I knew I should’ve added at least some spice to that english food I made a while ago.

“I promise, the 6th mini fridge is not the problem here. “

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[removed]

Reject fantasy, return to monke

More

Que??

Rain. Rain. And more fucking rain.

That was the only thing that I could hear, it was the only thing I could see.

In the middle of a jungle, all I could see were trees and the sight of falling rain drops filled the grey skies.

The reason that I was here, was because my Commanding Officer deemed it important that I undergo a training program.

What he didn’t tell was that the instructor was a particularly dastardly and somewhat sadistic fuck. It has four straight days of tireless combat, tense waiting, and terrified watching of the shadows. If anything as small as a gnat budged, I was already looking and tracking its wings.

I stood now in the middle of a clearing, having only been given a sidearm, my basic training fatigues, and a blade that was mounted onto my wrist.

In the distance, I could hear the hollow laughter that vaguely resembled that of the Officer that sent me on this mission, meaning that my ‘Instructor’ had given them complete authorization of this training session and voice print to boot.

I turned my head and could see the silhouette of a towering figure with dreadlocks, hidden behind a mask that stared into my very soul before tapping a panel on their wrist and vanishing. . .

Giving a flick of my wrist, the blades hidden in the device would extend, tightening the grip on my pistol and taking a deep, calming breath.

“Alright. . . Let’s go!”

This wasn’t a training session, this was a damn Hunt.

🙏🙏

"Oh my god, who FUCKING CARES?!"

Both philosophers shut up, and for the first time in hours, a silence falls over the pond.

"Did that duck just talk?" Ernesto asked.

"Do you mean if we perceived the duck as talking or-" Lily began, before being interrupted by the same duck flapping its wings.

"No! No more of that bullshit! Yes, I'm a talking duck. We immortals occasionally take vacations in the forms of lesser beings, but after hours of deciding if I'm a duck or not, you've got me wishing for death. So I figured, I'd just tell you and you can shut up. Yes, I am a duck. Go the fuck home."

"But you just said you were an immortal in the form of a duck!" Lily exclaimed, raising a finger in the air. "Therefore, you are-"

"Ducks can't talk. I hate to say this but I agree with Lily." Ernesto nodded.

The duck slapped its forehead with a wing, demonstrating a surprising amount of range of motion. "Okay. Great. You got me. You're in agreement. Go home. This is my pond."

"But..."

"NO BUTS!" The duck screamed, throwing its wings back.

"BUT... if you're in the form of a duck, the shape of a duck, and swim like a duck, you are indistinguishable from a duck and therefore a duck!" Lily said.

"No, not at all. Ducks don't talk. He is just in the form of a duck. If he wanted to be something else, he wouldn't be a duck, and so he isn't a duck." Ernesto replied.

The duck sighed, perhaps the first time in the entirety of world history that a duck sighed, and the two witnesses were more concerned with whether the duck was a duck. The realization of this caused him to sigh again. "I will shapeshift again if it will get you to go away. Then I won't be a duck anymore."

"Don't you dare shapeshift, we're trying to have a discussion here about whether an indistinguishable object by all standards of perception would truly be the object if it later ceased to-" Lily started.

"I would actually kind of like to see the shapeshifting." Ernesto muttered.

The duck dove under the water and bubbles started forming. After a few moments, a large crocodile rose from the depths and snapped at Lily's feet. The philosophers screamed and ran.

"You can come out, they're gone now." The crocodile gurgled. The duck from before rose from the depths.

"Thank god. Some humans will believe anything."

[removed]

Wow, didn't know that their was anyone else out there that knew this.

Do not bother defining what a Good Man is, and instead be one.

If I recall correctly, the king who squashed that the hardest was king josiah

Melanie quickly but carefully unlocked her front door. She was mindful, as she always was, that her husband might be lying in wait to kill her. Although she felt fairly confident she'd already won her and Jonathan's game of cat and mouse with her latest gambit, you could never be too careful.

She reached into her purse and withdrew a small pistol, before standing to side of the door and opening it. Then she dove inside, rolled forward, and came to her feet in a crouch, sweeping her weapon left and right.

The living room was clear, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the interior door to the garage in the dining room was slightly ajar. She whirled to face the door, and then approached in slowly, her head on a swivel.

Again, she stepped to the side of the door, and slapped it with her palm to make it swing open. A small mirror that she kept in her purse, when angled just right, showed her no one was inside without her having to leave cover.

Cautiously, she stepped down into the garage. To her surprise and bewilderment, she found that a large plexiglass enclosure had been set around a folding table inside. Two gaps had been cut in the plexiglass, through which two telescopic painter's poles had been inserted. One had a sharp knife duct-taped to the end, and the other hand the grabber she used to reach objects on high shelves tied to it, with a wire running down the pole to control the jaws.

To her dismay, on the table behind the plexiglass she saw an opened Amazon box, the very one she'd prepared earlier that day. Beside it on the table lay the note she'd put inside, along with a rock of the appropriate weight to represent its contents.

Bomb. You are dead, the note said.

She frowned in consternation. Except Jonathan clearly wasn't "dead". He must have noticed something off about the package, and gone to Home Depot to construct this makeshift blast shield. It wasn't a real blast shield that would protect you from an explosion, perhaps -- but then, neither was a note and a rock a real bomb.

As she was about to turn away, a pair of strong arms seized her from behind. She felt the dull, rounded edge of a butter knife slide lightly across her throat, the coldness of the metal making her shiver.

"Where did you come from?" she whispered, hoarsely, her heart pounding.

"Shh, you can't talk. I just slit your throat." Jonathan whispered back, affectionately, and pulled her against him. He kissed her neck gently, and added, "I took the shelves out of the tool cabinet so I could fit inside, hid the shelves and the tools, and then I just waited. For hours."

Melanie let out a blissful sigh, melting into the "deadly" embrace of the man she loved -- the man she'd "killed", and been "killed" by, dozens of times over.

"Aww..." she said, tilting her head up to look at him smiling down at her. "You really know how to make a girl feel special."

Are there gloves for your gloves? A quick search on the reception desk computer nets me nothing. I let out a sigh, my breath doesn't appear because the room is allegedly warm despite the fact that I'm constantly freezing. I wrap another scarf around my neck. It does little for the chills but no one can say that I'm not trying to fix the problem myself.

The other employees always give me worried looks. At least, I think they look worried. Some of these monsters make the same expression whether they're happy or angry. Have you ever tried to figure out what a Slime was feeling as you informed them that they'd have to pay an additional cleaning fee for leaving the entire room wet? It's not easy, let me tell you. But I guess that's why I'm considered one of the best.

Maybe that's why the other workers look at me that way. They might be afraid that I'll work them out of a job! Even the customers believe it. They laugh and say that I work an unholy amount. I believe it. This desk is manned by me, twenty-four hours, seven days a week. Of course, like any other hotel employee manning the front, I'll occasionally sneak away and try to take a power nap out back. Just laying down and closing my eyes for a bit is enough as of late.

Ah, its Mr. Rutt, and he's brought his family along. He's a Werewolf, and after seeing him a few times he's become my favorite customer. He always leaves me big tips. It has to do with the first time he met me. The guy was coming back drunk after a fight with his wife and tried to check in at the hotel to spend the night away. He was a bit angry at the time, and ended up venting his frustrations on the desk. The shock of seeing him maul the giant block of sturdy wood must have caused me to pass out. When I came to, Mr. Jeeves had arrived, scolding Mr. Rutt and asking me if I was okay.

Honestly, I was just worried I'd get fired for the property damage somehow. In this line of work the employees get blamed for everything. But Mr. Jeeves just gave the equivalent of an awkward smile for a lich and said he would be crazy to get rid of his best worker now. I ended up making amends with Mr. Rutt, though he's always quiet when stopping by, but hey, more money for me!

"Checking in with the family tonight, Mr. Rutt?" I ask with a smile. He wordlessly gives a short nod of his head, clutching one of his pups nearby. After typing some things into the system, I retrieve his door keys and slide them across the desk. "Enjoy your stay!"

He quietly nods again as he grabs the keys. One of the pups makes a sniffing noise. "You smell funny!" he said. Werewolf pups sound adorable!

I raised an eyebrow and tried to smell my armpit, but couldn't detect anything. Well, that was probably because I'm wearing three layers. I unzipped my coat and jacket and then tried to smell my body, but nothing seemed amiss. I shrugged. "I can't smell anything at all."

RTX ∞90

Agent Levi flicked open the case file on Regina Hawkes. Caught by the FBI’s Economic Espionage Unit, Regina had been employed by Promotivate, Inc. as a low-level programmatic technician for the Nyx Advertising Program. As far as the public knew, NAP was discontinued in the beta-testing stages, ostensibly due to running over-budget. Vague rumors had circled among Promotivate’s competitors that the project had actually been pulled due to the actions of the disgruntled employee he was about to interview. She was being head-hunted by both domestic and foreign agencies when the FBI had finally collected enough data to bring her in.

A guard came to the waiting room to escort him into the bowels of ADX Florence federal super-max prison, which Levi personally thought was a bit overkill. But he was there to find out precisely which foreign agencies she had been in contact with and what had been shared, not question the location of her imprisonment.

She waited alone, cuffed to the table, in the standard orange jumpsuit. Levi would have put the subject in her early forties, but her birthdate stated that she was 57. Her brown eyes were a little more sunken than in her photo, and her brown roots needed a touch-up, but prison was hard on everybody.

“Good afternoon, Regina. How are you?” Levi sat across from her, discreetly keeping the file’s contents out of her view. The woman was physically unremarkable, enough that she would have made an excellent under cover agent – her former employer had clearly underestimated her.

“I have had better days,” she quipped, leaning back in the small metal chair.

“Tell me a little about NAP and what you worked on.” Levi preferred to dive right in, which usually garnered surprise from his previous interviewees, but Regina remained impassive.

If she was annoyed by being asked a question she had answered repeatedly over several weeks, she didn’t show it. “The Nyx Advertising Project was touted as next-gen product placement to investors. Promotivate would have been able to directly transmit advertisements to the target audience into their minds while they slept. The big drawback to the project was that it would require installment of a brain chip, which means a partnership with Google, whose research is much further along in that type of hardware.”

“And what did you personally work on?”

“I was one of several programmers tasked with coding in the products themselves. The ‘several’ was the issue Promotivate had – I was classed as redundant and laid off.”

“You took issue with that.”

“Agent, I’m a 57 year old female programmer, less than 10 years from retirement and on the company’s pension. Despite several laws in place, ageism and sexism are still very much a problem in Corporate America,” Regina almost sounded amused by this, but there was an odd emptiness, a robotic quality to her voice and expressions.

“But you were head-hunted.”

“NAP was a closely guarded secret. After several months, and a bit of corporate espionage, I was head-hunted. Someone was finally smart enough to dig in to my background.”

“Neuroscience.”

“Yes, Agent.”

“Who did you speak with?”

“I’m not that easy, Agent. You need to wine-and-dine me first.” Again, as if she were reading a script, her tone lacked inflection. Levi wondered if there was more to her layoff than simple redundancy.

“Fair enough. You found something that would benefit the project though. A back-door, if you will.”

“You’re simplifying it a bit, but yes. The human mind can be manipulated with external factors. No need for a chip. Nothing confirmed, however.”

“Which you tried out on the beta-testing group.”

“No comment.”

“To remarkable failure.”

“Again, no comment.”

“Who are currently restrained in their hospital beds, trapped in their minds by a nightmare from which neurologists can’t awaken them from.” He tossed pictures of her victims, emaciated and straining against their bonds, across the table, seeing if he could evoke a reaction. Her eyes flicked to the photos, but she remained impassive.

“I do not know what you are referring to.”

“Agent. Please cease all further questions. My client has a right to an attorney, and she has been released on bail.” A faint Chinese accent underscored the new arrival’s statement.

“Bail? She doesn’t have bail.” Levi turned around to see a young man in an Armani suit striding up to him. The attorney handed him an updated court order. Bail for Regina Hawkes had been set for 50 million and promptly paid for by AdCorp. Levi pursed his lips – he knew a shell company when he saw one.

A guard followed the attorney in and released her from the hand cuffs. Finally, a small smile touched the probable traitor’s face. “I appreciate your time, Agent.” She peeked at her legal representative’s watch for the time. “And sleep well. I’m sure I’ll see you again soon.”

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This one had me in tears. Excellently written.

In the original mythology, things got a little bit complex. First and foremost because it was outright stated that like all angels, satan had no free will. When he rebelled, it wasn't his choice to do so. It was so the pantheon that Yahweh was a member of at the time could flex on having their servants beat up another group of servants who couldn't fight back. And yes, the original Hebrew religion was polytheistic just like most other religions of that era and region. It didn't get squashed down into a monotheism until one of the later Hebrew Kings marched into the temple and destroyed the statues of all the other gods except Yahweh. But the point is, that from the start the whole rebellion thing was staged because the gods needed a villain.

Хвилиночку...

Now me, I went a different route than even that.

I opened this place called Arby's.

The other demons say they wonder why they didn't think of that.

Sad but true. Not the time travel, the exploitative megacorp stuff.

Same with governments or anything big.

All hail the duck