Thursday, January 31, 2019

TBT - Warriors of Risnar: Not of This World

An agent of the enemy?


Kren watched her face as she worked. She sucked her lower lip into her mouth, concentrating on the image she created. Her brow crinkled again, her face grim with purpose. She scowled at the way her drawing was turning out, waving her hand over it a couple of times to erase her first attempts.

She was definitely intelligent, Kren decided. He wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover she possessed a soul, sentient and animated by the All-Spirit.

Nex’s upset voice broke into his happy contemplation. “Oh no. Is that what I think it is?”

Kren looked at the drawing Jeannie was putting the finishing touches on. It was crude, the lines thick. Childish almost, especially compared to Kren’s earlier sketch. But he could identify the figures.

She’d drawn a round-headed stick figure with wavy lines that Kren supposed represented Jeannie’s head full of hair. The eyes were tiny dots, the mouth a downturned curve that expressed sadness despite its unsophisticated rendering. It was on a horizontal plane, lying on a rectangle. Jeannie pointed to it and confirmed Kren’s supposition: “Jeannie.”

Other figures stood vertical around the rectangle. They were rendered equally as crude, with larger heads, big holes for eyes, and drawn shorter than the stick-Jeannie. Kren’s hearts sank as his fellow officers began to mutter to one another.

Jeannie’s drawing was rudimentary, but the small-bodied, big-headed creatures were immediately identifiable all the same. Kren looked at drones, creations of the Monsuda.

It could only mean that Jeannie was also of Monsudan origin, a biological creation of their obscene labs. She would have to be killed.



Wednesday, January 30, 2019

WIP Wednesday: Righteous Fury


Traffic from the main highway was a distant hum. There were no voices from the derelict tract houses that Kimi could see. She could have been the last human on Earth. It gave her the creeps.
              There was no sign of the spaceship Laaruu had promised was there.
              “I guess your flying saucer has been hijacked. In this neighborhood, it’s probably been stripped for spare parts. If we see any flying cars, we’ll know for sure. “
              Laaruu said nothing. He opened the trunk of the car and withdrew the case she’d packed. He then pulled a small metal box out of his pocket—in an earlier era, Kimi would have mistaken it for a pager. He spoke his incomprehensible language.
              The ship appeared before them, shimmering like a heat-inspired mirage at first before solidifying. Kimi gaped.
              It was a giant chevron that took up half the parking lot, sparkling as if an army of kindergartners had lost their minds with silver glitter and covered the entire contraption in a frenzy. Or rhinestones. Yes, definitely more like rhinestones, except the thing appeared to be smooth, not bumpy.
              Kimi took a step back, away from the twinkling spaceship. The realization that this was no game, that she wasn’t going on a lighthearted jaunt to another town or state or even country—but to another fucking galaxy in an alternate universe—hit her like a cement truck. This vessel would take her from her planet. Her dimension. The only life she’d known.
              As fucked up as her existence had gotten, it abruptly seemed precious to Kimi. What had she been thinking when she agreed to this? Why was the import of her actions only occurring now?
              Because even with this freak switching his face a billion times and attaching weird sex torture devices on her, she hadn’t really believed. Not until now, when she’d been given no choice.

Releasing in March (date subject to change).