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7 Int, 17 Wis.

Well done OP! 👏

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"Honey, what happened?"

"I lost, ma," I said, my eyes finding a crack in the floor to focus on.

"Oh," She whispered, beginning to cry.

"I'm sorry." I had no more words. Bile filled my throat as my body betrayed me.

The thunder cracked as it must. Ma's cry ceased.

The instigators came forward, prying my eyes open, forcing me to look at the wreck that was my ma.

They had been kind, in a way, I thought. A single clean bullet. In the shock of the moment, I nearly thanked the man hefting the rifle.

The men led me to the next game, where my father was shackled.

No probs.

Love it lol

This is neat. I love the twist

Thank you. That's the best thing a writer can hear.

A group of old friends getting together again after many years apart, recapping what they have been up to.

Everyone pronouns are their names, and speaks in the third person.

Gran insists she doesn’t need help. She’s run the farm for fifty years; she can handle a few more. Her routines have fashioned well-worn ruts into her life. She’ll forget me before she forgets to feed the sheep.

If only that were enough. Things increasingly slip through ever-widening cracks. Another year, another door off its hinges, another piece of machinery grown faulty and rusting. Failure isn’t fatal. Not usually. It’ll take more than routine to keep both her and the farm from collapsing.

The farmhouse has become disordered and dusty where it was once meticulous. Mortar crumbling. Pipes leaking. Every room needs refurbishing.

I leaf through Gran’s photo albums. Easy smiles and fraternal hugs and recurring facial features. Page after page of unnamed faces. Strangers.

It’s not just the forgetting that’s painful. It’s the loss of what I’ll never have.

I harvest what’s left of the neglected vegetable garden while Gran does her rounds. The ones she still remembers, at least.

Withered roots slip free from the soil like surrender. Only one puts up a fair fight. Eventually, it bursts from the black earth, its twisted roots clutching the pale-smooth form of a human skull.

I stare into its empty sockets. It stares back.

I try to list them all; the deaths, the disappearances, the family who have since ceased to be my family.

And I know I’ll never know.

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230 words

r/Quiscovery

I love this. Idk why but it makes me want to read more of it tbh.

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Okay but what about the important part? Did he end up eating the booger?

Neato love it

Everyone remembered it like it was yesterday. Christmas, 1999. The more technophobic branches of society were busy fearing Y2K. Some apocalyptic events due to a computer bug.

Everyone wished they were that lucky. A quick death via the Walmart version of Skynet. What a time to be alive.

But no. Instead, the apocalypse came in the fashion many were unlikely to actually believe. Everybody's religious until actual angels are spotted. That's what happened. And then, people disappeared. Remember all those religious texts about The Rapture? God's chosen people ascend to the heavens and the rest of us are left behind to confront the apocalypse via legions from Hell.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world vanished in an instant. Which in the grand scale of things is already problematic enough. But it's not the people that was the problem. It's what those people were in the middle of doing, at the moment of being connected to God's Wi-Fi.

Vehicles crashed. Multiple infrastructure services, and resources collapsed for a couple of weeks. And generally the world shut down for most of a month. This isn't including things like mass panic, small civil wars, and generally idiocy that tends to occur when people assume it's the end of the world. You know, the usual.

Eat your heart out Y2K.

Then supposedly there would be several years of societal collapse and destruction before the second coming of Jesus.

"Well, Jesus never showed up. And neither did Satan or any demons. So I'd say we're in the clear." Parker said with a grimace. The irony wasn't lost on him.

"That's what I'm saying." Vinay agreed.

The pair continued scanning the various things around the room. In the 25 years since The Rapture, science had truly taken the wheel. Our differences were much more trivial than figuring out what actually happened that day. At least to learn why they each wore a cryptic symbol on their heads from that day forward.

Parker remembered the hours after it scratched itself in on him. A fun thing to occur immediately after losing your family. His mother and brother vanished, his father was killed when their driveless truck hit a retaining wall.

Vinay didn't fare much better. Famine visited his part of the world when much of the local farming community got deleted. Most of his family who didn't disappear starved.

"You know the thing that gets me." Vinay began, as they began working on the large skeleton in front of them.

"Hmm? What's that?" Parker agreed as they let the AI program begin reconstructing the odd symbols they found in the clothing.

"It didn't just take Christians."

Parker sighed. "I kinda' assumed that. The whole world doesn't believe in the same things. That'd just be vanity to think that."

"I know." Vinay continued. "Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims. Mormons."

"Exactly. The whole world got affected. Plenty of people told me their loved ones and friends got taken. Even people who didn't believe."

"So what does that tell you."

"Angels, God, or not..." Parker assumed. "It picked us at random."

"Like tending to a crop." Vinay explained as he checked the scans of the clothing. The symbols matched language used in the symbols on their foreheads.

"What does it say?" Parker asked from the skeleton.

"Do not harvest." Vinay paused. "Not fit for consumption."

The reveal was only a couple of years earlier. But the world erupted in confusion yet again at its translation.

"We're just food for them." Parker theorized.

Vinay continued reading what he could see. "We don't necessarily know that."

"If it was a rescue, you'd say it was a rescue. Unless we're talking tuberculosis, there's usually only one other meaning for the word 'consumption'."

Vinay grimaced at the idea. "We're the flock, they're the shepherds. Did I get that right?"

"Close enough." Parker brushed off. "So what happened to this guy? Thought they weren't able to be killed."

"You'd think that." Vinay said as he checked a work tablet. "Turns out being hit by a 747 at cruising speed does the trick."

They both looked over the shattered bones. The fanged jaw slack and broken. The wings that had been reduced to fragments.

"World's largest bird strike." Parker answered.

Violeta, their team's photographer, circled the body incessantly. She was busy snapping photos of the bones for later research. With new technology, came new chances to investigate past discoveries. She was there to document it all. She wasn't a fan of banter however; and so she continued silently despite their observation.

"Everything that comes in here just suggests what we keep talking about." Vinay said as he rested against a counter. "We're just food."

"What concerns me." Violeta spoke. "Every child born has the mark too."

"Not fit for consumption." Parker repeated.

"Yes." She said before setting her camera down. "But what if someone is born without it? After all this time?"

"...Be prepared." Vinay said as he looked at the bones again. "Because I think they're coming back."

Little bit of eldritch horror. Just a little. r/Jamaican_Dynamite

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This is exactly what I thought, I've seen this before.

That was well written, and well paced.

What if the cult really did get on the hidden ship, and the LPL was cracking open their special area. That might make a more interesting story. :)

I was wondering that too but figured it probably meant a literal gate.

I agree on principle, but I guess that's where the story is supposed to fill in the gaps (we meet the alien civilization and slowly learn their language like an exact reverse of the Covenant from Halo).

Anecdotally I'd heard that interpretation too, to say nothing of how, if the world really were ending (and it didn't happen after smallpox or the World Wars), we wouldn't have to guess or speculate.

This is an Adamtots comic