Things That Actually Happened 4

No names, because this person would get angry and the like if they found this comic. Shame that it has to be this way.
In any case I think, if nothing else, the hand in this one is mediocre (which is better than my usual crap).

Things That Actually Happened 3

I may love this job but this happens a lot. Also holy cow I am horrible at perspective.

Things That Actually Happened 2

Go to the girl above me's place. She declares that she will make some tea. Hilarity ensues.

Incidentally we did not end up having any tea.

Things That Actually Happened 001

This conversation happened today at Royal Host, which I thought was a fancy coffee place but ended up being significantly fancier and much less coffee-ish. It happened completely out of the blue, and I thought it was amusing enough to share with whomever is looking. I suppose from now on I might serialise similar things that actually happen to or near me that some people might find amusing (well, really, it will be things I find amusing and you guys will just deal with it).

I drew it on my neat new ipad 2 with the ArtStudio app, which is likely to be my full-time drawing method. Maybe look forward to more? I don't know.

Furthee, maybe this will get me at least passable at drawing?

DREAMS

Glass. Shining glass, curves and cylinders and beakers. Fire. Leaves and plants and extracts and powders. Metal. Edges and blades and tiny knives and needles and POISONS.

The room was endless, black in all directions but for the workstation at which he stood. There was a bunsen burner ablaze, its blue flame flickering and dancing like it had ought not to dance and flicker. He found himself holding a volumetric flask over it with tongs, swirling the whining and writhing contents around. He looked into the substance, and briefly he thought he saw a face.

Then he was at a centrifuge, pouring the mass into a test tube to be separated and handing it to the amorphous arms the machine stretched toward him. He did not remember the machine spinning, but he was decanting the tube just moments later, pouring off the thinner layer into a petri dish and leaving the weeping precipitate to cry alone in its glass prison.

He studied the delicate liquid, watched as its fragile tendrils formed shapes he could not describe, turned colours for which there were no words. Observe me, it called silently, so silently he covered his ears, and the noise that emitted from his palms made him feel like he was melting.

Then he was there with the dish, inside it and not inside it, part of it and yet separate from it. He watched himself become things reality forbids, things that trespass on the edges of the corporeal world and taunt the living and dead with their impossibility. In the midst of these images he could not hope to comprehend, he saw a shape he recognised--

My sister.

He reached out, but then how does one reach out when one is not? And then she was gone, replaced by improbability imbued with form. He tried to turn away from it, but then he was there at the workstation again, and the smell of gunpowder invaded his nostrils. He became aware of a falling sensation, and he watched the room itself spring away from him, leaving him behind in the black.

Needles. Water. String. Knives. Hands.

He saw his lung, a weakly heaving, deflated ball of tissue, reaching up with hands it did not have to tear at the wound in his heart, whose face constantly morphed this way and that, whose mouths spat words that had no meaning or sound. Then it was all zipped up in a sack, and as he saw the zipper ascending, locking the teeth together in a dance that could not be performed, he felt a sudden coolness in his lungs.

He sat up straight and gasped, turned to the side of his bed, and let spill all of the contents of his weakened stomach on the linoleum floor. The orderly looked up from his comic book, and when he saw the boy wretch, he immediately called in for a doctor as he rushed over to his bedside. The boy breathed heavily, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

Sixty-second Prompts

Oh man this is the coolest site ever.

www.oneword.com gives you a random word and sixty seconds to write about it. I have GOT to do this more often. I sure got my creative juices flowing.

Today's word was "Shore." I did it twice.

http://oneword.com/word/shore/comment-page-7/#comment-228939

In other news, NaNoWriMo is COMING UP OH GOD.

Flash Fiction? I guess?

Cain had been left by the girl Alia a while before, but he, too, found himself gravitating toward these "gardens." In a place like this one, he knew, nothing could be considered safe by any means, and yet he sauntered in, his new knife already coated in the appropriate poisons and strapped tightly to his thigh. The scents and colours played across his perception, a hearty mixture of debauchery and allure that would tempt the best of men to at least take a look at what was being offered to them by the rat-nosed little men with soft hands and grubby hair.

Met with specimens of rare beauty, dancers that suspended themselves on the tips of their needle-pointed shoes, smoky gypsy girls behind crystal balls wearing less than what covered their table, and exotic and fantastic races Cain had only begun dreaming of since arrival on the station, what was a boy like him to do? Almost tranced, he wandered into one of the lavish tents covered with elaborately woven gold and silk, removing his hat as he did so.

Before he realized what was happening, he was being touched by fingers that glittered with silver and jewels, and his cheeks flushed immediately in the light smoke that permeated everything inside the tent. A woman with bared breasts that were painted in an outward gradient from yellow to purple and a veil covering the bottom half of her face sat lounging on a luxurious, overstuffed couch in the center of the tent, surrounded by lavish silk and satin pillows and mattresses; with a snap of her fingers, the three similarly-clad and -painted girls that had swarmed him assembled in front of her.

"Welcome to my den, young stranger. I am called Tsuchilbara, the Red Goddess, and these are my Djinni. You may choose any of them as you please, as long as your coin does not run dry, young stranger..." she said, curling her fingers into her hand in a "come closer" manner. Cain felt himself moving forward, but only after it had started, in a sort of delayed-sensory state.

He knew that this was caused by narcotics or similar chemicals, and while his mind connected that the smoke might be the source of said chemical, he could no longer control enough of his conscious brain to say any different. One step, two steps, and then he was assaulted by those soft, glittering fingers once more, buttons on his vest magically coming undone, his gloves sliding off, one girl slid her simultaneously warm and cold hand under his shirt, ran her fingertips against his abdomen. He could feel the blood rising in his body, beginning to fill those places which were empty, but then...

As his belt was loosened and his shirt unbuttoned, someone started to slip the crisp white fabric off his shoulders. Suddenly his face was hot, his hands clenched into hard fists, and he'd brought one of them hard into the ribs of the girl who was behind him. The scars that marked his skin, those crimson and white streaks that lay across his back like badges on a captain's shoulder, he would allow no-one to see. No-one but the one he trusted the most, but his servant had not been brought to this place with him. No, this was the secret he would not divulge.

Consequently, the three girls recoiled, and each of them showed the purposes of those intricate and beautiful bangles and rings they wore as they popped open or twisted out to form needles and blades. Here stood Cain, partially drugged, and now grasping tightly the burnished brass hilt of the long knife he'd just so recently purchased, facing three lithe figures bespecked with blades he'd sooner not deal with. The choice, in his mind, at least, was obvious.

Seconds later, with only a scratch to his cheek and a slightly damp and stained knife, Cain dashed clumsily out of the tent, his shirt still open and his belt flopping around open by his waist. They had his vest and one of his gloves, but he could replace those. Leastways, he still had his coin purse, and they had not gotten any of that. He touched his abrased cheek and winced a bit, and then buckled his pants back up.

It seemed those girls would not follow him outside their tent, so he felt at least a little safe. Safe enough, at any rate, to button up his shirt, wipe his knife on a scrap of cloth tied to one of the rose bushes, and begin stumbling back out of this "garden." If he could remember the way back out.