EEEEEVVVVVIIIIIIILLLLLLLLL

"Here Comes the Bride" played for the third time. I felt my heart sink and felt a tear on my face because I knew she wasn't. I was in a tuxedo staring at a priest who was suddenly too engrossed with his bible to look up and see me. "I guess the wedding is off. Sorry everyone" was all I could say as I walked out.

As I got to my car I saw downtown erupting into a brawl. Celestia was battling Mistress Magic again. Luckily they usually kept things away from this part of town so I drove home and watched an entire season of Chopped while drinking cheap beer and eating ice cream before I finally passed out.

When I woke up the hangover reminded me why food network and Coors lite are a terrible combination but I got up and checked my phone. "I'm so sorry" was all she could bother to write me. I replied "you left me at the alter. Again. This relationship was over a long time ago but I'm finally done thinking it could be saved. You can save the world but something has to give. Goodbye" and hit send before I could chicken out. Then I turned my phone off and got ready for work.

A few months later, I had been going to the gym and had lost enough weight to fit back into my college pants so I felt like I was ready to get back into the dating scene. I looked at the apps mostly at work since it was close by a major university and the chances of finding someone I actually wanted to be with were a lot better. Right before my lunch break I pulled up my phone and saw her for the first time. Beth. She had a huge smile and was holding a small dog by the river. I swiped right and for the first time the app immediately sent me to a message screen. She had liked me first! I went back to her profile and took note of anything that might make for an interesting opening line and wrote "cute dog! What breed is that?" Then immediately deleted it. Then wrote "where did you take that picture? I'd like to see the view in person" and barely got the message typed before I deleted it too. Then I saw her typing and froze.

"So, are you writing me a novel or do you keep second guessing yourself? 😅" I looked around to be sure she wasn't there next to me. "lol yeah. Every line I came up with was too cheesy and didn't want to mess up a first impression" I replied. "I like cheese. Wanna go to a wine tasting?" She wrote. I almost dropped my phone. "okay. What time?" "Downtown at Le Fromage. It starts at 8:00. See you then!" I took a moment to gather myself. A gorgeous woman had liked me first and THEN asked me out? Was this real life?

I arrived at the restaurant a few minutes early and got a table. Beth arrived right on time wearing a stunning red silk dress and matching heels. Her photos didn't do her justice at all. I stammered "hi Josh, I'm Beth, nice to meet you" and she laughed. I felt my cheeks light up which made her laugh even harder. "Not very good at this, are you?" She chuckled as she said it. "Let's get some wine and see if it helps you remember who you are."

A bottle and full board of cheese later, it was like I'd known her for years. "so how did you find your way onto the app? Most of the guys on that app are either in college or on their third divorce." I sank a little in my chair. "I was with someone right out of college. She had a great job but it always came first. We even tried to get married but every time the world suddenly needed to be saved and I would have to wait. It happened again this winter and she left me at the alter." I tried to hold it back but I felt a tear run down my face. Stupid wine. "That really sucks. You didn't deserve that" she said as she hugged me. Then she looked me in the eye and said "that's the thing with people who put their careers first. The world will always need saving and you always take a back seat to it. For me, there is nothing that comes before the guy I'm with. I'd watch the whole world burn to save him. This place is nice but let's go somewhere a little more private. Before we do I have to get a selfie for my Instagram. Smile!" She said as she held her phone in the air. "let's get out of here" she said as she took my hand. As we were walking out I noticed a text on my watch. "What the FUCK are you doing with HER?!?!?" I ignored it. I was ready to be saved.

They came for Tyra in the dead of night, while I was two hundred miles away. Kicked down the front and back doors after cutting the power, rushed her bedroom, threw a black bag over her head and hauled her away. At the same time I watched, impassively, as one of my interrogators pulled teeth from a stubborn detainee, Tyra was getting packed in an unmarked van and driven off to a black site. Bastards.

I knew nothing of it for hours. I was doing, as I had done since the Revolution, my job: hunting down dissidents and rebels, getting every scrap of information I could, whether it was real evidence or simply conjured up to make the agony stop. There are those who will read this and shudder at the thought, who know the history and thus know what a monster I am. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered to me. I did what I had to, to survive. My conscience was clear then, and in light of what followed, it’s clear once more.

But it wasn’t when Party Secretary Hull surprised me at the entrance to the detention center with his personal guard and that sniveling little shit Ingram. My conscience caught up with me as they drove me to the Party Headquarters in the capitol and sat me down before the top dogs in the country to denounce all the things I’d done at their behest over the past decade and a half. Murder, torture, conspiracy after conspiracy, backstabbing and backbiting. They accused me of preparing to seize power illegally.

“…a power-hungry madman,” Ingram, the last to ramble on and on about my crimes, finished his diatribe, “Whose sole objective since the Great Revolution has been to depose and murder this Council, and seize control as dictator.”

“You’ve heard the charges, Security Director Musitano,” Hull said to me after his cronies banged their fists on the table demanding my execution. He had a knowing smile, a devious little gash in his face that I recognized from when he’d condemned the last democratic leader of the country to death, “What do you have to say for yourself?”

“I want it seen to that my wife is looked after,” I answered without a hint of emotion. In fairness, this much I had seen coming. One does not rise in the hierarchy of such a vicious government without expecting his comeuppance. I’d been prepared for death since we were young men concocting the murder of policemen before the Revolution had even taken shape.

“She is being investigated as an accomplice to your crimes,” Ingram said, “By my officers. God willing, she’ll be found guilty as you are and shot.”

This, of course, was their great mistake. In the histories I’ve read, my motivations were something of an enigma—why didn’t I do as they said and seize power? Why, when I was dragged off to the prison in the capitol and slip my coded message to an agent in Ingram’s organization, was I planning a return to the republic?

That night was torture. They didn’t beat me, they didn’t even spit on me or curse my name—no, Director of Internal Security Musitano was locked in a lightless, windowless cell to be ignored until his execution the following morning. They wanted me to know that I would be forgotten, stricken from the records, damnatio memoriae, punished from that moment to eternity. They thought that would bother me. In truth, the anguish I felt was for Tyra. A woman whose only crime was growing up down the street from me, falling in love with a man whose obsession bordered on the psychotic. Her only crime was marrying an evil man. Sometimes, her crime was tempering that man’s violence with her warmth, with her efforts to help the masses stricken with poverty in our Revolution’s wake.

My people seized the armory within the prison first. Mere minutes before my execution would have taken place, gunfire rocked the building as they annihilated the gate guards and let in a convoy of Internal Security troops loyal to me and me alone. I heard screams, pleas for mercy, the whoomp of grenades through concrete, the wet slap of shredded meat on the ground. I was released, and from there we worked quickly.

Ingram was in bed with one of his young concubines when we caught him at home. We spared the poor girl, but in working to learn Tyra’s location we skinned most of Ingram’s bloated, disgusting body. I never knew the man had such resistance in him. For him, I did not passively watch. His last words to me, spoken through burbling blood, were:

“You’re too late…too late to save her…if you’d been quicker…”

He was right, of course. By the time I had boots on the ground and Tyra’s black site she’d been dead for hours. I was with them, fast-roping in with the second wave. When I found her body, half-buried in a shallow grave outside the facility, I fell to my knees and screamed. Many, many people would pay for her death.

For a few years after democracy was restored to this battered, splintering nation, I was considered a hero. I never did anything to dispel the stories, I suppose, but at the same time I never encouraged them. I knew my comeuppance was on its way, that as the Truth and Reconciliation Committees continued their investigation all would come to light. Soon, I’ll face the same fate as I was supposed to the night of Tyra’s murder. That’s all right. Maybe now that people have read this they’ll understand why I spent fifteen years as the master of torture and interrogation, of double-agents and betrayals so foul there isn’t a hot enough place in Hell to put me. They’ll understand that if they hadn’t come for Tyra in the dead of night, if they’d assured me she would live a long and happy life in luxury, I’d have sold out every human being on the world and myself.

"We want the shoe department!"

"No, we want the shoe department!"

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

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Thank you so much! I loved Inside Job and it broke my heart to see it canceled :( I'm glad that I can channel that love into some entertaining shorts :)

Uuuhm... into the spiderverse?

"... and then you could usurp the power of Azkab Sherelar! That artifact is basically ripe for the picking. And soon thereafter, the world shall be yours! They'll kneel before you, their new king, Bobarator!"

He hasnt stopped talking about the staff of Akzab whats-his-face since hours. I don't even know how he knows about all these things and why he hasn't tried stealing them... y'know, in his own lifetime. But no, of course he has to torture me in mine with these stupid ideas

"For the last time, I told you my name is Bob! BOB! Not Bobarator or Bobus the terrible. Just Bob. I don't need some fancy villain nickname, Kevin!"

I could already hear the protest rumbling. Since Kevin didn't want to call me by my actual name, I have decided to give him a nickname of his own. A boring one, since he insist of naming me something 'cooler' than Bob

"You seem to not treasure my gift Bob. This gift of power I entrusted on you"

"Oh, you mean these things like hell flames, black hole generation, and mastery above all critters of the dark, like bats and crows and the like? You mean all these abilities that do not help me in the slightest in my fucking everyday life? Oh yeah, 'Boo hoo, Bob doesn't enslave the world or sets a city ablaze', cry me a river!"

It has been like this for months now, back and forth, the same conversation in a different form, every. Single. Day. Normally a Demon King gets killed by the hero in their dark citadel, but no, of course Kevin had to face the holy hero in my fucking city and of course his concentration kf his soul and power had to miss the hero and hit poor old me, at this one day where mom dragged me out for grocery shopping

"How are you ever supposed to take over the world in this way? Kill the hero? Extort money from the masses? Do anything, really?"

"Nah Kevin, I just wanna hang around. Why bother with all that stuff? It's too much of a hassle, really. Why did you even wanna take over the world? Was that part of the job description"

I already knew that Kevin wouldn't answer. He disliked that topic. Now we come to the next part. Bartering

"Alright Bobbicus, maybe not all that... what about hitting someone on the streets?"

"No"

"Playing pranks on the local kids?"

"No"

"Stealing Bellas lunch money?"

"Nah"

"But you hate her!"

"Sure, doesn't mean I'll risk getting caught stealing"

"Alright... how about... uh... spending all your pocket money on sweets, despite you needing it for other things, so you'll have to pump your mother for more money?"

He's gotten better over time. At first he tended to start way higher and this phase took way longer. Some small progress. Even he is starting to get sick of these conversations

"Yeah, I guess we can do that, Kevin"

"Yes! EEEEEVVVIIIIIILLLL"

I still don't know how long I will have to live with this situation. Tomorrow this will repeat. But atleast I'll always have some company

I wasn't referring to the name of the show your character was watching, but the way the key works, and more to the point, the way it DOESN'T work (creating opportunities)

This absolutely sounds like something out of an actual episode. Fantastic job!

I said "WishMASTER", not "WishMAKER", so to aptly answer the question you posited...

That's nonsense.

You heard me; absolute nonsense.

Have you ever, even once, heard a story? Read a book, watched a film? Interacted with any form of media ever?

Heroes are always sacrificing the world to save the person they love. They always put the gun down when the girl is threatened, catch the pram rather than the criminal, hand themselves over instead of a minor character. Narrative convention gives them the victory anyway, but the choice is still made.

It's a consistent trope. It's so common that it's extremely boring. Heroes stop fighting to protect those they love, even when the down-stream consequences are terrible. And villains? Villains choke the woman they love for an imagined betrayal, turn their backs on their families in pursuit of profit, won't even save their own lives because the quest object is right there.

"The thing about loving a Hero is, they always have to put the world first. But a Villain? A villain would watch the world burn to save someone they love!"

It's not true. It's never been true. It's a greeting card sentiment for abusers, a red flag that when they hurt you, when you're left alone or with the blood running down your face, they'll tell everyone that it was for your own good. That they made the difficult, right choice.

And then they'll go on and hurt someone else, still convinced of their righteousness, still adamant that they're doing the right, the loving thing. They'll find someone else vulnerable, someone else who needs to be told how special they are.

Someone else who will nod along to the pretty sentiment just because they're grateful to be spoken to, someone else who will ignore the warning signs, the 'am I a hero or am I a villain?' of it all, the shifting back and forwards between personas, always - somehow, coincidentally - inhabiting the character that happens to benefit them.

They'll claim to be a villain, half-redeemed by love of you, after they've hurt you. Before they hurt, or when you're not there, they'll claim to be the hero, suffering under your irrationality, your neediness. It's not meaningful; their morality doesn't really shift. A hero would be the same inside and out, would love you whether you were there or not, would never tell you your pain is your fault.

It's true, of course, that real heroes don't wear shining armour, that there is a smothered spark of goodness inside even the blackest heart. Believe that, and - when you can - polish the armour, help fan the spark. But also, always watch for the other case, when the spark has no air to breathe, when some stains don't wash clean. A real hero would set you free, not wield your guilt as a weapon and force you to stay.

Be wary of those who tell you about their own shades of grey. No hero is perfect, but someone claiming to be an imperfect hero is rotten to the core. Many villains are redeemable, but the one still stoking the fire while asking for mercy isn't. Beware - most of all - those who tell you they are both, who tell you that anyone else would treat you worse, that their cruelty shows a deeper kindness.

It's not the hero who wears a thousand faces; why have that many masks if you're not afraid of the truth?

“Look, I’m only paid to patrol this mall at night, not to settle turf wars going on between the damn mannequins!” she said.

"Kathy, please try to understand, the fact that you weren't bombarded with product yesterday means they trust you." he said.

"I don't give a fu-"

"I'll double your pay. Double" He said. He tilted his head down and stared at her, unobstructed by his big glasses.

She thought about what that meant. Double pay would mean placing Aiden in a better preschool (somewhere where they actually remember to cover the electrical outlets). It meant she didn't have to constantly play Bill Collector to Marcus. She'd be able to pay off her nursing school debt in half the time. She mulled it over.

"ok, but this better be it. I don't want anymore surprises, so if you have anything else to tell me about this mall now is the time." she said. Kevin, her manager, was extatic. "Just the manequins, aside from that it's a pretty normal mall" he said.

The mall was a normal modern mall. It was dead. No customers and the little foot traffic they did have was from elderly people walking laps.

She looked at her watch and noticed the second hand ticking in the same place. The screen on her phone was cracked making it useless for telling time. "What time is it?" she asked her boss. "Seven, seven" he told her. She made her way towards the exit, passing the now frozen manequins. Now the weird poses made sense. One manaquin towerd over another, who was on it's back with it's arms fully extended in a defensive posture. Other manaquins froze mid battle with heads underneath armpits of others. When she first interviewed for the security job she assumed the manaquin displays were caused by bored retail workers trying to draw attention to their storefront. Now it was all too obvious that every night at midnight these things came to life and viciously attacked each other.

"its double the pay, it's double the pay, Its double the pay..." she kept repeating to herself.

Did you even read anything after "[WP]The Wishmaker's Key. It's like the Monkey's Paw"?

For instance?

No one ever really gets to know you.

This was at first a defence mechanism put in place to protect your identity. It’s not fucking easy to build relationships when people really know who you are.

But every night on discord, while searching for your people, your appearance, height, age, accent and ethnicity change in order to protect yourself.

It wasn’t until last week that you came to realize the psychological impact that it was having on you.

The AI helps you to maintain your stories for each persona, it gets complicated. Having an AI generated face for interactions through discord has been a venture on its own. It took 2 months to hire the right team and another 9 months before it was usable. The audio portion was tricky with accents but when it was finally fixed it worked. No one could really tell the difference with the exception of a slight lighting issue.

When you sleep you dream of these other yous.

Sharing about your then girl who you adored writing anime style love and adventure stories with, was the last real time that you felt like you meeting people.

It was like a piece of you was etched in stone in that time and space.

The darkness that came afterwards consumed you into a solitary beam of triumph, fighting to be on the top of the world.

It tore you.

So seeking solace in people who couldn’t possibly have motivation to harm your ego, challenge your choices or give other negativity to you in this format was a natural formation.

Shielded yet meaningful connection.

Aaa aaaa aaaa aaa. I’m up, I’m up. My alarm is starting to piss me off. Gotta fix that.

Why was I talking with an accent? My mind has been playing tricks on me. I was up too late again, making a wonderful connection with a Canadian woman on discord.

Everytime that happens a part of me stays in that persona, no matter how much I try to shake it.

I think part of me recognizes a connection, something that is fucking painfully real and deep..

[deleted]

Pretty sure there was a movie of very similar circumstances. Someone falls in love and has to find the person over and over, or something.

Try googling the lines by the narrator 🙂

I love this one! It's interesting seeing a relationship in a situation like this

[removed]

Death was no stranger to me. I was surrounded by it growing up. As a child my village was ravaged by war that we had no say in, no real part in. When I got out, when I got to a better place, I still chose lines of work that dealt with death. I was emergency medical technician, I was a mortuary assistant, I was a cemetery caretaker.

All my life I surrounded myself with death. It was not on purpose at first, of course. But somehow I was drawn to it. And it to me. The dead liked me, and in some ways I liked them. Because the dead told stories of truth. The dead did not lie. And that was comforting for me.

Maybe I should have gone to therapy earlier in life. So I would deal with things more healthily. But I was fine where I was. Working nights, away from people. It was quiet where I was. And I liked the quiet.

The cemetery was filled with ghosts.

The whole country was, brimming with phantoms and echoes of the past that anyone could see if they chose to look. Young, old, innocent, guilty. People. At the end of the day, that was all they were, all they were used to be. People.

Each with their story to tell, should they remember it.

I sat on the rickety office chair, filling out a building defect checklist to hand in the next day. I could hear the hum of the florescent light above me, a low, uninterrupted noise that provided the backbone of the symphony of buzzing from the autumn insects that flitted around this singular light source.

I put the list away, and looked out the window. I could see them, the shapes that wandered. Some aimlessly, some with purpose, some that just stood, watching. I knew there would be a few outside my door, waiting for me. They liked to stare. They liked to think they were creepy, trying to scare me. Some liked to do that, when they realised they could be seen. They liked to perceived as frightening. As if in their boredom all they had was this.

Most of them usually ignored everything. They stuck close to where they passed, or close to a loved one. They also liked to watch the living, but in a passive, mildly longing way.

But some were talkative. Especially when they found someone who could hear them and talk back.

Radhika was nine years old. She was strangled to death according to her autopsy. No killer was ever found, and her family mourned her deeply.

She was also at the window, looking urgently at me and beckoning.

I put the checklist on the drawer and left the room, being greeted by the scary ones at the door. They were looming, one of the door frame, one hovering a few meters in front of me, pointing at me with jaws opened impossibly wide. One was crawling towards me rapidly, breathing raspily and erratically.

I gave them all an awkward smile, sidestepped the crawling ghost and went to meet up with Radhika.

"They don't like that." She told me, looking at theghosts outside my door.

"Huh?" I asked.

"They're supposed to be the scary ones. But you're not scared of them. They don't like that." She said, worriedly.

"Are you scared of them?" I asked.

"Yeah. They're... They follow you. Not just you. They follow everyone. And even if the person they're following can't see them, they can feel them there. And it's not nice. Why are they like that?"

"I don't know. I can only guess that they're bored."

We both stared at the three ghosts that had tried to scare me. They were slowly dispersing, and I could feel their disappointment.

"What's up?" I asked.

"Oh! I saw her! I saw the woman who killed me yesterday! I wanted to tell you but Jeeva was the one working. And he can't see me."

"Wait, you saw her?"

Radhika nodded, eyes wide.

"Is she going to kill me again? Does she know I'm a ghost? Does she want to kill me when I'm a ghost?" Radhika was trembling.

I wanted to hold her, comfort her. But that was not the prerogative of the living.

"No, Radhi. She can't hurt you anymore."

"Then why did she come here? She was looking for me, right?"

"For your gravestone. Maybe to see where you were buried."

"But why?"

"I'm sorry, Radhika. I don't know."

"But she was here. She was here last night. Maybe she'll come again today."

"Come, let's look at our camera to see what she looked like."

I have never been the same person two days in a row. Tom says he doesn't mind. "It's like a new adventure every day!", is what he says, and I suppose there's some truth to that thought. But I can see it in his face when he wakes up every morning to me, the new me. A droop in his eyes. A slight in his expression, as if every morning he is desperately trying to remember the me he first met, the one he fell in love with.

The pictures that scatter the walls are of that me. A me so far removed I forget what she looked like until I look at the pictures again, but when I do I cannot remember what it felt like to be her. Despite what Tom says, I know he only stays with me in hopes I become her again one day.

This morning upon waking up I am Asian; tall, thin, and model like. When I check the mirror the first thing I notice is my skin: fair and flawless, like a sheet of freshly fallen snow wrapped around me. And I feel pretty for the first time in a while.

Thankfully I'm a woman again today, the days where I'm not become... uncomfortable, for me and Tom both.

From the bedroom I can hear Tom stretch out loudly as he does most mornings, then call out.

"Who are you today?"

"A woman, really pretty." I try to hide the tiredness in my voice, but feel as if it's ingrained now.

"You sound different too. Can I see?"

As I step back into the room his eyes widen, and I feel excited to be this new form, but as usual his face droops again.

"In the past few years have you ever felt the same as you did back then?" Tom gestures over to a picture on the bedside; an image of me and him, the me before my condition.

In truth I had not. I don't even remember what being her felt like anymore, and if I did then I'd already be her again. But that's not what Tom wanted to hear. What he wanted to hear was that everyday I was closer to being her again. That any day I would return to his beck and call as who I once was. What he really wanted to hear was:

"Some days, yes. I can tell you like me better those days. But I'm getting closer so you don't have to worry."

My words were met by a soured expression, like a rotted grape staring back at me. Whether distaste for my reply or a disbelief I could not tell. It did not matter though, tomorrow I would be a new person once more and be taken another step further from the me I once was. No longer Marcy or Anna; Glenn or Carry, something new every day.

As I returned to the bathroom and looked in the mirror once more I could almost see her. The woman I had been those years ago. She teased me, flashing between the old her and the current me. I reached out to the glass and touched, my fingertips, the fingertips of this Eastern born stranger I inhabited, meeting with the fingers of the real me. If I could just push through maybe I could be her again.

"Honey, did you take your medication today?" I jumped, Toms voice startling me back.

"No, I will now" I replied, opening the bottle by the sink.

Carefully I took out a little white pill. Mood Stabilizer, is what my doctor had called them. I didn't know what that meant though. My mood wasn't the problem.

I brought the pill over to the sink and dropped it in as I did every morning, then turned on the water and watched it decay.

"There, took it." I called out.

"Good, you won't get better if you don't try sweetie. I'm proud of you and whoever you feel like today."

This time, in the mirror, I saw her. Me staring back at me. The me from all of those years ago; though as always, the moment passed.

from last year

https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/p6us7e/wp_an_agoraphobic_princess_is_sick_and_tired_of/

and even earlier

https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/ae6uli/wp_you_are_a_princess_that_owns_a_pet_dragon_you/

Welcome to the Prompt! All top-level comments must be a story or poem. Reply here for other comments.

Reminders:

>* No AI-generated reponses 🤖 >* Stories 100 words+. Poems 30+ but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* [RF] and [SP] for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

🆕 New Here? ✏ Writing Help? 📢 News 💬 Discord

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