Thank you.

It is. Good catch.

It glared at him, frozen in place yet menacing nonetheless. It seemed to threaten him with its mere existence. If it was allowed to pass through, Roger and everything he knew, eveything he had worked for would be doomed.

The seven red numbers, shielded in parentheses, at the bottom of the budget. A loss. A huge loss. He mashed a few keys, clicked a few buttons, but he knew it had been futile. He sighed. He had no other choice.

Roger peered over his cubical wall to check for anyone that might observe him. He only saw Dave, sitting in his chair, annoyingly loud yet efficient at his work. Between all the sports talk and persistent munching of chips, Dave always seemed to have his work done early and well. Some rare type of supply chain magic, he wondered.

Roger sat back down and hunched over his keyboard, keeping his hands out of sight from the adjacent cubicals. He contorted them this way and that, as if his fingers were wrestling to the death. He whispered ancient words, known only to those who kept ledgers for kings, tyrants, or other lavish leaders who couldn't understand cash flow even if they'd been given a seventeen slide presentation with only a few bulleted lists and lots of Clip Art graphics.

He was reluctant to look up. His magic was powerful, sometimes too powerful. But he had to move on, to finish his job.

Where the terrifying red had been was wiped clean and replaced with magnificently black, bold numbers. Only six figures, but he couldn't risk altering too much while keeping his magic secret. He peeked over the cubical walls to see what may have changed.

The fruit and salad bar down the way was now stocked with oatmeal packets, cereal bars, and a dirty microwave. The sales team had grown, but by the looks of it they weren't pleased with greater pressure on their backs. Among other things, Dave was gone. So there was at least some relief.

I know. That's the twist. She never told him about that part.

not sure about that, OP has replied to someone yesterday, its very likely that

OP is not very active user in reddit or a terrible bot

In scale of Discworld to the trashfire which is Dresden files, just how bad is the writing? If it's at least readable, might give it a shot, the series sounds fun as all hell.

Short yet very much effective. When a man recognises an angel, the first thing they think about is all the sins they carelessly committed. Sometimes, your final judgement comes sooner than you think.

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And thus, David overcame the biggest of all Goliaths. Fascinating story. What stronger proof of free will is there than to chew out the leash your owner has on you ? Die as a person who has shown God what he and his kins were capable of, and made God take a step back. Die with your people. Thus, humanity reaches its greatest potential, as it flies beyond its creator, and extends its arms to embrace the fire of the Sun.

Come on down to my Simple Spell Shack!

Will you be able to defeat a dragon? No, but I can temporarily turn your hair whatever shade of purple you’d like. Have you ever wanted to levitate about 2 inches off the ground for about half an hour? Well do I have the spell for you. Dust the cobwebs in your hut with ease. Impress your friends with my Shrinking Spell. It only works on fruit and wears off in the matter of minutes, but it makes a great party trick.

While you’re here, enjoy a slice of my homemade apple pie. The taste itself is magical enough to have you come back for seconds!

Simple Spell Shack, at the corner of Magic and Fun.

super fast legal disclaimer voice (SSS is not responsible for misuse of spells. Do not use Purple Hair Spell if your are allergic to Purple Hair Spell. Fruit under the Shirking Spell may pose as a choking hazard for small children, not designed for children under the age of 3. Shrinking Spell does not work on cooked fruits or vegetables of any kind. Apple pie does not actually contain magic that will have the consumer retuning for seconds. Please use magic responsibly and remember: don’t enchant and drive.)

That's really nice to hear. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

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This one's my favorite 😁

"I suppose at some point we should at least try to escape."

"Escape? Escape? My brother, we're in Malibu! The sun! The sand! The ocean! The women!"

"You do of course know that we are not in Malibu right now."

"Right yes I do know tha--"

"We are locked in a room somewhere in Connecticut."

"Yeah no you're right I just--"

"It has been three days since we've seen the light of the sun."

"I'm just having a bit of fun with it, y'know?"

"I'll say."

"Is that so wrong? To enjoy my time here?"

"In captivity, you mean?"

"We're all captives! That's why they call it Captivalism!"

"They don't call it that."

"I'm just saying, they have to at least feed us or we'll die before talking, they have to house us so we won't be discovered... our basic needs are being met, free of charge!"

"I feel like a few levels to Maslow's hierarchy of needs are neglected during forced captivity."

"Not if we use the power of imagination!"

"You've gone mad. Three days in here and you've gone totally mad."

"If 'going mad' means I'm on a beach in Malibu, then I'm Hannibal fucking Lecter!"

"Again, not on a beach. You're alone, in a locked room, with an increasingly large pile of shit in the corner."

"Don't bring up shit-corner, it shatters the illusion."

"There's no illusion! None of this is real! I'm not even real! You've retreated into the confines of your own mind in a desperate attempt to maintain some sense of control over your situation, when the truth is you are doing really poorly right now!"

"I am not! Just as soon as I get out of this room I'll be back on my feet!"

"Oh, oh good. So get out of this room then."

"No."

"And there's our problem."

"There's no problem! Malibu!"

"There is no Malibu! You can't keep hiding from reality like this!"

"Now you listen to me, pal. You are a part of my escapist fantasy, and you will ACT like--"

"You're diving into escapist fantasies without even trying to actually escape!"

"How am I supposed to escape? This room is impregnable!"

"You haven't so much as checked if the door is locked!"

"Well excuse me for believing in people! For believing our captors are competent!"

"God, you'll do anything to avoid reality, won't you? You're not afraid of being trapped in here, you're afraid of going back!"

"Shut up."

"You're afraid of the bills, and the responsibilities, and the social interactions--"

"Shut up!"

"You're gonna die in this dark, rancid, windowless room because you're too afraid to face the world outside!"

"SHUT UP!"

...

God. Okay. Yeah, it does smell pretty bad in here.

I was so rapt, I didn't notice any mistakes. Not saying there are none there. In fact, just glance and caught a "forced" where you meant "forces," but nothing shook me out of enjoying the story and atmosphere as I read.

"I was enjoying solitude," you complain to Sobek and Frigga over mugs of honeydew. "I didn't have... obligations. You know, the boons. The smiting."

"I always did enjoy a good smiting," Frigga chuckles.

Sobek hisses amusedly, mead running down his snout. "There are only threeee of them! Sssso it could be worssssse. Low expectationssss. I like the axolotllll though. Nicccce fellow."

"This whole setup seems... familiar somehow, though," you ponder. "A teenager girl? Summoning a deity? Quirky siblings with a cute animal sidekick? Come on guys... you know I'm not one of those omniscient deities."

"Ohhhhhhh..." Frigga suddenly looks hugely awkward; it's a slightly terrifying sight on a senior deity. The crocodile's tail twitches in confusion. You both look at her expectantly as she snaps her fingers. "Benzaiten! You around? Got a minute?"

A sudden vapour coalesces into a beautiful woman: Benzaiten, the Japanese goddess of creativity and art. "Frigga! What a pleasure! What can I offer you?"

Frigga explains your situation. "... and there is a cute pet. An axolotl."

Benzaiten laughs, the sound of a thousand silver bells in perfect unison. "Ah, I see. So amusing! The girl, manifesting power at her age of adolescence. You see, it is an anime!"

It’s always the same. First, there is a slight, yet sharp sense of awareness that spreads from the head to the spine, that makes the legs tense, and the fists clench, gearing up for a punch that will never come.  It is not unlike the sensation of being watched, especially when your eyes do not, or rather cannot meet those that are already fixed on the back of your skull.

Besides; even if you were to turn your head, there would be nothing there to meet your gaze.

The feeling continues. It sinks into your palms, settles into your shoulders, and you feel yourself rising, up from the stool, away from the bar and the feel of a glass in your fingers.

‘Hey!’ A voice cuts in, but it’s not enough to make you stumble. And dimly, as the voice rants on about how they’re not a charity and you better think twice before daring to scamper off into the night, your fingers remember the feel of your wallet, and how to shift through the coins inside, to draw them out with a shimmer of silver. They rest on your palm for a moment, miniature moons, fallen from the sky, and then you place them, oh-so-gently against the glass you left behind. There’s something satisfying about the clink they produce and how the cold presence of the metal vanishes from your skin; and then you’ve moving, leaving the voice and your money behind.

Beneath both the shadows of people and the flare of electrical lights, you wind your way between tables, clamber over steps, banishing the feel of the wooden banister the hand as soon as you meet the dark, drifting space of the night air moments later.

You turn right, and the awareness fades. Turn left and it sharpens.

That’s all it takes to make you walk, to pace beneath street lights that almost, but do not quite flicker as you pass. If people were to stop, to stare a little longer than the seconds it takes to pass you by, they might notice the way your shape jolts and moves a little too fast, from one shadow to the next. Especially when you pass hedges and panes of glass, the easy-to-see habitat of cobwebs and the tiny deaths they entrap. It’s easy to tug on the energy that spills over from the cessation of lives here, the snap of electricity that fills your skin and that makes you a little faster than anything that still has the right to breathe.

And time flies by sooner than it should as a result, enough for minutes to pass instead of the hours it should take to reach the place that makes your scalp prickle and your sense sing, to tell you here, here, before anymore go there,to the place that is not yet ready for them.

But this place, this place you have arrived to, is tall and cumbersome, a house with four stories and blackened beams that criss-cross over white walls. A place for someone richer than you, except when it comes to time; and the proof of that is in their groaning door that falls open with a simple push from your palm. Locks, and other time-wasting measures do not work for someonewho has altered death’s timetable, enough to push their own appointment up a few decades.   

You walk and feel the crackle of energy as you pass various items; a jolt past the table where a solicitor choked on soup filled with something other than pepper and meat; a snap where someone stumbled and fell, the knife rising and falling along the curve of their chest as they struggled to breathe. These deaths are bigger than the ones before, though many, you know, would argue that they are still small. Small in comparison to others.It does not matter.

They were still meant to travel on a little longer.

‘Who are you?!’Another voice cuts into you, for the second time tonight. You stare at the mouth that moves, at the eyes that glare. At the shoulders that square, as the figure stands and starts to move.

But you are faster, and the butter knife that was on the table is already in your hand; because that’s how death works. Using anything and everything in the immediate environment as a catalyst. For the surgeon a few hours ago, it was a cracked petri dish, the broke edge as jagged as a shark’s tooth; but for this person here it is a butter knife, blunted both by farmhouse bread and margarine.

The figure flails as you press in, panicked when their arms are too weak to push you back, and even more so when the hand that grasps for a candle cannot force you hair or clothes to catch aflame. The orange light runsoff and away from you, in a waterfall of fiery colour, but it cannot catch holdof you, not when it is not yet your time.

‘No, No!’

Last words, soon whispers, and then even those cease. You pause, look curiously at the blood on the knife. It’s good blood, strong blood. It should have carried the person beneath you through many more years. But if it had, itwould have carried away others, others who protested having the wills of theirloved ones altered in ways that made no sense, who cried out for answers overlost homes and unfulfilled insurance pay-outs. You can feel their stories in the air, and the endings that they were given.

Yes, you know there are others out there, who make bigger waves, cause more deaths. But you are here for the stragglers, the ones who fall through the paperwork, never to return.

You go back out into the night. You walk and walk under you find a river, or a washroom, or any kind of water. Once, one night, it was a puddle.You gaze down at your face. Try to spy more lines, more wrinkles under thebrow. But there is nothing new enough to worry you

.But you still must pay the toll. So you raise the knife. Plunge it down. And the blood clinging to its surface peels away, your fingers already diving in, through the threads of red and brown, to pull energy through and mould it like clay. You whisper to it of the girl who came to claim her fortune and how her breath was divided from her lungs with a blade; and of a solicitor who was loyal enough to his clients to end up choking on soup that stained his insides, all because he tried to bargain for a truth that would help them and doom himself.

The red and brown within the water shifts, slips fish-like into a silvery gleam, the colour you have sometimes imagined to be that of the souls you speak of. You lift your hand from the water, carefully. And there, perched between finger and thumb are two coins, bright as the moon, and small enough to roll up inside your fist. Perhaps you will use it to pay for another drink. Maybe bless another bartender with a just a little bit more time to their life, reallocating the hours stolen from another, all to help correct a balance you can still mostly guess at.

And if Death itself minds? Well. They have yet to speak to you about it.

Still…

‘Death?’ you ask the air, the sky, and the coins in your hand. ‘Death?’ you ask again, without knowing where to look, knowing there is no mouth ready to answer you. ‘Am I doing the right thing? Do you mind it when I give others the coins? I…’

But you trail off. Because you were warned once, not to bargain with Death. Serve them, yes. Speak? Well, if you must. But to understand it? To have an actual conversation? No, that is beyond any and all means of the living.

And that is what you must do. Live. And trust that you have not already turned against Death’s judgment.

The grim strip lighting of the loading bay dazzled Christian Rabellino as he stepped inside. All around him, rebel fighters frenzied with activity as they prepared to launch their most audacious attack yet against the regime. They planned to strike right at it's heart - the presidential palace. He had long since informed the agency of the plan, when it was in its infancy. In response, a significant proportion of security forces had been removed from the capital - baiting La Gente into a rushed execution. The official line fed to state media was that they were needed to put down an insurgency to the East.

Though he had always emphasised to himself the need for professional detachment, he could not help but feel some personal connection with his would-be comrades. After all, he had spent two years ingratiating himself with them, earning their trust. He would be gone, extracted covertly in the night as he kept watch outside, before the compound was raided at dawn. That was the plan as communicated to him by dead drop. As he watched grenade launchers and rifles be passed hurriedly from fighter to fighter, before being stuffed into the beds of trucks, he felt a new kind of solemn adulation for the dedication and true belief he had come to begrudgingly respect. The feeling took him by surprise.

Perhaps this was some kind of cosmic foreshadowing of what was about to come. In rushed little Javier, young son of Alejandro Busquets. Busquets was right hand man to the legendary Escorpión.

"Javier! I've told you not to come in here!"

Javier was not dissuaded, making a b-line for his father, who dutifully lifted him into his arms despite his unhappiness.

"Papa, papa... When will you be home again?" asked the boy, wide eyes pleading.

"I hope soon my boy. I hope soon. And then we will go into the city again, for it will be ours once more. No more exile, no more hiding. You can go back to school!"

The boy cried out in comic sadness at the suggestion.

Suddenly, Christian felt dizzy. The world spun around him. Because of him - his actions - this boy would watch his father die at next sunrise. The boy himself would not be safe, either. President Peñarol's forces were not known for mercy, or for discretion.

He had to do something. He had to tell them that he had received intelligence that a raid was being planned. He would think of an explanation. He had to do something.

He cared not to join a band of terrorists. But he cared not to live as a man responsible for the nightmare that had confronted him. After years of service to his nation, he had made the decision to betray it in an instant.

"Alejandro! I need to speak to you and the boss. Now."

I wrote this quickly with little to no proofreading due to being very short on time, so apologies for any mistakes!

Great, but Edison isn't really the best choice for the "inventor" of electricity. The man was a blatant thief and a liar.

This was an interesting flip on the prompt!

If it's word for word, though, especially one as long and involved as this, there's a good chance it's a karma-farming bot.

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

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Scottish then?

I’ve always known that my past actions would catch up to me one way or the other, I just assumed I would be killed in the battlefield, tortured maybe, not go through all that insane journey to be kidnapped over a decade later.

It all started last Tuesday when I was returning to my shithole of an apartment after yet another day of pretending to be somebody I’m not, I reached the corner-store well aware of some random car following me, yet I shrugged it off, ‘Meh, worst case scenario, I’ll have an excuse to beat someone down’, I thought to myself, next thing I know I’m here in this featureless cement cube with voices barking at me, telling me to share all the information I have on ‘M’, an old war-brother that I hadn’t communicated with in years…

A few hours in, and various attempts later to make me fess up, I realized, pacing around my cell, that my capturers knew almost nothing about me, other than my ties to M, as this wasn’t my first rodeo, not after being held captive multiple times during that god-forsaken war, not after that asylum, not after…

That’s when it hit me, it’s been ages since it was this quiet inside my head, it’s been ages since I’ve taken my last trip to that beautiful world I’ve constructed to escape all that surrounded me, it’s been eons since I’ve been with my real family, well, their ghosts at least…

A smile is suddenly painted on my face, as I sit down, crossing my legs beneath me, humming an old song about my city’s ruins, eyes wide shut as the light fills up every cell of my existence, I am finally home again…

To be continued… or maybe not…