Her Best Act

A new mask improves an acrobat's talents and makes her more of a crowd-pleaser. Explicit.

The crowd looked at her and laughed at her and they were all upside-down.

"And if my puns didn't please you, remember a groat is always better than a groan!" Tam said.

She stage-winked and nodded toward the wide open pouch beneath her. There were a couple snickers, a few groans all the same, and some flashes of coins flicking into the depths of the pouch.

Tam unwound her legs from the second-story bannister. Her hands clutched the edge for a pivot and she swung down into a roll, tucked into a ball. Everything pitched around her and she tumbled until the ground was coming up underneath her and she landed, feet-first, arms outstretched, smiling. She was greeted by gentle applause. She kept up the smile until the crowd was breaking up and drifting away into the market and there were no profits to be lost by snatching up her pouch.

Lophiformes Elapidae Cordyceps

A batch of contaminated eggs cause a series of strange mutations. Explicit, body horror.

T-0:30 to Patient Zero; six eggs remain.

Alice pushed open one of the few remaining cartons of eggs. The last one had two that were chipped, but these seemed all in order, except for one of the eggs which was smaller than the others by a centimeter or so and sitting at an angle to all the rest. Alice picked up the exceptional egg. It weighed fine in her hand and there were no marks or otherwise to hint that it was damaged.

Maybe then it was a sudden spasm of her hand, or she had misestimated the strength of the egg, but whatever the reason, the shell cracked open. She expected a mess of white and yolk to drip down her hand, but what oozed between her fingers was an opaque, sticky, whitish substance. Alice shook her arm and wiggled her hand and spread her fingers but the white goo only bounced and rippled and stayed stuck fast to her hand.

Pacem Per Tyrranidem

A hacker discovers a Reptilian conspiracy. She can't beat them, but she does join them. Mature.

Four in the morning was a terrible time to be awake. It was when Alyssa worked best. The noise from outside her windows, the endless waves of the city's shore, was quiet, reduced to a ripple when a wayward car meandered through the tight streets. Anyone with sense was sleeping, but Alyssa was searching.

But it was alys_null who was really searching. Alyssa was the young woman, the stringy dark hair, the hunched back, the salty noodles and empty soda cans congealing behind her keyboard and around her monitor. Alys_null was her on the inside, the more accurate approximation of who she was. Alys had no creed and she was not fed by ego. She wasn't looking for fame. She wanted a challenge, and here she had found one.

A program on a computer, an average node in a banking network, was running a peer-to-peer file transfer. Each chunk of the file was copied and sent, and once the 'received' message from the computer at the other end came through, the chunk was deleted. The same program was running on the other computer. The file was stuck in constant motion, scrambled between the two computers.

Storm and Stone

A woman becomes a gargoyle to join her lover. Explicit.

Sheets disperse into stippled splashes against the granite facade. The door to the stairs slams open, slammed by the wind which whirls around the rooftop. Her feet cut splashes into the water that pools on the roof. The rain swirls and soaks her from every angle.

A crack of lightning throws shadows against the bared fangs, wrinkled snout and hunched muscle of one of the stone gargoyles that sit on the outcroppings along the edge of the roof. It throws her off balance. She topples forward, arms spread wide, reaching and grasping and holding tight to the stone beast.

Stone eyes blink, stone sinew shifts. A head with glowing eyes turns to look at the woman grasping its neck, and astonishment writ in monstrous form stretches the gargoyle's jaw.

A Tale of the Diluvian South

A folk tale from a flooded world about finding your way.

Way back, even before the waters came pourin down, Old Man Eli was feelin mighty angry. He gone and had Mami make them people, all the people down in the world. But they wasn't doin they job like he liked. They was making all kinds a noise and fuss and it made Old Man mighty angry. So what Eli do he start cryin. He don't want to bother no more. Big ol tears come rollin down his face, come rollin off his beard, come hammerin down onto de ground. Old Man Eli he gone wash them away with his tears.

Now down there with the people there was a girl name of Alice. She ain't nothing special, just a girl with a lotta sense. She work at a paper, writin down words other people done said and other people gone read, and she loved that job.

But then Eli's tears come, and the water came risin up from the ground and washin down from the sky. Whole town done start to panic, and back in those days towns was big, like you ain't even know half the people livin there. That's how big old towns was.

Sip of the Ol' Moonshine

Drinking with a donkey guy leads to further donkey-fication. Explicit.

Amy's friend's dad knew someone who was friends with a guy who had a place out in the backwoods that, if the hype was true, was an 'awesome place for parties and shit'. This somehow meant that Amy had to be the one to go out and get the keys from the guy. There were like five people who had more of a connection to this guy than she did, but nope. It was her out rumbling in her mother's sports car down dirt roads so tiny that even her phone had given up trying to navigate.

The girl bouncing on the driver's seat was a little on the short side, and that fact did annoy her every so often. But the good side of being short was that even if you weren't that curvy, it was like an optical illusion that made it look like you had boobs, even if they would look a lot smaller on someone taller. Her ponytail bobbed with every big rock the tires rolled over. She had grit her teeth together to stop her jaw from clattering. And the road just kept on going.

It had been about an hour's drive into the middle of nowhere when she finally came to the end of what was now little more than a trail in front of a wooden cabin. It didn't look bad, to be honest—it was a decent size, had a porch out front, and even seemed to have a basement from the looks of it. She'd been worried there was going to be just a tin shack or something.

The guy she was supposed to met must have heard her pulling up, because as she was climbing out of the car, she heard the door of the cabin swinging open. She pushed the car door shut and rounded the car to see him coming out of the cabin.