Written for @autistic-character-month Day 20 prompts: Touch + Hair braiding, a character who is simultaneously touch averse and touch starved; accepting / declining touch
Title: The Haptics Star
Summary: For her simurgy (virtual reality design) course Koa has to model an alien being in VR. This includes haptic modeling to convey the sensations that an alien might feel. For that purpose Koa needs to tie them to equivalent human sensations. For someone who is both touch-averse and touch-starved, this turns out an unexpected obstacle that requires unusual solutions.
Original work
Gen / Gen
No warnings
Words: 3,915
Read here on AO3
If you liked this story, I would really appreciate it if you clicked the kudos button on AO3. And if you left me a comment, I would be overjoyed!
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial #FFF 338 "No happy endings".
(Apropos of nothing, the sign referenced at the beginning is an actual sign I saw on a massage parlor door in my city.)
Original work
Words: 750
Gen / Gen
No happy endings! Don't even ask! said a faded sign on the door, and Noeve wondered if the new owners kept it there ironically, or if they didn't even know what it meant. Perhaps Spanringers had not yet figured out which of the accoutrements of the former massage parlor they had to preserve to make a stray earthling that wandered over here to believe that this place still served the same function.
As she reached towards the doorknob, her heart pounding, she sifted through all the conversations that she ever had about Spanringers, searching for a reason not to go in.
They do massage in complete darkness, people told her, and you never see them. You don't know what's manipulating your body.
It's not a massage, it's an extra-dimensional transformation, some said.
It's not a massage, it's their way of marking you, some others said.
Marking with what or for what? Noeve had tried to ask them. Marking as one needing to be⌠punished? Rewarded?
People laughed. Why are you asking it, as if you would actually go in there?
Why not? Did anyone not come out? Noeve asked.
They do come out, said a man she remembered as Vert, but none of them made it to wherever they were going next: work, home, a corner store, you name it.
Hey, but sometimes they give you a gift, said a pale teen named Sarath. Not often, though. And that gift is different for everyone.
No kidding, Vert replied, I had a coworker, Ingar, and he came out of one of these parlors speaking in two voices at the same time. He even called me to ask if I was hearing it too. I freaked out and asked him to come over, not sure why, maybe I thought I'll have to take him to a hospital. And he never showed up. No one found out what happened to him.
Noeve was not concerned about that. She had no one waiting at home, so of course, by laws of irony, she won't go missing. And she never won a prize at any drawing, so for her to worry about a random odd "gift" would be way overblown.
She opened the narrow door, sandwiched between boarded-up windows in the abandoned strip mall, and faced a hallway with a row of dimly-lit rooms. Not a soul inside, and no surprises. She stepped into the first room and followed the instructions posted on the wall, which told her to undress and get under the sterile-looking white cotton sheet on the massage table. As soon as she did so, the room turned pitch-dark. The sheet stiffened around her like a concrete glaze. She could not move a muscle. Remarkably, the immobilization also dampened the fear she thought she should be feeling.
When something descended on her, she could not tell if it touched the sheet or her naked skin, because at that point the two must have merged. At some moments the pressure on her back appeared to come from a smoothly-muscled limb, and at other times from something rigid like bone. It pressed deeply into her flesh, so deeply it had to be going all through her torso and into the massage table, but she felt no pain.
The lights came on slowly, and the room was completely empty and perfectly still. She was intact, with no holes in her flesh. Coming out into the dazzlingly bright midday street felt almost too mundane. Nothing looked diffeâŚ
She had two shadows. Two shadows at right angles to each other.
She stumbled but managed to walk on, blinded by the sun, trying not to panic about the gift she received. She was about to pass the Spanringer embassy on the right, and burst out into a momentary chuckle at the thought that she should stop by and ask them what it meant. The embassy had a giant sculpture on the front lawn: two stars that made up a binary system, the Spanringer home. Two giant brass spheres slowly revolved around each other. Two shadows stretched across the lawn, at a right angle to each other. Noeve's eyes widened.
She stepped into the intersection of the shadows cast by the sculpture, and they aligned perfectly with her own. A central door opened in the building. That which came out was not visible since it carried its own pool of darkness. But even without seeing she knew it beckoned her.
Why did they say 'no happy endings' Noeve wondered, walking towards it.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial #FFF 337 "Sweeter Than Candy".
Original work
Words: 980
Gen / Gen
CW: Child abuse
Summary:
In a hard-hit human colony on an inhospitable planet lives 13-year-old Orila, who almost never speaks. When an abusive authority figure tries to force her to speak, Orila becomes a conduit for something that will forever relieve her of a need to use words.
Read on AO3 or under the cut.
"When you are ready to speak, call for me and I'll let you out," said Aunt Garang, and slammed the door of the cylindrical dome. This used to be the ship cafeteria, where no one had cooked since the ship crash-landed on the Gatewheel planet. It now served as a makeshift jail for the colony.
Orila could no more speak than she could fly. The only few times her throat squeezed out a barely audible word was in her grandma's company, but grandma, though she managed to survive the crash-landing, did not even live to see the winter - the first winter here on Gatewheel. Months later Orila turned thirteen, the age of full adult responsibilities. Going out in search of firewood, treading the honeycomb-like rock structures to try to catch small furry rabbit-like creatures that darted in and out of hexagonal holes - it required the group members to yell commands and acknowledgments at each other. So Aunt Garang made it clear that Orila was going to speak and eat, or neither.
Shivering in a pile of dry leaves on the floor - the only bedding provided for prisoners - was how Aunt Garang found Orila in the morning.
"Will you speak?" said Garang, and her eyes lit up gleefully when Orila pried her parched lips apart. But Orila tilted her head back and brought her hand to her mouth, imitating drinking.
"You want water?" said Garang. "Ask me. With words."
Silence. An unbreachable thousand-mile wall stood between Orila's mind and mouth, as always. Aunt Garang seethed with anger.
"You do have a tongue, don't you?" Garang took a step towards Orila, yanked her to her feet. "Show me." She squeezed Orila's cheeks together, forced her mouth open, and poked her tongue. "See? Use it."
Silence.
"Or you can drink this." Garang pushed Orila towards the window. There were frost flowers and ferns on the windowpane, intricate, pure, and indifferent to human matters. Garang jammed Orila's face into the glass, frost searing it instantly; up close, for a brief second, the ice crystals resembled circuitry. Garang pried Orila's jaw open again, pulled out her tongue and pressed it to the glass. "Here's your water."
The thud of her slamming door was no match for the shock to Orila's tongue. The frost was sweet: it was a taste she had not known in the year since the landing. There was no sugar in the colonists' diet of grain and potatoes. The ice crystals were sweeter than the candy made out of moondew flowers that grew in the cafeteria orchard during the flight. Orila's mouth watered, but even after she swallowed, the sensation of something alien on her tongue remained. She stuck out her tongue as far as she could and peered down at it.
There was circuitry on it.
Orila panicked, tried to scrape it off with her finger, but it was hard like diamond. Then the taste in her mouth formed the words.
"Eat some more of me, little sprout. Enjoy the taste of the Honeycomb. I am the land. I'm plentiful."
The honeycomb rock. That which the colonists treaded in search for food, never daring to stop in one place for long. If you stopped, and if you were so unwise as to peer into the hexagonal hollows, the stillness brought whispery open-eyed dreams. They beckoned you inside, they made you feel like you were no bigger than a rabbit and just as nimble, and just as well fitted to fill the nooks and crannies of this planet: the rabbit holes, the cracks in the rock. If you saw your group mate standing still for even a few seconds, you were required to yell "run!"
"And Sister-of-Quartz is also here," the taste said. "If I am rock, she is a vein running through me. She now runs through you too, and through everything alive."
Orila saw no reason to ask who they were. They were the planet to which she now belonged.
"You are the first of your tribe to partake of me and you are happy," the taste-speaker continued. Orila would have never thought that taste alone could form complex sentences like these. It was as if letters were written on her tongue, an alien script that was somehow instantly recognizable; ancient glyphs of sugar, fruit, even chocolate.
"And she looks so happy!" A second taste-speaker spoke. It must have been Sister-Of-Quartz. "Is your frost circuitry magical, Honeycomb?"
"Do you think I have 'honey' in my name for nothing?" the first speaker laughed. "Of course I sweetened the ice crystals. They don't have much to live on, these colonists. They need sugar."
"You want them to accept our circuitry," said Sister-Of-Quartz.
"Of course! Much more effective than sending them dreams."
Orila's inexorable hunger swept over her like an avalanche. She greedily licked another spot on the frosty window. And another.
"What are you doing, idiot?" a voice sounded behind her. Aunt Garang had come back. Orila whipped around.
"It's sweet!" Words escaped her lips all on their own. This was the first phrase she spoke in a year, and she knew equally well it was the last. Those that loosened her tongue were soon going to take the words away when human speech was no longer needed. Very soon.
"Sweet?" Garang said. Her gaze danced between Orila and the glass; between wariness and temptation. The latter won. She strode towards the window.
Orila knew she could, if she wanted to, scream "Danger! Stop! Don't do it!" She could warn Garang about that which will invade her if she licks the frost. But there was no need. Soon Garang's tongue will pass into the control of the Honeycomb and the Sister-of-Quartz. With her swan song she will lure other colonists to follow suit, then fall into silence. And then nobody will say another unkind word to Orila, and no one will call her names.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial #FFF 336 "Don't Be Afraid".
Original work
Words: 500
CW: mild body horror
Don't be afraid, you'll be face-down when the Lintari makes the first cut. You'll never even get to see them. Yes, they will be closer than anyone has been to you. How do I know, you ask? I know because they pointed you out to me. The Lintari requested you specifically. They can tell a person who has not been in anyone's physical proximity in a long while. That's what they told me. They said it makes you moldable, pliable. They struggled with a comparison. They haven't been on Earth that long.
Ah! They said. She is like those inflatable figures. Yes, they meant you. Like the figures on people's lawns on winter holidays. Full of air, they are rigid. But you've seen them in the mornings, crumpled by the sidewalk. Floppy - floppy enough to fold into a four-dimensional shape, they said. Oh yes, I told them, I see what you mean. Infinitely bendable, with air gone out of them.
Well, at least that's what I said, "air gone out of them". But for the Lintari everything is the opposite - the interior and the exterior. Switching the inside and the outside is how their gates operate, you know? The gates they build that join pieces of the universe millions of lightyears away. And so when we say "the air has gone out of you", they would say that a vacuum is crushing you. Aren't they right? Don't you feel that way? When was the last time you called someone a friend? You won't answer, of course. You don't have to answer. The Lintari see it. That's why they selected you to be one of humankind's first travellers through their gate.
Oh, you think it's because they don't think anyone will miss you? No! They picked you because that vacuum that surrounds you pulls them in. I agree, it's a shame that you won't get to see them, but they haven't shown themselves to any of us. The only way to experience them is by touch. And you will be the first one so lucky.
You'll be lying on your stomach, face down. They will start the process of folding you into a four-dimensional origami. Yes, four-dimensional. How else would you pass through a gate whose other end is a billion lightyears away, if not through a cross-dimensional shortcut? But sometimes an origami requires a cut in the paper, and the Lintari will have to make one cut. Yes, in you, of course. In that spot at the top of your spine, right around the shoulder level. No, don't be afraid. A Lintari will anesthetize you first. They will lick that spot - yes, lick; I'm told that their tongue is like a cat's tongue, and their body, pressing on yours from above, is like a big cat's; they will, as I said, lick that spot until your whole body forgets what shape it once carried. No, I don't know what shape you will have on the other side of the vacuum.
We're having a Trope Flip Fest here at the Prompt Foundry for November 2025!
We all have our favorite tropes in media and fanwork, and we all have tropes we merely tolerate or are bored of. Either way, there's lots of room to have fun exploring the possibilities of turning the usual tropes on their heads!
A big thank you to everyone who helped contribute to this list by sharing their favorite tropes! It's great to have the community chime in.
These prompts are particularly well suited to prose writers, especially fanfiction writers, since that's the realm we're drawing inspiration from this month, but all artists and forms of creative work are more than welcome to join the fun.
Feel free to combine different daysâ prompts with each other, or combine them with other events, like OC-tober, Inktober, or last year's Nom Nom November! Use your OCs, your favorite characters from media, your own experiences, whatever tickles your fancy.
If you use this list, please tag me here @thepromptfoundry, Iâd love to see your writing and art!
Respond to as many prompts as you want or as interest you, donât worry about missing or skipping any, or posting your work after the day the prompt is assigned to. Remember, this is supposed to be fun!
If you have any questions or musings, check our FAQ, and if you donât find your answer, shoot me an ask.
Plain text list below the cut:
1 Cursed to Lie
(Truth Serum)
2 Too Many Beds
(Only One Bed)
3 Forced Distance
(Forced Proximity)
4 Fake Divorce
(Fake Marriage/Fake Dating)
5 Misplaced My Person
(Accidental Child/Family Acquisition)
11 Blorbo In The Real World
(Isekai/Transmigration)
12 Irredeemable Heroes
(Redeemable Villains)
13 Unrequited Apathy
(Mutual Pining)
14 Dropouts and GEDs
(High School and College AUs)
15 Enforced Secrecy
(Secret Reveal)
16 Oh, Please Kick Their Ass
(Touch Them You Die)
17 Actually Good Parenting
(Various Characters' âA+ Parentingâ)
18 Characters All Over the Map
(Bottle Episode)
19 Open Book Acquaintance
(Mysterious Stranger)
20 It Doesn't Matter Who It Is
(Identity Porn*)
* Note that âIdentity Pornâ refers to shenanigans around the maintenance of secret identities, and need not be sexually pornographic.
21 Highly Specific Memories
(Amnesia)
22 Too Hot for Human Contact
(Cuddling for Warmth)
23 Fated Foes
(Soulmates)
24 Intense Platonic Devotion
(There's No Platonic Explanation for This)
25 Orchestrating a Breakup
(Playing Matchmaker)
26 How Worse Things Could Be
(Fix-it)
27 Hate Potion
(Love Potion)
28 The Faintest Family Resemblance
(Identical Cousins/Matched-set Siblings)
Teshmir's spiritual officer told zir to go to the room of Ascent. Zie will find a fissionid there, the officer said, and the fissionid will tell Teshmir what zir rite of Ascent will consist of. Then the officer led Teshmir to a small door in the back of the temple. The ritual was to be done in complete privacy, and no one even explained to Teshmir why it would be administered by a fissionid. Their name is Kaelori, the officer said, and did not answer any more of Teshmir's questions.
Fissionids were such infrequent visitors planet-side that Teshmir had not seen one before.
The door shut with a soft, claustrophobia-inducing click. The room had walls draped with fuzzy, ornate swatches of fabric. To mute the sound, a thought crossed Teshmir's mind, but then zir attention was taken by the fissionid, Kaelori: the most impressive - and indeed, the only - object in the room.
The alien had a long, thick tail that resembled a giant, flattish loaf of bread. Their six limbs looked way too feeble to carry their body around. The fissionids developed on a world with a much lower gravity than Teshmir's own. Zie could imagine that here, on a high-grav planet, Kaelori felt like a splayed, immovable blob, similarly to how Teshmir felt after a Shedding Night dinner at the grandparents', but ten times worse. The alien, however, managed to look dignified as they scrutinized Teshmir with their deep-set, yet sharp and focused eyes.
"By undergoing your rite of Ascent you'll do me a great kindness," said Kaelori. "I'm honored to be picked as an individual who ushers you into the next stage of your life. Your species forms a symbiosis with mine, and it is at the heart of the rite. Simply put, you will give me some of your enzyme splisomorphase. I need it for my tail to split and make legs strong enough to enable me to walk on this planet. These," they wiggled their straw-thin limbs, "are of no use to us here."
"Ah, I see," said Teshmir. This seemed a trivial request, nowhere near special enough for the first truly important ritual of zir life. "I can milk myself, but I was not told to bring a receptacle. I can still go and get one?.."
"No," said Kaelori. "You will inject it into me directly. If the splisomorphase is exposed to air, it will lose potency."
"Oh," said Teshmir, stunned. "I don't see how that's possible. We⌠express our enzyme by biting into something, you see."
"That's exactly what I want you to do to me," said Kaelori.
"Dear Kaelori, our teeth can crush rocks. I'm afraid that's out of the question."
"Dearest Teshmir, do not even dream of not cooperating in your own ascension ritual," said Kaelori. An imperious note crept into their voice. "My tail does not feel pain. I would appreciate you just getting it over with."
"Alright." At the thought of failing the ritual Teshmir decided to overcome zir squeamishness and do what zie was told. Zie approached Kaelori with great reluctance.
"You'll need to bite me right there," said Kaelori and pointed to a soft, unprotected-looking spot in their loaf of a tail, most of which appeared to be covered by bark. The "bark" was peeling in places. Kaelori scrunched up and pointed their short, limp arm to the desired place. There, the "peel" had come off; it looked like a bald spot.
Teshmir crouched, opened zir narrow, snout-like jaw and tentatively moved it over Kaelori's tail, positioning the two front fangs over the target spot.
"And now, on three, clamp down with all your strength," said Kaelori. "Ready? One, two, three!"
Teshmir had never bit a living being. Zie clenched zir jaw with all zir might, and felt something - springy, crunchy, slippery bits - slide underneath zir teeth, moving apart, grinding against each other. It was not even the sound, but the pure feel of it - the grinding, the slipping - that caused Teshmir to seize with fear and revulsion. In an instant zie became unshakably sure that the flesh in zir mouth was sensitive and undergoing pure agony.
"Stronger!" Kaelori croaked. The sound that erupted from their throat was so full of torment that Teshmir could not bear it: zir jaw cramped, fangs piercing the flesh until the upper and the lower teeth met.
Zie heard suppressed grunts, more vibrations than sounds, coming from deep within the fissionid. Terrified of what zie had done, Teshmir pried zir own jaw open with both zir hands. Teshmir was panting heavily, the sound filling zir own ears. Only seconds later did it register that Kaelori was panting too. Their eyes did not look sharp or alert anymore, but rather clouded and diffuse.
"Did I hurt you?" whispered Teshmir, feeling foolish and terribly guilty. It was very plain that zie did.
"You did very well," Kaelori said between gasps for air. "You did me a great favor."
"I'm very sorry," said Teshmir. Unable to stand being in the room with someone zie hurt horribly, zie headed towards the door.
"Don't leave yet," a croaky voice said. "You are not done."
"What?" said Teshmir. Zir voice came out as a tortured screech.
"You need to do it again," said the fissionid. "Bite another spot, equidistant from the central axis of my body. Only then my tail will divide into three serviceable legs."
"I can't!" Teshmir yelled. "Not after knowing what my bite did to you!"
"I'm afraid you have to," said Kaelori, zir breathing returning to normal, voice regaining its previous icy tones.
Teshmir rushed to the door. It was locked from outside.
"That's the real test for your Ascent," said Kaelori. "Knowing how terrible the task is, and doing it anyway, because you must. Do you understand the meaning of your rite now?"
did you read an Ao3 fic and want to comment about what you read, whether a specific line or your reactions or whatever, but you're anxious of how it may be received? well, if knowing some possibilities may help:
What to Expect* when you Comment on Ao3
nothing happens externally, but internally your thoughts are essentially puffed into smoke, your feelings have been felt, and you move on with less words weighing you down (catharsis!) â it's like leaving kudos with that physical evidence of you being there, but i find with longer emotional release.
the author responds sometimes rapidly, other times months later. you may get a "thank you" or some more info about the story. sometimes they say how much the comment means to them! or they update and cite your comments as the inspiration. i find it's easier not to hope this to happen (see motivations post) but if you want to have the author reply, i find it helps if you have a question.
another reader responds. extremely rare occurrence, but if they're agreeing with you then it's nice! if this has been after a long-time of "nothing happens", i've been momentarily confused until i remembered the fic and am happy to reminisce or re-read. it has inspired me to reply to other comments that i agree with and we have a tiny connection :>
*this is just from my experience as part of the What to Expect series. i would love to hear your experiences if ya wanna share!
Prompt: @whumperless-whump-event Day 22: Touch-starved
Activation Points (2241 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Touch-Starved, Touching, Touch Aversion, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Hurt/Comfort, Massage, Science Fiction
Summary:
Richa, a student of simurgy, has been touch-starved for so long that experiencing touch sends her into mental upheaval and physical pain. Someone notices this and sets out to remedy it. But first they need to overcome her resistance.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt #FFF 314 "Half Awake".
Original work
Word count: 469
Genre: science fiction
Title: Oneirics
It was those bizarre dreams that happened between wakefulness and sleep, those that started out as convoluted thoughts as you were drifting off to sleep and suddenly seared you with an especially vivid image - those were the most dangerous. She was never told what was the real danger of the escaped oneiric threads, as they were called, but her oneirics headset was always turned off until the sensors on her temples had registered the steady waves of deep sleep.
Usually her fall into sleep was sudden; she would lay down in bed, attach the sensors to the selected points on her head, and wake up the next morning with no memory of anything happening. But that night demanded a purposeful exercise of submerging herself below the surface of consciousness, and that was not good. Oneirics did not work with deliberate effort; the space would not fold if you set out to draw the crease lines; those crease lines already existed in the eleven dimensions, they were just not visible to the daytime mind. It's the sleeping mind that found them without fail.
And if you drew them in the wrong place, a starcruiser would fall into a spacetime crack that didn't lead anywhere.
If she can't fall asleep in another few minutes, she'll be required to take off the oneirics headset, just to avoid the risks of the half-awake state.
And suddenly she was driving on a highway, and there was a black truck driving beside her and it turned and started spinning in a circle, and she was terrified since it was inevitably going to hit her, but suddenly it turned into something a child's wooden horse on wheels and shrank in size and she reached out her hand from the driver's seat and pushed it out of the wayâŚ
She woke up with a startle, realizing that she just had an extra vivid precursor-to-a-dream. The oneirics headset was on her head, active. The horror of what she did may not become apparent in her lifetime, or could be revealed any day, decades from now. It all depended how far the spaceship was - the one that was affected by her escaped dream thread (if she was lucky, there wasn't one), and how long the information about its fate took to reach her. She may go to her grave not knowing who she killed.
A spaceship that was circling the OJ 287 black hole, unable to gain enough speed to break out of its ergosphere, doomed to fall into its event horizon. Its trajectory suddenly changed. Its crew knew it could be decades or it could be hundreds years to find out which of the oneironauts somehow produced an impulse to propel it out of its fatal spin. They may go to their graves not knowing who to thank.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt Out of the Box
Words: 916
Original work
How are you doing, my fellow sonauts? I have big news for you today. A new version of the Sonorix Box has just dropped, and you are about to get a first look at it! Like the earlier versions, it is a cube. The cubical form supposedly gives the right shape to the four-dimensional soundwaves it produces. Which are not like our soundwaves, by the way. I will get to that later.
You see these two handles on the opposite sides of the box? That's new. Tell me in the chat, what do you think they are for? The first one to guess will get a free subscription to my channel for a year. Let's see your guesses!
Ah! Some of you are saying the handles are just for carrying. You think I'm trolling you. Well, folks, if you haven't watched my earlier videos about the Sonorix Box, let me remind you. It's not possible to pick up and carry a Sonorix Box. Or any four-dimensional object, for that matter. What we see here in our three-dimensional space is just one slice of the box. One 3-D slice. If you need help thinking about this, imagine the box in one less dimension. Say you have a 2-D surface with 2-D people in it. If a box crosses that surface, those people would see it as a rectangle. Would they be able to pick up that rectangle and carry it? Remember, their surface is infinitely thin. The absolute majority of the box mass is outside of it. From their perspective it's infinitely big. So no, carrying such a thing is impossible.
What else could those handles be for? Oh, user NoiseNest is a smart one. They're saying, try pulling those handles and find out for yourself. How did you figure out you need to pull them, NoiseNest? Because you're right. I guess our four-dimensional friends, the Velari, have made the Sonorix UI really intuitive. It's not for our sake, by the way. I think it's to benefit themselves. But I'm getting ahead of myself. For now, let's just try and see what happens.
Here we go! I'm pulling both of them simultaneously in the opposite directions. Now, you all can see that the box expanded. But do you understand what actually happened? Did the box really get bigger? Come on, say it in the chat! The first correct guess gets a year of free subscription to my channel.
Aaaaand user Echo_In_Threaded_Glass is the winner! That's right, the box didn't really get bigger. At least not in four dimensions. It's just as you said, Echo, we are seeing another three-dimensional slice of the same box, and it appears to be bigger in area. So the whole Sonorix Box in 4-D is more like a pyramid. Its cross-sections shrink in the direction that's orthogonal to our 3-D space. And pulling on these handles allowed us to lower or raise this pyramid in fourth dimension. That's why we see it getting bigger or smaller. Can you imagine how cool that is? We couldn't even dream of doing that with the previous version. The Velari built this feature just for us.
Now, I see some of you saying, who cares? As long as it plays sounds. And I'll get to that. But first, shall I turn it on and see what sound comes out of the box? It's that button on the side. Here I go.
<Pause>
OK, so we know that the sound emitted by the Sonorix Box is not comparable to any earthly music. The Velari are a 4-dimensional civilization, so how could it be, right? But look. I'm pulling the handles again, very little this time. The box moved through the fourth dimension again, only a tiny bit. And the melody now is very different. I'll do this again. See? With each tiny shift, the melody becomes unrecognizable. So what does this all mean?
My Velariologist friends say that the four-dimensional sound-waves of the Velari can be decomposed into orthogonal three-dimensional melodies, each of which sound completely different. They comprise the whole that the Velari hear. We, humans, can only hear one 3-D component at at time, just like we can see the Sonorix Box one 3-D slice at a time. That sounds plausible. But why do the Velari want us to listen to their music? Why do they give us these boxes? What do they want from us?
Let's see some guesses in the chat.
User rixx_953u2 thinks each layer of the melody has a message encoded in it, and the Velari want us to decode it and send it back to them. OK, rixx, but why can't they do it themselves?
User SnackForScale thinks it's because the Velari know the 4-dimensional melody has some kind of mind-virus; they want us, who can only hear one 3-D melody at a time, to decode so they could neutralize it. Since we can't hear it all at once, it's harmless to us.
They may be right. I don't know the right answer to that.
User rebooted_twice points out that the Velari are at war with another 4-dimensional race, and maybe they want us to help fight that war. I take it you mean they want us decode the messages meant to infect and destroy them. You know as much as I, my friend. I'm sorry, but the prize for finding the answer won't be a free subscription to my channel. The prize might be survival of the human race.
in all seriousness, i find it concerning how weâve begun to denigrate rigid/formal english in favor of what feels ârealâ (i.e. informal, social). harrowing implications for neurodivergent and ESL communities. i was a child who âsounded like a computerââi canât imagine what my education would have felt like under AI-driven scrutiny. as an adult, iâm far more equipped to construct my thoughts using informal language, but i consider that skill a privilege
many people experience this in reverse, learning english as a native language through peer-driven social experiences. in that world, âformalâ english signifies privilege and education rather than neurodivergence and/or multilingualism, so i understand the impulse to attack it, but thereâs nothing wrong with relying on structure to be understood, andâfor the recordâyou cannot always identify generative AI with a cursory glance. it is an exercise in hubris to believe otherwise
Reading the scene of the a spaceship crew waking up from cold sleep and finding an unexpected menace (the scene that truly hooked me on this book) in Adrian Tchaikovsky "Children of Time", I'm remembering myself writing a scene with the same premise in one of my now-abandoned novels. I cringe at how clunky it was compared to Adrian Tchaikovsky's suspenseful prose.
Written for the @newwwwprompts Autistic Acceptance Month 2025, and for @aprilisthecruelestmonth Day 7 prompt "Panic Attack".
A bridge over the sea of dust (3857 words) by logonaut
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: A Fall of Moondust - Arthur C. Clarke
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence & Tom Lawson
Characters: Chief Engineer Robert Lawrence, Tom Lawson
Additional Tags: Augmented Reality, Autistic Characters, Moon, Panic Attacks, Computer Programming, Queerplatonic Relationships, Science, Science Fiction, Outer Space, Virtual Reality
Summary:
Once Selene's passengers were safe, the largest thing preoccupying Chief Engineer Lawrence's mind became Tom Lawson. On their second expedition into the Sea of Thirst, Lawrence has ways to avert Tom's panic attack.
Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt #FFF 299 Stranger Than Fiction
Words: 741
Original work / no fandom
Zie woke up after the hundreds counter rolled over in the chronoflux capsule display, as zie always did. The capsule informed zir that it had to make an unplanned stop in the second half of the previous century. It was to eject an alien body, an unwanted passenger, it said. Zie was not sure if zie were still dreaming, but there was no misunderstanding of the capsule AI, which spoke in a simple, bussiness-like manner. The earliest time it could eject the passenger into was 20 years from zir departure; if the time interval were any shorter, the strain on the temporal cone would be too big. Zie was astounded, because the notion of a passenger getting into chronocapsule with zir was unfathomable on a planet where the notion of chronoflux was still at least two thousand years away.
None of the locals even knew that at the end of the furthest recess of the remotest, tightest curve of the cave tunnel was a niche that was zir home. The Fish Mother priestess tried to follow zir a few times, but zie thought she was just trying to chase away the Impostor Moon-Man. That was their name for zir. The one with face pale like the light of the Face in the Sky, the one who stole the tides and caused the sea recede and the fish disappear. Zie who came from the other side of the Moon through a shaft in the mountain, the one that goes to the very top of the peak, the peak that the Moon perches on at sunset.
Zie had no idea that she, as the capsule camera showed, will not only follow zir into the cave, but bring an obsidian knife along. Luckily, the sleeping gas in the capsule incapacitated her pretty quickly.
How lucky zie was that zir chronocapsule only stopped once in each century, and that the people that gossiped about zir on zir previous stop won't be alive. The Fish Mother priestess will be long-dead. No one alive will remember the Impostor Moon-Man who snuck around their great-grandparents' shacks, markets and temples, peering from the shadows, listening to blacksmiths and wheel-wrights talk, watching nuns and philosophers bisect squares and circles with chalk on stone floor and track Sun's movement in the sky. One stop a century is enough to not overlook the moment when a critical change starts in a civilization.
Scrunched up and blinking, zie reappeared through the cave mouth. The Fish Mother temple was still there, but much bigger now; its sides were decorated with stone bas-reliefs. That long braid, that square set of shoulders and jaw: even in marble, the semblance was not lost. Here she is looming over the Impostor Moon-Man - zie is literally moon-faced, because zir face is a crescent with no features; zie is recumbent in something that looks like a teardrop. Zir capsule is teardrop-shaped for better chronoflux, but Fish Mother didn't know such words. The Fish Mother triumphs over zir body, holding a knife aloft; blood is shown dripping from it into the sea below. Filling the sea. The sea has returned, and with it the fishes, now that the impostor wasn't stealing the tides anymore.
Zie was happy for her. Twenty years after the chronoflux grabbed her, careless and curious traveler, and spat her out a generation later, she not only reintegrated into her former place, but became a venerated semi-deity, thanks to vanquishing the Impostor Moon-Man. In reality, she was fortunate that the Moon, being in a highly irregular orbit, entered a phase where it is closer to the planet and the tides are stronger. But it's a truth for which her tribe simply does not have a framework to think about; zie did not resent the pleasant fiction she had created to explain it. Even at zir expense.
For it was not the only fiction she created. The truth, zie realized - which was, again, stranger than her tribesfolk knew - was this. She did not try to kill me in that capsule. The camera footage shows it. She brought the knife to protect me. (Now I know why she attempted to follow me repeatedly.) Before the sleeping gas knocked her out, she had already curled up all around me, knife resting gently at her side, her arm across my chest, wishing to disappear with me into the other side of the Moon, the world that I, the impostor, came from.
