better because it was an answer to his advertisement “Will fix any computer for $20.” There was another drop, then another. Roger’s smile faded as trickle of responses increased in volume and frequency.
His little ad had been blogged, Dug, Tweeted and Retweeted
The e-mail kerplunks became a tidal wave. The noise was deafening.
Roger scrambled furiously to quiet the din, but sadly he didn’t how to turn off the sound.
Mike P.
You thought your website was doing fine. You set up hosting, and installed WordPress. Even researched and set up amazing SEO. Then you went on vacation. While you were away, Penny Arcade linked to your site. By then, there was nothing you could do. When you got back from Costa Rica, the first place you went was your server room. You opened the door, a tidal wave of page views flowed out into the hallway, and you spent an hour mopping up the squirming creatures. You knew that the server was dead, turned into a nest for the hive.
Ben Clarke
“What is that?”
“what?”
“Up in the sky.”
“Oh my goodness it looks like a whale.”
“A whale? in the air?”
“Yeah, these young people and their improbability drives.”
“Improbability huh? Well what are we going to do about that whale?”
“Hmm, not much we can do. It is going to fall in that lake over there.”
“But don’t whales live i the ocean?”
“Don’t worry.”
“Why not?”
“It won’t survive the fall, worry about the tidal wave.”
David Tomes
“Ok guys we need to get organized here.”
“What are we trying to accomplish here?”
“You forgotten already? Look we need to all rush forward at the same time.”
“But why?”
“Come on we talked about this, we are trying to take over the world.”
“How we going to do that, we are just krill?”
“That’s why we have to get organized.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We are all going to swim toward Washington DC at the same time and create a tidal wave an wipe’em out.”
“Ok lets go.”
They never saw the whale that swallowed them whole.
Martin Joyce
“This will be the final message from our civilization. It is important that someone know we where here and what we accomplished in our time. Our lives have been spent building thie beautiful world, that our children will never be able to enjoy, after the disaster that is about to befall us. Our scientists saw the disaster coming only a short while ago and told us all to prepare for it. Our world’s about to wiped out. Oh the humanity, tidal wave!”
“Ow that water is hot,” Tom said pulling his big toe back out of the tub.
Misty Fritz
Mortally wounded, and heart sick from the betrayal, King Arthur made is way to the sacred lake. There he’d return the sword from whence it came, and hopefully gain access to Avalon that he might sleep until he was called for again. Nothing disturbed the lake’s surface as he neared. Looking down the goddess saw all of this and more. She watched his life, and failings and knew the price that it has exacted on her. If she did this her vision would be obscured for some time.
“Merlin, what’s that?”
“Surf’s up your highness, tidal wave!”
Fred Hickman
The tidal wave of human bodies rushed forward and there was nothing they could do.
When the sparks began to fly from the stage everyone gasped in anticipation of a pyrotechnic light show. When the fire works lept from the stage to the gutiar, to the gutairist arm everyone realized it was no show. The screams flowed before the bodies but only because the bodies were heavier. All of the bodies moved as one, rising and falling with the pitch of the wailing guitar.
“See Garth, look at this mess. I told you we shouldn’t do the flaming shirt trick.”
Robert Metsker
“We are a document Imaging company right?”
“Yes, Jack, we are why do you ask?”
“Well it just seems rather odd to me that we’d sell this wonderful software that takes digital images of paperwork and turns them into data to be stored a way on some server but we would have a room like this.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? Have you looked around you? I mean look at this. I can’t reach the top of this stack.”
“Don’t touch that.”
“What? Why?”
“Because it’d be bad.”
“Whatever.” he said leaning against the stack.
“Tidal Wave!”
Alan Marker
Laurence and Alan worked feverishly to stem the tide of cases that were coming in. Three techs had called in sick leaving only skeleton crew. They joked between calls about The Day That Sysadmins Ruled the World, but It had been a murderous day, and they worked like mad men, but the calls kept coming in.
“Geeze you would think that this was harder than it really is.”
“Right, I think every wacko whoever used their CD-ROM as a cup holder is calling today.”
“Maybe we should just plug the plug.”
“Won’t help, as they say you can’t stop stupid.”
Carolyn Westburg
“I told you to brush the dog.”
“I did.”
“Come on, there is no way this all came from today.”
“I Brushed him, that is my story and I’m sticking to it.”
“That is so typical, a guy that lies and then won’t admit to it. I mean here we are with indisputable evidence, and you won’t even admit that you are wrong.”
“I wouldn’t call it indisputable. A few dog hairs laying around.”
“You call this a few?”
“Ok more than a few.”
“We are floating in a tidal wave of dog hair and you call it a few.”
Arthur Kline
When the giant comet hit the Earth, it caused tidal waves that wiped out coastal cities all around the pacific rim. But, that was only the beginning of the devastation that it caused. The water and air around the site were vaporized and broken into it’s component elements, causing massive explosions, which cascaded to more and more. Resulting in the largest nuclear explosions ever on the face of the planet. Half of what was left of the atmosphere was blown off in to space. Even the dinosaurs could not survive such colossal devastation. I wonder if we, with our wonderful technology will be able to.
Jeffrey
Tom Tossed the gauntlet last week with the stats. Laurence took the gloves off when he laughed at Tom’s stats only having 6 stories. It was a sad day to be sure, when the 100 word stories didn’t even cover my commute time. Ashley was the impetus for the tidal wave to new authors with his tpoic. Since I don’t know any other authors I wrote 10 stories this week. Got a number of people to record for me, and just tossed all to Tom’s stats in the toilet. Giggle giggle snort. I think I cheated on this one. Thanks everyone!
Planet Z
Coming back from the pub’s bathroom, I recited the rhyme:
If it’s brown, flush it down.
If it’s yellow, stay mellow.
“What do you do if it’s green, glows, and has tentacles?” I asked.
The bartender raised an eyebrow.
In a corner booth, Professor Nightshade put down his pipe. He pulled out his Pocket Necronomicon and showed me the page for Shuggoth.
“Evil,” he growled. “We must kill it.”
Two hours later, a tidal wave of shit rolled over South London, driven by an multidimensional explosion.