Tag Archives: the red and the rest

Chapter 18- Encounter with Nature

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Mel and Smith gasped for air as water poured through the large gap in the barrel. Of course it wasn’t airtight; why would it be if it was meant to be a guest room? The river had swirled in through the cracks in the hull and only a tiny amount of air remained by the time Mel had the good sense to crack the glass window floating above water level. The leaks continued, but breaking the glass any further meant being showered with the shards and perhaps even tipping their makeshift vessel fully underwater.

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Chapter 16- Wearing Out Your Welcome

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One of the most burdensome things about going anywhere, whether it’s down the street or into another universe, is trying to figure out what to wear. It can be frustrating to balance fashion with comfort, practicality with cost, weather with time, all while secretly wishing you could run out into the street in your underwear without being judged or, worse, arrested.

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Chapter 15: Walk, Talk and Barrel

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Smith continued scribbling in the notebook Mel had so generously provided even as the three Earthlings exited the forest. Mel walked behind Smith, still gripping his sword as it bobbed in the jury-rigged sheath at his side. Carla was the only one of the three who was actually looking where they were going, which worked out as her perch on top of her uncle’s head was the best vantage point to serve as lookout. Over the past few days, Carla had been working on her pronunciation to the point where it was clear even to Smith what she meant when she declared that they had arrived at a desert.

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TRaTR Part 2: Getting It Together; Chapter 14: The Gift Legends

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In the Cathedral of Saint Decius there are many religious texts, but none so interesting as this. The Verses of Papyrus are much rarer than any Qu’ran or Bible or other book of religion in this vast, complex world we live in, but the words within are cherished by the sort of elite priests who like to keep to themselves in the far reaches of distant monasteries. It cannot be said whether these texts are mere fairy tales or some permutation of the true history of humanity, but this didn’t matter, for the only copy the heroes of our story would have encountered had been dropped out of Carla’s pocket onto the forest floor outside and lost. If you were to find this book, the open pages would have given you the following lost legends:

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Chapter 12- Missing

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On top of the Cathedral of Sainte Decius, a man with a long nose lay prone, gripping his weapon so tightly that his right hand ached. In the last two days, Smith had been threatened, shot at, tossed into a mysterious bureaucracy, shuffled along into a pile of socks, given a gun from the sky, forced to run for his life and finally, most distressingly, he had run out of cigarettes. Filled with an abundance of nerves, his hands shook and he had to grip the gun with two hands to keep it still.

Despite all of the adrenaline and fatigue, Smith raised the handgun, unsuited for sniping as it was, and focused on his target. In a voice he hoped the abomination would never hear, Smith whispered “Death”.

Bang.

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Chapter 11- The Worst Day in Living Memory

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Carla thought she was opening her eyes, based on the fact that she could see again. Then again, it didn’t feel anything like opening her eyes usually felt. Her body felt cold and stiff, like what she imagined waking up from a coma must feel like.

In front of her, Carla saw a bloody stain on the ground. Continue reading →

Chapter 10- Living Statues Always End Up Wanting To Kill You

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Mel was still tired after sleeping, but this was not unusual for him. Ever since he was a young boy, his parents had trained him to expect danger around every corner. This practice of constant vigilance left him groggy and unfocused most of the time, especially when his father would come into his room in the middle of the night, liquor on his breath, with a long wooden staff in his hands with which he could wake and break his boy until he was a man who could carry on the heritage of his name, untainted by the Redshirt goons breathing down his neck that Rei Okabe would never tell his son about until maybe someday they could break the whole damned cycle of money and corporate violence and finally their plans would all come to fruition and the family could-

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Chapter 9- The Situation Gets Progressively Worse

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Carla woke up with a problem. For the last two days, the young woman had been experiencing an enormous amount of stress, from fighting with her uncle to interdimensional travel to watching a man bleed to death in front of her. Besides all of that, everything that Carla had eaten in that time had been prepackaged and canned food- mostly beans and corn. On top of this, she’d spent a lot of the time dehydrated and moving around a lot more than most days. Of course, any dramatic change in stress, diet or level of exercise can lead to problems with one’s digestive system. And so it came to be that Carla had not used the bathroom since coming to the Lost Dimension.

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