Extinction Event

Henry Mahuta fastened his belt, attached his sidearm and left the compartment he’d decided to call the head.

Its original function was an enigma to him. Its chief value to Mahuta now was a shallow basin into which he squatted and shat when the need arose. Age had stolen from him the ability to predict his bowel movements, so the old Marine did plenty of squatting and waiting, just to be sure.

Mahuta could no longer do the calisthenics that kept him hale and sane at the start of his long voyage. Instead he practiced yoga and tai chi, long poses that shook his limbs and made his swirling tā moko tattoos stand out from his blotched, leathery skin. On bad days, he settled for walks through the ship.

Today was a bad day.

Lament of the SKULL SUZERAIN

I drag my clammy hands down my face, open my eyes.

The city nightscape glows through the floor-to-ceiling window behind me. I drop my hands onto my desk, polished marble taken from the rubble of Liberty Temple after SKELETRON tore it to the ground. I put in 20 years to get this desk. My wife and I made love on this desk the night I got the promotion.

But now it’s all gone to shit. SKULL FIGHTER is coming and I can’t stop him.

DM's Girlfriend

“You’ve done well to get this far,” intoned Chad the Dungeon Master, “but you’ve outlived your usefulness.”

Chad’s accent, Percy decided, was the second worst part about this D&D campaign. Chad tried, bless his heart. He was way more into role-playing than roll-playing, and tried to encourage that mentality in his players. Percy could respect that.

The problem, the second-deepest pit in Hell, was Chad’s voice. He only had one stock voice, which he used for every evil character. It sounded like a French cartoon character talking in an Italo-German accent. It ate. It ate so bad. Percy knew that most people who played D&D weren’t professional actors. They were in it for the love of the game. It was okay if they didn’t have the acting range of Mel Blanc.

Purge

Freshman year: I’ve scrawled a saw-toothed gargoyle on my day planner with a 0.7mm mechanical pencil. It takes up all of the space alloted for Thursday, where I was supposed to mark down my homework. My gargoyle spreads big bat wings and flexes the pectorals and abs a boy learns how to draw after years of reading shitty Rob Liefeld comics.

Crap Poem

fuck your middle class, contemptible ass reachin for brass rings
grabbin pointless things, suburbanous bling
you’ll do anything to dull the sting of self-awarenuv
I mean -ness, go ahead and confess, you’re nothing but a Big Lots Crassus
sittin high on a pile of denarii until a Parthian guy lets some sky in your asses
you didn’t grok my sasses? take some classes, hell, get a study guide
won’t see no history on your fucking DVD of the blind side
can’t abide these facts with which I pepper you, the only way out now is shameful sepperku
there’s no meter to these verses, but you know the worst is yet to come
this writing’s fucking dumb, a rumbling ramble through syntactic bramble
I’m no poetic Fred Astaire, I’m running out of care, pitstained shirt and white stockings
I’m writer’s blocking, wanna quit this shockingly bad harangue
50 words to go, let’s google “what rhymes with boomerang”

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, The Lime challenged me with "Write a post between 100 and 200 words long that includes the words 'pepper,' 'boomerang,' 'stockings' and 'bling.'" and I challenged MaryBethC with "Write about a good old-fashioned training montage. What's the character striving for and what's keeping them going?".

Horsewise

Charlie knew the jig was up when his exercise partner stopped talking.

My Hero

Sir Lawrence Teilhard found his captor lying face down on her bed.

The Necromancer-Technician Aconite’s purple satin sheets spilled between bed posts onto the floor. The lady herself was in dishabille, her arms stretched forward as though diving. They were, in fact, stuck in a robe she had put on halfway before giving up. Her feet hung over the foot of the bed. Aconite wore one black stocking and, praise be, her panties.

Teilhard cleared his throat, brushing his mustache with a knuckle.