Friday, June 8, 2012

Awful

It wasn't milk. Well, nor was that soy stuff sold side-by-side with the real-deal in grocery stories. And yes, somehow it was far less milk than even that. Yes. It was possible to be partially-hydrogenated non-dairy creamer. And that was all Phil had to put in his coffee. He would rather die. That was, until he tasted the coffee. Then he tore open two tiny containers' worth and dumped them in. The coffee was goddamned terrible. Phil's father had been a marine, and so he had a high threshold for awful coffee. This exceeded that.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

Migration

They were not a huge number of elves living on the plains, at least any more. They had long since been driven into the mountains by the gnomes. Gnomes were always doing that sort of thing; moving into an area, buying up all the land, and driving the locals away with high prices, hipster coffee bars, and the senseless slaughter of innocents. The elves had eventually bounced back, and had formed a commune in the mountains, and were making goat cheese. Which was all fine and good... Until the fucking gnomes decided to get into the goat fudge-making business.

Wednesday, June 6, 2012

Roadtrip

They aren't even out of the solar system before the first complaint comes from the rear of the cabin. "I have to go to the bathroom!" shouts one. The other one contributes to the conversation with "I'm hungry." Ula doesn't even turn around. "Oin, you should have thought about that before we left. Trudu, I guess you should have eaten your breakfast, huh?" Both offspring began whining in the same high-pitched distress-tone at the same time. Ula sighed, setting a new course. "Fine. FINE. But then we're GOING. No matter what." They'd never get going at this rate.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Solutions

Apparently, it's illegal on the planet of Aanarta III to have humans off-leash. I know, right? So, I decided to be incredibly self-sufficient (because I didn't want to be accused of breaking local laws and customs) and put myself on a leash. I carried the end of it, so that I wasn't an 'uncontrolled human,' and pranced myself through the center of town, going about all the normal chores one does on a Saturday morning--post office, grocery shopping, returning books to the library. SOMEHOW, the police were not amused by my work-around. I don't know how.

Monday, June 4, 2012

Sea Life

There never was a point to the Atlanteans. Oh they thought thought they were so clever and such of course--the height of both fashion and culture. But, really. Could a bunch of people living in a bubble of their own self-importance ever really be the height of culture? Klaxxon, soon-to-be Surveyor of Trenches, found himself largely unimpressed with every single one of them during his semester of studying there. Other than some truly impressive gelatto, they were nothing to write home about. Which greatly disappointed Klaxxon's mother, who found her son's letters extremely boring and trite.

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Modernization

The trolls kidnapped the children to see for them. To tell them if their payment was treasure or trash, so they would know whether to let travelers pass, or if they ought to rip the flesh from the travelers' bones and consume it while the victims, themselves, watched. It was tricky, sometimes, due to poor eyesight. But the children so often stole the trolls' treasures and ran away. After a century or so of this, they switched to robots. They were highly efficient, and honest--well, until the inevitable uprising. And, due to poor eyesight, they never saw it coming.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Shine

It was a fine line between polished metal and an actual shiny stone, the trolls thought. It was, in many cases, hard to tell what the travelers were passing them, so horrid was their eyesight. And so well-known was the issue, that said travelers often tried to pass off bits of this and that--anything that glinted in the light, really, as proper payment for traversing the troll bridges. At some point, in the grand history of trolling, the collective decided that this was completely, absolutely unacceptable. They needed eyes--someone or something to see for them. But what?

Friday, June 1, 2012

The cats were at it again; they'd been making hot water for tea, and had suddenly taken it upon themselves to make muffins, which was a messy task. None had opposable thumbs (Mortimer, the Hemingway cat, had gone to live with the dogs two houses over, citing irreconcilable difference) and so breaking the eggs was always a tricky proposition. They tried their best, of course. The pink pads of their paws pressed eagerly to the eggs as they gently tried to crack them against the counter tops. For the most part, they were wildly, destructively unsuccessful. Except for Janet Mae.