Red | they/them, ne/nem, fuck/fucker or he/him | 23 | This account is not suitable for minors. I write a lot of fucked up stuff. | Mainly Transformers fiction and original fiction; almost always horror genre or horror/other genre fusion
🚧 this is not finished and there will be adjustments! 🚧 please do not reblog this post! 🚧Â
Hi, I'm Red. Welcome to my writing blog. I use he/him, they/them, ne/nem, and fuck/fucker pronouns, and this is a sideblog. I follow and interact from @bitegore. I'm bi, transmasc, aro, polyam and above all Queer.
I write primarily original fiction, sometimes fanfiction.I like dragons and I like robots, and I will put one or the other (or sometimes both!) into everything I do. I consider myself to be a horror writer, and I typically try to lean in toward whatever shitty implications I can come up with rather than lean out.
I have a particular love of in-universe documents and pastiche of things like current event news articles and sociological papers. I also love gore, death, horrific power dynamics, and bad sex that hurts everyone involved. I love when characters do bad things to one another and I want them to be awful.
I fully intend for everyone reading my stories to get some sort of rubberneck-style voyeuristic fascination out of everything I write. My smut is bad and I hope it makes you want to peel your skin off. My humor is pitch black and I will rhyme lying with dying and try to make you laugh about it. I do my best never to shy away from the edge and I want you to stare down at the pitch-black hole I've dropped my characters into and acknowledge the abject depths of their suffering and then be forced to admit that actually that's kind of funny anyway.
But i promise i'm chill as, like, a person and I want to give you the tools to read or not read that at your leisure and all that.
Current Ongoing Wips: 👇👇👇👇👇👇none of this has been updated in like four years and i cant be assed to fix it so just ignore all this
Transmissions from Cybertron - a letter-based epistolary fic about a transformer who goes on a weird mission and gets his brain fried super duper hard by it. Currently in its last few stages, I think, I just have to get it DONE.
Dedication - my take on the Tarn and Pharma Have A Child thing, wherein everything is bad, Pharma is currently dead, and the kid has never had a single positive adult in his life thus far. and also hasn't got a name yet. i just need to finish what i have written so i can get to what i want to write. this one also only needs a couple more chapters and then it should be done. Also Transformers fanfiction.
"You really wanna know where I'm from?"Â - my beloved transformers oc Bait lies about her background to a bunch of people for fun and profit. A personal project and on the back burner.
Closerverse Main Story - Original fiction; a two part story that starts with a fucked up child soldier/member of a military cult discovering that non-human people (this is one of those high fantasy worlds with like shapeshifters and shit who are very much people) are still people and killing them is bad. and then falling in love, or at least good friends, with a dragon shapeshifter who also rather likes her. and THEN we take a hard swerve into grimdark territory and do bad things to our beloved dragon shapeshifter and hit him with a curse and do bad things to our ex-child soldier and THEN they go ahead and burn down the old world order and build a kinder one in its ashes. This one needs a prety comprehensive re-plotting but the bones are good; but also there's some awkward eeehhhh shit about what is essentially me processing my hashtag jewish-in-2022 feelings through making shapeshifting lizards be an oppressed culture and people that I don't want to take out because I want to be a shapeshifting lizard so bad i could cry but also the antisemites. they do that too. im not with them
no other serious origfic stories at this time smh
Housekeeping:
Tags in Use:
#tag game - tag games (where I'm tagged/pinged by username)
#ask game - ask games (asks sent in that I respond to)
#wip thread - a long "thead" where i post snippets from one particular wip, usually short fanfics I intend to wrap and post within that week
#tf writing - tag to specify Transformers writing
#cls writing - tag to specify Closerverse-universe writing (changed 3/25/22)
#ff writing - tag to specify other (non-Transformers) fanfiction
#origfic writing - tag to specify other (non-Closerverse) original writing
#others' writing - tag to specify that someone else wrote this and i just think it's cool
#advice - advice
#aesthetic - pretty pictures, usually just to fill up space
#cn: sexual violence - "content note: sexual violence" - umbrella category for rape, noncon and dubcon
#cn: gore - "content note: gore" - for body horror and "extreme" violence
#cn: self-harm - "content note: self-harm" - for written descriptions of self-harm, including slightly less traditional ones like starving oneself
#cn: death - "content note: death" - for stories dealing in large part with death. Note: not ones where it's incidental or background- stories where major charcters die or deal with grief.
I don't have a taglist for any wips because I have very few serious ongoing projects. If you'd like to be tagged for discussion and workshopping of Transformers fics, or for original works, please let me know which.
Transformers taglist:
- General TF taglist: -
- Transmissions from Cybertron: -
- Dedication: -
- Crystal Clear: -
- General Bait (OC) fic: -
Origfic taglist:
- General Closerverse Origfic: -
- Closerverse Main Story: -
- General Non-CV Origfic: -
1905 words, sci-fi. No established setting or background. Written in one sitting, but I did do a full edit pass. I'm really pleased with this one!
Azeron didn’t know what Hell was, not being from Earth and not being interested in religion, but if you gave him a description and a couple of reference images, he’d call you a xenophobe. Maybe there were some aesthetic parallels, but they were entirely superficial. Tirou City had outlawed the tortures three months ago.
Azeron’s work was mostly on the volcanic flats. They were gorgeous, if you’d asked Azeron. The overlapping plains, cracked and oozing the silver-and-white molten metal coursing beneath Balakur, stretching out as far as the eye could see and shimmering with Balakur’s barely-harnessed, untameable energy. It was a marvel of the natural world. Everyone knew that.
Azeron worked in risk management, which on paper meant trying to make sure that Balakur's violent volcanic eruptions didn’t destroy the geothermal plants powering Tirou City, but half the time it meant trying to predict which money-grubbing executive was going to start trying to convince Azeron’s boss that the were fine as they were and didn't need to be babysat, which was a bigger risk to the plants as far as Azeron was concerned. It used to also involve feeding people to Balakur’s most active fissure of the month, but Tirou had banned the tortures. Azeron was inclined to count it as a new form of executive meddling, but it didn’t come from his higher-ups or the political bobbleheads in Tirou, so maybe he needed a new risk-management category. For idealists.
It was naïve, was what it was. Azeron had been working here for decades. He had been here with his hands in Balakur’s roiling guts for longer than some of these idealists had been alive. He knew its ins and outs better than almost anyone. And Balakur was a capricious place on a capricious planet. It always had been.
There was only so much you could do to account for it, right? Balakur's eruptions were ten times more complex than the weather. And there was only so much data you could gather. You could map the temperature gradients a fathom or ten under the surface, all the way down past the lower bound of the molten inner core. You could stick a probe on the drilling head of one of the deep-mantle pipes and measure the welling flows at its deepest point. You could track currents through the motion of the floes at the top of the plains and you could run compositional analysis of the metals in harvested lava to estimate the boundary instability of Balakur's denser liquid layers. You could do any statistical analysis on that data. You could hope. Azeron sure did.
And of course you could move the generators, pull back all their pipelines and send them a few quadra over to avoid a hot spot forming underneath. If you were really concerned, you could shut a whole quadrasystem down, lift the whole apparatus into a low hover during a terrible storm, and hope that Tirou’s massive batteries and backup solar foils could make up for the deficit. Azeron tried to avoid that, because it was overkill. Or it had been overkill. But there hadn’t been a choice a few months ago, when a truly violent geostorm chain had blown through the seventeen quadra just under Tirou and knocked out three quadrasystems in one chain vortex. The city had been rationing power for days before they could get enough plants back online to make up for it. Azeron was still dealing with the fallout. If he could’ve accounted for the upwellings better in that chain, maybe it wouldn’t have come to that. But that particular storm had been impossible to predict.
That was the thing. Predictions. Azeron’s whole job was prediction, which meant Azeron knew prediction like the back of his goddamn hands. The thing about a prediction was that it could never be certain. Even the most ironclad was a statistical estimate, a maybe, an “it’ll happen if we got all the priors”. When it came to Balakur's geostorms, there was no such thing as all the priors. The systems underneath Balakur were too deep and too complicated to map that way.
Azeron hadn’t worried about it too much, not for the first forty-odd years here. It was fine. It was fine because there was another option. There was a second way to deal with Balakur’s infinite variances. As a last resort, of course, or at least an unwanted one. But it was there. Just in case someone needed to fix something before it became catastrophic. Or, at least, it had been there until some soft-hearted Tiruzans who had never been to Balakur decided to throw out what worked.
Anyone down here could tell you, Azeron included. It was something they'd discovered a long time ago, and the evidence made it clear it was true. Balakur had been populated on the ground for millenia. Tirou had been built after the invention of the geomagnetic float and the gravitational pad and the airhover citybase, when it became possible to just not live so close to Balakur’s shifting fissures. The religious would say that Balakur was hungry. The religious held that Balakur needed to eat. Azeron wasn’t interested in religion, though. There was probably a mathematical reason for how it worked. Maybe organic material made the plumes cool, or something. The how didn’t matter to Azeron, at least not any more than he had to know to keep pulling power out of Balakur. In that regard, it was very simple. If you had a nasty storm on its way up, and you needed it to cool down, you filed a form so that someone from Tirou could send you some undesirable they didn't need, and you stripped off most of their skin, and then you threw them off into the biggest fissure you could find. Then, anyone could tell you, the flats would cool down a little. People probably couldn't have survived on Balakur that long if that wasn't true. You really couldn't go out there without protective gear now if you didn't want to lose a limb to a hot patch of slag.
And as far as Azeron was concerned, they needed the tortures more now than ever. Balakur felt like it was storming more and more in recent years.
But that didn't matter. Who cared about what the people working on Balakur thought? Some blockhead up in Tirou had run some dodgy stats and they'd came away with the conclusion that it was just superstition. And that same idealistic blockhead had decided that the hot spots could be managed some other way, and that flensing some unwanted idiot wasn’t a nice enough way to be rid of them, even though no one cared about the torturees anyway, and Azeron was pretty sure Tirou was just going to execute them some other way instead. Point was, the tortures were over. No more tortures for Balakur.
So, naturally, Balakur was starting to get cross.
It was just how it worked. Azeron tried to focus on the data. Well, there was a really nasty-looking plume down under Plant 6 in the south-southwest quadrasystem. They'd just had to move that plant; they hadn't even gotten the majority of the pipes into the ground. Azeron was pretty sure that a surface-height indicator a few quadra away implied the upwelling was part of a much bigger deep-level plume than the preliminary data at the plant suggested; it looked like a full-on mid-mantle boundary breach. That meant they were going to have their hands full again. Another chain storm. Wonderful. See, this was exactly the kind of situation that meant, if things were normal, you just called up to Tirou and they sent you someone who didn’t matter and you bled them and tossed them off the platform and then probably moved the plant a few quadra and it was all sorted. Eh. Maybe two or three sacrifices. It was a real nasty-looking system. But that was how things worked. The tortures meant things just worked. Now they couldn’t mitigate the plumes, so there were going to be more chain storms. Lost power, lost productivity. There would be so much shouting. And they'd have to ramp up extraction even further to compensate.
Azeron sighed, looking out the window at Balakur’s glowing landscape. It really was marvelous. He couldn’t live outside Balakur to save his life. He couldn’t live outside Balakur even if someone had told him he had to be the next guy tortured to save the stupid city a thousand-odd feet over his own head. It was just too special. Where else could you see these seething veins of pure silver? Where else was this unyielding natural might on display? Where else could you take a tool you made and drive it so deep into the ground that it all but touched the solid core of the planet, and pull power straight up into a towering gem in the sky? Where else could you reach all the way into the burning heart of a place you loved so deeply, and take that fire back home with you?
There were other geothermal plants. Kizavi, on the other pole, had its volcanic vents. But Kizavi was boring, and different, and its vents didn’t even move because it was barely even active in the first place. Kizavi had been dying for decades. It was nothing compared to hungry, ever-changing Balakur.
Or maybe Omuro. Omuro was one for the history books. They’d copied Balakur’s generators, but instead of a volcanic system, Omuro was a river delta. Or at least it had been. All green, in those old pictures. They grew verda in massive rolling fields along the shore and they called it the breadbasket of the North. And when Omuro’s scientists had turned their geothermal plants on, they’d cracked Omuro’s stupid green landscape open like an eggshell and spilled molten metal into every field they had and burned their whole food supply and half their population in one afternoon because they didn’t understand how geothermal plumes worked. Omuro was like a miniature Balakur now, but Azeron didn't want to settle for a bad copy. And he didn't want to be there. It didn't seem right, living there. They'd done something to the planet that wasn't ever supposed to happen. And he had a feeling that they didn’t feed Omuro's open jaws anywhere near as many sacrifices as it needed. It was a great case study for why you needed a good risk management team to run an operation like Balakur’s.
Well, Balakur’s risk management team was hamstrung now. The volcanic flats were going to need sacrifices sooner or later. But Tirou had banned it, and where else should they get bodies for Balakur?. So maybe they had an Omuro looming on their horizons too, a big blow-out there to screw everything completely beyond repair even if Azeron and his team warned them what was under Balakur's skin the whole way down. The place needed what it needed. It was that simple. And Azeron would have to watch as Tirou starved of energy and wavered until those great engines failed and the gem collapsed and destroyed itself and the flats both, all at once.
Well, Azeron thought morosely, you couldn’t ask a Tiruzan to understand. They didn’t do any real work. They weren't down here. They didn’t know Balakur. They didn’t understand that their sacrifices were necessary for the greater good.
-
Reading Comprehension Questions (if you want to help me fine-tune this; it's not a gotcha)
What's this a metaphor for?
Is Azeron correct about how Balakur works? What makes you think he is or isn't?
Azeron says he's not interested in religion. Does this indicate to you that Azeron is not religious? How might Azeron engage with religion?
Is Balakur actually more geologically active than usual, or is Azeron suffering from a recency bias? What makes you lean one way or another?
Also if I got every geological process in this completely wrong or you know more about what I'm writing about than I do, feel free to chime in! I'm curious. Probably won't come back to this world but I love sci-fi.
For Q1: I'm not, actually, entirely sure. It's a phenomenon that involves drastic change to an area for human benefit, entangled with the dynamics and structures of imperialism, and people regularly die to it and that's just waved off. The opener and unpredictability makes me think "global warming", but the *deliberate* nature of the sacrifices makes me hew more towards something capitalism-adjacent.
For Q2: I'm biased against human sacrifice, but the way he says you'd sacrifice one person, "eh, maybe two or three," *and* move it several quadra, when the originally mentioned approach is to move it several quadra, leads me to believe he's wrong.
For Q3: Sentences like "Omuro's open jaws" and "bodies for Balakur" lead me to believe that he's both religious and part of a culture where it's an unremarkable element of his psychosocial background.
For Q4: He says that he doesn't really know what's happening down there, that the system is basically impossible to completely predict, and the latest issue he notes is one he expects to be a problem rather than one that is. As a narrative device, I'd suppose it a product of bias.
Thanks for answering! I really appreciate it, it's good to see 🔥
if you're curious about what the intended answers were/the thing i was going for -
Q1: I was mostly trying to draw parallels to fracking - the way that the pipes are drilled into an already-fractured landscape was meant to evoke breaking up shale taken to an extreme degree and the human sacrifice was meant to evoke damage to surrounding communities being written off and more broadly the way that the fossil fuel industry ignores the human cost of fossil fuel extraction. And of course the environment. So like even though you didn't put your finger on that specific thing, I think you still got the core of it! :D Which is really helpful fedback for me, means the themes stand outside of the more narrow frame I was trying to put it on
Q2: nailed it again! Exactly the takeaway and reasoning I was hoping could come through. (I'm also biased against human sacrifice.)
Q3: exactly what i was going for again, dead on 🔥🔥
Q4: I think it makes more sense if the fracking thing is more explicit, but I was trying to imply - especially by comparing Balakur to Omuro - that it was human intervention that was causing the situation to become more turbulent. So he is seeing something real, but is completely overlooking the actual cause and the recency bias (i did concieve of him having one) is that he thinks it can be blamed on the end of the human sacrifices, instead of a slow build of environmental damage leading to increased geological activity in the region.
Again, thank you so much! I'm going to try and come back to this with an eye for revision/edits in a little while and this is super helpful đź’–đź’–
Not a single pin bound. Fine. Den pulled back the pick and turner and took another look at the lock on the door, trying to think. A rake attack hadn't done anything, but je hadn't expected it to. It was a little more concerning that picking properly hadn't gotten anything either. No turns, no binds, no nothing, not even a single little half-click to give jien something to go off of.
The housing looked totally normal, though. Not a thing wrong with the housing. It was just the mechanism inside it. Something wasn't right.
Well, maybe…
Den thought about it for a moment longer and pulled out the narrow prybar they used. That hinge was looking pretty removable. And je wasn't in view of the street.
Amelia considered herself to be a rational, simple person. She generally also considered herself polite, well-mannered, and easy to like. None of these things were true.
Beni looked down, unamused, at the near-brown smear of dried blood across her kitchen floor. She'd known things were going to catch up with Amelia sooner or later. Everyone except Amelia had. But Beni didn't see why it had to happen in her apartment.
Beni's roommate Kiera had been one of Amelia's enemies, of which Amelia had several. Amelia made enemies in the way that other people made friends, and Amelia hadn't been able to tell them apart. That didn't make Kiera any less fed up with Amelia's behavior, but it did mean that Kiera had probably invited Amelia in. And because it was Kiera, of course she'd just left the body here. She was probably in a different state by now. Now Beni's kitchen stank of blood. And Beni's kitchen was going to get flies.
Fine. Beni sighed, going to look for the mop. Because after all, someone was going to have to deal with this.
actually it's extremely normal to fantasize about kidnapping your friends and keeping them locked in your basement, and the fact that you didn't know that suggests that there's something fundamentally wrong with *you*, actually
2743 words, horror. You don't know this character either. Place is fake. Was challenged to write a narrator with less of a distinct voice; didn't succeed.
Alavera was a very small city. There were a number of ways in which this was true. Firstly, the population; Alavera was only inhabited by just over seventy-two thousand people. And the people, too; hurried and quiet like any other city, but shy, scurrying, unwilling to linger on the street for more than the time it took to go from building to car or car to building. And it even went down to the architecture, clustered together, narrow and squat. It was hard not to feel as though the place was sinking, walking down Alavera's unimpressive market-district main street. Alavera was, fundamentally, not a place to live. Alavera was a place to slink out of, or to shrink into until you were just as small as it.
Alavera was, inevitably, dead by dark. There was a curfew - unenforced, technically - that closed every business by seven; most were shuttered by five instead. The city had one bar and that bar was open until just past six. The general understanding was that, if one wanted to do anything after work, they got in their car and drove the seventy-three minutes from Alavera to Reno, and then they drove home. Few residents of Alavera took it upon themselves to do this. I did. I don't much want to be here after the sun went down.
Because there is something wrong with Alavera.
It wasn't immediately obvious, of course. When I came to Alavera to stay with my sister and her husband, I thought nothing of it. The suffocating shrunkenness of the city and its oppressive, all-encompassing lack of any features of a normal population center were strange to me, but, I had reasoned at the time, it was central Nevada. I had thought, perhaps foolishly, that it must have been a case of a small town growing over itself but never quite catching up. A weed of a location, not intended for its current population, never adjusting to the thing it had become, like a sprouting thistle between slabs of concrete. Alavera felt like a place that had thorns. Alavera resisted contact.
But that wasn't it. After a few weeks in this miserable place, I had begun to realize that there was something more persistently wrong with Alavera.
One could describe Alavera as "quaint", if they wanted to be kind. The city had strange customs and strange buildings. Though most retail buildings were prefabricated construction, much like those in any normal location across the rest of the States, Alavera's homes shared a few features. My sister had called it "Alavera's doorways" as though it were common parlance. I found it strange at first; at the time, I had commented on the wooden shutters that could be found on every first-floor Alavera window, but none of the second. Alavera's doorways looked nearly normal to me. My sister saw my confusion and pointed it out, once we had gotten to her home, the detail that made Alavera's doorways special. Some traditions held that a horseshoe over the door made the household safe. Alavera's residents operated differently. Tradition in Alavera was to hammer a series of nails, spaced just an inch or two apart, into the back of the doorframe, all around. They were cut to a length such that the tips just barely protruded inward. The silver nail-points made a pair of straight lines in the wood, neat and strange. My sister, bless her heart, described it to me as decorative.
But I could have written all of this bizarreness off if it weren't for my brother-in-law. Nothing was wrong with David. He was a good guy. It's just that he told me about the deaths.
Alavera had no organized crime to speak of. It had drugs, because you had drugs everywhere you had pharmacies, but it didn't have much of an organized drug trade. I hadn't ever heard of a Kia being stolen. No broken windows, no snatched purses. There was very little petty crime. Alavera had crime, though. Alavera had murders. Nearly every crime in Alavera involved a murder. And there were disappearances, too, and deaths, which no one could figure out, apparently, but David had said were probably also murders. And there were a few hundred a year. A lot, for a place as small as Alavera.
The point was, he said, I absolutely needed to be home by dark.
It was about this point that I realized that Alavera would infect you, if you let it. I was right to think of it as a weed, but I was wrong about what type it was. It was like some sort of creeping vine. I could feel it seeping into me, not a week into sleeping on my sister's couch. The place was poisonous. It wanted to strangle those who walked into its trap, stunt them, leave them withered and trapped in Alavera's terrible sway. It would drain the life from you, if you let it, like a vampire. Why was David still here? Why was my sister?
And yet, I had too few options to pretend that it was that simple. I was here, living on my sister's kindness, because I didn't have anywhere else to go. But I had to get out of the house. I just couldn't do it, staying with them day-in and day-out during my miserable online job hunt.
So here I was. Sitting in my car with its busted aircon and its busted radio for an hour-plus trip down the 439 into Reno, last rays of the sun setting squarely into my eyes, just so I could be outside after dark.
Escaping Alavera meant that the night was very dark. There weren't streetlights in Alavera. Its darkness was suffocating. Out here, at least you could see the stars, high enough that you could take a breath. But the scrub still hugged the land low, like it was trying to stay out of sight, and the mountains on the horizon didn't help. My teeth were on edge. The blue-black of the infinite sky only did so much to help settle me back in my skin after the crushing nervous nothingness of my last few days. I had my foot heavy on the gas pedal. That didn't help much, either, but I won't pretend it didn't help.
I reacted almost before I even saw it. There was a vertical flash, yellow-white as the moon, right on the parkway's yellow line. I jerked the wheel and slammed the brake and it was only luck that I didn't spin out like an idiot and drive myself off the road.
Heart hammering in my chest, I whirled to see what I'd almost hit. It was a deer, right? That's what always—
No. It was a telephone pole. It was a telephone pole, smack-dab in the center of the road. I had almost hit a telephone pole in the center of the road.
That didn't make any sense. I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight, shining it through the windshield dubiously. That was a telephone pole. If I looked up, I could see its cables stringing off, into the pitch-black of the night. A few ragged, black-and-white papers hung limply from it, unmoved by the light breeze.
I hated this place. Leave it to Alavera to put a telephone pole in the road. It was like they wanted to kill you.
Incredible. Just incredible. Some real genius had been at work here. Baffled as I was by the choices that must have lead up to this point, I took a photo to send back to my sister. Even though I had no data, I queued it into the Whatsapp group I had with her and her husband, so it would send when I got coverage back. It looked even stranger on my phone, harshly lit by my headlights and absolutely nothing else.
I took one last deep breath, settled my nerves, and got back to the drive. Slow and steady, in case any more random telephone poles appeared in the fucking road.
But it was a long way to Reno. I was stressed. I've always had a heavy foot on the gas pedal, and it's hard to keep from speeding no matter how much of your life has flashed before your eyes when you're driving along a long straight road in a long dark night and there's not a single other car in sight because you're coming from fucking Alavera where no one does anything once the sun goes down. It wasn't long before the glowing golden line was streaming by in a liquid blur again, back at the normal pace.
But I had my eyes peeled this time, still wary, so when I saw it, I slammed the brakes fast. A large, dark shape on the road, just outside the cone of light from my headlights. It hadn't been another absurd pole, at least, and it was in the other lane. I could've ignored it. But I had to go home this way eventually.
My phone flashlight wasn't quite strong enough to illuminate the whole thing, but if I squinted, I could see some of the details. And, honestly, in comparison to a telephone pole in the road, a car was less strange. Parked on the road was weird, but at least it wasn't built into the road.
The stars felt very close, all of a sudden. I didn't want to find out why that car was there. I didn't really want to be here. I wanted to be in a place with real people that was normal and that didn't feel like Alavera bullshit. I'd never really considered myself claustrophobic before, but maybe Alavera was getting to me. There was a part of me that felt like I could see those white pinpricks approaching, like the sky was closing in. I hit the gas.
The other car didn't follow. It was probably a dead husk, out of gas, or something. No other excuse for the lights not running. But for some reason, there was a pit in my stomach until I saw that it hadn't turned to follow me.
I had a bad feeling at this point, like I was going to run into something before I hit Reno. Call me superstitious or call me anxious. Both were probably true. But it just felt off. David's thing was getting to me. The doorposts made as though an open mouth, bristling with teeth, the Alavera doorposts were getting to me. The cross hanging off my mirror twinkling was getting to me. Who needed luck, anyway? Me, maybe. Not for the last time, I wished that the radio in my car worked. I could've used a song right now.
So it probably shouldn't have been a surprise that there was a third thing in the road. And I shouldn't have been surprised that, this time, it wasn't in my way either. I still stopped, just for a moment. I didn't need an accident. This time, it was a shed, or a small house, or something. Lights off, eerie because of it, cheerfully blue-and-white in my headlights. Normal construction, a normal house, not some Alavera nonsense, at least. But that didn't help. Something was off.
Maybe I was losing my mind. Maybe I was having a panic attack. But I really felt like the sky was starting to close in. The stars felt too close, too close on both sides. I sat there, staring, longer than I wanted to, with this unease creeping higher and higher, the hairs on the back of my neck straight up.
It felt like it took a lifetime, but really it could only have been a few seconds. The house was built onto the road, so close that if I opened my driver's-side door, I could step right onto the porch. That wasn't right. That wasn't how this worked.
If I were more prone to flights of fantasy, I'd have thought I was dreaming. But I could feel the wheel underneath my clammy hands. I fucking floored it out of there. A line of stars flew by my windshield, close enough to touch.
Okay. I was pretty sure I was shivering. I just had to get to Reno. Something wasn't right, but I'd been driving for almost an hour, so I was probably almost there. If I made it to Reno, everything would be fine. I'd stay overnight or something and go back in the daylight. I'd get a hotel. I'd—
—something flashed, taller and bulkier than my car by a good margin, catching my high-beams on what looked like metal. Fuck it. I clamped down hard on my instinct to jump and just kept the gas steady. It didn't follow. It didn't follow. I didn't have to worry about it, I could just drive past it. I could just drive.
I passed another thing, not two minutes later. I didn't even know what it was. I kept my teeth gritted and kept the gas down, and it took me a minute to realize that there were two pinpricks of white light floating well below the line of the mountains, they had gone by so fast. Set in a line, like eyes.
Set in a line, like eyes.
I'd made it this far because I had decent instincts. My impulse to slam the brakes was stronger than my impulse not to. So when I saw the next flash of light, it took a second before I could remember I was supposed to drive. Lucky, that, because whatever this was had gotten smarter. It was in my lane.
My bumper was maybe an inch from kissing the glass of… whatever it was. It looked like a convenience store. It seemed like a convenience store. It blocked the entire two lanes of traffic, there between me and Reno.
And I looked around and saw them, white pinpricks, small enough to mistake for stars if I wasn't looking closely. Two sets each, floating at head-height. And there were at least six or seven, a wide ring. Eyes burning white like a deer in a flashlight. It wasn't right. None of this was right. What — what did I even do here, turn around? Go around off the road? If I drove off the road I'd hit whatever that was.
In the back of my head, I was pretty sure it was a vampire. It would add up. If I was going to be believing in stupid bullshit like vampires, it would add up. Alavera felt like the kind of place that would have vampires. I didn't want to deal with a vampire. I didn't want to get eaten by a vampire. Like, the whole reason I didn't want to be in Alavera was to avoid whatever was killing people in Alavera. I didn't want to deal with a vampire. I didn't want to deal with seven of them.
There was a crunching noise near my door, muffled through the window, but audible. I could hear it. A step onto the road, off the sand. It didn't sound like a human footfall. That didn't matter to me. I jumped.
My foot was on the gas pedal, and I jumped, and my car lurched into motion. It all happened so fast I barely had time to flinch, so close I was to the front door of that goddamn store. Alright. This was it. Had a good run, I guess.
I didn't die, for some reason. Your guess is as good as mine. My car slammed through the store and hit something solid, but it wasn't concrete, and it wasn't glass. It was big, though, and solid. I didn't really know what to do, barely able to understand what had just happened, and I stepped on the gas and felt something roll under my wheels. It took me a second to realize I should stop, but I did.
That ring of eyes was still behind me, but not close. There was something, longer than a human form, laying in the road. It didn't seem like it was moving. It didn't seem like a vampire.
Those eyes seemed, slowly, to realize I wasn't going back, and they began to cluster around the fallen… thing. It was impossible to make out what they were at this distance.
Whatever it was, I didn't want to know. I looked over my shoulder one last time and hit the gas.
1905 words, sci-fi. No established setting or background. Written in one sitting, but I did do a full edit pass. I'm really pleased with this one!
Azeron didn’t know what Hell was, not being from Earth and not being interested in religion, but if you gave him a description and a couple of reference images, he’d call you a xenophobe. Maybe there were some aesthetic parallels, but they were entirely superficial. Tirou City had outlawed the tortures three months ago.
Azeron’s work was mostly on the volcanic flats. They were gorgeous, if you’d asked Azeron. The overlapping plains, cracked and oozing the silver-and-white molten metal coursing beneath Balakur, stretching out as far as the eye could see and shimmering with Balakur’s barely-harnessed, untameable energy. It was a marvel of the natural world. Everyone knew that.
Azeron worked in risk management, which on paper meant trying to make sure that Balakur's violent volcanic eruptions didn’t destroy the geothermal plants powering Tirou City, but half the time it meant trying to predict which money-grubbing executive was going to start trying to convince Azeron’s boss that the were fine as they were and didn't need to be babysat, which was a bigger risk to the plants as far as Azeron was concerned. It used to also involve feeding people to Balakur’s most active fissure of the month, but Tirou had banned the tortures. Azeron was inclined to count it as a new form of executive meddling, but it didn’t come from his higher-ups or the political bobbleheads in Tirou, so maybe he needed a new risk-management category. For idealists.
It was naïve, was what it was. Azeron had been working here for decades. He had been here with his hands in Balakur’s roiling guts for longer than some of these idealists had been alive. He knew its ins and outs better than almost anyone. And Balakur was a capricious place on a capricious planet. It always had been.
There was only so much you could do to account for it, right? Balakur's eruptions were ten times more complex than the weather. And there was only so much data you could gather. You could map the temperature gradients a fathom or ten under the surface, all the way down past the lower bound of the molten inner core. You could stick a probe on the drilling head of one of the deep-mantle pipes and measure the welling flows at its deepest point. You could track currents through the motion of the floes at the top of the plains and you could run compositional analysis of the metals in harvested lava to estimate the boundary instability of Balakur's denser liquid layers. You could do any statistical analysis on that data. You could hope. Azeron sure did.
And of course you could move the generators, pull back all their pipelines and send them a few quadra over to avoid a hot spot forming underneath. If you were really concerned, you could shut a whole quadrasystem down, lift the whole apparatus into a low hover during a terrible storm, and hope that Tirou’s massive batteries and backup solar foils could make up for the deficit. Azeron tried to avoid that, because it was overkill. Or it had been overkill. But there hadn’t been a choice a few months ago, when a truly violent geostorm chain had blown through the seventeen quadra just under Tirou and knocked out three quadrasystems in one chain vortex. The city had been rationing power for days before they could get enough plants back online to make up for it. Azeron was still dealing with the fallout. If he could’ve accounted for the upwellings better in that chain, maybe it wouldn’t have come to that. But that particular storm had been impossible to predict.
That was the thing. Predictions. Azeron’s whole job was prediction, which meant Azeron knew prediction like the back of his goddamn hands. The thing about a prediction was that it could never be certain. Even the most ironclad was a statistical estimate, a maybe, an “it’ll happen if we got all the priors”. When it came to Balakur's geostorms, there was no such thing as all the priors. The systems underneath Balakur were too deep and too complicated to map that way.
Azeron hadn’t worried about it too much, not for the first forty-odd years here. It was fine. It was fine because there was another option. There was a second way to deal with Balakur’s infinite variances. As a last resort, of course, or at least an unwanted one. But it was there. Just in case someone needed to fix something before it became catastrophic. Or, at least, it had been there until some soft-hearted Tiruzans who had never been to Balakur decided to throw out what worked.
Anyone down here could tell you, Azeron included. It was something they'd discovered a long time ago, and the evidence made it clear it was true. Balakur had been populated on the ground for millenia. Tirou had been built after the invention of the geomagnetic float and the gravitational pad and the airhover citybase, when it became possible to just not live so close to Balakur’s shifting fissures. The religious would say that Balakur was hungry. The religious held that Balakur needed to eat. Azeron wasn’t interested in religion, though. There was probably a mathematical reason for how it worked. Maybe organic material made the plumes cool, or something. The how didn’t matter to Azeron, at least not any more than he had to know to keep pulling power out of Balakur. In that regard, it was very simple. If you had a nasty storm on its way up, and you needed it to cool down, you filed a form so that someone from Tirou could send you some undesirable they didn't need, and you stripped off most of their skin, and then you threw them off into the biggest fissure you could find. Then, anyone could tell you, the flats would cool down a little. People probably couldn't have survived on Balakur that long if that wasn't true. You really couldn't go out there without protective gear now if you didn't want to lose a limb to a hot patch of slag.
And as far as Azeron was concerned, they needed the tortures more now than ever. Balakur felt like it was storming more and more in recent years.
But that didn't matter. Who cared about what the people working on Balakur thought? Some blockhead up in Tirou had run some dodgy stats and they'd came away with the conclusion that it was just superstition. And that same idealistic blockhead had decided that the hot spots could be managed some other way, and that flensing some unwanted idiot wasn’t a nice enough way to be rid of them, even though no one cared about the torturees anyway, and Azeron was pretty sure Tirou was just going to execute them some other way instead. Point was, the tortures were over. No more tortures for Balakur.
So, naturally, Balakur was starting to get cross.
It was just how it worked. Azeron tried to focus on the data. Well, there was a really nasty-looking plume down under Plant 6 in the south-southwest quadrasystem. They'd just had to move that plant; they hadn't even gotten the majority of the pipes into the ground. Azeron was pretty sure that a surface-height indicator a few quadra away implied the upwelling was part of a much bigger deep-level plume than the preliminary data at the plant suggested; it looked like a full-on mid-mantle boundary breach. That meant they were going to have their hands full again. Another chain storm. Wonderful. See, this was exactly the kind of situation that meant, if things were normal, you just called up to Tirou and they sent you someone who didn’t matter and you bled them and tossed them off the platform and then probably moved the plant a few quadra and it was all sorted. Eh. Maybe two or three sacrifices. It was a real nasty-looking system. But that was how things worked. The tortures meant things just worked. Now they couldn’t mitigate the plumes, so there were going to be more chain storms. Lost power, lost productivity. There would be so much shouting. And they'd have to ramp up extraction even further to compensate.
Azeron sighed, looking out the window at Balakur’s glowing landscape. It really was marvelous. He couldn’t live outside Balakur to save his life. He couldn’t live outside Balakur even if someone had told him he had to be the next guy tortured to save the stupid city a thousand-odd feet over his own head. It was just too special. Where else could you see these seething veins of pure silver? Where else was this unyielding natural might on display? Where else could you take a tool you made and drive it so deep into the ground that it all but touched the solid core of the planet, and pull power straight up into a towering gem in the sky? Where else could you reach all the way into the burning heart of a place you loved so deeply, and take that fire back home with you?
There were other geothermal plants. Kizavi, on the other pole, had its volcanic vents. But Kizavi was boring, and different, and its vents didn’t even move because it was barely even active in the first place. Kizavi had been dying for decades. It was nothing compared to hungry, ever-changing Balakur.
Or maybe Omuro. Omuro was one for the history books. They’d copied Balakur’s generators, but instead of a volcanic system, Omuro was a river delta. Or at least it had been. All green, in those old pictures. They grew verda in massive rolling fields along the shore and they called it the breadbasket of the North. And when Omuro’s scientists had turned their geothermal plants on, they’d cracked Omuro’s stupid green landscape open like an eggshell and spilled molten metal into every field they had and burned their whole food supply and half their population in one afternoon because they didn’t understand how geothermal plumes worked. Omuro was like a miniature Balakur now, but Azeron didn't want to settle for a bad copy. And he didn't want to be there. It didn't seem right, living there. They'd done something to the planet that wasn't ever supposed to happen. And he had a feeling that they didn’t feed Omuro's open jaws anywhere near as many sacrifices as it needed. It was a great case study for why you needed a good risk management team to run an operation like Balakur’s.
Well, Balakur’s risk management team was hamstrung now. The volcanic flats were going to need sacrifices sooner or later. But Tirou had banned it, and where else should they get bodies for Balakur?. So maybe they had an Omuro looming on their horizons too, a big blow-out there to screw everything completely beyond repair even if Azeron and his team warned them what was under Balakur's skin the whole way down. The place needed what it needed. It was that simple. And Azeron would have to watch as Tirou starved of energy and wavered until those great engines failed and the gem collapsed and destroyed itself and the flats both, all at once.
Well, Azeron thought morosely, you couldn’t ask a Tiruzan to understand. They didn’t do any real work. They weren't down here. They didn’t know Balakur. They didn’t understand that their sacrifices were necessary for the greater good.
-
Reading Comprehension Questions (if you want to help me fine-tune this; it's not a gotcha)
What's this a metaphor for?
Is Azeron correct about how Balakur works? What makes you think he is or isn't?
Azeron says he's not interested in religion. Does this indicate to you that Azeron is not religious? How might Azeron engage with religion?
Is Balakur actually more geologically active than usual, or is Azeron suffering from a recency bias? What makes you lean one way or another?
Also if I got every geological process in this completely wrong or you know more about what I'm writing about than I do, feel free to chime in! I'm curious. Probably won't come back to this world but I love sci-fi.
a character being a perpetrator does not negate their victimhood and neither does their victimhood negate being a perpetrator. u can accept and reckon w both dimensions in ur analysis
Wanted to write, but couldn't come up with anything, so I treated this as a worldbuilding exercise. It's an alien based loosely off of an ant doing an obstacle course. (That's why the pronouns are like that.)
Aje:va threw 2herself over the waterflow and hit the ground kinda hard, bounced off the cement and felt it rattle in 2her carapace, and then 2she was back up and running.
Seven.
Six.
Okay, there was the final climb. A ramp and a couple steep handholds. It would take a hell of a jump to make it.
Five.
2She missed the first handhold but clipped it on the way, dug her pincers in when her second talon reached it, and just barely managed to hang on. Sent a jolt clear through 2her shoulder. That was going to hurt later. No time for that now, though.
Four.
2she swung sideways and hauled 2herself up to the next handhold as the arc took 2her around, much easier, and then rocked back to make the final swing. 2Her talons skidded across the smooth surface before 2she caught the lip of the platform and managed a final handhold, and then 2she hurled 2herself up.
Three.
The buzzer was right there at the end of the platform, not far. But there wasn't much time on the clock, so Aje:va started to sprint, but—
Two.
2She didn't think she'd make it. Flying leap it was.
One.
2She hit the buzzer more with 2her chest than with a limb. It still sounded: fourteen seconds left on the clock.
Finally 2she had a chance to turn around and see how everyone else had done.
Mirya was on 4her first-rank platform. Of course. Mirya had been the analyst pick to win first. Everyone knew that. 4Her times were too good for anyone else to beat. 4Her clock had a full twenty seconds left on it. Absurd.
Over on the second platform was Ta3j:lei, who Aje:va had figured was probably a good call for a winner too. At least on this course. 0He struggled with flat sprints and crawls, but 0he was good at the climbs and jumps. Aje:va looked a little closer at 0his clock. Three minutes, nine secnds. Not bad.
Third platform was Za5aiya. 4She was up there, but 4her clock was displaying the yellow x of a loss. That was good news; 4she'd be out of the competition after this round. Aje:va didn't want to have to worry about Za5aiya on the water challenges. 4She'd been a little too close to Aje:va's time for comfort in that last race.
Aje:va 2herself was on the fourth platform. The fifth was... what was 2her name again? Maza? Amaisa? Ma3zya? Something like that. 2She looked to be licking her pincers in frustration, so Aje:va assumed 2she'd been disqualified, but a glance at 2her clock read tten and a half minutes. Ten? 2She was on the fifth platform. 2She wasn't supposed to be good enough to worry about. What in Ija7a happened there?
Sixth platform was... right, they called 0him Taj:ag7:laiz. Mouthful, that was, some stupid nickname for the yellow stripes on 0his little chelacerae. 0He was out, too, and obviously. 0He was still down at the bottom of the final climb, clicking 0his pincers together like 0he was trying not to start hissing.
Seventh and last was that, uh... Aje:va had no idea. Up on the platform, too. 3She... probably a 3morph, Aje:va thought, looking at 3her stumpy-looking foretalons. Usually it was 4morphs and 2morphs who were best at higher-level quintsports, but this year there were a few 0morphs too. Maybe Aje:va shouldn't have been surprised that a 3morph could make it. But this 3morph was out, too. So maybe it wasn't that surprising.
Well, 2she was dead last. Mirya in first, as usual. Whoever was relegated to the fourth platform was in second, third was Ta3j:lei, and then there was Aje:va. Damn.
I guess, Aje:va thought, more pessimistically than 2she'd have liked, I'll get 'em next time.
I find it simultaneously funny and sad whenever a Whumper treats their literal pet better than Whumpee. Like bro, what do you mean you feed the damn animal like three times a day and then starve Whumpee for a week?
If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.
1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.
2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.
3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.
4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.
5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.
Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.
Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.
Taran wasn't bored, exactly, but he wasn't not bored; he just had nothing to do with himself, and too long to not do it in. It wasn't that he particularly wanted to be at the boardwalk. He just didn't feel like being at home.
The sun was gorgeous, and the ocean was also gorgeous, but Taran had been here with Haven in this blisteringly-hot beach town for two weeks, and the allure of both were wearing thin. Instead, he turned his attention to the people. Most of them were not gorgeous. This wasn't a celebrity town. Taran greatly preferred staying here to Haven's place in the Hamptons, even if the Hamptons were less hot. You couldn't really talk to a celebrity, but you could talk to a person.
There were two people—a woman and a man—sitting at a table outside one of the restaurant stands near the water, eating french fries. There were also a bunch of seagulls. Well, that wasn't unusual—there were seagulls everywhere—but there was a throng of seagulls around them, really. Vying for the fries, maybe? But they had a berth of maybe five, ten feet. Out of arm's reach and out of kicking range, just watching, hawks of the busy beach.
Taran put on his best smile and walked clean through the ring of birds to lean over the table. "Hey," he said, like he hadn't just sent a bunch of seagulls fluttering, aggrieved, out of his way. The man and the woman, both similarly aggrieved, looked up at him.
"Do we know you?" the man said.
"No, but you could," said Taran, taking a fistful of the fries.
"Hey," said the woman, not an exclamation. More like she was trying to catch up to the situation she found herself in. The man she was with didn't look like he was following along, either. Not much of a surprise. Taran wasn't actually here to talk to them.
"Hey yourself," Taran said, and stepped off.
How many fries did he have? Six. Six was plenty, they were long. He tore the first one in half, and chucked it at the birds. Instantly the entire crowd were upon it, cawing and pecking at the ground.
"Hey!" the woman said again, now properly angry. "Hey, what the fuck's wrong with you?"
Taran threw another fry at the birds. They descended like piranhas. Did that imply violence? Haven's piranhas weren't violent toward one another, at least.
"Excuse me!" the man shouted, standing up from the table. "Those are my wife's fucking fries!"
"Okay," Taran said. "Do you want them back?"
It was plain on their faces that neither of them had a response to that. Well, whatever. Taran did. He chucked the handful of them at the man's feet. The birds, well aware of what Taran had been holding in his hands, swarmed instantly, and their squawks were raucously loud.
Not as loud as the man's, though. His were definitely louder.
AITA for releasing crickets into my husband's office?
I feel like the title says it all. I (46M) live with my husband (….we'll say 50M, it's complicated) and he works from home. He is not afraid of bugs and goes to frankly absurd lengths to make sure that several of the enclosures he keeps his pets in have enough bugs to mimic their natural habitats. He really doesn't like when things are out of place, though, so the crickets will annoy him by making noise and not being where he expects them to be.
We got into an argument earlier this week because he was angry that I wanted to go out to talk to a friend (25F) who I know in the city. We have an open relationship and he was okay with me hooking up with her, but apparently going to a concert she invited me to was beyond the pale. He has been very annoying, to put it mildly, since. Yesterday he hid my car keys and I lost my temper, so I had someone deliver seven hundred crickets from a local pet supply store and opened the box in one of his planters a few minutes before he had to take a work call.
He's really mad now, and says that I crossed a line by getting him in trouble with his boss. I think he might have a point, but I also think that we were both being frustrating, and a little bit of retaliation is only fair. Besides, it wasn't even that many crickets. He'll probably kill them all before the end of the week.
Anyway, like, am i the asshole here?
AITA?
YTA (you're the asshole)
NTA (not the asshole)
JAH (justified asshole)
NAH (no assholes here)
ESH (everyone sucks here)
INFO (needs more information)
Voting ended onMay 2, 2025
writeblr sideblog @red-the-dragon-writes - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
