Well... they say bloom where you are planted and today we are not planted in the forums :P = Jan 25 --- I looked out the window and watched as Jay washed the dishes. I waved through my own kitchen window. He looked up for only a brief moment. His eyes were alight for just a moment, and he waved at me before returning to the soapy mess before him. I turned on my heel with a sigh and started walking to the glass door that led to my apartment’s teeny tiny garden. Only a few flowers and sprigs of rosemary grew there, but it brought a little more joy to the grind. Just a little extra life to my empty apartment. I’d been living on my own ever since I finished college and started working for the architecture firm a few miles away. Just me and my plants. I promise, it’s not as sad as it sounds. – Laurel smiled at me through her window, and the plate I’d been drying slipped out of my hands and landed back into the sink, earning it a small nick in the corner. By the time I looked back up, she was walking to the other side of her apartment. For a moment, I wondered if she even knew my name. I hardly knew her- but I knew we were the same. Working every day, climbing life’s little ladders, making our own lives. (218 words) Jan 26 -- (words- reveal, hope, development, wrong) The revelations came in little moments. The moment that I realized the sky was dusted over with black-tinged clouds. The moment that the pearls around my wrist began to tighten, cutting off the circulation to my hand. They were coming. They knew I was a threat. Estelle stood on my right. She looked down at my wrist. "You need to take that off," she said. I shook my head. "I can't." "Why?" "They're not coming off." "I hope that you have the d2gger Eli gave you," she said. "Then I regret to tell you your hope is in vain," I said. "Eli grabbed it, and he's off to the mountains after as soon as he heard about... you know." She sighed. "That's quite the development." I looked at her with an eyebrow raised. "All of this is 'quite the development.'" She laughed humorlessly. "Fair enough." I dug the toe of my sandal into the soft ground beneath me as the sky grew ever darker. "Don't you think we should be out there, doing something?" I said. She looked down at my wrist. My fingers were getting pale and purple. "I don't think you can." I sighed in frustration. "If I'd been faster, this wouldn't have happened!" "Let's not start with the 'ifs', Lea," I heard a voice say. I whipped around. "What are you doing here?" He shrugged. "You shouldn't be here!" I yelled. "That's where you're wrong," he said. "I'm here for a very good reason." "And what might that be?" I asked. "You forgot something," he said. He held something silver out to me. I sighed. "You know everything." "I know," he said with a grin. "Wanna get those pearls off?" (283 words) JWC Fanfic for Monthly Challenge --- It's no wonder some of the greatest stories ever told were set in wartime. Chuey ran into the Astronaut cabin, clutching a cup of coffee like a lifeline. "Another war, incoming!" Luna was holding onto a cat in one arm, a pencil in another, violently scribbling words across the page. "Not another one!" "From who?" Snowy said, her hand resting on a book. "Fairy," Chuey gasped out. Poppy stood up, but it didn't look very heroic because she tripped over the leg of her chair, nearly toppling into a pile of scribbled-over sheets of paper. "We need to fight back." "I'm on it," Mouse said, standing up. "Are you sure?" Chloe, Astronaut's co-leader said. Mouse nodded and sprinted out the door. "I'm pretty sure the Trojan War wasn't even that bad," Chuey said. "Didn't the Trojan War last ten years or something?" Snowy said. "This is twenty-four hours." "But it wasn't this brutal," Chloe said. "Now *that* I'm sure of," Snowy said. "I've got hand cramps," Poppy said. "Think I can type with just my pinkies?" "Maybe not, but it'd be great to see you try," Mouse says, coming back into the cabin. "Fairy's gotten payback?" Luna asks. Mouse nods. "Let chaos reign," someone whispers. The words echo through the cabin in a quiet, yet powerful refrain. (217 words) Jan 27 Daily -- Emi sat in a large chair, the massage feature running behind her back and soothing her as she feverishly typed out the daily before it hit 12 am UTC. A holographic main cabin is situated to the left of her face, a new comment popping up every minute or so, telling about a lost word war or a completed daily. The holographic screen had the forums up. Thankfully, because it was 3024, a new form of AI was able to perform maintenance on the forums without the forums themselves shutting down. When Emi had first learned that JWC-ers had once had to deal with such an inconvenience, she'd almost laughed. Forums being down? What a silly notion. Her word counter was opened up on yet another screen, declaring that she was still a hundred words away from finishing the daily, and time was (cont)
running out. She only had five more minutes to complete the daily. Suddenly, just when she reached a good stopping point for her daily and she was just a few words over the count minimum... all three of her holographic screens went black, the music that had been playing through her ear chip went silent, and everything that was connected to her central computer system went dead. Emi rolled her eyes. "Not again!" she yelled through her teeth. With a sigh, she pulled herself up and out of her chair, over to the teeny tiny black box that had blinking red and purple lights declaring that something had gone wrong. Using only her pinky finger, Emi tapped the box furiously, banging on it lightly. The three screens came back to life, and the music began to move softly in her ear again. After all, the "banging on it until it works" trick always works, no matter the time. Unfortunately, the little tech malfunction cost her an entire minute. She quickly dropped back into her seat and opened a new comment on the sleek design of the main cabin. "Daily complete for Eliospinaactia," she dictated to the microphones of her computer, naming a genre that a strange author had come up with years ago, a new favorite of the JWC community. "Three hundred points, four hundred words... insert link." "Post," she said once she read over the comment to make sure she'd gotten the point values right. Unfortunately, a little swirling loading symbol declared that... her computer was running slow. She groaned in frustration. "This website has been running for OVER a thousand years, and my computer STILL can't load it!" Some things never change... -- SWC July 2024 word war with Kit :) I thought that if I had it, I would finally be happy. Satisfied. I would have all that someone like me could want or need. But no. I've been left like this. Alone. Hurt. Damaged. I walked away from the cave of the cliffside, the hairs on my arms sticking up, as the aura of the thing that I held radiated through my hands, all the way up to my head, which began to pound. I tried to breathe. Breathing was no longer an option. I thought about all that I had suffered for in order to get this thing. I nearly died. I lost my dignity. I lost the one person who made the biggest difference- who led me here on the belief that it would change our lives forever. His body sits at the bottom of the ocean. Water creeping into his longs, and he could not even yell for help. I could not think of that. All that I had lost. Wouldn't this cure it? Save me from all that I had been through? I had sacrificed everything for this... worthlessness, only to have it pay me nothing back in return. This simple wing of gold. It took everything from me. -- (ignore the terrible thumb hsdfhskdjfh)
