Go Chargers!

Billy gets stuffed into a Bully Charger mascot suit and has to find help before the suit takes over.

It was the night of the fall dance and Billy was on the floor of the supply closet with a knee in his spine.

"Quit wiggling, you dweeb," said Ryan. He grabbed Billy's left wrist and cranked it behind his back. With his free hand, Ryan shoved a long glove onto Billy's left arm. Ryan was the absolute worst. He didn't just have confidence and good hair and a great jawline. He was also the only male cheerleader on the school team.

"Let go!" Billy shouted. He ground his chest against the floor. A layer of foam and synthetic blue-and-white fur separated him from the carpet. Ryan had already managed to wrestle the mascot's padded torso onto him.

This was all about Julie. Ryan didn't even have to say her name; Billy knew it. To Billy, Julie was the prettiest girl in the school, with blonde hair kept back in a ponytail and a big, bright smile. Through some insane stroke of luck, he'd made friends with her. Julie was a cheerleader too, though. That meant that, every day, she spent time with Ryan during practice. Billy was sure Ryan wanted to date her, as sure as he was that Ryan was jealous of what he and Julie had. Or, well. What they could have. Billy hadn't asked her out yet. He was going to do it at the dance tonight, he'd told himself for weeks.

La Dame de la Louve Blanche

A wolf pursues her friend through noir-Paris, while getting hypnotized into an elegant femme fatale. Explicit.

Two blocks from the private investigator's office, Vicky heard the narration kick in.

“The water came down in sheets, giving Paris the cold shower it deserved. The city of love? When you’re lucky, love chews you up and swallows you whole. When you’re not, it tears you to shreds and leaves you drowning in the gutter. Whoever decided to make a city of love was mad, or French. The two were close enough.

“Anyone with sense was inside. Which was why one rain-drenched wolf climbed through deep puddles and streams of water running down the streets: madness. Or love for a friend. Close enough.

Vicky got the idea. She was inside a film noir that was set in Paris; she'd figured out that much when she showed up and everything was black-and-white except for her. She was still baffled how Liz had gotten here in the first place, but that wasn't important. What was important was finding her friend.

The Dragons Womb

An adventurer becomes host to a parasitic worm that turns her into an egg-laying dragon-insect hybrid. Explicit.

Talia walked through the ribcage of a dragon. Ten feet above her, its spine jutted from the rock ceiling. Its ribs were like curled pillars embedded in the rock walls. A tiny stream ran down the middle of the floor, fed by the trickle of water dripping over the ancient bones. With one eye on the floor and another ahead of her, she followed the slow incline of the tunnel. Up. Up to the mines, and then up out of the Dragons' Tomb.

A bag of drake scales rustled inside her pack. She'd plucked them fresh off a centipede drake's hide: her prize for braving the Tomb. Eline had said it wasn't worth the risk, but a suit of scale armor was a precious thing to have. Talia had found enough scales to make gloves for her roguish friend, too.

Her torch cast a flickering light over the damp. It lit her body: her banded steel armor, her short, dark hair, her young but stern face, and the muddy grit smeared on her cheeks. The centipede drake was still fresh in her mind; wet chittering, hundreds of scuttling claws, and a head that bulged with far too many eyes. She had only nearly bested it.

A flicker of movement caught her eye, shifting in the shadow beyond her torch. Her heart quickened. She gripped her mace. Torch low, she advanced step by step.

The Treasury of the Sphinx

An Egyptologist and her partner discover a vast store of riches, then become its guardians. Mature.

To my esteemed colleagues, Victoria began. It was the third draft of her letter asking for more time and funding, and she still sounded desperate. Cambridge wanted another Tutankhamun, but all that the workers had uncovered was sand and stone.

"Ma'am? One of the boys thinks he may have found something."

William stood under the tent flap, surrounded by the glare of the desert sun. Victoria squinted up at her fellow archaeologist like he was a mirage. Then her blue eyes widened.

Victoria slapped on her hat and stuffed her feet into her boots and was still twisting her hair back into a ponytail as she followed William across the camp.

The young Egyptian man still clung to his pickaxe. He beamed brightly, standing next to the apple-sized hole into some deeper darkness behind the rock. William lifted his lantern to the hole. There was a flash of something beyond, but the hole was too small to see through properly.

In her best Arabic, Victoria asked the young man for the pickaxe.

Tales of the Strange presents: You Are What You Eat

Some bat investigates an abandoned candy factory and falls victim to its horrors. Guest starring Agouti-Rex's (murrypurry.com) characters.

Rule one of investigating the abandoned candy factory was that no one should know why Mercedes was there. Mrs. McGolly was really insistent on that point. If anyone asked, she was doing a project for school, and had never heard of Mrs. McGolly or her candy corporation. She certainly wasn't getting paid fifty dollars to take pictures of a rival company's abandoned factory.

Rule two was easy, take lots of pictures. Mercedes had a camera, done.

Rule three was weird. "While you're in there," McGolly said, poking a hoof right into Mercedes' face, "don't say 'candy'."

"Uh, why?" Mercedes asked.

"Don't worry about it, just don't say 'candy'. It's my business, not yours." McGolly slapped a ten-dollar bill into Mercedes's hand and swept the bat right out of her office. "Remember—you weren't here," she said, and then ended the conversation by closing the door.

Later that day, Mercedes stood outside the run-down factory, with a camera in one hand and nothing else. She'd been trying to think of alibis for taking pictures, and she had hit on a good one by accident: She was doing a paper on, like, why McGolly's company had opened a brand-new candy factory, when Failtown already had an abandoned candy factory just sitting around.

Actually asking McGolly a question like that would lose her that fifty bucks, though.

Stacked

The library patrons seem a bit bubbly today, but then so does the librarian on staff. Mature.

Alice's strangest day as a library clerk started when Tiffany walked in. Alice knew her from school, but they had never really met. Tiffany was popular and pretty and blonde—most of the things that Alice wasn't. Seeing Tiffany brought back all of Alice's high-school inadequacies. Alice was mousey and wore glasses and couldn't get her dark brown hair to do anything other than frizz, no matter how much she spent on shampoo.

Alice stowed the fantasy novel she'd been reading behind the desk. She looked up at Tiffany and found herself staring at Tiffany's hair. She had dyed it black, like The-Raven-is-my-favorite-poem black. Alice wasn't one to judge, but Tiffany was the last girl she'd expect to dye her hair. There was a little furrow in Tiffany's brow and she glanced around uncertainly.

"Hi, welcome to the library," Alice said. She seized the opportunity to be the confident one for once. "Anything I can help you find?"

"Um, yeah," Tiffany said. Her voice hid in the back of her mouth. "Do you have books about…ghosts and stuff?"