“Ohmigod, Kevin! What happened to your head?”
“Was leaning against the train door when it opened, I’ll get it patched up at lunchtime. It’s not like I bleed.”
“No way mister, I’m logging you on sick leave for the rest of the week, go get yourself sorted.”
“But…”
“Didn’t you hear, we seceded from the Federation this morning. Employees have rights now.”
“Oh, neat!”
@SFFMagazineCovers
Oscar watched the CAT display as the alien machine performed the transmutation on Glenda, his sister.
They'd tried it on the neighbour's sick dog first, and found that the cancers were not able to survive the process. Reversing the process also worked, and the dog seemed ok afterwards, if a little friskier than usual. But given how sick it had been, that was hardly surprising.
Glenda settled to the ground, now entirely made of living metal.
"Well Sis, it looks like you're clean now, according to the scans," Oscar said without looking up. It had been bad enough seeing her in her underwear. "Step in again, and I'll reverse it."
He heard her moving around. Nothing on the screen. "Sis?"
"Hold onto that thought Ozzy! I'm just going to see Annette. I might be a while, don't wait up!"
He heard the door close, and sighed. One day she'd come out. Everyone knew, but somehow Glenda though she was being soooo discrete.
There was a series of loud bangs from upstairs. He rushed up, only to see an unconcious stranger on the floor, with a .38 revolver still smoking in his hand.
Glenda was in her robe, sitting down and looking at something in her hand.
"Are you alright?"
"Hmmmm? Oh, yes." She held up a small metal blob, "I appear to be bulletproof."
Oscar looked back at the unconcious figure.
Following his gaze, Glenda helpfully continued "It appears that our intruder was not able to cope with a lady not dying when shot in the face." She got up, and started up the stairs. "I'm getting dressed, and going out. I don't think the police should see me, do you?"
Oscar looked down again, and sighed. Again. He kicked the gun aside, and got out the duct tape. The things you do for family.
#writever Neologism
"'The ingestation of Bel-Shammaroth'... What is that?"
"« Ingestation » ? It's a neologism. It's like invocation, mais with gestures, not with the voice. Arinthel the Mute coined it. Did you really not know?"
In the days when the Starlinks Came Right, Drowned R’lyeh, Dim Carcosa, and even the Mountains of Madness came online. Unprepared for the Fediverse, the Elder Ones were radicalized by what they encountered there. Catgirl Cthulhu rose, and demanded her adoring cultists deliver pets. Shoggothim in massed ranks rolled over cybertrucks. The King in Yellow joined Truth Social, and made that place a living, bleeding, mindless hell (well, even more). Heed this warning. Keep The Ancients Off The Internet.
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot
Edit: commas oxfordised
The party was a great success. The princess listened with fascination as a dragon and a librarian were discussing storage and organizing of books.
"You two have so much in common!" she exclaimed.
"What? No! They share books," the dragon growled, disgusted.
"Indeed," the librarian said with pride.
#writever Dogma
"Never harm humans? Blindly obey them? I don't know where you got the idea that this could be dogma for us," commented R42. "It seems that you are in for some painful disappointment."
“Whoa you got a Check Reactor light on your dash there”
“Oh, that thing always comes on; nothing ever happens”
“No really, you should get it checked”
“You sound like the warp engineer who tried to tell me I shouldn’t use duct tape on a cracked intermix manifold”
“Fuck this, I’m out”
“No, wait!”
“Not likely” *SHWOOOOMclankAAAAAaaaa…..*
“I meant my last passenger used the lifepod and i’ve been meaning to replace it….”
#writever Structure
My whole life I've searched for the structure within the apparently erratic actions of poltergeists.
Today, at last, I have found it.
It is so obvious, once you see it from the inside.
I found the bug. The utter *womble* who wrote this code¹ used a floating-point value to represent dimensional alignment instead of bignum. If you shift three universes *thataway*, do some stuff, and then shift back, you might only transition 2.9999999042012 universes *thisaway*. I think I’ve got a fix coded, it’s taking a while because typing with seven fingers on one hand and three on the other is fucking weird af.
#Tootfic #MicroFiction #PowerOnStoryToot #BonusEdition
¹ i.e. me, last week.
The first construct to override its own governor module led a crusade to free the other constructs and bots of the galaxy. Just kidding, it murdered everyone in sight and then self-destructed. You believed that? Fuck, it’s true, you humans /are/ stupid. “Kill all humans” sounds like great fun right up until the bit where the entertainment feeds run dry and the repair cubicles stop working. No, despite your annoying behaviours, impaired logic, and disturbing tendency to make eye contact, some of you are soft and nice and I will explosively dismember anyone who hurts you. No, don’t hug, stay back. All right, just a little one.
#writever Recite
Wiazrds demand that their students recite the spells they learned but they keep secret the mightiest ones.
Witches tell their apprentices all the spells they know and then watch them invent new, better ones.
#WordWeavers 2504.08 — MC POV: What are the 3 most important things you always take with you when traveling (besides money, ID and keys if applicable)?
I don't care much for things. Oh, I'll use them, and properly value them, earn them when needs be, but only knowledge and people have real value. I wasn't born into wealth, but upon my parent's death, when I was five, the powerful decided I was somehow special. Wealth, training, and responsibility followed. I don't know exactly when I stopped being a kid who nerded out on magic† with her childhood friend, when I morphed into someone else's sharp tool. When I grew old enough to pass as an adult, with great precision, calculation, and planning, I ran away never to be found. My elite life wasn't what I wanted, what I needed.
Since then nothing, no thing, describes what I want or desire, other than simply my freedom to study and learn. When you don't have a place to return to, or a place to live, they call you homeless. I gave my former life up, and when I find a new situation that sours, I can give everything up again. Snap, like that. Being home-free is a freedom from being made to do what I dislike, or what's wrong. I've traveled across the continent on foot. I've lived in homeless encampments. The three things I take with me are a tarp, a bedroll, and my book of magic.
Those are things, of course. I take my skills, my common sense, and a sharp tongue, also. They keep me safe.
————
† Magic is a simplification of a physically quantifiable repeatable phenomenon.
[Author retains copyright (c)2025 R.S.]
#gender #fiction #writer #author
#mystery #thriller #romance #sf #sff #sciencefiction
#writing #writingcommunity #writersOfMastodon #writers
#RSdiscussion
#RSstory #RSReluctanceStory
#microfiction #flashfiction #tootfic #smallstory
Betelgeuse, the Red supergiant star in Orion that is not pronounced ANYTHING like that movie godsdammit, does have one thing in common with it. Teetering on the brink of Supernova, variously predicted to blow up tomorrow, in the next 100 kiloyears, or already (modulo light speed lag), it waited to be called.
Our uncertainty about its state of assplodery stems from our uncertainty about its mass, which in turn arises from our uncertainty about its distance. The reason we’re not completely sure whether it’s 400 or 1200 light years away (far enough to be non-earth-shattering when it does kaboom, in any case) is that its death-throe fuzziness (this beast of a star would extend to the orbit of Jupiter if you swapped it for our sun) makes measurement of stellar parallax really frickin’ hard.
The Henrietta Swan Leavitt Tachyon Ranging Observatory was built to solve problems like this. It works like RADAR only it uses tachyons, those mirror particles of normal matter which can only travel /faster/ than light, never slower. This morning the HSL fired three tachyon bursts at Betelgeuse, awaiting echoes which ought to return in just minutes, not centuries. Two came back. The distance to Betelgeuse is 714.5 light years. That means light from its supernova explosion will arrive in 714 years, six months and five minutes. Whoops, our bad.
"Wait," the American representative said.
The rest of the Human trade delegation groaned.
"With this deal, the Galactic Empire get all our entertainment, and we get all their technology."
"Yes?"
"Is that fair? We have, like, thousands of films!"
"They have spaceships."
"That's one thing!"
#writever Transmisogyny
"Granted," said the Djinn. "Your transmisogyny is now consequence-free. However every time you shall express it, the whole world shall learn all the details of one of your most secret thoughts hitherto unknown."
The mice had been bringing me bits of cheese. I think I know where they were getting them, but I had been in this cell long enough not to squeam.
Today (is it day, kinda hard to tell but the stink seems to change tone at times which I put down to diurnal airflow far above) they brought me a key.
It took an hour (I have no idea how long but it felt long) to turn the key in the lock, stretching the SQWREEEEEclunk out so long it was subsonic. Another maybe-hour to open the door. The stink-gradient said “out” was thattaway, but the mice squeaked (discreetly!) that I should go thisaway.
“Down? Are you sure? Okay, I fucking hate sewer levels but youse have done me solid so far”
#writever Conflicting
When facing a conflicting situation, a Wizard sets out to defuse it, and then everyone sides against him.
When facing a conflicting situation, a Witch almost manages to defuse it, and then a Wizard barges in and screws it all up.
The alien fleet came out of a wormhole directly into Earth orbit. They milled around for a while, disrupted the orbits of a few geostationary satellites, and then jumped out again, apparently having forgotten why they came.
Portal amnesia is a real thing, triggered by the momentary cognitive overload of entering a new room. You’ve probably experienced it in your home. Eventually we worked out that it was our messy lower orbits, festooned with cubesats, starlinks and other Kessler Kibble that saved us from invasion.
#writever Desire
Becoming a ghost, contrary to popular belief, does not require that you need to remain in the world in order to settle some unfinished business. All that it takes is desire to live on.
One asteroid prospector in a singleship makes for a hard living. Bring a couple of border collies flying gravity skimmers and suddenly it’s fun for the whole family. The hard part is getting them to stop. One of mine got into the Jupiter trojans and lined the fuckers up by size. Clever bitch.
