He assumed he had won, so he took the opportunity to monologue about how good a manipulator he was, how all my actions had been controlled by him.
So I pulled out my gun and shot him.
He fell to his knees, holding the new hole in his stomach, and I guess he'd rubbed off on me, as I decided to monologue as well.
"You assholes don't get it, real life isn't a game, there aren't rules about how humans have to react, we can-"
He pulled a gun from somewhere and shot me back.
And I mean, fair play.
Sally and Gareth had the perfect set-up going. They'd stake out the place they wanted to hit for a few moments, until they were fairly confident as to the sexual orientation of the clerk. Then, whichever way they swung, one of them would be outside and act sexy, before the other would hit the store and escape. There wasn't any good description of either of them, as the clerks would always be too obsessed with the 'unrelated' person outside.
This worked well until, after a scare with a bisexual clerk, they made the mistake of hitting an asexual one instead.
I was watching them through the bug in their glasses. I had it on good authority that they were the best hacker available, but I still didn't trust them. Plus I needed to make sure all the work done to get them in the room was worth it.
So I watched them use the ID card, the keypass, and the doorcode to get into the room. I spoke through the earpiece.
"Remember, the password is 36 symbols long, and is-"
They typed it in perfectly.
"You ARE good!"
A finger tapped the post-it note on the edge of the monitor.
He'd planned out every possible outcome and ensured they'd benefit him. Sure, some were better than others (he would much rather one of the many outcomes where he was ruling everything rather than an outcome where he was remembered as a martyr by his children who now ruled), but no matter what the rag-tag bunch of misfits trying to stop him did, he knew he'd win.
So when they burst into his throne room, he sighed, and prepared for one of the lesserly optimal outcomes.
Then they tossed paint over him.
Fine, just adjust the "defeat them epically" plan slightly...
Sister Grace found her new posting to an outreach center in the middle of central Africa rewarding, but as the days turned into weeks, she became more concerned.
The only other white person for miles was a man who was called Tonto, and who seemed to live on the general store's steps. With every greeting he gave her, she was sure he must be hiding from some vicious crime.
So in her messages back, she requested help from the authorities.
When the reply came that he was the local authorities, as far as they knew, she was graceless about it.
The Wizard clearly didn't get a lot of visitors, so I tried to look interested as he showed me a bunch of his devices. I don't think he would have noticed either way, until he showed me a simple silver ring with a pearl on it.
"And this is my Ring of Truth. If you wear it and lie, it glows."
I paused.
"Is that based on intent or fact?"
"What do you mean?"
"If I think I'm lying, but I'm not...?"
"It doesn't glow."
I put it on.
"My wife isn't cheating on me."
I didn't like the answer.
The two snipers were stuck in a dilemma, as both of them had their weapons trained in roughly where the other one was. But neither knew exactly, they needed the other to move enough to target. But both of them would only move once they were about to take the shot, and they wouldn't do that until they'd spotted the other.
So they were stuck, waiting for something, anything, to break the stalemate. A wild animal, an uncontrollable bodily function, anything.
A rainstorm wasn't really enough, at first, but then a couple simultaneous lightning bolts sniped the problem quite cleanly.
We managed to shut the door behind us quickly enough that they didn't get through, but they instead began to bang on the door, which would probably break sooner or later, even as we leant against it.
We both saw the warning symbols, the detailed signs saying how bad an idea it was to open the door in front of us.
We looked at each other, and silently we agreed that better the chance it'd take them out first.
We jumped forward and opened the door ahead as the door behind burst open.
The next few minutes were... Complicated.
Nicely.
Time slowed as the two spellcasters battled.
That's not a metaphor, it threw out all cosmic calculations for a few weeks until we learned the required compensation changes.
The fabric of space and time was torn asunder by the forces they brought to bear.
Also not a metaphor, luckily a few repair enchantments kicked in and the resulting reality loss was fairly minimal, relatively.
The battle was for the heart of the Archangel Glorania.
I wish that was a metaphor.
But in the end, the simplest magic trick won the day.
I guess that's a metaphor, for a right hook.
Heaven was... Nice.
But after being shown around, they finished the tour at the Oracle Of All Current Knowledge. Due to free will, they couldn't tell me anything about the future, only what had happened or was current. And time didn't flow differently in Heaven.
But that was fine, as the only question I had was about the past. I took a coin from the bowl and slid it into the slot abd asked.
"The relationships that I ended, how many times was that the right move?"
The... Thing in the box answered, simply, "Zero times."
So, Heaven WAS nice...
It was known as "E.P.C.S", Explorer Personality Control Syndrome. Explorers, for cost issues, explored deep space on solo vessels, and to avoid isolation issues, multiple A.I.s would accompany them on the computers.
Made sense, and often it would go fine. But explorers would often start to alter and change the A.I.s for... 'improvements'.
But then they'd return to base, return to other people. And they'd get angry when other people didn't act how they wanted.
Those that didn't end up getting arrested often went out on more missions, which is why the problem's not actually a problem, to the Fleet.
I'm sure when it was built, the stairwell was warm and inviting. But after decades of use and then decades without use, it was now dark, foreboding, scary...
And what I now had to climb up.
I thought about using my phone as a torch, but with a battery life in the single digits, I couldn't risk it. Instead, I just started to climb.
At first, it didn't seem that bad, once I got used to the slime that was growing underfoot, I just had to make sure I took each step slowly and forcefully.
Until there was the nail.
So I knew that there was some practically impossible but technically plausible way for my hand to pass through a solid object, every molecule, atom, and sub-atomic particle just had to miss every other one. It'd never happened, far as I knew, but physics said it was possible.
I had that factoid buried in the same place in my mind as what badgers, snakes, and mushrooms had in common, something I knew but didnt think about.
But as I stared at my hand and the table it just went through, I kept trying to think of an alternative.
Still thinking.
I managed to get him to sit down in a booth with an expensive drink he clearly didn't appreciate and explain that he needed to calm down. I gave him a cliff notes version of the power struggle in the night-life section of the city. But before I could get to offering suggestions, he gulped down another few hundred dollars and stood up, looking excited.
"Sounds like to me a bunch of fucking pussies who won't know what hit 'em!"
He left, and I presume went and hit them, considering how many parts they found him in the following morning.
So as a storyteller, which is what I think I am when I'm either really pleased with myself or drunk, or both, there are areas I can and do tell stories in. These Drabbles, wrestling matches, DMing tabletop RPGs, stuff like that.
But I do get other ideas, ones involving properties I'll never get to touch officially (probably).
And I've noticed a pattern, in that most of the time, I want to take comedic foils and turn them into absolute fucking monsters, to prove funny doesn't mean weak.
Which is kinda weird, as I'm a funny guy, I feel like...
He led me to his inner sanctum rather excitedly, assuring me he'd found a way to defeat the impending Orc invasion.
There was a man in a strange green robe, with a few boxes made of metal. When my Master introduced me, it took a minute for my translation spell to kick in, and another for me to realise I'd heard him correctly refer to me as a fellow Master.
Before I could ask what was going on, he ordered me to start casting a mass gold making spell, which I did, as he examined his new "rocket launcher" staff.
When the Humans first got to see the Alliance Galactic map, they were confused. Trying to remain diplomatic, they asked why there were so many sections and areas the Alliance was surrounding but didn't control.
It was explained that when a society wasn't accepted into the Alliance for being too warlike or discriminatory, it was left alone.
The Humans were aghast, asking how the Alliance could let such security risks remain.
That led the invitation to the Humans being rescinded, which then led Humans to reach out and coordinate a new alliance the Alliance never saw coming, for some reason.
I hadn't intended to trauma dump onto the old man at the bar, but he asked enough questions to basically get everything out of me.
When I finally realised what I'd done, I began to stammer out an apology when he spoke.
"Now, I can't say that I understood everything you said just then, young man, but I understood your pain. I've felt similar, and you know what got me through it?"
I braced myself for this to become religious, or possibly just multi-level marketing.
"Beer. Makes everything better."
Not a good answer, but better than a lot of others.
I thought I'd managed to forget her well, considering how deep I'd fallen for her. I managed to block out what I thought was every memory trigger, through a lot of work in breaking the mental connection
Her perfume was just a flowery smell.
Her hairstyle was just a haircut that didn't suit most women who wore it.
Her pasta sauce was just a dish that needed more garlic.
Her ringtone was just 'Gentle_Waves.wav'.
Her touch, well, I never had to experience that, so that wouldn't matter.
...
One meeting, one grasp of my wrist, and it all came flooding back...
It was always called "Westward Road Cliff Bend" in the government documents, but the locals just called it Dead Man's Bend. Because, as you might have guessed, people tended to die there.
For thirty years, every safety measure they installed wasn't enough, as cars and motorcycles would somehow still end up going over and crashing below on the rocks.
They tried the traditional methods, then the extreme measures, even the experimental ones. And they still don't know what it was that fixed it, crashes just stopped after local 'Legitimate Businessman' Garry Dante was found crushed beneath a 'friend's' new car.
They both saw the knife. They both lunged for it, and it skitted across the metal grating they were fighting on.
After several strikes back and forth, he got leverage and threw her away from the knife, and then he scrambled towards it.
He got a hold of it, only to then feel the lead pipe come down across his neck, as his vision filled with stars and pretty colors. The next pipe shot replaced both with pain.
The third never landed, as he managed to throw the knife upwards, missing her, but hitting the rope holding back the girder.
Important Conversations are often already decided upon before they happen. Days and weeks of careful negotiation by underlings lead to the Important Conversation where the Important People agree to what has already been agreed to.
Sometimes the Important Conversation goes awry, certainly, but usually not.
But Important Conversations do sometimes happen without this, usually when someone destined to be an Important Person is put on or off the right track.
But in all history, the most Important Conversation between Important People was in a cave, between someone playing with new toys, and someone telling them to put down THE ITEMS.
The running joke is that every wizard spell was created for sex. Helping hand? Originally a sex thing. Summon demon? Summon succubus you mean? Create liquid? Well the first liquid created wasn't water, I bet, nudge nudge, so on and so forth.
Now, the reason this is so funny is that everybody knows that there aren't any actual sexual spells. Hence the comedy, since it's obviously false.
Thing is, there are possible sex spells out there, and they are discovered relatively regularly.
As are the discovery of dead wizards who've been drained of energy by some unknown force no-one knows...
He waited, deliberately, until I was taking my first gulp of my energy drink to speak.
"She was totally flirting with you."
Once the coughing had subsided, I glared at him.
"No, she was in a service industry job, they're supposed to be friendly."
"Dude, there's the plastic 'HiwhatcanIgetyou' smile, and there's genuine flirting. That was the latter."
I tried to think of a response, then I got it, as I shook my half empty can.
"Clearly I need another one."
I turned around, walked back inside, and asked her directly.
I was stuck when she said she had been.
After I explained what had happened, amd how I felt terrible for setting him off, she was silent for a moment, and then gestured out of the window to the mountain in the distance.
"Remember a few seasons ago when there was that avalanche? Thousands of pounds of snow and rocks swept down the mountain and damaged so much. That was probably set off by a traveller stepping poorly.
So what caused it?"
"The traveller, obviously."
"No, it was caused by all that put the stones and rocks there, and didn't bother securing them. Never forget what set things up."
"Hello, Suicide Prevention Line, you're speaking to Susan, how-"
"You ever thought about it?"
"About what?"
"Guess."
"Well, who am I speaking to?"
"Call me... Phil."
"Well Phil, what are you asking about?"
"Suicide, obviously."
"Ah. Well, yes, I have actually."
"Did you do it?"
"Well, obviously not, how else would I-"
"I mean did you ever try to do it, then."
"Ah. No. I got close, but I stopped myself. And you can too, if you're-"
"I know I can stop. I'm not doing it."
"Well, that's excellent, can I-"
"Just getting your numbers up. Call you tomorrow.
Maybe."
