Unpublished – A Creative Experiment

So yeah. Going back, filling in the gaps and what not.

This story has not had as much time to fester in my mind as some of the others I’ve posted here, but it still has some semblance of potential.

So here it goes – very rough outline

A curious government experiments on a small town in the southwest, suddenly shrinking everyone in the 400-some population to about an inch or so tall. Some people, the elderly, many of the young, or those with weakened immune systems, do not survive the transformation. Some with a body-mass index too high in fatty acids were not shrunken properly and basically turned inside out. Those who managed to survive obviously were in a weakened state for quite a while after, and were cared for by the government employees who infiltrated the town after then ray or beam or gas was deployed and dissipated. anyway, the survivors, numbering around 250 or so wake up in a circle of light on a cold linoleum floor beside one another, already in government issued uniforms to fit their size. Looking around, they find any friends or family they can. As the first ones step outside of the light circle, the rest of the lights around them flip on in a brilliant flash. When their tiny eyes adjust they all know where they are and look to each other in confusion. The local grocery store smells of floor wax and cleaning solution – the government employees must have cleaned their experiment space, and are no doubt behind the swaying cameras along the ceiling.

A brave couple individuals attempt to turn to the crowd and organize them. Most people are screaming at one another, crying in another’s arms or sobbing prone against the tile beneath them. No one understands why theyre here, where their life has gone. A few just curl up and wish for sleep again. Then after not too long the first few small groups trudge hopelessly from the group, clutching to loved ones, trying to wipe away tears and think rationally. Outsiders find a group amongst strangers, though a hand full sprint solo in different directions. Finally a voice rises over those who have not moved out yet; a police officer tries to organize the people into groups, focusing first on dealing with any possibly dangerous emotional states. A couple inconsolable victims stumble unbelieving towards the green swinging door leading to the employees only area, whimpering and moaning. Even more refuse to go anywhere when the officer’s troupe votes to find the store’s main office.

Over the course of the story, the plot would follow several characters at once : Likely the police officer or someone close to him, a person or two in his group, a rational person on their own, one of the distraught people who slowly go insane, one of the people who at first considers letting themselves die then remotivates to find the government scientists who are watching them, et cetera. There would undoubtedly be turf wars over certain food sections – the foods that do not expire and easily divided into “bite size” pieces would be more highly coveted and protected, as would sources of water. Large insects would be a problem, as would the coolers/freezers, the extended travel time of the “liliputianed” peoples, their increased metabolic rates, the psychological damage of being trapped and so hopelessly limited by size. Possibly more ill effects of the process could begin to take hold of the characters; the process would have to be concieved ahead of time so as to sprinkle slight signs of degradation through the narrative.

Anyway, there’s the basics. Hope it was thought provoking. I know it sounds like “the borrowers” or similar, but this is a very different setting, environmentally and chronologically, and these people have to deal with conflicting goals and possibly shifting morals. I think it’d be best to keep contact with normally sized peoples to a minimum, but have it in the story for more dynamic periods of action.

Thanks for reading!

So it’s been a while…

Not for lack of trying, but no especially stirring ideas have come to mind in a while. Any promising ones I either chose to keep to myself for a rainy day or figured were too “out there” for anyone to want to read or respond to. Or when I do have an idea it’s when I’m too busy to post it and forget it later.

Anyway, I just watched The Conjuring. Expected scares, predictable timing, but very good cinematography and an engaging story, better than average, I would recommend it for any scare junkies. I found it more interesting than scary, but it really just depends on how you watch horror movies. Anyway, kind of inspired me a bit –

Post-Halloween Spooky Post

So backstory first, then I’ll let you guys develop a way to bring the scare into the present –

Early October one year ( very early 20th century) a small American family starts making their costumes for Halloween festivities (at this point in the history of Halloween in America, the holiday has only recently gained national popularity so it’s still a new experience for everyone). The teenage daughter of the family has chosen to go as a demon. Her parents got her a red costume and at first could not find the right mask. The father, however, is friends with a veteran of the American forces who had been in China during the Boxer Rebellion. This friend was deeply changed by his experiences and has frequently returned to China and Japan on exploratory missions to find himself in the culture of the region (or something). The friend recently returned from his latest trip and when the father looks through his newest souvenirs, he spies an interesting mask from Japan. When asking about it and mentioning his daughter’s costume plans, the father’s friend does not hesitate to give it to him as a gift. The father graciously accepts and studies the mask. despite its obvious age it remains a brilliant red, and the face depicted upon it is an angry demon with a set of horns, steeply arched eyebrows, a grisly smile, and almost avian features including a long rounded nose. He thanks his friend and returns home, and upon giving the mask to his daughter, he notices as she waves it about in excitement that there is a small line of characters along the inside edge of the mask. His friend, who is already off on another trip, is the only one he knows who can read Japanese so it is quickly forgotten.

The daughter loves the mask. It matches her costume perfectly and gives it a unique exotic flare. She puts it on and wears it around the house that night and is still wearing it the next morning as she has her breakfast, flipping it up over her face to eat. The father smiles at her excitement as the mask grins terribly at the ceiling, its nose pointing almost accusingly upwards. Throughout the day it is always on her head in some way, sometimes over her face, sometimes backwards, a hat, a necklace. She takes it off for school the next day but her father comes home to find her at the kitchen table, staring at her homework through the red ceramic demon. Days passed, growing ever closer to Halloween, and it wasnt long before she started bringing the mask to school. She told her parents that other kids were bringing in their costumes too and they begrudgingly accepted. His wife was starting to get worried and so was he. But the smile on their daughter’s face whenever she chose to lift the mask always calmed their anxieties, and the whole family could hardly wait for the end of October and all the spooky festivities.

Halloween had finally come and the daughter wore her entire costume to school. She thought it must have been a lot scarier as a whole. None of her friends seemed to want to look at her for too long, even those who had already seen the mask. She playfully tried to spook one kid and he threw up all over the floor. As she walked down the halls people turned towards her then quickly averted their eyes. She felt a little confused and a twinge of sadness but more than anything noticed an odd feeling of power. They were not just surprised by her costume, they were scared by it. When she passed they moved. No one, not even a teacher, could muster up the power to say anything to her the entire day. When anyone tried they ended up staring into those roughly painted eyes and their breath came out slow and wordlessly in a submissive hiss. She felt everyone’s terror coming off of them in waves like heat. She did not know why she felt such power but her confusion quickly faded and she grew to liking it.

That night she and her family went to a Halloween bonfire. Her parents had not seemed as scared of the costume as everyone else but were still oddly tense. The sun was soon down and all of the adults and all of the children naturally congregated on either side of the fire. All of the other kids seemed to huddle together and occasionally glance in the girl’s direction, their eyes shining back at her in the firelight. She didn’t mind though. By now she relished the surge of power she felt from every whimper, every quivering look of terror on their faces. She felt she could control these other children, her friends and family, through their fear. She knew she could. Throughout the night she had snarled and cackled at them quietly but now the parents were gone and she knew she could really scare them now, really feel in control.

She stepped closer the fire to cast an eerie silhouette across their small huddle and she felt a sharp slice around her face. It took a moment for her to register the acuteness of the pain and she staggered, gasping for breath. Then the slicing came again, twisting deeper, like a cookie cutter around the edge of her face, like jagged edges were burrowing in. She staggered again but kept her footing, stumbling a few yards from the fire. She felt for the scars and remembered that she was still wearing the mask, how had she forgotten…she took it off and felt around her face. An oval scar traced around her face and a short moan of fear escaped her. A short smart of pain from her finger jolted her from her racing thoughts, and when she looked to her hand and the mask it held another moan came forth involuntarily from somewhere deep inside her. She staggered back closer to the fire in shock and disbelief, it may have been the flickering firelight but she swore, she was sure she saw a slight serrated edge of spearheads grow and flow from the inside edge of the mask, moving in waves like caterpillar legs, shifting like a saw. She looked out to where the other children had been standing but was blinded by the smoke, blown by the changing wind to her face. Blinking, weeping, then staring at the blood dripping from the finger that had been caught by the sliding knives, she noticed something else.

It was the one aspect she hadn’t noticed about the mask because of how often she had been wearing it. A thin line of writing along the inside edge, painted on the ceramic, slowly flowing with the sharpened edge (or flickering in the firelight?). As it flowed with the serrated edge and the bonfire it seemed to shift, to change from English to Spanish to…was that Japanese or Chinese? Arabic, Danish, French, Russian…After staring for a few minutes, frozen by fear, tears streaming down her face from the pain and the smoke and the hollow feeling that she was suddenly alone, she could read the message.

“Though many names I’ve taken, many peoples I have ruled, many times I’ve walked the earth and strangled the hearts of man in my molten grip of fear I am but one force,” As she read the text switched languages faster and faster, it seemed flames from the bonfire licked into the air at double speed, the wind whipped a quick dust devil around her, billowing smoke, rustling the nearby trees, she could hear the adults still laughing and one of a child calling for a mother. More than just a trick of the light, she coughed at the smoke as her tears mixed with the blood of her scars and she read on, “One power, one source of darkness to contrast all the sources of light,” The wind snapped across the top of the bonfire pile and burning brands flew at her through the darkness and the smoke as she gripped the mask in both hands and grimaced again. One scratched across her face. The other caught the hem of her costume and the fire spread as she kept turning the mask and reading the curving text through her tears and blood. A voice that sounded like a thousand sang the words through the wind, a hollow tuneless shrieking in her ears: “Many names to be whispered, many corners filled with my shadow, and ever more hearts choking on their clotting fear and tears and blood. But only one true face. A face of fire, a light to cast shadows across all souls. A face you’ll wear.”

All of the rippling speartips and the painted words crashed deep into her oval  facial scar and hooked through the skin, and as the mask slapped hard against her face the long malicious nose caught the fire from a branch flying through the howling wind. And the force of the mask hitting against her face sent her flying into the fire. And there was no scream but a rattle, like a burning throat, and the bonfire went out.

Well. There you go. What’s next is a way to add in a contemporary way for the story to continue, to further develop and sort of devil masks and their various properties. obviously the intro needs a lot of work, dont know if it should be more or less specific. I kinda went ham with that last part, but it was fun to write. The mask I described is based off of Japanese Tengu masks. The Tengu is a Japanese mythological bird demon and trickster, and traditional long-nosed masks are worn at festivals or for the occasional prank.

Anyway, hope this was scary or interesting enough for you. Don’t have much experience writing horror, but this is more just creepy I think.

Let me know what you think and DON’T FORGET to add your own twist! Thanks for reading!

Good morning, readers and writers! Another story idea is waiting just below, though this one is even less developed than the last and I’m kind of losing confidence that it’ll get any comments, as the last two have failed in this also. For a blog based solely around a community’s interaction with a story prompt and the stories that each individual tells, it’s kind of a ghost town over here. It’s probably something I’m doing wrong, but I’m sure with refinement this process will get better! But anyway, let’s get to today’s premise.

This one definitely falls more under science fiction (probably just lost a bunch of you right off the bat with that). I’m not sure if a story like this already exists, though I would not be surprised given the relative simplicity of the set up. Basically, the “what if” is

“what if someone’s soul or personality were transformed into a cloud of cellular signals or trapped as information inside the internet?”

I can’t take credit for the idea either, this came up in a rambling text conversation wherein my friend was convinced I was trapped in her phone. I’ve been saving the idea for now, since I knew it’d be good for this blog.

Ok, important details that need to be sorted out –

1. (most importantly) How and why does this happen?! Making up bunk science is always fun, but if you think about it the human brain is just a vessel for the series of chemically generated electrical signals that make up our whole mental being. If these energies were perfectly converted into different kind of energies, or permanently stored in a computer or a cell phone, would that person still exist within that medium (assuming the “soul” is strong enough to somehow manipulate the technologies in which it exists, at least enough to keep all if the information needed to stay sentient together). The fundamental “how” is usually introduced in science fiction as either exposition and is made apparent from the beginning or is discovered closer to the climax, when a solution is discovered. I would think for this prompt that the latter is more appropriate, since once this poor trapped soul finds a way to communicate with anyone he will be asking for a way out. The fundamental “why” can either remain inferred, based solely upon the actions of the character who is assimilated into ‘the cloud’, or could be explained alongside the how following the climax. To answer that, we’ll need to see how the story flows once there actually is a story.

2. Who is the person who gets trapped? Is he/she a scientist victim of a failed experiment? Is he a randomly selected test subject with a normal life? Is he a computer expert who unlocked something terrible inside his technology? Or did this happen randomly? Another question could be if the story begins with him/her inside of the cloud, would they remember their life/personality in a human brain or would they begin completely anew, only clinging to sentience due to the nature of the electrical signals that comprise their consciousness? I’m sorry if I’m losing any of you here, but I’m excited at all of the prospects.

3. How, if ever do they get out? This really should be saved for last, definitely not until we at least have the how and why. But still something to keep in mind.

My mantra for this passion blog was “One raindrop raises the sea”. So far I’ve been in a bit of a drought, but I’ll keep trying different ways to portray my prompts so to make it more appealing to the audience.

Thanks for reading, don’t forget to comment!