Today’s prompt: “The richest you’ve ever been”
You die from head trauma because no one ever told you that when you dive into your vault filled with gold coins a la Scrooge McDuck, the coins don’t suddenly take on the properties of fluid dynamics like they do in cartoon logic, but remain, instead, a pile of solid coins.
Today’s prompt: “The poorest you’ve ever been”
“Oh man,” you say, pushing three ants onto a plastic spoon, “I’m so poor, if it wasn’t for bugs, I’d starve to death.”
“Excuse me,” a man in a suit approaches you and pulls some paperwork out of a briefcase. “I’m sorry, but the bank is repossessing this anthill.”
Today’s prompt: “How to get from point A to point B … and why you might not want to”
As we all know, the shortest distance between point A and point B is a straight line. So you start tunnelling through the center of the earth. You did not take enough precautions against cave-ins.
Today’s prompt: “Rewrite the above story from the point of view of a wealthy stockbroker who ends up in the poorest part of town.”
“Last stop,” the bus driver yells, rousing you from slumber. You clutch your briefcase and leave the bus, blinking at your surroundings. You’ve never been in this part of town before. It’s definitely the wrong side of the tracks. Pawn shops. Dive bars. Payday loan offices. Lava. The lava quickly surrounds the graffiti-covered, cigarette butt-filled bus stop. You clamber up onto the bench, but it continues to rise. The bench shifts beneath your weight as its iron legs melt away in the red-hot, flowing stone.
“So this is what it’s like to live in a non-gentrified neighborhood,” you think.
Today’s prompt: “Write a story from the point of view of a homeless man or woman who falls asleep on the bus and accidentally ends up ‘on the other side of the tracks,’ in a quiet neighborhood late at night.”
“Last stop,” the bus driver yells, rousing you from slumber. You hoist the trash bag full of your personal effects over your shoulder and leave the bus, blinking at your surroundings. You’ve never been in this part of town before. It looks like a gated community – not the type of place you’d feel welcome – but there’s no place else around for miles. Might as well hop the fence and see if there’s a garage or something you can sleep in unnoticed.
You clamber over the gate, and an alarm triggers. Lights lock onto you. And a pair of massive robotic metal-jawed Doberman Pinschers appear from out of nowhere and tear you to shreds. Too late, you realize that this is Roboterror Acres, a notorious community for semi-retired mad scientists.
Today’s prompt: “Write a story in which each sentence will begin with a different letter of the alphabet, beginning with the letter A, and moving sequentially, i.e., B, C, D, and so forth.”
Ahead of you on the boardwalk, Ammutseba, Devourer of Stars, appears from the mist as a cloudy mass riddled with red dwarfs and blue giants (and riddled with tentacles, because duh, it’s the Lovecraftiverse). Before you can flee, Byatis, the Berkeley Toad, blocks your path – a giant toad with crab claws, a hell of a snoot, and, yes, tentacles. Crashing in from the right you spy Cyäegha, and it spies you, what with it being just a big green eye in the middle of a big bunch of tentacles. Digging up from the ground beneath you is Dhumin, the Burrower from the Bluff! “Egad!” you think, escaping from Dhumin’s mouth and sliding down his serpentine body to the ground, only to be confronted by Eihort, a pale gooey oval with lots of eyes and legs. “Fuck!” you shout, and run from the five Lovecraftian horrors, grateful that there isn’t an Old One whose name starts with “F.” Gushing forth from the ether just to ruin your day, however, is Ghadamon, a slimy god that looks like it went through a three-hole punch a few too many times. Huffing and puffing, you dart to the left, to what looks like escape, until H’chtelegoth pops out from behind a shaved ice stand with his rows of eyes and crown of (you really hate tentacles now) tentacles. Imminent death seems inevitable when Inpesca, the Sea Horror, appears and shoves H’chtelegoth out of the way, wanting you for a snack all to itself. Just then, Janai’ngo, the big crab monster, decides he is the more worthy marine monster to devour your little human body, and snaps at both you and Inpesca with his claws. Keeping yourself just out claw-reach, you run and run and run and, as you glance back ever so briefly at the sea monster brawl, run straight into a crocodile snout with six blinking eyes – Kthaw’keth. Leaping away from Kthaw’keth’s monstrous jaws, you find yourself snagged by claws and lifted by Lexur’iga-serr’roth’s massive bat wings. “Maybe this is for the best,” you start to think, when M’basui Gwandu, another bat-winged creature with the eyes of a spider, attacks Lexur’iga-serr’roth, forcing it to drop you. “Noooooooo,” you cry, plummeting to earth, when your fall is broken by the puffy tissue of a gigantic beating heart, Nssu-Ghahnb, who responds to your landing by immediately spawning a few more monsters. Off you jump and away you run, so afraid of what you’ll run into next that you nearly die laughing when it turns out it’s Ob’mbu, the half-giraffe, half-reptile (bad move – Ob’mbu bites your shoulder and dislocates it). Pain searing through your shoulder and torso, your screams summon Psuchawrl, a humanoid with a face like a sea anemone with a beak. Quickly making an about-face, you run down the beach, only for Quyagen, a big octopus covered with horns, to reach a tentacle (fuuuuck, again?) out of the waters and grab your ankle, tripping you. Reaching deep inside yourself for a last burst of energy, you wrench your ankle free, pull yourself to your feet, and run to the shelter of a tree – but that’s no tree, it’s Rhogog, a black oak whose bark burns your hands before it opens up its massive red eye. Skin singed, you flee from the tree and barely dodge Sthanee’s snaky limbs covered with suckers. Terrified, but tiring, you twist from the grasp of Tsathoggua, a kind of toad-bat-sloth-thing. Unable to run much farther, your right arm is gouged by one of the many horns on the fish-finned Ut’Ulls-Hr’Her’s oozing beard. Vying for survival – you’re so near the end of the alphabet! – you vault past the tentacles and spines of Vthyarilops, the Starfish God. Wriggling free of one last spine that snagged the sleeve of your jacket, you look up at a massive nightcrawler – the Worm that Gnaws in the Night – sigh, and give it a wide berth as you limp away. Xcthol, however, doesn’t want you to have an easy exit; he mind-controls you into walking back toward the two dozen Old Ones who have been trying to devour you all night. You are frozen in your tracks as Y’golonac bites snack-size pieces off of you for all the Old Ones to share, using the mouths in the palms of his hands. Zstylzhemghi, the Matriarch of Swarms, passes the paper plates and napkins.
Today’s prompt: “A taste that excites you and the moment you first encountered it”
Great Old One viscera, when it spattered all over my face after Bugg-Shash swallowed you while you were holding a live grenade.