26 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: “Explain to your boss why you spent $5,000 during one business meeting and why he should reimburse you.”
Your phone rings. You pick it up. Your boss’s name pops up. You answer.
“Hey, Dave, what’s up? We were just getting on the boat.”
“Hey, I was just looking at those expense reports you’ve been filing from R’lyeh.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve got Concur on my phone, so I figured I’d get a jump on filing them while I’m out here, as soon as I get receipts.”
“Sure, but I had some questions about some of the expenses.”
“Was it dinner last night? I know we went a little bit over the per diem, but I don’t think it was much. It’s hard to tell with the exchange rate.”
“That’s not the issue.”
“Was it the club? We were taking clients there, and I swear to god, I didn’t think bottle service was going to cost that much.”
“That was definitely on the expensive side, but if they signed the contract, it’ll more than make up for it. No, I was mostly wondering about this $3,428 charge at NecronomicInk.”
“Oh! Me and the whole crew decided to get tats.”
“And the company should reimburse this … why?”
“Well, it’s kind of a cost of doing business here. R’lyeh’s a dangerous place. Old Ones lurking on every corner. We thought we’d get tattoos of protective sigils on ourselves, and then we could negotiate from a place of safety.”
“O…kay?”
“Dude, you should check out the one I got on my back. Hey Sergio!”
“Yeah?” Sergio yells back to you.
“I’m on the phone with Dave. Quick, come take a picture of my back and text it to him!”
“That’s … not really necessary,” Dave says.
“It’s so cool! You have to see it,” you say, peeling up the back of your shirt. Sergio takes a picture and sends it to your boss. “I swear, these sigils are so much cooler than tribal tattoos or kanji. If more people knew how rad they looked, everyone would be coming down to R’lyeh to get their tats.” You look over at Sergio. “Has it gone through yet?”
“He should get it right about … now.”
“Hey Dave! Dave! Check out my tattoo in Sergio’s text!”
Dave sighs audibly, but there’s a momentary pause where he must be checking Sergio’s text. “That’s not a sigil of protection,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“I know how to read elder signs. That’s not a ward at all. Quite the contrary.”
“What’s it say?”
“It says, ‘Eat me, for lo, I am tasty.’”
As if on cue, the waters nearby churn as a massive sea-dwelling Elder God begins to surface.
24 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: Write a song.
This is a song about the day you died.
(What a way to die!)
You got hit by a double-wide.
(It fell from the sky!)
We now commemorate your death in song.
(Sha-la-la-la!)
Sorry that it isn’t very long.
(Sha-la-la-la!)
22 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: “Do you have a superstition? What is it, why do you have it, and how do you follow it?”
I hate to tell you this, but wearing the same pair of socks day in and day out will not protect you from Cthulhu. I’ve seen the future. I know what happens Thursday. Yes, I know the socks have Elder Signs woven into the design on the ankle, but the knit is too chunky for the representation of the symbol to have enough verisimilitude to be effective.
19 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: “The most recent time you were betrayed”
“I don’t know about this, Kevin,” you say, peeking out from the embankment you’re hidden behind to peer at the dragon stretched out lazily on heaps of gold.
“It’s a pretty small dragon. A juvenile, from the looks of it.”
Kevin was right about that. The dragon was about the same size as a fully-grown bear.
“I get that, but it’s still a dragon.”
“And there’s two of us! We can definitely take him. Hell, I bet if we just run up on that big mound and jump up and down and yell at him, we’ll scare him off!”
“That doesn’t seem likely.”
“Sure, you’d think so, but which of us has actually been on a successful raiding party to a dragon’s lair before?”
You sigh. “You.”
“That’s right. And I’m telling you, they’re more scared of us than we are of them. Just remember – we want to make ourselves real loud and real big. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“All right. Now let’s run out on the mound in three! Two! One!”
You jump up and dash to a large mound of treasure, yelling and whooping. You jump up and down and wave your arms.
The dragon’s head jerks up with a start. This is it! You turn to look at Kevin to tell him you think it’s working.
But Kevin isn’t next to you at all. Out of the corner of his eye, you think you can see him sneaking along the embankment, just out of the dragon’s eyeline.
“Youuuu….” Your last words are interrupted by about a half-ton of scales and muscle ramming into you. The dragon’s sharp teeth find the unprotected skin of your neck between your helmet and breastplate, as Kevin tiptoes toward the dragon’s hoard.
17 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: “Describe your grandmother’s childhood.”
Your grandmother wore flour sack dresses when she was little. She wished her mother didn’t always pick out the flour sacks with the ugliest floral prints, but somehow she found them every time.
Before she was very old, your grandma had to help out with housework and with younger siblings. But she still had opportunities to play. She had several rag dolls. Though her mom made doll clothes from the same flour sacks as your grandmother’s dresses, your grandma would often make her own fashionable gowns for her dolls from pliable green leaves bent and tied into flared skirts and stiff cap sleeves.
Your grandma was the best jacks player in the neighborhood.
The carnival came to town once for two weeks. It was the highlight of the year for your grandma – the games, the ferris wheel, the food smells – until one day near the end of the carnival’s stay when your grandma visited the fortuneteller’s tent. The fortuneteller told her she would one day have a grandchild who would die a gruesome death. The fortuneteller foresaw her grandchild on fire, flames licking their skin as they ran and ran from an angry mob. She described the way the burns spread hideously across your skin, the pain of the fire, the jeers and screams of the crowd. There was a strange glee to the fortuneteller’s description that your grandmother did not care for. She didn’t sleep well for about a week afterward. It wouldn’t have bothered her so much if everything else the fortuneteller predicted hadn’t come true within a year.
15 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: “Rewrite a piece of your own writing in one-syllable words.” [I’ll be rewriting my post Fear Itself, with the exception that I’ll keep the multi-syllabic names of the Old Ones and Outer Gods.]
You like to think you have good taste in things that scare you. You find jump scares dull, like where a cat jumps out at you and then all at once it’s not a cat, it’s Cyäegha. Gore does not do it for you these days; pails of blood, and guts and ropes of meat that spill out from the dead, and folks with their lips sewn tight with strands of their own hair, they all just get kind of stale in time. You thought the one way you could taste true fear, that white hot fear that gnaws its way in you and ties your guts in knots, is to stare in the eyes of the Great Old Ones.
So you went on a big trip. You thought you would start out with some of the Old Ones that you thought, based on the tales, might not make you lose your mind as much. You thought that way you could get in lots of scares while you were still sane. So you kicked things off with some of the gods that sound like they could make you laugh. First, Basatan, who, yes, is a big crab. You asked to get in close, but the man in charge of your ship said no. Basatan’s huge claws, each the size of ships with big sails, went clack-clack-clack, and he seemed like a big old goof, but then you looked in his eyes on their big stalks. In them, you could see, the whole was more than the sum of its big crab parts. Those deep black eyes held whorls of – of a thing that made your guts try to stand on their heads. It was like your heart and lungs and spleen did not want to be in you and would fight to get out. The crew that had not left let out screams and jumped off the ship. But you just stared, your jaw slack, in the face of that great scare.
From that point on, you were hooked. Next stop was Chaugnar Faugn, who was like a man and like a beast with a trunk and tusks and big ears, and that drank blood, and there was a mouth on the end of its trunk. Ha ha! But then you saw those eyes. You looked in those dull gold eyes, and it felt like you had walked through all the halls, all the halls, and the halls were full of screams.
Then you went to see Glaaki. Glaaki is a big slug with three eyes and spines that shine like steel. You don’t know how he walks since his small, small feet are this shape that has four points and each face of the shape has three sides. How do you walk on that? It made you want to laugh, but then you looked in his three eyes, each of which spelled out to you in real smart words what it feels like to die with no one next to you and no one that loves you.
Golgoroth can look like two things and you weren’t sure which one you would get, the big black toad or the thing with scales and bat wings and squid arms. You lucked out. It was the toad. Some say the toad has a glare that is so mean it can’t be real. Its eyes said they hate you and your mom and dad and their moms and dads and their moms and dads, all of them back to the great apes. Its eyes said they hate all the bits of you, from the nails on your weird toes to the way you think you can make good jokes but they’re not that good. It has so much hate for you, the hate could roll over you and crush you. You’d seen so much, and yet your skin crawled and you shook.
You of course checked out a few of the Gods that Live in the Out, and all the big names, your Cthulhus, your Nyarlathoteps, your Shubs-Niggurath. But to tell the truth, you found that the more the god sounds like a big goof, the more deep scares it hides. One of the best was when you went on a hunt to see Baoht Z’uqqa-Mogg. Baoht has an ant head on top of a big bug that flies and has a tail that can flick forward and sting you to death. When you looked in its eyes, it felt like a dream where you fall and then you wake up and then you go back to sleep and then you fall, on and on. It felt like your skin was full of bugs that would crawl and make you itch. Fear made your whole self shake like when you put clothes with dirt on them in the wash, but you put all your clothes on one side, and the wash shakes since the load is all weird.
Of course a god ate you. The one that ate you was Ctoggha, a god that likes things best when no one is near it. Your book that told you what the Old Ones are like did not tell you what Ctoggha looks like since no one knew, so you thought you would take a real good look. It had a chain of beaks that moved like waves on the sea. You did not think a beak could move that way. It had eyes that grew out of its neck and hands that grew out of its guts. It did things with space and math that would have made the guys that made the math rules want to crawl in a box at the top of the stairs and roll down the stairs for so long that the box would not be shaped like a cube. But those eyes … those eyes on those necks…. First they made you feel like the wing of a moth had left dust on your cheek. But this built and built, up and up – nails that scratch on a board you write on with chalk, then a cold breath on your neck, and then you were sure you left the stove on, each thing built up like a piece of a song by Bach. At the end it felt like all at the same time, you had to wade through blood, you had lost your best friend, you could be seen by lots of eyes, you were now just like your mom and dad, and you had cut slits in your arms and now had to sew them shut.
Sure, you died, but the things you’ve seen … no one can say you did not live.
12 Feb 2021
Today’s prompt: “Ten euphemisms for sex” [Let’s make it 15. I came up with a handful before I came up with the idea of looking at the epithets of the Great Old Ones for ideas.]
Too drunk to come up with a cute pickup line, and too horny to leave well enough alone? Feel free to use one of these on that attractive stranger, and then pay the consequences when it turns out they need to make a sacrifice to the Old Ones:
- They say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing. Would a little bit of carnal knowledge be an even more dangerous thing?
- Wanna play hide the tentacle?
- Did you know the French term “la petite mort,” or “the little death,” refers to an orgasm? What I’m saying is, I’d let you kill me.
- Are you a worshipper of Dhumin? Because I’d let you burrow in my bluff.
- I’d like to make the beast with two backs, eight fangs, and three deadly stingers with you.
- Are you a worshipper of Gloon? Because I’d let you corrupt my flesh.
- I’d love to get to know you in the Biblical sense, because I’ve been smitten, also in the Biblical sense.
- Are you a worshipper of Lexur’iga-serr’roth? Because I’d let you devour me in the dark.
- Are you a worshipper of Nyaghoggua? Because I’d like to have your Kraken within me.
- Could you turn me into a skeleton? I’d really like to bone.
- Are you a worshipper of Sho-Gath? Because I’d really like your god in my box.
- Are you a worshipper of Sho-Gath? Because I’d really like to check out your big black thing.
- Are you a worshipper of Y’golonac? Because I’d let you defile me any time.
- Are you a worhipper of Bugg-Shash? Because I’d let you fill my space.
- Are you a worhipper of Bugg-Shash? Because I’d like to make you come in the dark.