Winter Short Story Contest (2012) Winners Announced!

[The Empire of Pretantia]

Four days left!

Huh, I utterly forgot this existed.

That tends to happen. Space!

[Venaleria]

Should we start judging now?

[Conserative Morality]

Should we start judging now?

Not until the end of the 15th.

[Nazi Flower Power]

Should we start judging now?

People have till tomorrow for last minute editing, but I am not planning to do any, so you can go ahead and start on my entry whenever you like.

I probably could make mine better if I did do some editing, but I can't be bothered.

[Esternial]

Should we start judging now?

People have till tomorrow for last minute editing, but I am not planning to do any, so you can go ahead and start on my entry whenever you like.

I probably could make mine better if I did do some editing, but I can't be bothered.

Hear, hear!

[Kingsmouth]

Hey, can we last minute change the entire god damn story?

[The Empire of Pretantia]

Hey, can we last minute change the entire god damn story?

"No John, you are the demons."
And then Krolov was a prisoner.

[Eskatonia]

My submission, around 4500 words or so. I hope someone gets a kick out of reading it!

Dropout

The morning air was still on the city street. The skyscrapers towered above, their walkways, windcatchers and solar panel arrays creating a thin canopy overhead. Scott ran his hands over the buildings, their granite foundations delicately moist. It would be a humid day, but not too hot. May 17, 5:30 A.M., according to his cell phone, and another day of work, though even his young body protested at the thought of it. The company had been working him hard - perhaps not hard by their standards, but then their standards didn’t take into account the standardized tests that 17-year-olds had to take in order to graduate school.

Scott couldn’t bear to imagine what would happen to his dad if he didn’t pass those tests - then the truancy officer would fine him, they wouldn’t be able to pay rent, and they’d be kicked out on the street. Worse yet, dad’s college would probably rescind the scholarships he’d received as a result of his flawless performance as a student, even though they weren’t supposed to. Then he, his little sis, and dad would be truly, totally destitute.

For the first time in a while, Scott thought about his mother. Wished he’d known her, so that at least he could pick out details about her to dislike. Dad didn’t talk much about those days except to say that things had been different then.

Scott found himself inside the correct building; let himself be guided onward by the sleepy autopilot of habit until he had inserted himself into the correct elevator. Men and women in business suits peered at him as he leaned in the corner of the wood-paneled box, staring at the fluorescent bulbs. Up, up, up. One by one they got out on their respective floors, leaving Scott alone for the last five.

Floor 45. Scott got off and - skirting the brisk secretaries dressed in officekrieg bustling through the halls, coffees and reports in hand - made his way to the utility stairwell, doing his best to ignore the awkward stare of a new assistant that looked either lost or smitten. At the top, Scott stooped in front of a small footlocker crammed into a corner next to the rooftop door. He retrieved his bag of tools, his air and soil quality samplers, and the non-issue item too risky to keep at home: his DIY slingshot. Constructed per meticulously followed directions from a You-Tube video, Scott had at first built it for fun, then found its marbles had certain practical applications in the roof gardens of Naperville.

Scott opened the door and stepped out into the first garden on his route. Trellises supported multiple levels of creeping vine and hanging flowerpot, while underneath a profusion of genetically engineered fuel and pharmaceutical crops turned the well-ordered rows into a jurassic undergrowth. Small birds twittered everywhere in the mass of foliage that surrounded the young man, rushing and gathering as they variably decided he was a threat or nothing more than a docile herbivore come to pasture. Truthfully, of course, Scott was neither in this ecosystem. He called in the number that would start the clock on his ten-hour shift. The soft respondent beep began his workday.
Scott was here to be the interface between the natural world and the technological world. The 21st century’s many large-scale “cloud” or “distributed” projects, as their designers liked to call them, all-too-often required a vast army of laborers that could be relied upon to consistently perform precise and repetitive acts over long periods of time. Robots, so Scott’s dad had told him, were the obvious solution to the problem. They were just starting to get sophisticated enough, cheap enough, and tough enough.
The teenager checked his phone: two blips, right on top of each other, on the roof of the Ramada Hotel. Just another reminder that despite all of the leaps and bounds and marvels the scientists had cooked up to date, robots still groped their way through the real world like primitive crustaceans halfway up a blind alley on the evolutionary tree. Those blips would be the first task for today.

Taking a few measurements of the soil and air as he’d been trained to do with the instruments given to him, Scott then made his way over to the side of the building. He was just in time to catch one of the advertising semi-rigids that he had learned to hack - also using company training, with a little adaptation and innovation born of necessity. How else did society expect him to finish work dutifully and ahead of time so that he could study for exams and keep up his part of the scholastic charade orchestrated to befuddle the truancy office? It helped that the airships provided the quickest, most secretive, and cheapest (free) way to hop from rooftop to rooftop. Just imagine all those elevator rides avoided, all those awkward moments with clerks and janitorial types. Scott shuddered at the memory of what his job had been like before he’d hacked the airships. Unmanned vehicles, the 21-meter craft drifted lazily through the man-made monument valley of buildings, projecting giant video advertisements on walls and low-hanging clouds, routing wireless traffic, or simply monitoring street traffic, crime rates - any number of diagnostics. As long as you left the municipal airships alone, you could be fairly confident that no corporate robojockey, assigned to monitor hundreds of blimps at once in various different cities, would notice the slight detour required to taxi a teenager from one rooftop to the next. At least that’s what Scott had read online...

Once he’d jumped onto the under-hanging superstructure of the airship - the part that held all the dorsal projectors, fuel cells, and engine parts - Scott heard his dad’s ring tone.

“Yeah?”

“Hi Scott,” came his dad’s voice. “What’s that noise?”

Scott’s dad knew that Scott was skipping school to get a leg up in the business world - he had suggested it. As the cost rose, the pool of graduates increased, and the types of degrees proliferated, the potential returns of a college education were diminishing. It only made sense to circumvent that shark-pit of educational competition and gain compensated experience at the entry level of a green-tech company like TopGro. His dad did not know that Scott was using hacked blimps to get around - a fact Scott knew he would be less pleased with, especially considering the lack of seatbelts: or enclosed seating, for that matter.

“It’s a blimp engine, you know - one of those commercial airships. It’s kinda hovering over the top of the building I’m on right now.”

“Well, whatever. Listen, Scott, the truancy officer came by our house this morning right after you left for work. He just left now.”

Scott’s blood dropped below room temperature.

“What was he there for?”

“He was asking about you. Said the administration at the high school was concerned that you weren’t at school yesterday.”

“But I should come up as being at school!” Scott protested. “Unless one of my teachers stopped taking our pay, I should be in, and getting fair grades and everything.”

“That’s the problem, actually,” Scott’s dad said wearily. He sounded like he did whenever he had to publish another paper at the university or reapply for a big scholarship. It meant this problem was not going to go away quickly and he was starting to resign himself to it. “The only reason they care about you missing a single day of school this year is because you were listed as present in every single class and they know this kind of thing has been growing more common...”

“Then how’d they find out?”

“I don’t have time to explain everything, actually. Something about a fight in cafeteria and a head count. You weren’t there and your teachers couldn’t do anything about it except of course mark you absent for all the classes afterward to hide the fact that we were bribing them.”

Scott swore. For once, his dad didn’t correct him.

“So pay attention - you’re going to have to be very cautious today because the teachers will feed them the line that you have been in school all along, excepting yesterday after lunch. Today Mrs. Santos has probably already marked you as present, so when the officer arrives and begins questioning she is going to have to tell him you were there for her class. This will look suspicious on two counts: first, that you skipped the second half of school yesterday when you’ve never done something like that before, and second, that you were at school today until the truant officer arrived. The only people aware that they were coming to the school today are myself and probably members of the building’s administration. He will suspect that I tipped you off. Therefore, logically...” Scott’s dad paused. Scott could hear a beeping sound on the other end of the line. “They’re calling me back, Scott. I’d better answer promptly. Think this through.”

Click.

“Therefore logically what!?” Scott yelled, staring angrily at his phone. Obviously, they were calling his dad back right now, asking about how Scott had “known” they were coming. His dad would tell them that he hadn’t tipped Scott off, which they wouldn’t believe, but what could the truancy officer do at that point? They couldn’t get a reflex lie test done on dad until they had a warrant for it, and to have a warrant they had to have some very good reasons to think that his father was either negligent or actively helping Scott skip school. It followed that they might try to find Scott himself, might ask his dad for Scott’s GPS position via cell phone, which he would be obligated to give in order to look like a responsible father trying to help bring his prodigal son home. If they found him, they would question him - and Scott would lie. Easy enough. But if they got him while at work, that would raise more serious questions - questions about how a kid could be hired, trained, and working the beat all in the space of an afternoon and a morning. He had to keep this job; he couldn’t just call it a day and wander off to be found. It was either come home now to appease the truancy officer and lose the career, or stay at work and potentially be found out. Potentially. Scott stripped his phone battery out and stuffed the divorced items in opposite pants pockets. Let them find me now, he thought.

Scott’s stop was coming up. The blimp descended toward the large skyscraper’s rooftop slowly, careful to compensate for the wind so it didn’t run afoul of two large windmill towers churning in the high-altitude current. As soon as the surface was close enough beneath him, he leapt to it - a distance of some four meters that necessitated a parkour roll in order to absorb the force of the impact. Once again, Scott was glad he had paid for those “classes” CJ, the school misfit, had taught him. Above, the blimp’s robot brain sensed the weight-loss and a trigger switched in its software mind, releasing it from the hack’s bondage. As it began to drift away in search of more cost-effective advertising locations, Scott went to work finding the machines that were his job. It would be much harder without the phone. No matter; he’d find them all the same. Tell the company their GPS locators had malfunctioned if it asked. Get through today, get home, deal with the problem and go back at it tomorrow, unmolested. Unlike so many of his attention-deficit disorder spectrum friends, Scott could force himself to concentrate on one task at a time. Although he didn’t know it, this was a result of his long-gone mother’s brush with ecotheology and her detox session right before his conception.

There they were - not hidden at all this time, thank God. The two small, squat horticultural ‘bots lay side by side, the miniature caterpillar track of one somehow wedged between the wheel and chassis of the other. Tough little critters - Scott could hear a servo still doggedly struggling from somewhere inside one of them. This was only the superficial problem, most likely the effect of a more subtle cause. Scott guessed the real problem was probably a software bug or physical malfunction with the robot’s motion detectors that had caused them to collide. It was the work of a moment to pull the two apart - a deft grip and a swift yank - but had it not been for Scott, they would both have become unsalvageable in a short amount of time. As soon as this was accomplished, each of the automatons spun their tracks as though rejoicing, testing themselves in the light of new stimuli. The one Scott had been obliged to leave on the ground scurried off - he would have to find it later. He turned off the robot still within his grasp and removed from its forklift appendage the small pot that had once contained a healthy plant.

Examining the machine, a likely culprit immediately became apparent: pigeon stool had splattered all over the right-side motion sensor lens. Not a problem if you only had an echolocator or some radar - something else you could have used after your sensor went to crap. But that’s against efficient design logic, isn’t it - why give you a redundant sense to complete your task? Ah well. No use for his handheld debugger tool today - Scott just scrubbed the crap off and, giving it a final look-over, set the robot down on the rooftop. It eagerly scurried off to a sunny location between the rows of pots, anxious to re-energize its battery using the solar paint that covered the upper half of its body. Absentmindedly, Scott wiped the excrement off his hand on the ledge of the building. His focus was on something happening to the blimp he had just ridden in on. Only a hundred or so meters away, it was descending into a small park area nearby, where a small group of people seemed to be standing expectantly for its arrival. Scott took out a small monocle he kept for the times when company ecologists would assign him to bird watching duty and brought the device into focus. The group in the park was a mixed bag of suits and police. Most of them were looking at the blimp as it came down, but one of the cops was eying the building Scott was on. Staring, it seemed, right at him. The last thing Scott saw before he ducked down behind the rooftop ledge was the officer getting the attention of his fellows and gesturing toward the building. How could they have known he was on that blimp? Even giving them the dubious advantage of acquiring a GPS fix on him before he had disabled his cell, Scott couldn’t fathom it. Had they been secretly tracking him all morning? Had the blimp company found out about his hack and called in the cops on him in a completely unrelated disaster?

Scott knew he needed to think, but the will to panic was overpowering. He lurched toward the rooftop access door, stopped, gave an exasperated cry and started off again, this time forcing himself to make a decision. Anything was better than standing around and waiting to see whether the police were on to him: he flung open the door and vaulted down the first few steps. After launching himself down the next flight of stairs, however, Scott found his exit blocked by a young, dark-skinned lady in officekrieg brandishing a black attaché in front of herself like a shield with one hand while she braced with the other on the handrail. Her eyes, a sort of grayish-green, displayed some subtle emotion that Scott thought he read as either apprehension or expectation. Her mouth was moving; she was saying something to him in a language Scott couldn’t understand. He tried to move past her by executing a slide down the center railing, but she inexplicably reached out and managed to snag one of his shirtsleeves as he was passing, causing a catastrophic deceleration. Scott ended up taking the steps down after all - just not on his feet.

By the time he had come to a stop on the landing below, Scott felt that the pain and delay he had suffered at the hands of this anonymous woman were already enough to warrant retribution, but his painful daze and her current distance - just beyond arm’s reach - made it hard to concentrate on that desire. Instead, knocked clean out of panic for a moment, he acted sensibly and listened to the words coming from this woman’s... hand. Scott looked up, bewildered. Indeed, the broken English emanated from her hand - she held a cell phone there. As she spoke, it was translating for her. Or rather, trying to translate. What came out was this:

“Please meet you. Saw earlier in the day in an office where it is your custom to ascend to the peak and ride in a balloon to another land and it is my custom to intern. I hiked after you this morn and visibly you rode the balloon, but my master followed me and observed additionally. Result is he calls law enforcement officers and I am a traitor to you. My wrong about the law enforcement officers and now I help and maybe you help me. Come with me,” all in an inhumanly proper British accent.

“What is your name?” the young woman asked in an obviously-practiced English phrase.

“Scott,” Scott answered reflexively. “Who the hell -” but he stopped because he could see that she was helpfully pointing to a nametag sticker she wore, anticipating the presumed responsorial to such a query. It read Chanchala Gupta - Intern.

“But you can call me Cha,” she rehearsed, smiling in a way that Scott found at once disarming and false, but false in that thoughtful way which shows the wearer genuinely wants you to be happy even if they cannot share the emotion.

Then it was back to a string of what Scott guessed was Indian and came from the hand as “now we must rapidly defenestrate.”

Scott stared, uncomprehending. “Defene-wha?”

“Due of police officers soon arriving on primary floor,” came the phone’s voice, and with that Chanchala skirted around Scott and began to lead him further down the stairwell. He followed, taking from the woman’s body language and sincerity signs that she was trying to help him out of the predicament he was in. Which she apparently knew about. Which she had said something about being her fault... but the descent was too rapid to think of anything else, and no sooner had Scott lined the pieces up in a way that seemed to fit than a door could be heard opening below. This was an apparent cue for Chanchala to retreat back up the steps to the nearest landing, whip open the door there and pull Scott through into a nondescript office hallway. Chanchala immediately took a left turn, braving a white-collar denizen by smiling and hefting her attaché meaningfully; a sort of cubicle-Jedi mind trick encouraging him to think of her as one more anonymous gopher - never mind the maintenance apprentice she had in tow.

Chanchala led him through a maze of gray cubicles, frequently consulting some kind of program on her computer as she did. Apparently there was a path to follow; for a moment Scott felt disembodied, as though he were watching himself traverse a video-game level, a non-player character being escorted by the user to the objective. Which was apparently a window in a break room overlooking the back lot of the building. The young intern walked up to it, peered down as steeply as she could, moved over to the only other window in the room. This one she seemed more satisfied with, and put down her phone on the window ledge while she unfastened the window-frame’s holders and hefted it up, warm air almost immediately entering the air-conditioned room.

“What is going on?” Scott asked, beginning to fear the worst.

“Must we not commit vandalism crime during defenestration,” the phone intoned over Chanchala’s softer, more rapid speech.

“I’m sorry, but I have no idea what that word means.”

But Chanchala, having taken off her shoes and thrown them out the window with the attaché (translating phone inside), now had one leg through the opening, and it was apparent she intended the rest of herself to follow shortly. She shook her head and pointed to an unobtrusive wireless earbud, which Scott realized meant that until she retrieved her cell phone she couldn’t understand anything he said. Then she lowered herself down until he couldn’t see anything but her fingers grasping the ledge, and momentarily these disappeared as well. There was a crunching sound from below, and Scott ran to the window. Below, he could see the young non-native speaker had landed herself in a waste recycling bin full of cardboard boxes and other used office supplies - a fairly good landing pad for a drop of about four meters. In a moment, she had gathered her belongings and hoisted herself out of the metal container to make way for Scott. She waved her hands wildly, motioning for him to follow. He did.

The stench of wet paper and degraded biodegradable plastic assaulted Scott - the sweet, strange smell of freedom. Scott let his legs recover from the fall for a second, then peered out over the container’s rim. Chanchala stood nearby, but instead of the irrepressible half-smile she had continually worn since their meeting in the stairwell, she was looking apprehensively out into the parking lot. There, an insectoid bowler-hat hovered about three meters up in the air, whirring and clicking and sending staggering amounts of damning telemetry back to its handlers somewhere nearby.

Scott ducked down inside the bin, panicky adrenaline pulsing through his brain. The police drone had undoubtedly identified him as he dropped from the window. It would follow the fugitives effortlessly now, guiding police right to them - unless Scott took care of things immediately. He realized he could do it - his slingshot could probably destroy the drone with one marble - if he could hit it. Scott knew he would have to get closer to be sure. The problem was that it was undoubtedly piloted by a real person back at the station, making it immune to any of the exploits heuristic behavioral algorithms imbued in robots. And yet humans were limited by the abilities of their avatars as well...

Scott sprang up, wildly waving his arms in the air. The drone, which had been tracking Chanchala as she inched away, now stopped and turned its largest camera eye to Scott. Taking his cue, Scott began to speak quietly, reciting the first idiot thing that came to his mind - his ABC’s. The drone moved closer. Scott imagined the frustrated young officer in front of his computer screen, turning his speakers all the way up to try to hear what Scott was saying. But there was too much noise - the birds, the traffic, the echoes of running feet as officers made their way around the sides of the building toward the back lot – and as Scott knew all too well, no right-minded engineer would build high-gain microphones into an ultra-light drone designed to be an eye in the sky. So the drone hovered closer and closer, trying to pick up what Scott was saying.

Close enough. In an instant, Scott brought up his slingshot and steadied his forearm against the side of the recycling bin. Almost instinctively, the drone started to backpedal, but as the little craft’s engines strained to reverse forward momentum, it became a momentarily stationary target. Scott let his marble fly; it fractured the drone’s outer plastic casing with a loud pop. Wobbling, the bot tried to stabilize itself, but a loose part of the casing had fallen into the path of the spinning prop and slowed its rotation considerably, so that the automaton was no longer able to stay aloft.

Scott didn’t wait to see its agonized descent to the pavement - he vaulted over the side of the bin and made for Chanchala almost immediately, who in turn broke out in a sprint toward a group of apartment buildings across the street. He had just committed a felony - what a terrible mistake! But it was done, and Scott was determined not to suffer for it. He easily caught up to Chanchala, who despite having longer legs and being in better shape than him, was hampered by her dress, and together they vaulted over the crosswalk. Once across, they might have taken solace in the fact that two solid lanes of traffic concealed them from any observers on the ground, but their young minds were full of cyber-cop dramas and the preternaturally loud sirens of squad cars in pursuit. The duo took off in different directions at first, faltered, and then Scott followed Chanchala down the sidewalk, the pair trying hard to look like harried commuters by jogging just below panic-speed. Scott’s urge to look over his shoulder was enormous. He resisted it by grinding his teeth together. They made their way past small groups of consumers browsing through fresh vegetable stands to a narrow alleyway between two skyscrapers, dozens of wind turbines churning methodically in ad-hoc interstices above.

Scott looked to Chanchala for the next move. She looked down both ends of the alley several times, seemed to think it was fairly safe, then leaned up against the bricks, cell phone in hand as she began typing something. Scott couldn’t understand why she would take the luxury of typing anything now, when efficient use of time seemed imperative, but aside from the whole bit with the robot, he realized he had reason to trust her judgment in such matters. Besides, something distracting was moving above them erratically, too big to be a bird. He looked upward - it was a spindly robot, some type of horticultural pruning model - and it was dangling precariously over the near mouth of the alley where he and Chanchala had entered moments before (hadn’t Scott’s phone mentioned a problem on a building near here this morning?). Its self-preservation programming somehow functioning far outside the normal parameters, the robot had managed to secure a tenuous position hanging from a turbine’s casing by hooking it with one of its shears as it had fallen from the rooftop. Scott could see that this state of affairs was temporary - the shear was steadily sawing its way through the casing, driven by the buffeting of the robot’s chassis in the wind. Try as the machine might, Scott could see there were no other nearby purchases for its manipulators. The hapless automaton would shortly plummet to the alley concrete. Scott realized without much difficulty that it would not behoove them to be present for the kinetic dispersion of razor-sharp blades and chassis-shrapnel inevitably accompanying such an impact.

“Cha,” Scott began, “since I wasn’t allowed to do my job today, there’s a robot about to fall on our heads. We’d better move.”

It was obvious the words meant little or nothing to Chanchala without her translator running, but her eyes did follow the direction of Scott’s arm as it pointed upward, where she immediately ascertained the threat. Without a moment lost, she started away down the alley, Scott once again in tow. Before they made it far, the sound of a nearby police siren halted them in their tracks, terrified. Scott whirled around, hands in the air like they would shoot him if he didn’t let them know he was unarmed. An officer had sprung from the vehicle, launched himself over the hood with the help of enhanced patrol boots, and started down the alley toward them, taser ready and aimed. Scott winced - he saw the blur too late to warn the cop - and turned away as the damaged robot dropped onto the officer’s vehicle like a precisely-aimed gravity bomb. Stuff went everywhere, and by the time the officer had recovered from the shock and turned around to take stock of his suspects, they were gone.

*** *** ***

Scott read Chanchala’s message as they sped away on a city bus: I was only going to ask will you aid me practice my English this morning! But now you must stay with my family a spell anyway, so... he looked into her eyes, and couldn’t suppress a giggle that savored of a late childhood lost – seemingly inappropriate for someone earning his way through a society unfriendly to his aspirations. Still, Chanchala thought it fit him.

[The Empire of Pretantia]

I have returned from the praising of the black goat. Took a while to find a thousand young who I don't care about. XBox Live makes it a hundred times easier.

[Kingsmouth]

I have returned from the praising of the black goat. Took a while to find a thousand young who I don't care about. XBox Live makes it a hundred times easier.

Aw, did you read my story yet?

[The Empire of Pretantia]

I have returned from the praising of the black goat. Took a while to find a thousand young who I don't care about. XBox Live makes it a hundred times easier.

Aw, did you read my story yet?

Nope.

[Kingsmouth]

Aw, did you read my story yet?

Nope.

Oh. It has goats, as I recall.

[The Empire of Pretantia]

Nope.

Oh. It has goats, as I recall.

It's a rule you know, to praise the black goat.

[Kingsmouth]

Oh. It has goats, as I recall.

It's a rule you know, to praise the black goat.

Is it? well, IA IA shub Niggurath I suppose.

[The Empire of Pretantia]

It's a rule you know, to praise the black goat.

Is it? well, IA IA shub Niggurath I suppose.

You wrote about goats. I wrote about the tragedy of a monarch. I'm totally a superior writer and stuff and everything you write is too optimistic. Real art is angsty. After all, Shakespeare was angsty!

[Kingsmouth]

Is it? well, IA IA shub Niggurath I suppose.

You wrote about goats. I wrote about the tragedy of a monarch. I'm totally a superior writer and stuff and everything you write is too optimistic. Real art is angsty. After all, Shakespeare was angsty!

Ah...now I get the name "pretentia".
In fairness, it probably is a better story.

[Eskatonia]

btw, how will we know if our story was judged or not?

[The Empire of Pretantia]

You wrote about goats. I wrote about the tragedy of a monarch. I'm totally a superior writer and stuff and everything you write is too optimistic. Real art is angsty. After all, Shakespeare was angsty!

Ah...now I get the name "pretentia".
In fairness, it probably is a better story.

Your story or mine? I wouldn't know about yours.

[Kingsmouth]

Ah...now I get the name "pretentia".
In fairness, it probably is a better story.

Your story or mine? I wouldn't know about yours.

Yours. Mine was pretty shit.

[Forsher]

btw, how will we know if our story was judged or not?

Once the competition has closed for entries the judges will read the stories and then post marks in thread. Often, but not always, a critique/explanation of the marks for each category will be concluded. Then, once two judges have completed the marking a replacement judge will be found and once they've finished the winner is announced.

[Conserative Morality]

Once the competition has closed for entries the judges will read the stories and then post marks in thread. Often, but not always, a critique/explanation of the marks for each category will be concluded. Then, once two judges have completed the marking a replacement judge will be found and once they've finished the winner is announced.

It's inevitable.

[Nazi Flower Power]

Hey, can we last minute change the entire god damn story?

Yes, that qualifies as editing.

For some reason I was confused about what day it was when I posted yesterday... I'm completely losing all sense of time.

[The Empire of Pretantia]

Your story or mine? I wouldn't know about yours.

Yours. Mine was pretty shit.

You're so modest. Have a little faith, babe!

[Aethyopea]

My entry. Clocks in at around 1385 words. It's actually the first and thus the best short story I've ever written. Huzzah!

Mago

Chapter 1
Nothing much ever seemed to change in the town of Guzar. Even Phocas, the town’s elder, couldn’t remember the town being any different since his childhood (apart from the loss of respect for the elderly, which he would make sure to remind you of every chance he got). Sure, things happened: people were born, got sick, got married and died; but actual change? No.
After what seemed like centuries Guzar still had the same wooden houses, the same rolling hills, farmlands and oak trees, and the river Ros still flowed next to the town at the same easy pace as it always had.
And in the center of this town stood a small cobblestone manor owned by the ancient lords of Guzar: the house of Marduk. And it is here, in this manor, that somebody is about to be born who will have a dream to change not only Guzar, but all of life as we know it, forever.
“It’s coming! The baby’s coming!” lady Mary screamed. The bedroom was packed with doctors, midwives and servants carrying supplies; and the guards were having a hard time keeping even more people out.
Among the throng of curious servants and distant acquaintances who were ordered to stay outside, lord Hannibal Marduk seemed the most nervous. He paced around the corridor with his hands clasped behind his back, pausing only to look up when Mary gave another scream or when another servant ran inside the room with a bucket of water or a blanket. The birth had already lasted for hours so far, and Lord Hannibal had gotten more jittery with every passing hour.
Eventually, Lord Hannibal had been ordered to retreat into the dining room (he was a large man and his increasingly frantic pacing was starting to get in the way of the servants) He was just about to drink some wine to calm his nerves. when the town doctor came rushing in, an ear-to-ear grin on his face. All he said was “it’s done.”
He saw his wife, more exhausted than he’d ever seen her, with a serene smile on her face. In her arms, she held a crying infant. He was large for his age, with gleaming blue eyes and bright pink skin. “congratulations”, the doctor said “it’s a boy”. Hannibal felt a kind of joy he hadn’t felt since the day they had gotten married.
Before either of them could say anything, Mary started gasping once again. “I-I think there’s another one coming”, she said.
The room was suddenly in a blur of motion once again, and Lord Hannibal was forced to leave the room.
Another child, another eternity spent pacing around the manor. Hannibal was feeling even more tense than before: seeing the exhaustion in Mary’s eyes made him wonder if she was even going to make it.
After even more long, creaking hours, the doctor returned.
The second child looked smaller than the first, with pale skin and green eyes. His cry wasn’t as loud as the first one’s, but Hannibal was too ecstatic to care. “Oh glorious day”, he said, “you have given me two sons today. What shall we name them, Mary?”
Mary?
…
Mary.

Chapter 2
Mago Marduk’s room was relatively simple: there was a bed, a desk, some loose floorboards that came in handy as a secret storage and a small pile of books.
Mago loved books. He’d spend nearly every second of his free time reading. Unlike his brother Himilco, who was tall and brash with a natural talent for fighting and getting into trouble; Mago was small and sickly. Ever since birth he had always been coming down with some illness or another. Years of staying inside with nothing to do but read or study had made him pretty much obsessed with it. Even when books weren’t available he’d still study anything he could. He’d look at birds outside the window, observe insects in his room and pester people with questions. This all lead to him being, in his own words, “pretty damn smart for a thirteen year-old” (humility wasn’t his strong suit)
Not today, though. Today he would read a book. He had just lit a candle and was just about to continue reading his new book when he heard a tapping on the windowsill.
At first he thought it was his his magpie Susan. He had given her some food one day years ago, and since that day it always came to his window every day around midday and beg for some food.
The strange thing was that it was that it wasn’t noon at all. In fact, it was already past dusk.
Suddenly, he heard a loud wisper from below. He looked down and saw his brother beckoning him.
“Himilco? How did you… What are you…” Mago tried to ask.
“Nevermind tht, got down here. I’ve got something to show you. Get down here.” Himilco said
Mago quickly put on his coat and tiptoed his way outside.
“You had best have a really good reason for getting me to come down here at this time of the day” Mago said
“Oh trust me, I do. Look at this.” Himilco picked up something big and square and showed it to Mago.
It looked like some kind of box. Around the size of a small briefcase, it had ornate black-and-green decorations of a type Mago had never seen before. The front of the box was adorned with the image of a single white skull.
“ What is it?” Mago asked
“No idea”, Himilco said. “I found hidden in the roots of an oak tree. You know, the big one near Potter’s field. the Must be some kind of treasure.”
“Have you tried opening it?” Mago asked
“I have, but it seems to be locked. Don’t see any keyholes either. Looks like it’s a mystery.”
Mago’s eyes lit up: he loved mysteries! “Maybe it’s some sort of puzzle.” he said. “Like you need to press some secret button or something. Mind if I keep it for a bit? Maybe I can find something out about it.”
Himilco shrugged. “You’re the egghead” he said. “Just be careful with it, all right? And be careful with it. This thing looks like it’s worth a small fortune. And hide it somewhere safe. Don’t just stuff it under the floorboards like you usually do.
Mago looked shocked: “You know about the floorb-“
Himilco grinned at Mago’s expression. “Oldest one in the book”, he said. “Honestly, you’re just too predictable sometimes”

Chapter 3
Mago was starting to hate the little box. He had already spent hours trying to open the damn thing, but to no avail. And he was starting to get cranky.
He had tried everything he could think of, searched every nook and cranny for some secret switch, and looked in every book he had on hand and the box was still as shut as it was when he got it.
“Alright, that’s it!” He said to no-one in particular. The infamous Marduk Family Temper was playing up again, and there was no way Mago was going to let a lowly box beat him.
He started taking out the dagger (more than one aristocrat was saved from an assassination by a good dagger, and even one wielded by a child could make one think twice) and started trying to pry it open by force.
No sooner had Mago taken his dagger than he cut his own finger. “You idiot!” he thought to himself after having only barely suppressed a yelp of pain that would’ve woken up the entire building.
His anger soon turned into surprise, as a few drops of the blood dripped onto the box. The blood must’ve done something, as he heard a mechanism click into place and the box opened.
Inside was the biggest book Mago had ever seen. It was the kind of book that you’d only read if you were either a great scholar or an idiot desperately trying to seem like one.
The pages seemed ancient. The cover had the same decorations as the box. The middle of the cover was adorned by the same grinning white skull.
The first chapter seemed to say something about raising the dead.
Mago was starting to like the little box.

Extra info:

Unfortunately, I didn't finish the story in time. A combination of writer's block, having to restart the story, procrastination and not having quite as much time in the last few days as I thought I'd have caused this story to be kind of unfinished.
The story was intended as a fantasy short story. The intention was to have the main character become totally obsessed with necromancy and not letting people die no matter what. He would try to resurrect people. The resurrection would fail dramatically causing him to be banished from the town and vow to continue his work.
The father was supposed to be a weird guy who was hit really hard after the death of his wife. He was supposed to be a kind of crazy guy who rarely went out of his room, which was supposed to help explain why 1.) the kids have so much freedom and 2.) why Mago was so obsessed with not letting people die (he kinda lost both his parents at birth and he has a bit of a guilt complex over indirectly causing his mother's death when he was born.) It may also have contained some millaiuvenumistic Capra aegagrus hircus worship.
I hope the story still kind of stands up even without the whole not-being-entirely-finished thing.

[Kingsmouth]

Yours. Mine was pretty shit.

You're so modest. Have a little faith, babe!

Well, I can't say I like the story much. Actually I should re-read it. Haven't read it since posting.