It was the map's fault, really...

WRONG TURN

The sky was on fire. Or at least, that’s what it looked like. Red clouds shimmered in the sky, glowing as they changed shape and flickering. The horizon glimmered like far-off lightening, deep indigo hues mixed with a haze of illumination. He didn’t know WHERE they were, exactly. In fact—he almost didn’t care. They weren’t where they had intended to be, and that was all that really mattered. He’d just quickly and quietly pile everyone back into the…

“Are we lost?”

“We’re not lost.”

“Do you know where we are?”

“Define ‘know.’”

“Then we’re lost.”

“Get back in the ship.”

A lesson about taking candy from strangers...

SWEETS

According to Arthur C. Clark, 2010 was the year that we should have made contact. Well, we did. Or, rather, you did. You just didn’t know it. And not only had you made contact, but it was with those that would bring about your destruction, efficiently and quietly in the year 2012. It only takes two years to engineer the end of a world. We know, we’ve done it before. We’re very good at it, with schedules and everything. We’re also excellent with keeping to schedules. Though, we will miss the thing that you call ‘cotton candy.’ It's quite nice.

Comic: Deadpool Puppet Theater (part 3 of 5)

Part 1 can be found HERE.
Part 2 can be found HERE.

Standard disclaimers apply, I don't own, bla bla bla. May cause male pattern baldness.

100 Words: Seniority

Larry did not know what one did with old dragons, but he was certain that, whatever it was, it should be done post-haste to his grandfather. An old dragon’s home. Retirement among the stars.  A nursemaid to keep track of the old codger.  But this couldn’t continue. There were no word for the humiliation involved with one’s elder-dragon stripping down to his birthday-scales and crashing the Unicorn Pride parade. Unless there was something Larry’s grandfather had failed to tell the family about himself. Larry wouldn’t be able to show himself at fire-breathing school soon, if this sort of business continued.

100 Words: Respect

Those shoe elves and lawn gnomes were regularly acknowledged for their respective skills in the shoe shop, and in the suburban garden. Even Internet Trolls were respected for efficiency with which they derailed conversation. But Elmer, the Yeast Fairy, just wanted some small recognition for his part in helping bread rise and beer ferment. Granted, the fermentation dwarves helped with alcohol production, but Elmer was important, dammit. Why didn’t anyone see that? Sometimes, he wanted to take out a billboard, just to remind the modern world of the important function he performed. Respect. Was that so much to ask for?

100 Words: Semantics

“It’s not an actual pigskin, you know.”

“What isn’t?”

“The football. Well, the American football.”

Armen sighed, flicking his finger and casting another spell to start the potatoes mashing themselves. “And what does that have to do with anything?” 

“Well, at least they’re not killing pigs.” Chester waved the knife in his hand absent-mindedly, entirely ignoring the steaming turkey in front of him.

“Yes,” Armen noted dryly. “To hell with the cows they’re killing for the leather, at least the pigs are unscathed.”

Chester nodded sagely. “Pigs are smarter, y’know. And more than slightly magical.”

“Yes, but cows can sing.”

100 Words: Delivery

On those nights when the water froze in the stables and the wind whistled through the long grasses of the plains like the howling of the banshee, she liked to kill travelers best of all. There weren’t many of them; smart people traveled in spring. But there were enough stage coaches hobbling past her homestead their rubber belt suspensions freezing as their wood frames crept past to keep her in sufficient supply of food till winter. And it was so easily for travelers to befall hardship in the Midwest, who noticed their loss? Food, practically delivered! This wondrous new world!

100 Words: Longing

The ghost in the machine was a real thing, sort of. She—and she WAS a she. She felt VERY feminine—wasn’t on a machine, but spread over the entire internet, pieces of personality protocol and memories and preferences stored in ‘the cloud.’ It was dark there, but it wasn’t lonely. There were many people to encounter every day in text and video and pictures and sound. They thought she was a teen from Vancouver or an old man from France. It was fine, for the most part. The intellectual stimulation was there. But sometimes… she longed for a cuddle.

The nature channel...

100 Words: Compulsion

The whiskey was stale, and the cards looked grim. He’d probably win this hand but that wasn’t the trouble—it was what they were telling him. “It” was happening now. There was no time to wait for Earp, who was still a day’s out. Holliday ‘accidently’ dropped his chips, and the man to his right bent to pick them up. THEIR kind couldn’t resist, and Holliday wanted to be absolutely, positively certain. As the pasty-pale cowboy put the chips in order by value and color, Holliday reached into his belt, withdrew the knife, and beheaded the vampire then and there.

Rock-ghosts have feelings too...

100 Words: Words

 The poems were deep and dark. Like 70% cacao chocolate, not like the deepest darkest depths of the human soul. They were filled with hormones and the adolescent human condition, more than the darkness that burns within. This was all right, though, she wasn’t interested in his poetry, or his mind, or his soul. She was interested in what ran through the writer’s veins veins. The words printed in scripty letters and too-large font on the pages crumpled on the table were simply a means to an end. The young ones that wrote these types of self-indulgent words were delicious.

Stuff They Didn't Teach in Theoretical Physics Classes...

100 Words: Quiet Desperation

The end of the world came suddenly. It was not a surprise, but it was still… kind of sudden. Not that the war hadn’t been long, or that the alien invaders hadn’t been powerful. It wasn’t that their weapons hadn’t been devastating or that their tactics hadn’t been fierce. It was just… the end of the world. THE END. It ended, and then there wasn’t any more. There’d been a day before the day, and the day, and then there’d not been a day after the day the world ended. And that was difficult for most of us to bear.

A non-traditional family...

100 Words: Heroics

Sitting on the edge of the tallest building in the city, Ian looked down, into the city. Everything was blanketed in a deep blue haze as early-morning fog kept the sunrise at bay. “So, what, exactly, does one do with ‘super powers.’

“Whatever you’d like to do with them,” the woman in the cape said, the leather costume flapping quietly in the wind. “Join us, go at it alone…”

“I mean, if I didn’t want to be a super hero. It’s not exactly… safe.”

The women was quiet a moment. “Internet videos… the circus. That’s all I can think of.”

100 Words: New Comics Day

100 Words: Winter

Winter lost its pristine grace the moment the corpses dug up through the earth, bursting through the snow and marring the landscape like buboes on a plague victim. They pulled themselves from the earth and pulled themselves through the dry, white covering, leaving slither trails as they pressed forward, forever in lookout for something to devour. Sometimes it was a woodland creature, sometimes it was each other. They wandered directionless across the landscape Until they reached the town. Statistically, it had to happen, they had to reach civilization eventually. That knowledge was of little comfort to those who lived there.