#sweetofferings

[nightvalelibrary]

Julie- 12

sweetofferings

((This was actually my favorite colors to work with so far))

[thescienceofnightvale]

Rode Off Into the Sunset Ending

"Why US?!"

"Why NOT us?!"

"Because I like LIVING!”

This week’s Omniscient Malevolent Corporation Pride Parade had gone downhill faster than a wheelchair with nitrous oxide attached. Robin was currently clinging to Julie, and Julie was currently clinging to what LOOKED like a dog, but was too big and two too many heads. 

Parade floats had been overturned, to form a set of makeshift barricades, and the streets were slicked with confetti and blood. Inhuman, flanged screams came from steel skeletons as the last vestiges of their human flesh was shredded away. A whirring something, with the eyes of a duck and too many teeth, clamped down on a small child’s leg before it was stabbed in the brain, and fell away. It sparked, and it bled.

Children in war paint grappled with looming shock troopers, with smiley-face helmets and Kevlar thicker than their batons. Something with a hundred blinking eyes and a halo raised its hand, and three of the troopers fell into an unseeable void as the peal of a heavenly choir rang out.

This was their only chance. The dog beneath them loped, stretching a head to the side briefly to bite the roof from an armoured car.

"There it is!"

He could see it, on the roof of the radio station. A throbbing, swollen ball of gas hidden behind a glass sphere, wires snaking from the sphere’s back and running down the length of the building (and only one god knew where else). Already, snipers were lining up to protect it, and a dozen red dots fell dutifully into place on Robin and Julie.

He yelled, and tried to wheel the dog back around. Julie grabbed his hand.

"Guns don’t kill people! People kill guns!"

"…WHAT-"

"Just TRUST ME!"

Julie kept her eyes on Robin, her grip on his hand tight, as she clamped her legs on the dog for balance and raised her free hand in the shape of a pistol. Robin’s hand was shaking, but gradually he raised it and did the same.

They fired, together, and so did the snipers.

A dozen cracks split the air, and a dozen bullets passed through Robin and Julie, harmlessly. At the same time, a pair of bulletholes appeared on the two big hinges keeping the sphere in place.

The sun tottered, and creaked, and fell. In an instant, the robots dropped dead.

Julie grinned, putting her hand back on the dog, and kept riding.

[thescienceofnightvale]

Mixed Messages

It had all started out innocently enough, a phrase probably carved onto a surprising number of gravestones.

Ever since StrexCorp™ had quietly informed him that Julie was coming perilously close to resisting them, and that resisting them was one of the more unorthodox methods of committing suicide, he didn't like her being out of his reach for too long. Well, not like that, obviously - that made him sound creepy and stalkerish and about a step away from locking her up in a basement or something, but...well, he just wanted her to be safe. And if that meant checking in on her a couple of times daily, so be it.

Besides, cruel and unusual geology seemed to be running short as of late: they'd found a pebble made out of a mineral that appeared to be denser than any of the surrounding rocks, but trying to contain it had just resulted in it breaking through the plexiglass and down through the floor. The tracker indicated it was approaching the Earth's mantle by now. He certainly wasn't complaining about the lull, but it made life a little more boring.

So he'd sent her a text - an offer of dinner, which was usefully open-ended in terms of venue depending on what she felt like. Then he'd sat at his desk, all typically white and sterile with samples and folders dotted around the place, and waited.

The first text had been...uncharacteristic. Short, but it certainly got to the point (in retrospect, perhaps mentioning "dinner" had been a little TOO open-ended.) His ears had reddened, and he'd promptly typed a curt response with a little blushing emoticon on the end.

The second text came immediately afterward. Then the third and fourth (Julie apparently felt descriptive). 

Robin immediately shoved the phone under his desk in case one of his co-workers was looking, the blush burning right across his cheeks. His second response summoned texts five and six, and the offer of informational pictures to go with them. 

After a third text received the offer of fanfiction, Robin hastily lied about a sudden and impending experiment and left. The whole thing had been...enlightening, and a host of new mental images were now carved into the back of his head.

He'd definitely have something to talk about over dinner, at least.

[thescienceofnightvale]

Say Nothing, And Test To Forget (Birthday Drabble)

((The timing's not exact, but heading to bed so thought I'd post this before I left. Happy birthday, sweetofferings!))

“And you’re saying you have cake in here?”

“Oh yeah! Absolutely, p-probably. Just have to sort of, y’know, find it but it’s out there somewhere! Actually just down this way, I reckon!”

Robin hadn’t been sure what to expect when he’d looked up “cake” in the Yellow Pages, and the first address he’d seen turned out to be a battered looking shack in the middle of somebody’s wheat field. After making sure this wasn’t a Strex crop (although, quite honestly, the place was so far from the borders of Night Vale, or anywhere, that he presumed the mega-corporation wouldn’t bother with it) he’d cautiously brushed his way through, trying not to upset any of the wobbling stalks as he’d headed towards the tin shed.

The door had been…oddly advanced, given that all there was to guard was a few rusty-looking tin walls, but he’d typed the passcode that’d been under the place’s name. After immediately throwing himself to the floor to dodge the crackling pellet of energy that’d been launched at his chest, the door’d swung open, dramatically, and he’d peered inside.

There’d been an elevator, in a glass tube, and nothing else. It certainly didn’t look like any bakery he’d ever been to, and he was tempted to abandon the whole venture right there. But then it’d take him a few hours to get back, and by then he wouldn’t have time to get any more and then Julie’s party’d be ruined forever.

…he inhaled, sharply, and stepped forward. The door’d slid away, with a cold, sharp whoosh, and slid shut again behind him.

Buttons with the numbers 1-9 had been there on the back of the elevator, and he’d noticed that the LCD screen above them seemed to have space for five or six digits. Above them, however, was a crumpled-looking bit of paper with a picture of a cake on it, drawn in marker pen, and the numbers “2845”.

He’d shrugged, and typed in the code. Nothing had happened, and had continued to not happen for a few seconds.

  Then

  he

  went

  down

  very

  fast

and the elevator had ground to a halt. It’d taken him a few seconds to feel his legs again, and more to prevent his suddenly-mutinous stomach from escaping through his mouth. He’d taken some shaky steps out, tottering like a newborn foal and gripping the wall to his left for balance, before surveying the landscape around him.

“Oh oh brilliant! You made it! …you did, make it didn’t you? A-and and like you’re still alive? ‘Cause you get like, ghosts down here, a-and all sorts, actually although they’re not, like, big users of the lifts they could just sort of, y’know, ectoplasm down here or something, that’s the scientific term-“

“Who are you? …what are you?”

Robin had looked, with confusion, at the person – well, not person, technically – who’d addressed him. It looked like a silver metal football, with handlebars attached and an oddly expressive-looking blue eye glowing in the centre. The shutters around it raised, curiously, before it suddenly and animatedly realized who he was.

“OK you’re…you’re not from here, are you? Did you get the advert?”

The little robot, which called itself Wheatley, had explained that it was, in fact, an AI, and had gotten a little flighty when Robin kept trying to look inside it. It had said that it was technically a Cake Inspection Robot, and needed him to open the door so it could get inside and inspect the cake, because that probably needed doing sometime so why not now, right?

And now Wheatley was gliding over his head, casting the piercing beam of its flashlight into the dark. Robin kept walking, conscious of how his footsteps echoed in the sterile, empty corridors and how the lights behind the panels seemed to be staring at him.

“Alright, um, the vault should be this way! So we just sort of take a left, and-and then a right suppose that means we just go straight on, actually, uh, just keep going straight, for a few more miles-“

“Miles?!”

“Oh! Right, sorry, metres. Still, gives you a bit of exercise, doesn’t it? Stretching the ol’ legs, does ‘em good! P-probably.” It shook its bottom handlebar. “Don’t really have those.”

Robin rolled his eyes, and kept walking. There WAS a door up ahead, with what looked like a fingerprint scanner attached to the side. Picking up the pace, he strode forward, eyeing the thing with a tempered curiosity.

“Now what do I do?”

“Well, you just scan your finger in! Works for humans.” Wheatley’s optic brightened. “I mean they let you keep it afterwards, s-so ‘er don’t worry-“

Robin gave the robot a Look, and pressed his finger to the pad. There was a few seconds’ pause, and a thin blue light ran over his finger with a low, thrumming noise from the mechanisms within.

Suddenly, sirens blared. The lights on the wall-panels glowed red, with a hissing sound, and the door steadfastly remained locked. Robin sprang back, looking panicked, and whipped his gaze from the door to Wheatley to the door again, yelling over the screeching alarms.

“Why’s it doing that?!”

“Don’t worry! Right! Activating Phase Two, o-of the brilliant plan! Any second now, a Party Escort Robot’s gonna come over, yeah, and then we ask him to open the door for us!”

Robin blinked. He wasn’t entirely sure Strex hadn’t found this place after all. “…what’s a Party Escort Robot? What does that do?”

“Well, if someone tries to get in there and all the alarms go off-“ Wheatley gestured his eye upwards, helpfully, to the screaming alarms blaring red at the wall – “it runs over, and ‘er kills them! Instantly.”

There was a second of silence. It lasted far longer than it should have.

“…and THAT’S YOUR PLAN?!”

“O-OK yeah when you say it like that that’s a terrible idea. Um. Um. OK, right, listen, OK, I can hack it! Maybe I can hack it!”

“Wheatley.”

“Yeah, I-I mean it’s not THAT bloody massive, is it? I can sort of go over, interface, have a bit of a friendly chat-“

“Wheatley.”

“I mean, alright, bear with me here, what if I told him I was the Cake Inspector-“

“WHEATLEY.”

…the core turned around on his rail, slowly, and his optic shrank to a pinprick.

Robin was staring up and up and up at the hulking robot standing behind him. It was around nine feet tall, with jagged metal claws and clomping metal legs and the kind of thick, plated body that used missiles for heat massages. A core much like Wheatley’s formed its head, though the outer shell was charred and the eye didn’t look as sophisticated. It glared down at the pair with a feral-looking red optic, and growled like a dubstep chorus that had learned to bite.

"…oh hiya! We were just talking about you! All good things, all good things!” Wheatley tried to brighten his optic a few notches. “So, ‘er listen, how’re the kids doing? Alright?”

“Hack it!” Robin’s voice was a hissing whisper, even as he took a shaky step back. “Hack it now!”

“W-what, hack THAT, you’re bloody joking, mate-“

“Hack it or we die!”

Robin looked up at Wheatley, intently, as the Escort Robot took a thudding step forwards. The core gave a little whimper, optic shrinking, and it fidgeted uneasily on the rail as it finally prepared itself to do something useful.

It charged forwards, and bumped into the Escort Robot with a little ting. Robin looked on, with disbelief. The blow it received back knocked it clean off the rail, and straight through the wall with a scream.

That was when Robin started running.

The flanged roar of the robot warped through his bones and tore through his ears, and even as he ran his thudding heartbeat was drowned out by its stomping footsteps. The robot’s speed increased, with mechanical efficiency, and Robin whirled around the nearest corner just in time to feel its jagged claw whoosh past his labcoat.

Suddenly, behind tinted glass, he saw a flash of red in the ocean of sterile white panels. Dredging up all the speed he could muster, he sprinted forward and grabbed it, glass shattering easily around his fingers as he grabbed the cold canister behind it. It was a fire extinguisher, and as the Escort Bot lunged to grab him he slammed his eyes shut and sprayed it.

He heard something start to crack, and some creaking groans, and opened his eyes to see the robot was freezing over. Frost was beginning to pool around its knee joints before stretching up the legs, and the whole thing nearly collapsed before finding its wobbly balance again. The frost hissed, and started…dripping?

The Escort Bot snarled, its outer shell beginning to glow with fierce heat as the remnants of the frost slithered away. It raised its sizzling claws, and stomped forward with renewed purpose to sink them into the scientist’s flesh. Robin scrabbled back towards the wall, just in time for a panel to burst loose and smack the robot in the face.

The core-head went flying free, bouncing off a wall before falling onto the floor, snarling and impotent. It writhed at the feet of its former body, which stood still as a statue as Robin carefully stepped around it, mindful of touching the searing metal. Wheatley popped out from behind the wall, inspecting the body curiously.

“So hang on, if I just sort of pop myself in here-aha! Oi oi mate, look at this! This is amazing!”

With clomping footsteps, the Escort Bot turned itself around, idly kicking aside its screeching former head. In its place, Wheatley’s core waggled its handlebars while its optic beamed, before raising his new arms showily.

“Check that out, ‘eh! Being all bloody massive, I-I could get used to this!”

“Look, just come on and open the door.” Robin stalked ahead, hands in his pockets. “Try not to hurt yourself on the way over.”

“L-look, alright, may have made some bad decisions on the way up here but I mean we did it in the end? Didn’t we? Go team!”

The two reached the door, and after a well-aimed punch from Wheatley there wasn’t a door anymore. The two headed through the gap in the wall, stepping through the rubble and staring at the cake behind the glass. It was a black forest cake, with luscious chocolate icing and ripe, fresh cherries and soft, cocoa sponge holding the whole thing together.

“Right can you sort of, pull me out? Getting a bit itchy in here.”

Robin obliged, removing Wheatley from the Escort Bot’s body and holding onto him until they could find a rail. He span him round, perhaps a little faster than necessary, and the robot looked at the cake behind the glass with reverence.

“That’s cake, then, is it? Brilliant. Just…inspiring. Um, what do you do with it?”

“You eat it.” Robin walked over, placing Wheatley under one arm while lifting the glass with his right. Carefully, he held the cake with his free arm, as Wheatley sputtered with indignation.

 “A-and and that’s the big reward? For everything, a-and and you have to EAT it?! Bloody…discrimination. That is. That-that’s obscene.” He sighed. “Come on, then, I’ll take you back up.”

 And the two headed back towards the lift.

-------------------------------

“That’s how you got my cake, huh?”

 Robin nodded, from his chair, and adjusted the party-hat on his head while grabbing another one of the skewers. “Yep. I’m not sure I could find the place again, but I mean you can say that about a lot of places here.”

 “Well, I love it.” Julie smiled, and crouched down to kiss him with a playful glint in her eyes. “And next time we go to the store, I’ll show you where the bakery section is.”

Robin swore, if only internally.

[thescienceofnightvale]

The Unsafety Dance

Robin had acquired a sudden empathy for the little furry things that got thrown in to tanks to feed the vipers. 

He was technically a lot taller than the woman dancing with him on his platform shoes, and clad in a thick layer of terracota-looking armour, but he felt as exposed as an insect with its rock lifted away. The woman dancing with him kept her glinting sun mask close to his face, keeping her tone light as it rose over the music, level but firm.

"So, we've been keeping an eye on your group's contributions to science! Since you're not part of the StrexCorp family like...well, pretty much everyone else by now, right?"

A little twirl again, to show off her glittering dress. The crowd around them was keeping their distance, consciously or not - she appeared to be carving out a space.

"Sure, at least one of them may have cost us a whole lot of money-" A little twitch, almost flawlessly hidden behind her smiling mask and graceful steps - "but I think we can work all this out in a way that helps out one of both of us."

Robin hadn't taken his eyes off her, and she leaned up again, patting his terracotta chest, and raising a leg coquettishly behind her.

"If I were you, I'd head straight on home after this and tell Carlos to reconsider our offer. Come to think of it, you can tell your girlfriend the same thing on the way back. And keep an eye on her!"

She span him hard, with deceptive strength, and he was jerked ninety degrees to the right before he could blink. Her hands were in his again. "You're a geologist, you know how spelunkers can get lost in those caves and never come back-"

There was an audible cracking sound.

Robin wasn't violent, certainly never purposefully and especially not to things that could reduce him to a stain on a labcoat, which was at least half the population of Night Vale. But holding the hands Robin didn't have total control of, and then saying that to him, was probably technically considered self-harm.

He dropped her hands, and they flopped uselessly on the end of her wrists. They stared, for a long moment, and Robin found himself speaking even as an incoming wave of regrets threatened to blast his retort to nervous pieces.

"Stay away from her."

The woman rolled her eyes - he could just about see it behind the mask. She shook her hands, hard, and there was another ricochet of little snapping sounds as her bones knitted back together. It sounded like rice in a bag.

"Rude."

There was a roar of thunder outside, and the panes of the windows shook like a lizard raising its frill. Both Robin and the woman turned to look at it, a fresh arc of lightning burning through the sky immediately afterwards.

"Well, I've got to run. Money can't make itself, y'know! Not in this universe." She nodded, not touching him again, and the razor hidden behind her voice flashed a blade.

"Remember what I told you."

And she stalked off into the crowd, vanishing instantly, like someone had thrown a tarp over a sunbeam. Robin breathed, unaware he'd been holding his breath in the first place, and let go of his prosthetic hands as he tried to stop the real ones from shaking.

Julie. He had to go find Julie.

[nightvalelibrary]

truth: any special people in your life?

Well, if you're talking about a "special" special person. No. A romantic relationship would just end in heartache and tears for the both of us.

But friends and the like? The ones that still stick with me through all the, you know. Stuff. Lucy, Eli, Julie, Cecil. That Holly girl is really sweet too.

[thescienceofnightvale]

Cursed Date (For SweetOfferings)

It'd been somewhat of an interesting week for Robin. His computer'd been temporarily placed out of action, having taken the concept of "Internet friends" a little too literally, and he'd only just turned it back on again after he was sure it wouldn't try and talk to him. 

When he had, a notification'd popped up from his calendar indicating the date with Julie was that evening, and there'd been wide eyes and a few hasty expletives.

He'd left the labcoat and goggles at home. He'd gotten halfway through putting the pants of his suit on before deciding that was too far in the opposite direction. In the end, he'd gone for some jeans and a neat white dress shirt, and managed to comb his hair to a nearly-respectable level.

And now he was heading down the dusty road, past the Ralph's and the Statue That Should Not Be to the candy and ritual offerings store, as the clouds drifted past the setting sun which hung like a great celestial voyeur. The air was hot and a little prickly, which probably explained the dryness in his mouth.

Maybe this'd even go well. He hoped.

[cecileofnightvale]

"Oops!"

6. Your character walking in on mine kissing a stranger.

Cecile released the man and wiped her lips- the kiss had been messy to say the least. She turned at the sound of a gentle cough at the entrance to the studio.

"Oh. Hello, Julie."