Just Add Prompt

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision. – RecklessPrudence

Nobody knew what the natives called it. There were no natives to ask. Whatever had happened on this world had destroyed all but the simplest and toughest of organic life, but left the buildings and infrastructure to be slowly buried by the forces of nature.

If there was anything more frightening than a dead city up close, Quilla couldn’t remember what it was. The knowledge that this was a whole world of dead cities was strictly intellectual. Roaming the actual empty streets and staring into the cavernous depths of echoing and dark buildings was far more visceral.

The whole place set her teeth on edge.

No bodies. Not any more. Scavengers had taken care of that. Statues told her and the other explorers what these people had once looked like.

Quilla stopped at one such monument that had evidently been broken in half by a fallen tree.

“You okay?” asked Enat. They’d been working together on trips like this for years. But this was the first grave-world that they’d encountered.

Quilla gestured at the statue. “I got chills. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

The two of them trudged onwards, looking for some hint of what had occurred. Silent.

Out of respect for the dead.

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“Wow, how’d you get it to work?”
“I ran a Physical Impulse Mechanical Stress Routine”
“Huh?”
“I kicked it.”
“Ahh.” – RecklessPrudence

It really only took ten minutes to fix, in the end. A little heat. And a lot of whacking with the right kind of maintenance.

She charged them an Hour for her work, part of which was a ‘luck tax’. As in, they were lucky they reached

I’ve made jokes about “Reboot… with steel toes” and “troubleshooting with a 12-Gauge - PULL!” plenty of times! – RecklessPrudence

A certain sign of doom amongst engineers is whistling backwards. It means something expensive is about to happen. When they hiss through their teeth whilst breathing in… there’s very little to be done.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” asked Rael, off-the-books-apprentice.

“Eh,” the engineer currently in charge shrugged. “Pass me

“Yes, I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world.” - Oscar Wilde c/- RecklessPrudence

Everyone who met her knew that there was something wrong with Sai’dut. She would talk to herself, or stop her appointed tasks to stare at something irrelevant, she would grow forgetful or latch on to some asinine entertainment and learn everything that nobody wanted to know

An Outside Context Problem is the sort of thing most civilisations encounter just once, and which they tend to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encounters a full stop.
-“Excession,” definition of an OCP c/- RecklessPrudence

Thus it is that the Cogniscent Rights Committee has passed numerous laws to prevent them. Shipping through inhabited systems with recognised intelligent life native to them is generally forbidden until such time as that native population has regular and reliable space flight.

Google Maps is accurate. Apple Maps is the product of Dali and Picasso smoking a joint before painting the child of a canary and penguin with a frightened cat used as the paint brush, then selling the result as a map. – RecklessPrudence

There’s an old human saying, that there is no such thing as an accurate map. Maps lie.

For a start, they compress thousands of square distance units into flat expanse capable of -for instance- being held by

On a scale of one to “I will invent a time machine explicitly for murdering your parents,” how mad do you think [person] is? – RecklessPrudence

“Ambassador Z0rk? He’s always tetchy.”

“That’s tetchy?” Shayde boggled. “Remind me never tae get him PO'ed.”

“Pee… ode?”

“Pissed off. Angered. Riled. Bluidy furious.”

Humans. They were equally confusing in any temporal zone. At least she wasn’t mysteriously speaking

“But, how did you know that the file contained their secret plans for world domination?”
“Because it was labelled ‘secret plans for world domination’.” — RecklessPrudence

K’orvoth could not believe that the humans would be that stupid. Or stupid enough to lable said plans in all known languages where anyone could read it.

Or to leave such things on an unsecured commconsole in the open.

He could not believe this windfall. “Decrypt it at once,” he ordered. “We

First submission since the identification of an ableist slur. Edited from original form, thusly:

I love the image of his brain just clearly rebooting because too much ridiculousness and unbelievability is hitting it at one time. – RecklessPrudence

Harry stared up at the edifice that was Security Chief ‘Sherlock’. It was hard not to. Sherlock stood at 6'4" and she was a diminutive 5'2".

“…i know i’m in trouble, there’s no need