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.

Demophagiai

Scythian hyena-barbarians capture a Greek man and make him join their warband. Explicit.

Demos had no reason to be scared of the Scythians. They were like beasts, or were they like amazons; they devoured everyone, or maybe they kidnapped everyone, or both. No matter who was telling it, though, they always came in the dead of night for misbehaving young boys and girls and snatched them from their beds. In short, they were the monsters at the edges of childhood.

Demos had no reason to be scared of the Scythians until they came. He was grown up. He sold oil all over Thrace. He had a slave who stayed up night to make sure no one tried to make off with a jug of his oil and another slave who brought him dinner. He was supposed to be beyond monsters, but they had come in the dead of night and then pain had exploded across his head and everything was black.

On top of him lay a thick weight and beneath him it was uncomfortably lumpy and all around him the smell was awful. At the tips of his fingers, arms outstretched, he could feel a breeze. Animal instinct drove him toward the open air, squeezing and pushing and grunting. At last his head and shoulders were free.

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.

Don't Enable Magic Animals

A cautionary tale about wishing that girls would find everything you say cute. Mature.

"That's not fair," said the young man.

"That's the rules," said the fox.

The fox was lying. There were no rules. Thus, there were no rules against lying about there being rules to get out of granting terrible wishes.

The little red beast stood atop a small boulder, which put him about at eye level with the man. The young man was standing on the ground, arms folded over a rough cloth tunic. A strip of fabric had been torn from the hem of his tunic and was now wrapped around the fox's left paw.

"That's the fourth one," the man complained.

"And all four of them were against the rules, so if you want a wish you'd better come up with one that isn't," said the fox.

"Can you tell me what the rules are?" the man asked.

"No. That's against the rules."

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.