Another set of stories! I’m posting these as they were originally written. Enjoy some sillies!

16. The Author

Another story! Prolific author Rutabaga Jones just spurted them out. Almost secreted them from his pores. It was really gross. He made nasty sucking noises while he wrote. And then he published. He usually wrote five or six hundred stories a year! Everyone was awestruck. Then some writers got jealous, because Rutabaga’s style was so chameleon-y that no one published anyone else’s stories anymore. Rutabaga wrote in all the genres and became the only author anyone ever read. But that was the start of his rise as global then galactic emperor. He started weaving subliminal messages into his writings and people began to believe that he would be great as a world leader and so they made him one. His first act was to request all the cheesecake. He did very much love cheesecake. So he ate it all and became very very fat. Then the world was not big enough, quite literally, it could not hold him, so he had his minions build him a space container and was launched into space and from there, took over the galaxy. It was quite a sight to see. He had the best weapons installed on his container and he floated around blowing things up. To this day, people still rule in the name of Rutabaga Jones, though he has to be dead. That was two thousand years ago. He is totally dead- oh no! there he is! He’s coming to get me! He’s screaming about blasphemy! He is so big! He’s the size of the moons! No don’t get closer! The world can’t take it! Kaboom!

11th February 2013

17. The Thought

Nathan pondered. There was something stuck in his mind, something hidden in the folds of thought. He couldn’t pin it down, couldn’t grasp it to make sense of it. It was something significant, he could tell, one of those thoughts that lingers beyond its inception, ephemeral but present. All day it stayed there, just out of reach, and Nathan could not focus on anything. Meetings passed by at work, and he heard little of what was said. The new drives on the new line of Stellar Ships were working just fine, or they weren’t working at all. Something like that. Nathan didn’t know because this thought had lodged itself in his mind like a splinter he couldn’t find. It wasn’t painful though. Just distracting,

Finally, Nathan left work. The transport capsule landed him in front of his apartment, and after unlocking the door with his palm, he entered. The door slid shut silently behind him. Nathan rushed to his desk. He flopped into his chair and leaned back, letting the chair adjust to his form. Then he flicked the switch on the right arm of the chair and entered the Mind Space.

The room around him vanished. Usually the room melted away slowly. It was sudden this time, so eager was Nathan to get into his head and find the hidden thought. He was disoriented momentarily. The suddenness of his transfer from physical space to mental space didn’t give his mind time to organize itself into something rational that he could understand. For a moment he stood amidst all of his unfiltered thoughts and ideas and dreams, all represented as images stretching away into the infinite distance of his mind. Then they all rushed together and Nathan was standing in the bedroom in which he had grown up.

The thought wasn’t here, he could tell immediately. He pushed the walls away, and they fell, and now he was on the green of his college, staring at the library. He felt closer to the thought, in time anyway. He needed to get out of memory, but he sensed something related to the thought. He took a step forward and ended up in the library amidst rows of shelves lined with books. A sense of comfort permeated the atmosphere in the library. Nathan had always felt at home amongst books. But he needed to move on. He stretched his mind and took a step outside of memory and into something else.

He recognized this new mind space as dream. He was in a crowd, and the people who moved around him were always familiar, although they did not stay the same people. He recognized an old friend from high school who, as he walked, turned into Nathan’s brother. Dream space was difficult to get used to. Nathan breathed and focused, and got a sense of the terrain. He sensed the land of nightmares to his left and was grateful that he did not sense the thought there. He had dared brave the nightmare space only twice, and he was not eager to go back there. He formed an idea and brought it into the dream space. It was a map, and Nathan made it hover in front of him. It showed all the spaces inside his dream space. There was the nightmare space, and the anxiety space next to it. Then the space of memory dreams, and future dreams, and then hope dreams, and-

And that’s where the thought was. Nathan focused on the space of his hope dreams and felt it. No, it wasn’t the whole thing, but the thought was attached, a piece of it lived in the space where Nathan dreamed of hope. He ran toward it. Yes, he was very close now. This was the link. He reached the space and saw all the things he hoped for as they appeared in his dreams. Wealth and fame on the outskirts, and then happiness and company as he got further in. And then, a step beyond these, the piece of the thought. It was a face he recognized, and he knew then where to find the thought.

He took a breath to try to calm himself. The mind space he was about to enter was hard to visualize, and the connection would be hard to maintain. He had to focus. Another deep breath in and then out, and Nathan stepped into his emotions.

He was bombarded. The Mind Space tried to rationalize emotion into image. All it managed was a field of constantly shifting images that turned to colors and then to nothing Nathan could ever explain when he got out of the Mind Space. He focused on the thought, the lingering hidden thought and the field of emotion calmed down. And then in the distance, Nathan saw it. And he felt it. Warmth and joy and comfort, and also fear and anxiety, and hope, lots and lots of hope. And he held the thought, the emotion, and all the images faded except for this one, no longer hidden from him. The emotions condensed, showing Nathan the source of the thought, the emotion, the dreams of hope. She smiled at him.

The Mind Space faded. Nathan looked around at the physical world, and he smiled.

12th February 2013

18. The Crooks

The crooks ran down the street, looking over their shoulders for the pursuing hero. There he was, chasing them tirelessly, wearing garish hero attire.
“He’s chasing us tirelessly!” said the taller of the two. “Keep running!”
“I believe I shall!” said the other, who really was much shorter than his partner in crime. “I think that is a much better plan than letting him catch us!”
So they ran, both carrying their signature bags with dollar signs painted on them. The crooks were dressed in typical crook attire, all black with ski masks. The masks had holes for their eyes, noses and mouths, to facilitate breathing and demanding bank tellers to hand over the money. The crooks had tried masks with only holes for their eyes, but the muffling of their voices had only led to confusion. So, eye, nose, and mouth holes it was. They turned a corner.
“Bah!” shouted the taller crook. Another hero was waiting for them around the corner, wearing much more sensible clothes. The crooks skidded to a halt cartoonishly. The chasing hero rounded the corner, and the crooks were surrounded.
“Halt!” cried the hero from behind them, a bit redundantly. The crooks looked at their feet to verify that, yes, they had already stopped moving. “Hand over the money bag, you crooks!” the hero said much louder than necessary.
“If I had my preference,” said the shorter crook at a much more appropriate volume, considering his proximity to the heroes, “I would rather not.”
“Well, uh, no!” said the garish hero.
The tall crook turned to his mate and shrugged. “I do not know what kind of option we have, mate,” he said. “They have us surrounded, and they are heroes, and we are but humble crooks who have been caught fair and square.”
“I do not like this one bit!” cried the small crook. But he complied, and handed his money bag to the hero, and his tall partner followed suit. So the crooks were put away, and they were sad, because they had really wanted the money, and the heroes were celebrated, and that was that.

16th February 2013

19. The Presidents

The newly elected president was sitting at his desk in the oval office when the two suited gentlemen came to see him. There was something odd about these gentlemen, the president thought. Like they carried a secret. “Mr. President,” said the gentleman on the right. “First, congratulations. Second, please come with us.”
“What for?” The president asked, wary.
“We will tell you on the way,” said the other gentleman. The president could hardly tell the two apart. “There is more to this office than you realize.”
The gentleman who had spoken first crossed to the desk, took a square piece of metal from his coat pocket, and placed it on the desk. The desk began to hum, and the president stood quickly and stepped away. And then the desk sank into the ground and was replaced by a set of stairs leading down. The stairs spiraled as the descended, so the president could not see what lay at the bottom.
“Come with us,” said the gentlemen. One led the way down the stairs, and the other followed behind the president. They went down and down, and then the stairs ended and they were in a large cavern. The ceiling rose many feet above. And they were not alone.
A large circular table dominated the space, and around the table sat many men. To the president’s shock, he realized that he recognized many of the faces.
“Welcome to the Legion of Presidents!”
They were all there. Washington, both Adamses, Lincoln. It was impossible, and the president said so.
“We are perhaps the largest secret in the world,” George Washington said, and the current president nearly fainted. “There are forces in the world that seek to destroy it, and I realized early that we would need a group to combat these forces. So, we found a serum that counteracts the effects of time on our bodies. And now you are one of us.”
So, the current president accepted a shot of serum, sat at the table with these legendary men. A screen flickered to life at one end of the room, displaying a map of the world. And the meeting of the Legion of Presidents began, deep in the ground beneath the White House.

18th February 2013

20. The Rain

Rain was what they needed right now, most of all. Just a bit of rain. They were the growers, and they needed things to grow. The rainer had been away from their town for quite some time, on a mission of aid to the town to the south.

“When do you think our rainer shall return?” one asked the other. This one was a tall man, and broad. His companion was a woman, tall as well, and strong.

“I do not know, and I fear for him,” she said in return, “because the woods between our towns a dark and filled with fierce creatures.”

“Without our rainer, we will not be able to grow our crop, and then what will the townsfolk eat?” said the man in his rumbly voice.

“I think it is time we sought out the towns finder,” the woman replied in a voice that rivaled the man’s in rumbliness.

And so the two growers went into town to find the finder. He was where he usually was, in the inn, drinking a coffee. It was said that coffee aided his finding. The growers sat down at his table and told him of their plight. The finder was eager to help. It had been a slow finding season, he explained, and was glad to have work, especially work that would help the town. “I will set off on this quest, once I assemble a team. For though I am good at finding, I shall need some aid.”

It was the next day when the finder finally set out on his journey, accompanied by a protector, a haggler, and a driver. All the town gathered to see them off, for they were a small town, and everyone knew of the quest. And they were all aware of the need for the rainer’s return. It was another two weeks before the travelers returned, successful but not unscathed, to the town. Tell us of your journey cried the townsfolk! But the travelers were tired, the events of their journey harrowing, and they wished to rest. But the finder agreed to tell the storyteller of what transpired. The storyteller was, as is tradition, the oldest and wisest of the townsfolk. This town’s storyteller was a woman, her hair white and full, and generally wild. She had a light in her eyes that belied her age, and her mind was swift and clever, and she was well respected in the town. She and the finder retired to a private room, and the finder told her of the quest.

The next night, the townsfolk gathered in the town center, and many fires were lit. Then the storyteller came down from her hut on the top of the hill to the west of the town, and she stood amidst the townsfolk. The everyone was silent.

And the storyteller began the story. And when the story was over, it began to rain.

23rd February 2013