Submission

A 900-post collection

Challenge #00963-B232: Love and Hate and Love Again...

Dunno what this is from originally, but I saw it on Tumblr in a few places, and figured you’d make something awesome from it…

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“They say ‘You can’t love someone unless you love yourself first.' Bullshit. I have never loved myself. But you - oh god, I loved you so much… that I somehow forgot what hating myself felt like.”

(Prompt from ChaosWolf1982 on Tumblr)

There were days, aching days when the rain made his entire, misshapen body hurt, that he remembered what it was like to have been smart. He got angry with himself. Shut himself away where there weren't any reflective surfaces, and let his heart hurt him, too.

Norman should have been grateful. Walter Manor had taken him in when the rest of the world would rather have shot at him. They made sure he was at least comfortable. Treated him kindly. Saw him as a person.

But nobody could stop this kind of hurt. The hurts that reminded him of The Core Incident. Of everything he had ruined because he'd been curious.

He'd just wanted to know how the core worked. He and Ignatious had picked Rabbit because it was the first. The simplest. It had been easy to disable the automaton and remove the core. They couldn't know what would happen when they tried to crack its secrets.

They couldn't have known that a core without its body would share its nightmares through time and space.

He had once dreamed of being as handsome as Professor Hottie. Now the rest of his life was a nightmare. He was a nightmare.

"Norman?"

No. Not her. Anyone but her.

He wanted to say, I killed your husband. I ruined your family. I wrecked the universe, but his addled brain wouldn't let him. He said, "Go away, I'm hurting people."

Wanda said, "It's the rain, isn't it? I remember it was raining when..."

When she lost her father and her husband and nearly lost her uncle. "...i'm hurting," he whimpered.

Her hand was soft and warm against his skin. Gentle and careful.

Norman risked a peek with his regular eye. He couldn't understand why she looked at him like that. Like... she knew he was suffering. It had almost been twenty years, and she still looked as young as she had... when he had limped into the mansion. Peter Walter the Third draped over his shoulder and Rabbit's core clutched in his good hand. When all he could say was 'sorry' for an entire month.

And on stormy days like this... he remembered loving her from afar.

What business did she have being kind and considerate and helpful to him? He'd wrecked her entire world. He could understand if she yelled at him. Threw things. Called him a monster like the rest of the world did. But weeping? In sympathy?

Norman reached up with his left hand, catching one of her tears. "I make you cry," he said. "I'm hurting."

"I'm crying for you, dummins," she murmured, moving around so she could face him. "It's been eighteen years. You're allowed to stop hurting yourself because of what happened." One of her hands found his most-normal hand. The other gently brushed his face.

He pushed that hand away. Let the lobster claws on the ends of his fingers nip and bite his face. "Monster," he said. "Hurt the monster."

"No," she said. Something slipped over his right hand. An oven mit. "Forgive the monster." She kissed what was left of his nose.

He stared at her. Norman wanted to say, I hurt you. I hurt your family. I hurt the world. I deserve this pain. But he couldn't. All he could focus on was how much lighter he felt for being kissed. He touched where she'd kissed him, half-expecting magic to wrap him up and turn him human.

No such luck.

The proper words came at last in a rare moment of perfect lucidity. "You... made me stop hating me."

"Good," she whispered, and snuggled into his lap.

The rain didn't stop, but the pain did.

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Challenge #00962-B231: Just Like Bricks Don't

On the training plane for the Space Shuttle, the gearshift had three setitings: “fly like a plane”, “fly like a brick”, and “fly like the shuttle”. Please note that “brick” was used as an intermediate step between “plane” and “shuttle”

(Prompt from RecklessPrudence on Tumblr)

"Now this," said the human in the tones of someone sharing something delightful, "is old school."

"It looks like a simple re-entry vehicle," Tarb'nathad tapped a wing. "Primitive, yet effective."

"You have 'primitive' right," Kanta, too, had

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Challenge #00961-B230: One Gloomy Evening in a Dimly-lit Tavern

Person #1: Everyone knows there are no female dwarves because dwarves reproduce through beards, stone, and beer. :p

Person #2: No, somewhere deep in the mine lies the Dorf Queen. Whale-sized, eyeless, telepathically controlling the entire dwarf species and continuously giving birth to new “drones.”

Person #3: This also explains why dwarves all act the same. They’re just appendages of the same collective mind. Which is an aggressive alcoholic miner for some reason.

(Prompt from RecklessPrudence on Tumblr)

Jolli Eskutrebe kept

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Challenge #00960-B229: One Stormy Evening in a Former Enemy's Tool Closet

“What, that? That’s a sword that shoots lightning. That one’s a giant walking disco ball that shoots lightning. That guy’s Albert Einstein shooting lightning. Look, just assume that everything shoots lightning, ok?”

(for context, Google Privateer Press’s miniatures Game Warmachine, specifically the Cygnar faction)

"I'm detecting something of a theme," rumbled Wulfenbach.

"Well, when you conquer the self-declared Lightning Lads, you can expect a little thematic monotony, my Lord."

Wulfenbach rolled his eyes. "Feh. I've seen someone make

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Challenge #00959-B228: Slight Technical Hitch

People’s relation to tech has not changed:

On two occasions I have been asked,—"Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?“ In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage

(Prompt from recklessprudence on Tumblr)

"HA! That's

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Challenge #00958-B227: Mortal Mutant Powers

(I’ve had this prompt for ages. I have to use it now, because they’re finally starting to make plugs and ports that this doesn’t matter for)

USB connectors are at least 4-dimensional. Proof: a connector doesn’t fit. You turn it 180 degrees and it still doesn’t fit. after a THIRD 180 degree turn it now does.

(prompt from RecklessPrudence on Tumblr)

Tambry had no idea why she'd gathered a crowd. All she'd done was hook up her

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Challenge #00957-B226: Obligatory Baby Adventure

http://outofcontextdnd.tumblr.com/post/127351161618

“Dwarven baby sleeps like anvil. Wait shit, that is anvil. Where is baby?”

Hroogar the Mighty removed the swaddling to make certain. Yes. It was the actual anvil that she used for the head of her war-hammer. The handle lay innocently right next to Nagdar the Sorcerer’s staff, where it would get looked over by the casual eye.

Hroogar breathed deeply and slowly, lest she fly into a berserker rage and lay waste to everything

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Challenge #00956-B225: Convoluted Jones

“[Name]? What are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story. I have a tank.”

“I kind of noticed by the way you shelled the bad guys and then drove it through the wall, Jones. One, how the flakk did you get your hands on a pre-Shattering Terran tank, and two: how the flakk did you find live ammo for it?”

“That’s… another long story. Better told inside. It’s noisy, but there’s headsets. And you can take over

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Challenge #00955-B224: Minnie Mighty

I don’t want my obituary to read ‘saved the world and was then eaten by a small dog.’

Life’s fun when your entire life runs on pure mutant bullshittium. Hi. My name’s Minnie and I have the power to shrink.

Yeah wow what a wonderful power. I can get small.

I
can hear you thinking that from here. Let me tell you a thing. I also have a little bit of a corollary. The smaller I get, the denser,

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Challenge #00954-B223: Careful How You Wish...

(Discussing being granted superpowers, Person #2 doesn’t want them)
Person #1: I’m sorry, but whether you want to or not… this is something that is going to happen. The next time you fall asleep-
Person #2: Then I just. /Won’t/. Sleep.
Person #3 (Full of cheerful sarcasm): That sounds like a solid long-term plan!

Irde glared at Bianca. “No. No. This isn’t a solid wish.”

“You did use the words ‘I wish’, said the Djinn. What she had

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Challenge #00953-B222: Millie the Conquerer

Well, I don’t think she ever seriously wanted the city. She conquered it as a stop-gap mechanism.

The line had to be drawn, somewhere, and Millie initially drew it with arsenic in Lord Pemberhall’s snuff. The man had been planning to raze her neighbourhood to put in a park, after all. He didn’t give a fig about where the people who lived there went, or if they lived or died.

Unfortunately, Pemberhall’s heirs immediately began bickering, and when

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Challenge #00952-B221: Innovative Resource Management

They outsourced a surprising amount of their ship building (that is, they had a habit of using ships captured in battle).

People think low-gravvers are weak. Let me tell you something. A deathworlder adapted to a low-G environment is still a deathworlder.

And when there’s a hive of them in chained asteroids… you do not throw rocks at the nest.

I saw it from a safe distance and under a definite amnesty. I’m not stupid enough to cross with

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Challenge #00951-B220: Pacifying Maneuvres

We haven’t checked other species yet, but it seems to be almost universal in humans that we can’t help but at least smile, and often begin laughing, when we see a giggly baby.

The Havenworlders retreated behind their safety shields as various human factions began raising their voices.

Shayde, somehow, broke out a gigantic cup of popcorn. She masticated whilst grinning.

Someone, somewhere, pressed a brightly-coloured button.

Starting at the main viewer, every screen in the Ambassadorial Meet became dominated

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Challenge #00950-B219: Sailor Fey

Grab another one!

http://thepreciousthing.tumblr.com/post/121702150607/finding-flight-okay-but-imagine-a-medieval

Most sailors feared to go near the Siren Pass. Beyond, they whispered, were shores of gold where the waves broke with pearls and gems as sea foam. Where untold riches and wealth awaited for anyone who could actually survive the pass. Here, there be mermaids. They decorate the rocks with foolhardy sailors who chance too close and fall victim to their song. Their bones, anyway. All of them picked clean and bleached

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Challenge #00949-B218: To Boldly Bed...

Turns out humans can interbreed with almost any cogniscient species and produce viable offspring. This breaks several laws of physics, logic, and basic biology. At this point the rest of the galaxy just throws its hand up in defeat and stops trying to figure out how they do the things they do.

[AN: I have had it since Amalgam’s inception that Humans can’t spread
their genes around the cosmos like that. Ergo, this has to be Star Trek]

Admiral Pavel

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