23 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “You are a peasant in 1890s Russia. There is no food. Revolution is in the air. The czarists offer meals for your allegiance. What do you do?”
Page 281
You are a peasant in 1890s Russia. There is no food. Revolution is in the air. The czarists offer meals for your allegiance. What do you do?
Pledge your allegiance to the czarists in exchange for food. Turn to page 285.
Death to the Czarists! Viva la revolution, or whatever that is in Russian! Turn to page 282.
I don’t want to go to Russia! Get me out of here! Turn to page 284.
I don’t want to time travel! Get me out of here! Turn to page 283.
Page 282
Your timing is really awful, you know that? It’s still the 1890s, well before the Russian Revolution of 1905, and that’s the one where the army supported Czar Nicholas II. He won’t be overthrown until the Russian Revolution of 1917.
So how did your little mini-coup that didn’t even make the history books go? Well, you’re a peasant. You and your friends don’t exactly have a lot of heavy artillery. But you do have an abundance of pitchforks. You all take your pitchforks and go to the nearest town and start killing off the bourgeoisie. Your revolt is quickly put down by the authorities.
There’s a saying: An army marches on its stomach. Well, prisoners in chains don’t march on their stomachs, because they don’t have that kind of opportunity for exercise. But that doesn’t mean hunger isn’t a worry for you. Yesterday you had about a quarter of a potato and a few boiled cabbage leaves. As you slowly die of starvation, you can only imagine what the Czar must get to eat every night. You bet he eats roast peacocks. What a prick.
Page 283
You are a journalist in present-day Russia. You have a very bad habit of writing true things about governmental corruption. Vladimir Putin is not a fan of your work.
You “accidentally” fall from a 5-story balcony.
Page 284
You are a member of the Lakota Sioux in Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890. Yesterday, the 7th Cavalry surrounded you. The army was taking all your tribe’s weapons away. An old man of the tribe named Black Coyote seems a little confused by what is happening. He doesn’t want to give up his gun.
“I paid a lot of money for this,” he says in his too-loud voice, for he is nearly deaf.
With this many white men among your tribe, with their horses, and their English words, there is much noise and much confusion. In the noise and the confusion, Black Coyote’s gun fires.
The white men turn their guns on you and all the members of your tribe. You try to fight back, but they’ve already taken your gun.
More than 250 men, women and children of your tribe die in the massacre.
Page 285
You eat so well for a while. Borscht! Pierogies! Cabbage soup! Rich rye bread! Plenty of porridge! Once, even a bit of chicken!
You are eating in your kitchen, candles illuminating a huge repast. An old woman walks past your house and turns, peering through your window. She stares at you, suspicion melting into envy melting into hatred.
When the revolution comes a few years later, you are strung up as a czarist collaborator.
21 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “Describe your last visit to a doctor’s office or hospital.”
You’re wheeled into the emergency room, blood gushing from a gut shot.
“Paging Dr. Guthrie,” a nurse says into a speaker. “Paging Dr. Guthrie.” A surgeon enters the room, pulling gloves onto his hands.
“Okay, Nurse … what was your name again?” the doctor says.
“Barton,” says the nurse, with an air of concern in her voice reserved for someone who has forgotten her name after having worked intimately with her for the last eight years and who is making her honestly wonder if body snatchers are a thing.
“Nurse Barton, of course, of course. Would you mind administering, oh, let’s say 20 ccs of….” he trails off, then makes a kind of coughed verbalization that sounds like “coughdrugscough.”
“Ummm, did you mean Ketamine?” Nurse Barton responds.
“Yeah. That. And hand me that thing that looks like an X-acto knife. What is that, the forceps?”
19 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “A rationalization of bad behavior”
An Old One’s gotta eat.
16 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “Rant about something you hate – let loose. Now rewrite that rant with the intention of convincing someone else to share your feelings.”
AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH CTHULHU IS THE WORST HE ATE MY ENTIRE HOMETOWN INCLUDING MY SISTER AND MY BEST FRIEND MICHELLE AND MY NEIGHBOR insert your name here AND MY DOG GODDAMN THAT VILE MURDEROUS PIECE OF BETENTACLED SHIT AAAAAAAAARRRGGGGHHHHH FUCK CTHULHU
But seriously, fuck Cthulhu, right?
14 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “Why you forgot to pay your credit card bill”
“Past due? Well that doesn’t make any sense, I have autopay set u–ohhhh. Oh that’s right! You know how Godzilla’s been going on a rampage lately? Well last week he stepped on a couple of the big Wells Fargo server farms. Somehow managed to crush both their primary servers and their disaster recovery in the same day. I guess it only wiped out data for certain customers – something about the way their servers were sharded, I didn’t totally get it. My balance was fine when we checked it, but it might have wiped out some of the account data they need to do the autopay. It was so crazy! I heard about it when I was cashing a check at my local branch. I was chatting with my favorite teller, [insert your name here], and they told me all about it. They said the likelihood of an outage at both server farms is like a million to one, and to have them both be caused by Godzilla rampages is like, a quadrillion to one? Maybe? And just as they were telling me that, Godzilla stomps my local branch and crushes the teller desk! I barely got out of there alive! I don’t think the teller did, though. Man. Godzilla must really have it out for Wells Fargo.”
12 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “Create an imaginary friend (human or not)”
“How was your day?” you ask Kimball.
“Pretty good. My occult studies are going pretty well,” he says.
“What all are you studying?”
“They’re teaching us to make protection charms and amulets that ward off eldritch foes,” he says. “The ones at the beginning of the class weren’t so great. They had us make an ointment that repels some of the Outer Gods. Mostly the ones that have an actual body, so it doesn’t do anything against The Nameless Mist or Tru’nembra. It doesn’t do much against the amorphous blob types like Mother of Pus or Ycnàgnnisssz either. Also, it smelled really gross, so it repels most people, too.”
“Yuck,” you say.
“It gets better later in the semester,” he says. “Check this out. I made it for you.” He holds up a hand at eye level. Dangling from his thumb and forefinger is a friendship bracelet. Knotted in the strands is a blue-gray stone with a hole drilled through it. As his wrist turns, you can see golden flecks embedded in the stone flashing in the sunlight.
“What is it?” you ask.
“Saurumaline. It’s a magic stone,” he says. “I performed a few rites over it. And now, if you wear this, anything with tentacles that gets within 50 yards of you is automatically banished to another dimension.” He grins. “Don’t bring it to a restaurant if you want to order calamari.”
“Wow,” you say. “You made this for me?”
“I made us matching ones,” Kimball says, showing off his other wrist.
“So seriously, that could protect me from Cthulhu?”
As if in response to your mention of his name, the earth trembles, and a batlike wing and tentacled maw crest the top of a tall building nearby.
“Gimme gimme gimme,” you say, cupping your hands below Kimball’s.
And then this weird thing happens. Kimball starts looking a tiny bit transparent.
“I don’t understand,” Kimball says. “I’m trying to give you the bracelet.” He continues to fade from view.
“Dammit, Kimball!” you say. “This is a terrible time to become intangible!”
09 Jul 2021
Today’s prompt: “Imagine that you were unable to speak for a year. What would you do to communicate, and what impact would it have on your relationships? What would you be saving up to say at the end of the year?”
Your immediate family and your best friend take the time to learn ASL after the freak curse plunges you into a year of silence. You’re grateful for that. It takes a while to get reasonably fluent, and a while after that to be truly expressive with your gestures, but after a few months you’re able to crack jokes in ASL that have your best friend laughing uproariously. The people at other tables in the restaurant stare daggers at you as he howls at your silent jokes.
Most of your friends don’t bother to learn, though, or only pick up on a few words here and there. And besides that, there’s all those conversations you need to have with strangers – giving your order to the guy behind the meat counter, or asking the woman in the parking lot if she can help jump start your car. You always keep a pad of paper and a pen around for that.
In some ways, it’s nice that it happened this year. Half your work conversations would have been happening over Teams anyway.
You don’t save up anything to say. Why should you? If it’s important, you sign it. You write it. You text it. Whatever. If it’s not important, it’s usually forgotten in few days anyway. Besides, one of the easiest ASL signs to make is “I love you.” And something about being cursed reminds you that you’re lucky to have every day. So you say that a lot.
You are nearing the end of the year, though. You haven’t saved up anything to say, but you’ve been thinking about what you might do anyway. Maybe sing a song? You’re thinking Roar by Katy Perry.
Unfortunately, you never make it to the end of the year. It turns out that, much like the ASL for Cthulhu is much more difficult than simply waggling your fingers under your chin like little tentacles, the sign for Shub-Niggurath involves way, way more than the simple signs for black, goat, woods, 1000, and young. It is, in fact, so wildly convoluted that you sprained your foot and caught your sleeve in a nearby tree.