Never read the thunderbolts. I heard they were making a movie but that is about all I know of that one. Might have to look it up.

“Hey Jerry, how has your evening been?”, I ask as I walk into the Flying W gas station I work at.

“Dead, man. Absolutely dead. I haven’t seen anyone in like two hours, man.”, Jerry said. I am pretty sure he is stoned again, but whatever.

I wander behind the counter, “If it has been that dead, then why don’t you take off. I got this.” Our shifts are supposed to over lap for an hour to cover the 11 to midnight rush but I was betting it wasn’t going to happen tonight.

“Duuuuuude! You rock!”, Jerry leapt over the counter and was gone. I am sure he would have been fired years ago, but he is always on time and the till always balances…. This place doesn’t set a very high bar for employee of the month if you know what I am saying.

Midnight came and went without a single customer. One am and two am came an went too. It was a very dead night.

Around two thirty the fog started to roll in. It was thick and low. It made the street lights into fuzzy orbs of floating light since the poles were hidden. The highway, just a couple hundred yards away, might as well have been on the moon. Only the occasional glow let me know that there were still cars going by.

I have been working the night shift for almost five years now. At first I thought the worst of it was the after the bar crowd or the crack heads but it is the witching hour when the crazy shit really happens. Between three and four am. If something is going to go down, that is when it is going to happen.

This fog felt ominous and put me on edge.

Three ten am. A vintage model-T Ford pulled into the station. I gawked. I had never seen one in such mint condition. It was a beauty. The driver was in period clothes too. Black felt top hat, driving goggles and a black suit, even spat shoes …. He went all out.

The driver got out and was walking towards the building when a second model-T came by, not slowing down I saw two Tommy guns sticking out the windows, they open fired, shredding the driver, as he fell to the ground he and cars disappeared.

I guess it was going to one of those nights.

Three twenty five am. A 1970 something half ton truck pulled in. The box was full of teen age kids, all dressed for the beach. Probably heading out to the old swimming hole off route 3….. which was paved over about a decade ago.

The kids piled out of the box of the truck and came into the store. They were all over the store picking phantom merchandise off of shelves that weren’t there any more while walking through the shelves that were there. They chatted among themselves, laughing and having fun. They paid in cash at a till that wasn’t there any more and then piled back in the box of the truck. The truck pulled out and was creamed by a semi going in the opposite direction. Bodies flew from the truck box and then disappeared as they hit the ground.

Three forty two am. “Give me all your money!”, he yelled, a sawed off shot gun in his hands.

“Easy man…. Easy.”, I said as I started to open the cash register. I saw a the barrel of a shot gun appear in my belly and let off a round. The would be robber went flying. I turned to see a young man with a Flying W t-shirt holding a gun. He must have been the cashier…. No clues as to when this robbery was. I got out of the ghost cashier’s way. He looked over the counter and got a shot gun blast to the face. He spun and hit the floor, disappearing along with the robber.

Three fifty five am. A couple came in. They were arguing. She went to get some chips and he asked for a package of cigarettes. I got the pack of cigs down from the display just in time to see her stab him in the neck. Blood squirted out and hit the door. His eyes bulged and he went down, she just kept on stabbing until they both disappeared. I put the cigs back into the display case.

Seven oh five am. The morning shift had arrived.

“Hey Stanley, how was your night?”, they asked as they came in.

“Oh it was pretty quite. Little excitement around three am or so but nothing too crazy.”, I replied.

Alarms blared as Avesi ran down the hallway. She looked out the viewport as five Warp Conduits opened into their solar system within near-light range. A cylindrical ship emerged from one, a glowing maw at the front ready to reclaim raw matter and energy for reprocessing, flanked by armored sides, and heavy weapon emplacements.

From another emerged a bright glowing streak of plasmic slag, a second ship reduced to raw materials by the raw energies present in The Warp, what a terrible fate those on board must have suffered.

Two more jets of slag emerged, and finally a second intact warship, with unmistakable Human engineering. They arrived mere weeks after their armada had been sent on its relatively short 20 year round trip to the nearest star.

Avesi scrambled into the Control Station as weapons fire lit up the orbital platform. She fired up the automated defenses, then took manual control of a High Energy Canon. It was too late. They could detect intruders coming from dozens of light-years away, and had configurable defenses to repel any manner of invasion, but Warp Armadas were... suicidal...

She looked at the jets of plasmic slag that had already moved significantly far away, 3/5ths of the Human Fleet was in ruin before they even arrived. That kind of sacrifice was unimaginable to Avesi, but she pushed her horror away as she saw pods raining onto the Orbital Platform.

Armored humans ran out, many of them dying as their suits suffered breached seals and died in the very vacuum brought in with their breaching pods. But the rest ran forward, weapons belching plasma, tearing through metal, tearing through flesh.

It wasn't long before Avesi and a small number of other survivors were rounded up in the control room, the a Human captain overseeing their security.

Aveesi spoke up in Veelan, "Why are you so horrible to your own kind? Throwing so many lives away in the pursuit of a fast victory?"

The man turned to her, glancing at a translator module. He gave her a Grim tight-lipped smile. "You can afford to travel between the stars in safety, decades at a time between neighbors."

He stepped forward towards her. "For us to cross into your system that way, it sacrifices all of us. Traveling through the Warp is the only way any of us will ever live to see our destination."

Outside the viewport, the two surviving warships positioned themselves to catch the streams of plasmic slag, processors converting the energetic stream of matter back into metal, back into plating, back into new ships for a new crew.

one problem Vesuvius and Pompeii are only a couple of miles away from Naples which is the third largest city in Italy

I don't know if I've ever read something and got this reaction. It's ridiculous, chill down the spine doesn't describe it at all. It's vibrating. Seriously, holy shit. I don't even have words. It's beautiful and profoundly sad. It's missing people I never knew.

kinda sounds like the thunderbolts

sigh... I tried :D :D :D

When Krell had first heard about the humans of the Sol System, his first instinct had been one of pity. It seemed a cruel twist of fate that a species should evolve the necessary intelligence and understanding to leave their world behind and journey to the stars; yet be cursed with so short a lifespan they could never hope to see any of them.

He recalled double checking the datapds’s submission, certain as he was that some mistake must have been made, a zero left off somewhere. It had been at least a thousand years since a species had been encountered with a lifespan even as low as the high hundreds. Yet these humans seemed to struggle to achieve even their first century.

How could they possibly hope to take their place amongst the civilised species of the galaxy when their kind would wither away and die before making it to even a handful of their cosmic neighbours. Indeed the whole thing was a tragedy. Numerous thinkpieces clogged the datapads as the ‘tragedy of humanity’ became the latest cause celebre. Before too long, their novelty now gone, they were mostly forgotten. Why give any attention to so insignificant and ephemeral a people?

-

A few centuries later, Krell’s pity had matured into annoyance. Humans, it was well known, were impatient. They had no respect for the passage of time. While the other species of the galaxy were content to accept the realities of life on a galactic scale, humans seemed incapable of doing so. It was as if their limited lifespan had likewise limited their vision.

Rather than accepting for example that their paltry lifespan meant they were largely doomed to remain tethered to their home star; instead they had heedlessly ventured out into the galaxy regardless. Their so-called generational ships were considered quite distasteful to the other civilised species. A species living, breeding, dying, all sealed up inside one of their grotesquely large vessels. Simply awful.

Then once they did arrive somewhere, they were restless and rapacious in their growth. Humanity had established more colonies in the last fifty years than all of the other species of the galaxy combined. Twice over. There seemed to be no care or deliberation in their actions. They just did things. And kept on doing them while everyone else was taking the sensible precaution of deciding whether or not to do them at all.

Not to mention that their diplomacy left a great deal to be desired. They were insistent. Many found their communications to be downright rude. If they needed something from you they might send as many as two or three messages in a single decade, with no concern for decorum. Even when you did respond it was often a pointless endeavour. On numerous occasions Krell had replied to an enquiry, only to discover that the original questioner had apparently passed away. How were you ever supposed to work with such a people?

-

A few centuries after that, and Krell’s annoyance had transmuted into an appalled fascination. Despite their obvious and sad limitations, humans had been able to make some remarkable progress.

Their colony worlds had developed at a truly staggering pace. A standard colony belonging to any other species might see a handful of new arrivals over the course of decades. Adventurers or misfits who yearned to experience life in a small frontier community. Not so for humanity. Even without the seemingly endless stream of humans coming from Earth, their colonies would have been entirely self-populating. Some of their earlier colonies rivalled other species' actual homeworlds in population and expansion.

This galactic migration had been further spurred by their impatience with galactic travel. While the other species had been content to use the same methods that had served them well all their lives, humans insisted on pushing for something new. They seemed drawn to novelty, unable to appreciate what they already had. Not that Krell could argue with their results. There had been numerous advancements to the FTL drives that had otherwise remained unchanged since Krell’s youth.

Every year seemed to bring with it new technologies or theories that the humans had spearheaded. For so brief a species, they certainly managed to get a lot done in that time. It was almost endearing.

-

With a few more centuries of careful study under his belt, Krell’s fascination had evolved into a grudging respect.

Krell now realised that it had been a mistake to consider the lifespan of a single human in isolation. Some strange byproduct of their fleeting existence compelled them to achieve immortality through legacy and institutions. To live on beyond what few allotted years they had. While for the other species of the galaxy an individual had the time to see things through to their fruition; for humans they had to entrust that to others of their kind.

Humans even had a saying. That they “stood on the shoulders of giants.” No other species in the galaxy operated the same kind of long term collective operations that humans apparently considered routine. In fact Krell had a theory that humans were really best understood as some kind of hive mind. Or, in his more fanciful moments, what he liked to call a ‘meta-conscious’ species.

If you tried to focus on the individual human, well obviously they were dead and gone in the blink of an eye. Their institutions however, they lasted. When an individual human died, the baton would simply be picked up by the next. If you thought of a human as nothing more than the cell of a larger institution, and treated those institutions as beings in their own right, with personalities, motives and goals… Well then suddenly humanity became much easier to interact with and understand. You weren't really talking to a human, you were talking to an institution through its human agent. It wasn’t about what the human thought or wanted, it was what the institution wanted.

Yes a single human might be lucky to see one hundred years, but how long might an institution live? What might it accomplish in that time?

-

Even now, after all those years, Krell hadn’t lost his respect for humanity. It was simply tinged with what he might label as concern. With the benefit of time, some worrying trends had become clear.

Humans appeared to have a remarkable ability to adapt to the rapid pace of change they were inflicting on the rest of the galaxy. While they freely and happily shared their technological achievements with others, only humans seemed able to adopt them with any confidence. The other species of the galaxy were honestly overwhelmed by it all. Technology advancements that used to take millenia were now taking decades. It honestly felt like everyone else was being left behind, it seemed impossible to keep up with them and their frenetic pace.

There was also the issue of their sheer number. Humans had colonised nearly half of the known habitable planets in the galaxy. They were terraforming others. The last time a Galactic census was held, humanity had comprised nearly 64% of all sapient life. Krell didn’t get the feeling that number was likely to plateau anytime soon. What would happen when they couldn’t find anywhere new to expand into?

-

Case Study: The Journals Of Krell Tan’Bo - Critical Analysis by Professor James DeWitt - Mars University

It is a truly unique experience to be able to see the viewpoint of another species during the era of humanities ascendancy. To have access to their first-hand observations and conclusions is undoubtedly a gift.

Krell’s journals provide an intriguing insight into a fascinating period of galactic history. As with other non-human species his incredible lifespan allowed him to bear witness to vast tracts of time and provide a single, unbroken perspective which covered several distinct epochs.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that Krell was not equipped to truly understand the macro-factors at play during this period. Though this atomised thinking, without recourse to structural analysis, is ubiquitous in non-human species; who seemed to operate as isolated bastions of personal/private knowledge. Nevertheless, despite their lack of academic rigour, they still retain a certain sense of wonder as they transport us back to a time when humanity was not alone in the cosmos.

Very intriguing.

That is a question that you hear from the local townsfolk of the village your truck broke down at. Apparently, something big happened at the small time gas station, but no one can tell you what. You don’t believe in ghosts, however, so you decide to investigate, as there is no one to stop you. You arrive at the station, ironically segregated from the rest of the village, to see the lights on, but no one there. You go to travel inside, but a man that was jogging nearby warns you that all is not what it seems. He was a decent looking guy, and he looked familiar. He continues jogging, and you continue your investigation. The door slides open as you arrive, which is odd because it isn’t a sliding door. The area is a bit foggy, with a tint of green - almost like how dry ice sits on the floor. Everything seems alright, nothing is rusty or mouldy or broken. It looks like it is in perfect condition. But why is it abandoned then? You haven’t seen a ghost. But if there is one, what kind of ghost is it? You look at the fridges in the back, and notice a column of sports drinks missing. Judging by the label, it is the same one you saw the jogger with. You jump as the building creaks with the wind, but you have an odd chill go down your spine, almost like you are being watched.

You go to enter the back, and to your surprise, it is unlocked. It looks like a lunch room, and someone seems to have been here not long ago, as there is food on the table, still warm. The chair is pulled out and the green mist seems to congregate at it. It looks like you can see a silouhette being formed sitting in the chair. Behind it, a cupboard is open, and inside is a barrel, slightly open. The warning signs on the side read “Caution - Experimental product: B-S10”. You decide to close the barrel properly, and pretend it is a highly valuable asset for fun while doing so, saying things like “approaching the target” etc etc. When you go to turn back around, the food is gone and the chair is under the table properly. Odd… very odd. You go to leave the building, and notice that what remains of the green mist is exiting through the front door. You go to leave, picking up a snack as you walk through an aisle. As you exit, you see the jogger again, staring at you. He waves and smiles as he fades away.

What sort of ghost would haunt a gas station? Well, let me tell you - a jogger

As you return to the village, you find what made the jogger so familiar. There is a statue of him with a plaque that reads — 1964 - 1997 May the light guide you as you guided us

I don't want to die.

That's what I told myself before pausing time. That's what I had told myself most times I used this power. Of course, it was usually less immediately dire. 'I don't want our relationship to die,' 'I'm going to die if I have to take this exam right now,' 'I don't want to die knowing I could've won this game of trivial pursuit with more time.' Those things all seemed important in the moment, I think. Perhaps they were.

I don't want to die.

And yet how long has it been that I've stared you in the face, my silver-toothed friend? How long have you waited to end the stupidly fast spiral of my thoughts? How can I remember only the immediacies of our struggle together: the way the light of some window glints at a 45 degree angle on your surface, how my arms are slightly pulled backward because I was unable to even pretend to defend myself. How-

I cannot look away. I believe I knew we would be in this still dance when I paused time. There are moments, blurry in the back of my mind, where I thought of solutions in a similar state. There was...must have been some sort of will in my bones, one that could make my mind's analytical ramblings true if it just tried hard enough. My bones, my body, myself.

It's funny, really. I can't even remember what I was wearing. I can't even remember my own name. I only really know you.

I didn't want to die.

I should be able to un-pause time whenever I desire, my friend. Perhaps it will be soon, perhaps we will stand here, in a disjointed and distanced embrace till the end of time. I don't know.

Because I cannot seem to desire. I have no idea what it means to live nor die, nor even the peace of closing my eyes. Would I miss this? Would I miss you?

For I cannot fathom what your imposed fear once felt like, and I'm sorry for that.

I'm sorry because all I do know is that we're here.

I hope you can be content in the silence.

Inertia though, surely. Bullet would just continue on its course, only now it’s tumbling rather than just spinning.

The Mortal Pain Of Excistence

I'd like to believe it happened. Fits better with the vibe, I think :)
But yeah, interesting comment. Didn't occur to me that it could all be just in his head.

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Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.

She Left Without Hope

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Astounding job.

Nice work.

"I don't understand, Captain. Why do we fear humans? They live such short lives-"

"Exactly, Lieutenant," the Captain said. "For you and I, we can expect to live a couple thousand years-any injury we get, we have to deal with for the rest of that time. Any grudges we have, we have hundreds of years to get over it. We grow into maturity into our two hundreds and spend that entire time learning the basics."

"I...I am aware of how our species works, Captain," the Lieutenant said.

"Then understand that humans don't have that kind of time," the Captain said. "Within one year of life, most humans can talk and walk. Within five, they are developing most of their motor skills. At eighteen? Many have decided or are deciding what they will do for the rest of their lives."

"Which are only a hundred years if they're lucky-" the Lieutenant started.

"As for grudges and wars?" the Captain said. "We can last hundreds of years and don't have to act upon it. Humans?" The Captain fully faced the Lieutenant. "They don't have that, so they take care of it. Immediately. Usually with explosives, weapons, nukes."

"I-Immediately?" the Lieutenant asked, turning slightly pale.

"Yes," the Captain said with a nod. "We can live for thousands of years and spend time thinking decisions over. Humans don't have that time and instead use their power to grow fast to cut our lives short-so listen closely, Lieutenant. NEVER cross a human, for while they die soon to us, they can make it so you will die sooner and not have to live with the guilt."

Ripping Open the Wound and Letting the River Run Red

I'm glad you liked it!

I get what the promt wanted but... honestly for me i like thinking about the 'reality' of it. Magical Girls to me always represent hopes, dreams, and idealism so i thought it would fit

The Inferno: The boy of fire and scale