300 Word Writing Challenge #46 -- VICTORY TO JO ZEBEDEE!

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A new hope

“Hurry, you’re gonna miss the show!” Alura said excitedly, dragging Zi behind her.

“You’ve never told me about a show before!” Zi said breathlessly.

Alura didn’t bother with a response. She had found this spot deep in the forest on one of her many treks alone and knew what she must do. She waited until the full moon had risen to execute her plan. Sneaking through Zi’s window, she quickly roused the girl and ushered her into the woods. They ambled on quickly at first but the deeper they transcended into the woods, Zi’s uneasiness started to show. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Alura but she was scared of what was hiding in the shadows. Her only comfort was Alura’s warm hand holding hers.

After over an hour of tramping through the darkness, a bright light shone ahead. By this point Alura was vibrating with anticipation. Before Zi could even question what she was seeing, Alura drug her into the light..

At first Zi couldn’t make sense of the scene before her. It was as if they had stepped into another world. Fluorescent mushrooms taller than the tallest hut in their village and small enough to lay a babe on stood in front of them. She had never seen anything more beautiful. Colors that didn’t even exist in her dreams were swimming right in front of her. How something so beautiful existed in this drab world was beyond her comprehension.

“What is this?” Zi asked.

“This is our escape,” Alura beamed. “They hold magic. They can take us far away from here. All we have to do is touch them and BOOM, gone. Transported to a new world where colors are brighter, animals aren’t kept in cages, and the people are free. We can be free.”
 
Space Walk

I had been searching for portals to the inner realms of space for days, tramping through forested land, Weaving my way through rotting leaves and clean dirt of a healthy forest. Bugs were everywhere, buzzing, flying, crawling. My garments were soaked with debris such that the animals hardly noticed me, only stepping aside to let me by, ignoring me.

Suddenly there they were, eternal mushrooms, doors to another dimension that accepted believing minds. Glowing like captured Aurora Borealis, dancing colors of changing light everywhere, yet seemingly totally contained within these giant mushrooms.

As I approached the nearest portal, a being of spindly limbs approached the stem wall.

"Hey, you want to let me in? I've been searching for days. I want to take a walk in space to other star systems, see what I've been missing. Maybe locate to another planet."

No response. "Helloooow," I called out. Maybe it's got a doorknocker. Where is the door anyway, maybe you can't see outside from the inside. I approached the giant stem gently touching it. Much to my surprise it was solid, more like steel than glass. Maybe these are tourists, maybe they don't even see me as another being, just another bug crawling along, giant size.

Suddenly I felt music in my head, then a strange voice said, "Your body needs to sing electric, right now you sound like a bag of bones rolling down a rocky hillside. That will never get you in."

"I can learn, can't I?"

"Eventually, but you need to replenish everything you touch. That will give you the eternal energy you need to travel by. Otherwise you got nothing the portals can use. Takes some time. Goodbye."

The connection went dead, the portals winked out of sight.

Oh well, back to the used bookstore.
 
Symbionts​

Their slender necks twisted in the muted breeze through the undergrowth. No need to hold up the heads, already starting to strain for the sky, their fragile skins full of plant-generated lift gas.
The nets to enclose them were being woven of finest gossamer - estimates of numbers of different sizes developing were being improved daily.

The orbs would not fly as fast or as far as without our weight, but when the skins split, releasing spores for the next generation, they would have nurturers, defenders, friends. They might never know we were helping, our encampment in their mycelia, but more of them, protected, kept damp and warm by our waste heat and decay of our leftovers, and more of us will survive, too.
In a year or two more paired colonies can spread out, carried by the wind, lighter than air…

Cooperation without communication.
 

The lights shone​

As the sun set and night embraced the world, the lights shone.

His Grandfather had told tales of the twilight crossroads and the lamps of the dead.

Sitting on the rug, wood crackling on the fire behind, his father’s father cradling a pint of stout that would last until bedtime. Oaken voice lowered to a warm whisper. Words of wonder and dread, tales to awaken the imagination.

He had listened, soaked them all up, ready to dream of majestic places once the call to tread the wooden hills to bed came.

Then, formative years of long nights out with friends, dalliances with girls, youthful excitement of work, Grandfather forgotten.

Forgotten until he passed.

The church, the grave, the wake, all blocked. Steadfast refusal to process his first adult taste of passing and the realisation of the inevitable. The exception, the first and only sight of his Father’s tears. A sight he knew would last until his own dying day.

He had found the journal while helping clear his Grandfather’s house. On yellow edged, well thumbed leaves, the delicate pencilled script of a man taught the correct way to write. Without reason, he had squirreled it away; a guilty nut to be consumed by him and him alone.

And there they were. His Grandfather’s tales.

Yet, the writings spoke of places and things as if they existed, and not as fireside yarns. As if his Grandfather had experienced them, lived them. Words flowed across the page not as a tale but a diary. The gentle prose written with an eager desire for them to be recorded for fear of forgetting.

Each meticulous entry began with the twilight crossroads and the lamps of the dead.

Now here, as the sun set and night embraced the world, the lights shone for him too.
 
Daydream Believer


Don’t open them.

My eyelids, ever curious, twitch in response. I scold them and they close tight. The songbirds’ melody fills my ears again. I am back in your arms.

And somehow through my heavy drapes, the sneaky tendrils of the morning sun pass, their caress, warm and inviting, summon me to seize the day.

Please don’t open them!

In terror, I pull you close. Your face, soft, glowing, with a smile that lights the verdant forest. Nearby, amidst the painted toadstools, tiny elves hover, smiling too, for they know true love.

I lean in for a kiss but find no purchase, only bitter words upon your sweet lips.

“We’re out of time.”

A rumble, like a million stampeding unicorns, echoes in the distance. They have come for her – the last Mage of the Wood - whose arcane talents nurture the mystical forest.

A solitary figure steps into the clearing. We stand and face him. It’s the white-coated man, the Knight of Science and Industry, holding the dreaded Survey of Subdivision. He roles it out and reads from it.

“I decree this land in the name of Progress!” he screams. She clings to me. The elves scatter like flies. He regards me smugly. “Single combat will do.”

I hear someone in the hallway.

Not now. Not Now!

She enchants my sword with her sweet breath, and I give her one last look. It says - I can defeat him. I know it! We will be together forever in this magical woodland paradise.

I step forth. Her eyes, and those of the forest creatures, fill with hope.

A dreaded sound rips through the forest. Undulating and unnerving.

No!

I wake up in my bed to the shrieking alarm clock. It’s 8 o’clock.

We’re out of time.
 
The Explorer’s Obsession

“The inquiry now comes to the next, and probably most important, witness.

Please state your name and occupation.”

“Wilson, James Wilson. I was captain of The Wayward.”

“And your employers?”

“The International Exploration Society. I was sent, with a crew of forty, to find the edge of the World.”

“And you succeeded, did you not? Perhaps you could give us some detail.”

“We set out in the summer of ‘86. Despite adverse currents attempting to force us from our course, we resolutely steered West. We knew if we pressed on that we’d reach an edge. What else could there be?”

“And you found what?”

“Well, after about three years, some kind of glass wall with an impenetrable haze beyond. The waves lapped up against it.”

“Ah. This is the bit that interests us and the thought processes, if any, that lead to your subsequent course of action.”

“My thoughts were, as an explorer, to go on.”

“And you chose to do this how exactly?”

“We fired cannon balls at it. Three to be precise.”

“Three?” A resigned shake of the head.

“Well, the first two had no effect.”

“And the third?”

“The glass cracked and broke. A hole appeared. With the sudden torrent of outflowing water it was all we could do to keep control of the ship.”

“I have to inform the inquiry that the estimated size of the hole previously, provided by the witness, leads us to calculate that we have, approximately, seven thousand years before our entire oceans drain away. An expedition is being prepared to see what action can be taken.”

“One is already underway. A submersible, with explosives, commissioned by the International Explorers Society has been sent.”

“With explosives! Good God! Why?”

“To enlarge the hole. How else can a submersible fit through?”
 
Agent Sasha Silverfox
in
The Dog Who Loved Me​

Location: Secret Desert Laboratory

The fiendish Dr Enoki addressed Sasha, “You were caught trying to sabotage my Werewere-Kokako mushroom crops.”

“Because you plan to poison the world with them.”

“No Sasha. When a person comes in contact with my genetically altered blue mushrooms, they become an excessive procrastinator. While the people of the world do nothing, I plunder the planet.”

“You’re nothing but a petty thief.”

“Bah! Before I do away with you, I would like you to meet my enforcer. This is Skullcap, my most ruthless henchman. I ordered him to euthanize your Husky dog sidekick, Sniffy.”

“You, monster.”

“That pesky canine has thwarted me in the past. But now, never again. I had Skullcap lock Agent Sniffy in your spy car. The desert summer heat will cause your precious pup to expire. Before you utter an expletive at me, it’s your turn to expire my lovely adversary. Skullcap! Eliminate Agent Silverfox.”

Just then, Sasha’s spy car crashes through an upper bay window and lands upon Skullcap.

“Shitake!”, exclaimed Dr Enoki. Then he noticed Agent Sniffy behind the wheel of the spy car. “Soldiers! Get that mutt!”

Sniffy wiggled his eyebrows up and down at Enoki, and switched on a Led Zeppelin CD. As Trampled Under Foot blasted from car speakers, Sniffy hit the accelerator, spun the vehicle in circles using a steering control joystick, then activated twin external machine guns. Hundreds of henchmen were cut down and valuable scientific equipment was destroyed. Dr Enoki screamed with anger. Sniffy stopped the car, hopped out, trotted to the doctor and spat a blue mushroom at him. It instantly incapacitated Enoki with severe procrastination.

Sasha hugged Sniffy, “You’re the best dog in the world. It’s a good thing those mushrooms don't affect canines.”

“Ahrr Rarr Roo.”

“Aww. I love you too.”
 
In my heart and my roots

Don’t go, they told me. People don’t return. But the forest called, in my heart and in my roots and, in the end, I went.

Along the dark path, into the heart of the woodland. Nothing moved, except the air that wound around me, filling my nose, my throat, infecting my breathing so that it became thick and unnatural.

Was this what stopped people returning, this choking? I didn’t care, truth be told. Grief had made me detached. The forest’s loneliness felt a blessing compared to the enquiries as to how I was coping, the helpful hands bringing dinners to ensure I fed myself, waking to mornings where my dreams had been bare of you.

Ahead, a clearing waited, full of mushrooms, the thick air above dancing with their spores. Behind them, something forced its way into the clearing.

I knew the heavy-limbed height of you. The shock of blond hair, turning to grey. Where my dreams were bereft, the clearing was not and you were ahead of me, silent, watching. I could go forwards. That was where the others had went, those who were missing: to their loved ones, and then beyond the clearing.

My heart and roots urged me to my feet but a gentle shake of your head made motes circle in the air between us. I stopped, mid-step. Behind me, I had people who loved me enough to try to feed me, to ask how I was through the lonely days and nights and the knowledge you were gone and I alone.

Step by aching step, my eyes never leaving you, I backed to where the air was sweeter. One day, this path would be mine again, in its right time, and you would be there, waiting. But not today.
 
The Language of Laguna

Mala stormed into the ship’s lab, ‘You turned the ship around? I didn’t give—’

‘I know,’ Ben said. ‘I had to, Mala. I have to return. Please let me explain.’

Mala huffed, but Ben never acted without good reason. ‘Fine. Explain.’

‘Our Laguna research—’

‘You disobeyed me because of those dumb animals?’

‘They aren’t dumb animals! Hear me out…What do you know of our Laguna research?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Well, let me bring you up to speed. During our research we discovered strange mushrooms growing on the Lagunas’ backs. We procured samples, and discovered it to be a language.’

‘The mushrooms have language?’

‘The mushrooms are the language. The Laguna communicate through them. The spores contain a breathable message which even we can understand. It is a language unimaginably powerful and advanced.’

‘Advanced how?’

‘It conveys experience, and I mean real experience, indistinguishable from reality. At first, the Laguna communicated basic survival strategies: the sight and taste of nutritious leaves versus poisonous ones, the sound of approaching longclaw.’

‘And you…experienced all this?’

‘As if it happened to me. But this was just the beginning. While we were there, we noticed the language evolving.’

‘Evolving how?’

‘The Laguna learned how to lie.’

‘…Their mushrooms contained lies?’

‘They contained false experiences, yes. Mainly defense mechanisms aimed at the longclaw. We sampled experiences of Laguna having poisonous flesh—which they don’t. Other mushrooms convinced the longclaw that certain Laguna were family, part of their pack.
But one Laguna in particular advanced the language even further, and through a profound religious experience, communicated that it was a god. Hordes of longclaw are now devoted to it, they protect it, worship it, live and die for it.’

‘Wait, how do you know this?’

‘This is why we have to return. I must attend my god.'
 
Assisted Suicide

‘I’m tired,’ I tell my brother.
‘You’re always tired these days, come on.’ He doesn’t sound like a three year old.
The house is so quiet, I hear the short hand moving on the hallway clock — but not my own footsteps; I’ve done this for too many nights not to know which floorboards are traitors and which are not.

As usual, I don’t know how he got in, but he waits patiently as I open the French windows onto the back lawn, my teeth clenched as if doing so should make the mechanism quieter. God knows what my parents would do if they saw him.

A moonstruck meadow of late winter snowdrops and crocuses frosts the bases of the trees at the back. A glittering pair of jet eyes regard us as an owl shifts impassively, tolerating me.

Darnley reaches out, to pass me something. I recall this bit, up till now forgotten like a dream.
‘Sleep! I want sleep, not sweets. I’m tired, Darnley.’
‘Just take it,’ he says.
I’ve little choice in the matter. I take it and we move on. The arthritic hawthorn arch we pass under stands like a stele; Abandon Despair All Ye Who Enter.

On the left, he tells me, is the spiral mound where Ivy directed her daughter bury her; the right side, next to the river, holds a plot of three, the Jameses. The stream has eroded the base since my last visit. Now two pairs of adult footbones and the polished ivory of a child’s cranium hang out over rushing waters.

Then there’s the plot covered in bright sweets. ‘What about that one?’ I ask.
He holds the sweet to my lips. I bite.
That one’s reserved, he says with his eyes, and I see the sweets are toadstools.
 
Prufrock

During the day the world was colourless. Years of abuse led to a bleaching of colour, at least it seemed so to those who survived. The heat blasted realms cast the world in a blurry haze, and on the rare occasions that it rained, the Earth became grey as poisoned streams fells from the sky.

No one ever said Armageddon would be this way.

Well perhaps Eliot had, ‘not with a bang, but a whimper.’

It was, one might say, suicide. What else might one describe a mass extinction event that was self-inflicted. Pollution let to climate collapse; changing conditions led to mutations of existing diseases, the biological genesis of new illnesses.

Staggering from one pandemic to another, as radiation levels grew, species died out, over population and deforestation and simple aggressive dominance over nature tipped the scales.

Humanity eroded, until all that was left was a bleached world, while mankind staggered like a punch-drunk fighter. One ready to drop.

It is a reality that the dwindling survivors rapidly came to realise – the end of the world does not mean the end of the world, it means the end of the world for humankind.

Something else out there will thrive in the new conditions, and just like the mammals filling the vacuum made by the sundering of Dinosauria something would not do the same to them.

So, it was at night that colour would come. Heat would give way to humidity and the radiation enraptured fungi would bloom, pods and ‘rooms erupting from the ground, luminous in the moonlight, pumping spores with each throb.

Spores that were lethal to humans yet were infinitely adaptable to the new world.

The early days of extinction may well have been self-inflicted.

The final were murder.

Or euthanasia.
 
The Fireflies Dance​
​
​
​
“Fireflies dance in a darkling wood.”​
​
“Of course, Nona,” Luce replied – twenty years a servant to a Seer-Storyteller, she was well used to cryptic utterances.​
​
She replaced the compress on Nona’s forehead. She’d carried her up from the cabin for the balm of the evening air, but still Nona burned.​
​
Twenty years. Hard years – the last ten, all the work for horse and narrowboat as Nona’s blindness overtook her. Good years, though. Wandering the waterways; listening with joy to Nona’s stories, with awe at her Seeing.​
​
“Fireflies danced the old one’s passing.”​
​
Twenty years. Ending. She’d known since dawn, when the swans sang for Nona, a funeral escort still gliding alongside the Speedwell. Ahead, a kingfisher blazed across the water, a pike breached the surface, a heron bowed. All day the river had echoed with farewells.​
​
“Fireflies danced giving me their power.”​
​
Tears burned Luce’s eyes. For her approaching loss, for herself. Money was always tight – Storytelling brought in little enough, truthful Seeing even less, but with Nona gone...​
​
What would she do? The bit of trading and ferrying they’d practised wouldn’t keep her alive.​
​
“Fireflies dance my passing.”​
​
Why fireflies? The fever talking?​
​
Darting blue-flamed dragonflies were the Speedwell’s constant companions; stag beetles battered its windows. In twenty years, Luce had never seen a firefly.​
​
It was getting late. Old Lampy was dependable enough to plod the towpath without her, but she should moor before the light went.​
​
Except…​
​
She stared. Lampy was placidly cropping grass. The river was gone. In its place, a dark wood with flaring pinpricks of brilliant light – yellows, oranges, reds.​
​
Her hand was gripped.​
​
Nona’s face glowed, as though her soul were aflame.​
​
“They dance for you, Luce. Giving their power.”​
​
And Luce Saw – her future, her Storytelling, and the fireflies’ dance.​
 

​

Dazzling​

​

Places at the back of beyond have always interested me so, with a sabbatical from teaching art due, I headed here. On arrival, I was disappointed.​
​
Umbra II’s a strange world. It’s also dull. Literally. Its parent star, Umbra, produces light too weak to give it its own Goldilocks Zone and yet it has one. Sort of.​
​
The planet’s greenhouse effect can’t support liquid water but, thankfully, no one’s told the native flora and fauna that liquid water’s essential for life. Unfortunately, the planet’s biology produces chemicals we can’t synthesise easily elsewhere, so they’re harvested here.​
​
Over the millennia that humans have been on Umbra II they’ve had to live much as humans lived on Mars before the terraforming. Terraforming wasn’t an option here: it would’ve destroyed what we needed to harvest.​
​
As an outsider, I’ve had to wear special glasses allowing me to see properly. Sadly, they don’t make the place visually interesting. Why not, I thought, cheer the place up with some art? The shapes don’t really matter – I can’t compete with the flora’s strange forms – but I love using fluorescent colours. Just what the place needs, in my opinion.​
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​

* * * * *​


​
The day of my departure finally arrives. Time to reveal what I’d been doing.​
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I’m met with puzzled looks.​
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“What do you think?” I asked my host nervously.​
​
“Very clever,” she says. “I’m reminded of ancient Earth’s attempts at camouflage. ‘Dazzle’, I think they called it.”​
​
Never having heard of ‘Dazzle’, I look it up and see lots of images of black, white and grey shapes painted on naval vessels to disguise their shapes and sizes.​
​
“What about all the colours?” I ask.​
​
“I’m sure they’re wonderful,” she said, “but we have only rods, not cones, in our eyes. Otherwise, we can’t see properly.”​
​
 
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Instructables

“Ah; bad art. Looks like old machine emulated crap.”

Voskul studied the Assembler, “You go back to when these were common?”

“Parts of me.”

Both men were politely avoiding the disassembled person distributed through the ConGel tank, staring at the art instead. Voskul was really watching their reflection, trying to peer through the man’s form to what might be inside.

“I’ve brought my own equipment. But I’ll need an Eye with twelve nano resolution to get everything out of this Key.”

______________

Voskul had left the expert seated in front of the painting. Now the cameras showed that he hadn’t moved, but there were two other spectral figures in the lab. One was all glint and lines - the proportions of the seated figure but made of fine wire - operating lab equipment directly through tendrilled extremities. The other within the ConGel: A bloody man-shaped streak of animated translucence. Its hands were gathering the human distaff and weaving it into flesh again.


As always, the Assembler marveled at his ability to decode an image key with all the data to make a person, and labor it into being. Or her, in this case. Artema Glaspol got too close to a curious Hejemi youth, who spent years seeing how she functioned. She had the presence of mind to save her template in durable print form - now guiding the Assembler’s many hands.

He had been destroyed in a similar manner, living again due to another tinkerer. And just as he had learned the craft by living the process, Glaspol would also wake as something far more than human. And, like him, she would never die again.

_____________

Artema smiled, “Mr. Voskul, I can’t express my thanks for your efforts. But I’d like to give you something.”

Voskul ran, hoping she would leave his mortality intact.
 
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