Esprit De Corpse

I didn’t sign up for this.

I enlisted for all the usual reasons, to help serve the Empire, to protect the innocent, the pay, the uniform to pick up guys in the ports, the usual reasons in the usual order.

When they said I had potential for the Purple Corps, I assumed it was something to do with covert ops and such. I mean, I wasn’t wrong, but I never expected to be using my mind to make enemy leaders’ hearts explode.

I didn’t sign up for this, but had I known, I’d have signed up for it years ago…

Cash Rain

It was pretty near the top of the list of things I’d like to see when I opened my front door, stuck between ‘Naked Female Supermodels’ and ‘Truckload Of Cider’.

It took me a minute to realise that it wasn’t snowing and this was, indeed, money falling from the sky. After a moment to thank whoever that it was notes rather than coins, I ran out and began to scoop it all up, using the wheelbarrow to dump it all inside my house, assuming I had only a moments to gather.

The hyperinflation issue never occurred to me until afterwards.

Diplomatic Timing

If there’s one thing that I’ve learnt about the Humans, is that you have to get to them early.

I know that sounds difficult, given that most humans have lived and died twice over before an Elven has reached maturity, but I don’t mean on an individual level. I mean culturally.

We were the first ‘equals’ they met, and thus they respect us, trust us, like us.

The Dwarves, they were soon after, and while they have never been fully trusted, they have the Humans’ respect.

But if the Felines had only met Humans before they had domesticated their cousins…

Daily Correspondence

One letter a day.

It wasn’t intentional, or at least not at first. He had never set out to write daily, it’s just that every day he had something he had to jot down in a letter to his wife, away on company business. By the time he noticed that he was losing the hour between 2 and 3 pm every day, it was habit, so he stuck with it.

He poured his heart out onto those pages, his thoughts, his feelings, his very soul, all expressed via fountain pen. It was such a relief.

Until she found them all.

A Positive Message

“Positivity!”

It was written in big multicolored letters on the rope banner hanging above his typewriter. Originally it was in Comic Sans, but he put his foot down, and she reprinted it in Curlz. He knew when not to push his luck, so he put up with it.

Everyone, his publishers, the fans he met at conventions, critics, everyone had told him for years his work was just too depressing. But once sales began to drop, he knew he had to do something. He stared at the banner, focusing on the message.

She found him hanging a few hours later.

The End Of Limits

His entire life was spent searching for limits, and then breaking them.

Not out of any sense of self-aggrandizement, nor a need to prove himself as being superior to anyone else, nor any of the many reasons most people sought out barriers to conquer.

The limits of what humanity knew, what it could achieve, they were holding humanity back, and he knew that if he could break through enough of them, humanity would be freed.

It led him to the stars, to the edge of reality, as he knew it. Then he broke through it.

And set the Masters free.

Wreckless

My Everything had a small but thriving air taxi business, if you didn’t want to wait for the ferry to take you to or from the mainland, you could always fly there, it was such a short journey.

Hence, when My Everything vanished without a trace, I didn’t believe it. There was no wreckage, no crater, nothing. She had to have been kidnapped or something, it couldn’t have been a crash, I never stopped believing I would find My Everything one day, somehow, safe.

And I did.

Turns out My Everything would do Anything to get away from me though…