Everything was in shambles, people were hungry and infrastructure was breaking down. They tried to get rid of government completely but it has only brought about ruin and destruction so far.

Yes, King John overtaxed the people and sent them all into poverty. But at least there were systems in place. Now, there were not systems in place. Robin Hood decided that nobody should have to pay taxes to anyone, because they worked hard and deserved to keep what they made from their own hard work.

But now there only turned chaos. Prices were no longer regulated in a way to prevent price gouging. Roads and buildings were falling apart without anybody to put them back together. Mail wasn't being delivered. And there was nobody around to enforce the law anymore. It was like some post apocalyptic world that was aimed at young adults.

Robin Hood decided to put a government back together. He started appointing officials and creating departments in the government to work on these problems. But he was taking them away from their work, so he had to pay them somehow. He had to tax the people. People were willing to at first. To solve the problems that were going on. And of course they trusted Robin Hood, he was the one that saved them from King John. So Robin Hood taxed them. And he took the position of President, solving the problems of society. But as the society grew, so did the government. More departments were formed, and as more departments were formed, the higher taxes became. Robin Hood started to enjoy it in the castle. He became used his big rooms and cozy walls. No longer was he the guy who would sleep out in the wilderness under the stars, but instead a giant bed. He no longer saw the individuals and their sufferings and their problems, but just heard about their problems in meetings. They did not seem as a big of a deal from looking at the pie charts.

Robin Hood continued to raise taxes. He continued to disregard the people. He became King John

This is so good! Very interesting take, I really like how you built it up quickly and it still felt earned, crazy good response!

I stare at him. "What?" I can't believe my ears. The kid repeats his message exactly, word-for-word. I take a second to register that in my head. "No...?" I respond awkwardly. "Then what's that?" He points to my birthmark.

It's in a perfect spiral. Sure I found it weird at times, but I've heard of weirder birthmarks. What I see next, is that the kid shows an identical birthmark. It's in the right upper arm, just like mine. He holds his next to mine, and both of them start spiraling and moving.

I can only stare as the kid's overall build gets bigger, and his skin gets a soft glow to him. I'm only weirded out even more as I'm experiencing the same change. "What is happening?" I ask him. "You seem to have forgotten who you really are." The other guy explains, "I transformed you this time to help jog your memory."

I'm suddenly sent to a bright place, full of strong-looking men and beautiful women. As I look around my brain gets flooded with new information, and I start to smile a mischievous smile...

"Dion!" a voice bellows to the kid that brought me here, "You should never have returned Shrinal to the land of the gods! He was sent to Earth and stripped of his memories because of all the chaos he has caused!"

Now imagine that B still equals 5 and there is no C.

Base 12 is considered more useful because it has more factors: It’s divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6 instead of just by 2 and 5. That doesn’t make it any easier for somebody who’s used base 10 their whole life, though.

I don't know. Old Indian guys swearing at each other could be the pinnacle.

"I WILL FUCK YOU, BUDDY! BEHENCHOD!"

I love it.

I want till part 40

Moar

I've had one of my buddies praise the shit out of base12 non stop for the last motherfucking months and it's driving me insane. I do not see why it's supposedly so good.

I mean, base10 increases in digits each 10^n times, it makes sense and is continues. Meanwhile base12? It's like base10 but I also have to not forget the extra 2. It's just more confusing.

I'm serious, do tell me why folks think base12 is so good because it's making me lose my mind.

Astrid despised her nightly visits to Leon's house, resented every step of the journey to the old man's front door. But what followed the journey itself set her teeth on edge and curled her fingers into fists so tight that her fingernails drew small cuts in the flesh of her calloused palms, leaking with stolen blood.

Beyond the worn wooden front door was Leon himself, and hours of doting upon the old man. It was predictable as clockwork---Astrid would unlock the door, and Leon would be just on the other side, dressed in his flannel pajamas against the night's cold. His face would split into a smile that turned the myriad of wrinkles that crisscrossed his face into yawning canyons.

And so, they would sit at Leon's old card table---one of the few pieces of furniture the old man still owned---and the charade would begin in earnest. Leon would ramble to Astrid about the trivial details of his day. The trip he had made to the corner store, the new neighbors down the street and their new baby, the rudeness of a telemarketer who had badgered him for nearly an hour.

And in a way, Astrid didn't mind. It was boring but it passed the time. The old man had little energy at this time of night, and each story seemed to carry him further towards the endpoint of sleep. Besides...the more Leon focused on himself, the less he focused on her. The less questions he had to ask. But eventually he would ask, and Astrid would meet Leon's eager questions with a host of lies.

Because it wasn't her the old man cared about. They did not know each other, not really. Their meeting had been brief, and Leon would never remember it anyway. No, Leon was asking about Jean, with an earnest desire to better understand his son and know where his life was headed.

Jean. He was the cause of this current situation. The young data analyst with a promising career, and a newly purchased apartment now gathering dust behind a seal of crime-scene tape. The young man who had recently lost his mother, which had kindled a desperate desire to look after his remaining parent---a desire that had been passed on to the young man's killer.

Our lives are not our own anymore. And why should they be? We take the lives of others into our bodies to keep ourselves tethered to this world. It is only natural that who they were can become who we are, if we are not careful.

The words themselves were overly flowery, she believed that even now. But Astrid soon understood their practical meaning. It was one of many lessons her mentor had taught her in the nights following the moment he pulled her from the bloodstained planks of a dimly lit tavern, licking blood from her countless bar-fight stab wounds before sinking his own teeth into her throat.

Never take the lives of one's prey, no matter how appetizing their blood tastes. Drain them just to death if you must, but never ever take it all to the last drop, unless you want their life to corrupt the borderline of what defines you and what defines them. It was an important command, impressed upon her nearly as much as the need to avoid the lethal sun, and Astrid had learned both lessons well.

It had been over a thousand years and Astrid had never slipped up. So many times, so many temptations, and she had turned away each time, leaving her prey to gasp out their last breaths at her feet.

And then came Jean. This man out of millions of faceless cattle, who had proven just a bit too much. Astrid was still not sure what had precisely led her mistake, but she knew the moment his heartbeat had stopped, and the steady spurt of his blood had run dry. And only seconds after that, his memories had poured into her like floodwaters.

And so now here she sat with Leon, the killer of his son pretending to be him.

She hated it. She hated Leon. She hated Jean. And yet she could not bring herself to harm him, even in the most minute of ways. She had invaded Leon's mind with a single look into his eyes the first time she'd come to his doorstep, destroyed his memory of his son's missing person's case and impressed upon him that she was Jean.

She wondered sometimes what would happen if she simply looked into his eyes again and restored his knowledge, removed the psychic mask that told his brain she was his son. What would his reaction be if instead of a young man, he was faced with a young woman? Red haired where his son was brunette, stout and short where his son was slim and tall? And what if she went even further? To show him her true face, a nightmare of bleeding red eyes and angler-fish teeth?

But then Leon would smile, and she would see him, not as he was now, but as he was then. Younger, strong and seemingly invincible. Always there to take care of him and his mother, to show him how to throw a baseball, how to chop wood. A harsh disciplinarian to be sure, but also his loudest and most raucous coach and supporter.

And the urge would fade. Because why would any son think to harm his loving father?

The whole book please

"What do you think?" the Director asked.

Phil knew better than to imagine the Director did not already have an explanation - possibly the explanation. However, looking at the corpses slumped all over the lab, he had a feeling that he did not want to know the answer.

"They triggered the Omega intruder Defense" Tony pointed out - even the normally unflappable lunatic was silenced by the sheer scope of the disaster before them. Not a quip from him since the moment of entering the lab. "Nerve gas. All dead within a couple of minutes or less."

"They triggered it" Steve echoed, looking around the carnage disbelievingly "Why? What could have been... It can't have been mind control - the labs are well insulated against it."

The Director nodded "They did this of their own will."

Steve and Tony glanced at each other. "Project Alpha" Steve said with an air of finality. It was not a question. The Director had no intention of denying it. After all, this was the entire reason he had summoned the team here.

The time for secrets was over. He now knew what Project Alpha had discovered. He now knew how it all worked. That kind of knowledge was not the type one man could bear alone - not even a man like the Director.

"They figured it out?" Tony frowned - this is not really his area of specialty. "That crackpot theory of Richards'..."

"They figured it out" the Director confirmed, his tone heavy. "And they decided they could not live with it."

"And we are here because?" Natasha asked.

The Director met her eyes calmly "To see whether we can live with it."

"Do we get a choice?" Bruce asked "You know, regarding we get told or not?"

"You can walk out that door" the Director shrugged "Go right ahead, if you wish.."

No one made a move. The Director smiled. He knew his people.

"The Hero's Journey" he could almost hear the air quotes in his own words.

It sounded pretty pretentious, when you put it like that. But the fact of the matter is, that was what they were - heroes.

Screwed up, of course, occasionally emotionally constipated, almost always with the survival instincts of a squirrel on crack cocaine. Yet...heroes.

People who got back up every time they were knocked down. People who stood in the dark to hold it at bay. Scarred people, crazy people, dangerous people.

People who did what had to be done. People who held the monsters at bay. Their defense against darkness and whatever dwelt within.

Heroes. Stories of a specific pattern, repeated throughout the ages. One in a million chances. Freak accidents. Mutations. Chances. They came up, one way or the other. Always following a pattern. And now...now they knew why.

"You - or rather, they - found the Guide." Steve said.

The Director nodded "In a manner of speaking, yes."

"And..."

"We are not human."

A stunned silence greeted the pronouncement. Not even Tony laughed. They knew, instinctively, that this was no trick, no joke.

The Director gestured around the place "This is not earth."

"Then?"

"We are the Immune System."

"Excuse me?"

"Humanity's immune system. Earth - earth as they know it - is one plane among many, one plane amidst a sea of chaos. A sea from which things creep out, again and again and again. Reaching out for earth. For humanity. Infections. Things that would devour humanity, body mind and soul."

"And we...we are..."

"The defense. Formed of their collective subconscious. Formed to be their defense. Formed between them and the madness out there. The Knight. The Atoner. The Spy. We are here, buffers against the things that crawl out of the dark."

Locked in eternal battle. there will never be a time when earth as they know it will be safe. There will always be one crisis or another. There will always be things to fight, things out of the true humanity's vast nightmares. Things they will have to battle here, hold at bay, forever and forever.

They, the archetypes, the heroes, the guardians carved out of humanity's dreams. The last line of defense for a world that stranded them in eternal strife.

The first discoverers had been unable to bear that weight - they had chosen to die, instead. Perhaps some of his team will choose the same, the Director supposed, noting how pale, how still, they had gone.

But that wouldn't matter. They would not be allowed to stay dead. Not for long. Not for real. There will be a miracle recovery. A deal made. Time Travel. Somehow, the dead will not be allowed to rest.

They are the archetypes. They are the dreams. They will never be allowed to die. They will return. Again and again and again.

Some of the mages were struck mad. Others had to avert their eyes. But a few had the strength of will and raw might necessary to record everything that they saw and heard. Every mad uttering from the creature's many mouths, and how in its middle, there was a face. A human face. Too human. Its eyes bulging. Its nose pointed. Its gums red. Its teeth wet with crimson blood. And it wanted something. One would not have to hear what it said, if it could speak. But it wanted what it had lost. One could look at it for a fraction of a second, and one would understand that it needed something. That eternally, it was creating Heroes, and sending them forth on journeys throughout the lands. Because it needed to make it right. It needed to remake its Hero. Forever had it worked on creating the part of itself it had lost. The one it loved about all others. The Eternal Hero. The one who have a thousand faces. Eternally it had laboured, not understanding that it was ripping what it wanted to shreds, rather than letting it come to be naturally. It had taken every face from the Hero With A Thousand Faces, not understanding why that hero had so many faces, and had made them a part of the world.

Forcing every face to live a human life. To suffer a human death. Eternally recurring, until the end of time itself. A blind idiot god, madly screaming into infinity, trying to bring back a dead friend, and only making them even deader. For every time a human wearing the face of a hero died, the face would become less and less like the ones once worn by the first hero. The Eternal Hero. And this revelation did so insult the scholars and mages of the world, did so make their blood boil, that their world would forever be condemned by this creature to be its mad attempt to bring back what it had lost, that they unleashed all their considerable arcane might upon that unreal creature. And out there, in the land-between-lands, where one might find the pools of Aslan, or the parasite dimensions, or even the Empyrean Realm of Souls, such powers were multiplied by all the spells that they could have cast in the past, but never did. All their potential selves, that had never been, and all their spells, that had never been cast, manifested in that moment to destroy the multicreature and its insane dream once and for all.

It did not even notice as it burned, boiled, froze, and rotted. It did not notice as its component parts began to collapse into raw non-baryonic matter, or dissolved into more raw nothingness. Only when it could no longer move the faces around in the universe that it was horrifically scarring, did it scream in agony. It did not understand what was going on. Could not on any level fathom that it was dying, in the realm betwixt all others, where its component parts would drift forever, never finding rest, never knowing peace, never rising again. Once it was done, then the mages could see that the multicreature had been standing over the corpse of the Eternal Hero, its thousands upon thousands of faces ripped off. Even though it was dead, it was pleading to them in their minds, to take it inside their universe, where it could be reborn properly, and arise again. Knowing that the Eternal Hero would have to spend the rest of the existence of their universe, slowly regaining its faces, they agreed, and dragged the body of the Eternal Hero through the fractal dimensional hole, back into realspace.

And upon that place where the dimensional hole closed, the many wizards and scholars set up a care facility for their mad comrades, and upon the top of it they placed the body of the Eternal Hero into a sarcophagus, where it would rest, recover, and become alive once more as slowly, the faces it had lost would die and return to it in a proper, healthy manner. And it is said that when the universe finally stands upon the brink of unnatural death, that the Eternal Hero will be healed at long last, and return to life; and it shall save this reality one final time as payment for its salvation from its maddened friend.

/r/ApocalypseOwl

For as long as humanity has been around, the pattern has repeated itself. Over and over and over again. As if the universe is nothing more than a machine, or worse, a game. Over and over, it has happened, is happening, and presumably will be happening again in the future. Eternal recurrence. The hero of a thousand faces. The Hero's Journey has been repeating itself throughout history without even a hint of failure. Always, there is an incident. A war, a battle, a death, someone going missing, or just an oath sworn under ill-timed moments. But it is always the same, the Young Hero arises from cosmos(the order of the home), and goes out into the chaos(the larger world) to fulfil a task. Rescuing a beloved one. Finding a long lost parent. Completing a sacred oath taken by their ancestor thousands of years ago. That, in and of itself, doesn't matter. And it ends the same. The hero with a thousand faces rides out and fights the foe, faces evil forces, and comes back stronger and wiser, having completed their goal, rescued the girlfriend/boyfriend/spouse/pet/child/parent, etc. and probably saving the world somehow.

But why does that happen. Scholars have wondered this for ages, or at least as long as people started to notice the pattern. Started to notice that when the third son of a peasant went out on a journey that his older, smarter, and stronger brothers have failed, he will inevitably win and marry the princess. Started to notice that young girls who passed three sacred tests would come home from the woods carrying the dead wolf on their backs. Started to notice that a hero, almost always in dark times when all hope seems lost, arises from nothing, and restores order in a thematically satisfactory manner. If one asked them about their journey, about their strange quest, they would note that in hindsight their sudden meteoric rise from assistant pigkeepers to high kings seem a bit unlikely. That the lowly and poor bard who would somehow kill the evil sorcerer when a thousand warriors could not do it, rescuing the sultan's daughter, and becoming royalty in some far off land, isn't particularly probable nor even suitable for kingship.

Thaumaturgic researchers, alchemists, practical historians, and proto-archeaologists, all came together to try and find out what exactly was going on, and why. Funded by worried kings, powerful merchants, archmages, and other high lords who were increasingly incapable of getting marriage alliances because their sons kept running away after getting rescued by handsome knights from dragons, and that their daughters kept getting saved by noble bandit princesses, who were oh-so-dashing. And always, these people were heroes. Out on a great and powerful journey. Leaving their home behind, to brave the chaotic unknown. Nothing in the world could ever hope to stop them. No army could stop them, no force could bar their way for long, and no wizard could hold them with powerful magic. That's concerning on multiple levels.

Of course, the best way to find out was quite simple. The powerful scholars set out to define precisely what the Hero's Journey needed, in order to engineer one. And it was clever. A volunteering dragon kidnapped a princess, who's father was in the know about the operation. A call was sent out into the land for some brave soul to try and rescue her. Predictably, normal knights, and various worthy people tried and failed to rescue the princess. But one day some peasant boy came around, dirty as if he had lived in a mudhole, and swore to rescue the princess and defeat the evil dragon. Which immediately marked him as one of the thousand faces of the primordial hero. The dragon was informed, and instead of fighting the peasant boy directly, it told challenged him to do something. The dragon gave the boy a magical gem that was attuned to find out the source of all heroism, which would theoretically work, but in practice, it had been impossible for ordinary people to use it, as the quest that the gem led them on usually killed them, or at the very least horribly maimed them.

The peasant boy accepted this challenge in exchange for getting the princess freed upon his return. All he had to do was to follow the glowing light of the gem's internal magical tracking spells to the target, and then open the gem. Of course the boy wasn't told about this, and was just told it led to someone who could order the dragon to release the princess. The peasant, being a hero but not a particularly intelligent one, followed the instructions without thinking. Through dark mountains that would have been the death of ordinary men. Through dry deserts that even camels would have balked at, he walked. Across tumultuous oceans, under the mantle of the Earth, through the sky. Until something broke on a mathematically impossible level, opening a strange fractal hole in reality, which the peasant boy walked through.

On the other side he opened the gem as instructed, and inside the various mages and scholars emerged, telling the boy to head home and tell the dragon that the package had been delivered, upon which the dragon would release the princess. That otherside, was the outside of time and space; a realm of raw firmament, raw potentiality. Of the is-not becoming the what-is. And there, like an obsessed mad creature, was the source of the Heroes. The originator of the Journey. A terrible thing, made from many creatures. A knight in shining armour, a dread wolf that walks on two legs with its infinitely wide maw filled with trillions of sharp teeth; a vicious dragon spewing forth unreal fires burning away at creation, a princess of impossible beauty that was painful to behold, a peasant boy or girl of unmatched plainness. All of them standing in the same place, their particles sharing the same space, merging and unmerging like some incomprehensible thing that cannot decide what shape it should have.

Base8 is probably about as usable as base10, but base12 is way better than either.

I think of a part 2 where the boy instead of an instant death, his soul refuses to die, anger fulling his existance to get revenge against that so called god

I was thinking gnomes, honestly. They're stereotypically irresponsible. Lots of stuff blowing up.

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There's an XKCD for that.

I'm not used to seeing riddles in the prompt itself

Oh now that seems genius

I think the answer is probably in the prompt.

How did only two "you" and "your" not get turned into "u" and "ur"

Tried to phrase it to avoid the whole "we're in a story" trope, but the prompt kept running on so I trimmed it to be more open-ended.

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

Reminders:

>* Stories at least 100 words. Poems, 30 but include "[Poem]" >* Responses don't have to fulfill every detail >* See Reality Fiction and Simple Prompts for stricter titles >* Be civil in any feedback and follow the rules

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

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.