Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“Well, I was on CupydsArrow.com updating my profile,” said Chrissy, hesitantly, “when suddenly a sinkhole opened up beneath my computer desk and sucked everything in my room into the ancient deep.”

“Oh, that was just me stirring from my dead slumber of aeons and shifting the door of my house at the sunken city of Ri’ya’dh,” said Xuhulu, its inconceivable form writhing with tentacles and chaos.

“And, uh, why did you feel the need to do that?” Chrissy asked.

“Because, um…” Xuhulu rubbed the back of what might have been its head with what might have been its arm, both appendages guaranteed to cause permanent insanity in anyone who beheld them in the wrong configuration. “I might be eldritchcutie321 on CupydsArrow.com. Got any plans tonight?”

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“Once the ritual begins, you’ll see their signs up there in the hills.”

“I see it! Bonfires, dozens of them.”

“Creatures such as those can’t enkindle bonfires. Those are malfires; they give no heat, no succor, and shed no earthly light. What ours eyes interpret as light is merely the iceberg-tip of the dark magicks they seek to unleash into an unsuspecting and ordered world.”

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“Gentlemen, I give you Ruins & Rogues, 1st edition,” said Matt. “The Old Testament. Fire and brimstone. Death around every corner.” With a flourish, he opened his bag and took put a stack of books with brightly colored if crudely drawn covers.

“Wow, is that a 1st edition Adventurer’s Guidebook?” cried Chris.

“With the rare first printing inclusion of copyrighted characters from the Tolkien estate,” Matt said proudly. “Bought them at an estate sale on Dounton Street East.”

“What’s this?” Jeff, the third member of Matt’s erstwhile Ruins & Rogues group took up a sheaf of papers between the Ruins & Rogues Creature Compendium and the Ruins & Rogues Interverse Manual.

“Oh, it’s the campaign that whoever owned this stuff before was playing,” Matt said. “It’s MS3TK-worthy, you’ve got to see this.”

“Got to see this is right,” Chris chortled, taking up a character sheet with a 1984 date. “Drake Midnight: level five barbarian of Clan War Bear. Nineteen strength, nineteen agility, four intelligence.” He held up a crude illustration of a Viking in a horny helmet wielding two axes bug enough for their own Congressmen. “Look, it’s straight out of Napoleon Dynamite’s sketchbook. Hope those straps are velcro. Hilarious!”

“Hilarious is this map right here,” countered Jeff. “Titcave Mound, home of the Priestesses of Lost Memory. Or is that lost mammary? Look at these booby statues they drew!”

“It’s a wonder they got in there at all considering their healer was Chastity Witchmourner,” Matt added. “Her character sheet includes her measurements and a nice little doodle of what I can only assume is a 12-year-old smuggling beach balls. Looks like the player–one ‘Steve’–was pretty into it. I hope this stain is from the fried chicken they were eating!”

All three had a good laugh before settling down to the business of filling out their new character sheets, with Mat promising that the old campaign would be incorporated into their new one for kicks and giggles. Before the playing got started in earnest, though, Matt excused himself to fetch more snacks.

The basement door opened onto a vast and red-skied vista illuminating a temple carved into the living rock of the mountainside with impossibly busty caryatids supporting it. A flamingly redheaded woman of similar proportions, and wearing what must have been about three cubic inches of chainmail, was rushing toward him.

“Drake had gone berserk with War Bear battle lust!” she cried. “You must help me!”

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Paulsen, head of the Auctions Unlimited team that had hired me, thrust a pitted and flimsy set of keys at me. “Here. First key’s for the main door, second’s a skeleton for the bar and restaurant, third’s a skeleton for the upstairs. No key for the basement; there’s black mold and our liability won’t cover it.”

The Royal Tecumseh had been Deerton’s shining jewel in the boomtown days, lying as it did astride both the road and the rails, within spitting distance of the sawmills. The salad days of cutting and shipping wood south to be made into furniture gave way to a leaner but no less golden age as a rail transshipment point, and the thriving restaurant, bar, and hotel served as the community’s focal point.

“You’re to prepare a written inventory of the contents and photograph each item. Multiple views.” Paulsen took a fresh, deep drag from his cigarette and rubbed out the stub on one of the Royal Tecumseh’s old No Smoking signs. “You can combine them into lots within reason. Every item or lot gets a tag from the stack in your bag.”

It had all ended so subtly that I was scarce able to notice it at the time. The last trains had come through in 1985, and they’d torn up the rails in 1990. The demand for wood had withered away, with what little remained of the furniture industry further south now reliant on cheap foreign timber. In an attempt to remain relevant, the Royal Tecumseh had undergone renovations in 1980. They’d been a disaster, slathering stucco and paint over the intricate brickwork and aluminum siding over the ornate pediments that had been common to all buildings of the 1870s (to say nothing of slapping cheap pressboard panels and kitschy artwork over the old wallpaper and woodwork).

“The auctioneers arrive in two weeks and demolition starts in four. That’s your timetable. You can stay in one of the rooms upstairs if you want, but there’s no heat and no water and the place is lousy with rats.” Paulsen offered no alternatives; the Royal Tecumseh had been the only hotel in town, after all. I figured I could walk in from my parents’ old house, since I’d already arranged for the water and sewer to be temporarily reconnected.

A minor bribery scandal had been the end; it had come out that the proprietors, the sixth set of hands the Royal Tecumseh had been in since its inception, had been quietly avoiding inspections through payola. They’d lost their liquor license, and with it the last vestige of business. The doors had shut for good in 2002, with a few half-hearted attempts at revivals. A 2004 attempt to reopen the restaurant as a deli had folded in six months. A plan by a couple of out-of-towners, the Patels, to remodel a bed and breakfast out of the place had failed when the tax assessor had shown up with a $40,000 bill in arrears–a gift from the last owner they’d failed to mention when handing over the keys.

“Payment is expenses up front–keep your receipts–and then a lump sum afterwards, plus five percent of the auctioneer’s premium. You do a good job, there might be more work for you in Petoskey at our next job.” I forced a smile. With the Hopewell Tribune belly-up along with a lot of the other newspapers statewide, and an unemployment level closer to Gaza than anywhere else in the USA, I was lucky to have found a gig that allowed me to use my camera and pen at all. If nothing else, the job would delay the inevitable for a few months. Most people who limped back to Deerton wound up working at McDonald’s.

Looking around the dark and musty confines of the Royal Tecumseh as Paulsen finalized his paperwork, I wondered how someplace once so prosperous and still so historic could have been so mismanaged. The entire east part of town had all but withered away with it, and persistent rumors that the place was haunted hadn’t helped. There were ghosts there, all right. Just not of the sort that made the walls bleed.

They were the ghosts of wasted potential, of squandered history, of the Rust Belt still quietly oxidizing as people like me stood by and did nothing.

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Edward stood on a wooded hillside, looking down over the slaughter beneath him. There were vast mounds of dead knights and men-at-arms around the enemy standards they had charged in vain. Armored bodies lay suffocated in the mud, drowned in their own helmets or crushed by companions in the heat of battle. Others were face-up where they stumbled, bleeding at the breast or shoulder from the final blow of a misericorde administered as they helplessly lay.

There were few to witness the scene; the victor had withdrawn and the vanquished fled. The few ragpickers who might have appeared were too busy mourning their own, leaving the field to naught but the crows.

“My brothers and sisters shall reap a fine repast from this foolishness,” said a crow, alighting on a discarded sword plunged into the earth and lost by its owner. “Even with the many hard and inedible parts, there are still succulent eyes aplenty to be plucked and fine, soft noble flesh to sup upon.”

“You would do well not to speak so lightly of such a tragedy,” Edward said sadly. “Three dukes, eight counts, a viscount, an archbishop, countless nobles, burghers, and bailiffs…thousands dead, including those who were slain outright and those who could not be ransomed and were not worth capture–ended by an enemy fearful that they might continue the fight and precariously outnumbered even in victory.”

“Does a farmer not speak lightly of the crows he shoots or poisons in warding them from his crops?” the crow replied. “Does an uninterested party not chuckle at the misfortunes of others which might be turned to its own advantage? I think that it is you who speak improperly about this, friend.”

“Perhaps. But within a generation, these men’s sons, and their sons’ sons, will flight over the same land and spill the same blood for the same futile reasons,” Edward said. “Even one such as yourself cannot help but see the tragedy in the shared fate of all those who have lost battles…and all those who have won.”

“Death is the shared fate of us all,” replied the crow. “As is futility, as is the repetition of past mistakes and sins. Why feed if we must die? Why bear our young if they too must perish? Why watch as a thousand crows die at the hands of a thousand farmers for a thousand worthless hulls of grain? No crow ever considers these things, as they are too amused by the blackest humor innate in all such things. One may view history as tragedy or comedy; it is in finding levity in both that my kind survives.”

Edward regarded his companion. From the way the early morning sunshine played across its feathers, and the unearthly way it broke that sunshine into its component colors like a ground crystal lens, it was clear no ordinary crow perched before him. “There is, I think, wisdom in your remarks,” said he, “and while I cannot agree with them, I find the perspective illuminating in the face of such despair. Pray tell me your name.”

“I have no name but that of my kind,” replied the crow. “Much as those before you mired in the field of battle now bear none but ‘man’ as their title and rank.”

Inspired by this.

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This post is part of the September 2013 Blog Chain at Absolute Write. This month’s prompt is “Steampunk/Retro-Future.”

General Sir Arthur Lloghov, 5th Baron Lloghov, watched as the second hand snapped into position. The Baron closed his ornate pocketwatch–a personal gift from Her Majesty the Queen Regent. A steam whistle in the marshaling yards outside confirmed the Baron’s impeccable timing, and he sat at the head of the ornate table drawn up in the Admiralty building, medals jangling as he did so.

“This session of the Landships Commission will now come to order,” he said.

An aide rolled out the usual map, with a bold line drawn through the middle to represent the front between the hated enemy of Almain and the noble forces of Loegria.

“I am sure you have all seen our latest casualty statistics from the Battle of the Verge,” said Baron Lloghov. He took a calm puff from his pipe before continuing. “They are staggering. Seventy thousand casualties yesterday alone.”

There was a muted response; most of the commission members’ faces were shrouded, sphinxlike, in gaslight shadow. One of the attendees, an attaché named Wilkes, spoke: “Isn’t that cause for concern?”

“I should think not,” harrumphed Baron Lloghov. “Our troops have already gained one and a half miles of ground in the Verge, and my sources inform me that Almainian casualties were one and a half times as great as ours.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow,” said Wilkes.

“So long as we have the last 10,000 troops, it doesn’t matter how many bullets we’re forced to block with the breasts of brave men,” said Lloghov dismissively. “We’ve a greater population and greater resources to draw on. Attrition.”

“Nevertheless, I must again point out that if the Landships Commission were allowed to do its work, such casualties would not be necessary.” Lt. General Emanuel Hobart had been the prime mover behind the Commission’s existence, and had pressed for the construction and testing of landships against Baron Lloghov since the very first. The old man was only on the Commission as a result of heading the Admiralty, but he had used his rank and prestige to monopolize its time and block its work.

“Nonsense, the Commission is doing its work splendidly,” Lloghov retorted. “The Queen Regent has confided in me that we must thoroughly talk out such foolishness, lest our enemies profit from us following a rash course of action. What have you brought us this time, Hobart?”

Hobart unrolled a set of detailed schematics and production designs. “Fresh off the proving grounds at Columb. Three centimeters of armor, four eighty-millimeter high-velocity cannons, eight rifle-caliber machine guns, and two flamethrowers. Impervious to any small arms or artillery in the enemy inventory, and capable of speeds in excess of ten kilometers an hour with a crew of thirty.”

“A destroyer with tank treads!” laughed Lloghov. “Oh, won’t the Almainians laugh when they flank it with their horse cavalry? It might win the war for us by sheer humor.”

Wilkes the attaché reached out and took the plans. He examined them for a moment before folding them up and placing them in his case.

“See here, Wilkes, what are you-” Baron Lloghov’s words died in his throat as he saw Wilkes remove a pistol from his satchel. “Guards! Guards!”

The Loegrian guards responded, but they were barely able to draw their ornate and engraved single-action revolvers, let alone cock them, before Wilkes opened fire. He was using an automatic pistol, magazine-fed, that had been rejected by the pre-war Loegrian government and not being conducive to the principle of individual marksmanship. Acquired personally from the maker, along with plans for its manufacture, the weapon proved devastating in the close quarters of the conference room.

Wilkes handily dispatched the guards before indiscriminately spraying the room, holding the pistol sideways so that its action fanned out the bullets, which shattered the ornate stained-glass windows and buried themselves in the luxuriant carved panels.

When the magazine emptied, Wilkes dropped it to the table and slapped a fresh one home. Baron Lloghov, at the far end of the table, feebly raised his pistol. Wilkes answered with a single shot.

“W…why?” It was Hobart, gravely wounded beside the table.

“They are trying to fight a gentleman’s war in an industrial age, a war of horse-power in an age of diesel and coal,” responded Wilkes. “I am putting the implements of change in the hands of those who would use them.”

Check out this month’s other bloggers, all of whom have posted or will post their own responses:
Ralph Pines
meowzbark
BBBurke
Angyl78
ishtar’sgate
asnys
pyrosama

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The Citizens’ Revolution

By 802 CE, the rule of the Sejanian dynasty had become increasingly decadent and corrupt. Huge portions of the imperial treasury were spent on luxury items, and the imperial army was regularly sent on raids into the Outland to enrich the emperor’s coffers. This tense situation led to a series of serious Oustsider invasions, as the scattered groups temporarily united under strong leaders. The incursion of 799 reached nearly to the City itself before being repulsed, and much of the Farmlands was laid waste in reprisal.

This led to a critical food shortage; importing foodstuffs from Outsiders was impossible thanks to the border raids, and the large imperial army needed an immense supply to continue its campaigns. Though gunpowder and musketry had been rediscovered, this technological advantage was offset by increasingly inept military leadership. For instance, the Battle of Stedman’s Farm in 799 resulted in the annihilation of an entire army after the emperor’s brother led it into a trap, but the reins of the armies remained firmly in imperial hands.

802 saw food riots in the city and fresh Outsider incursions along the frontier. Emperor Marcian II ineptly left the situation in the hands of his family members, and the result was the Canal Street Massacre, in which nearly 200 unarmed and starving citizens were gunned down by troops from the Citadel. Two days later, news arrived in the capital of imperial defeats at Marcus’ Mill and Caleb’s Ford. Though these defeats were nowhere near as serious as Stedman’s Farm, the effect was to galvanize the City into open revolt. Many members of the imperial army joined the citizens as they stormed the Citadel under heavy fire, and Marcian was forced to flee the City.

A council of citizens formed a provisional government, seizing imperial weapons and supplies while accepting the allegiance of many units bound for the front lines. Marcian and his court retreated to the imperial army encampment in the Farmlands, and immediately began planning an assault to retake the City. The resulting fighting, which pitted royalists against revolutionaries, lasted until 808, and was utterly ruinous, with opportunistic Outside invasions and bitter campaigning in and around the City itself. The last imperial forces surrendered after the decisive Battle of the Bay, and Marcian was executed by a kangaroo court along with most of the remaining nobility.

The Citizens’ Republic

Taking inspiration from then-radical political philosophy, the new provisional government declared itself a democracy, and elected the first Mayor in late 809. Mayor Quinn, a veteran of the Citizens’ Revolution, moved vigorously to restore order. The remaining Outsiders were expelled, and the imperial treasury was emptied in reconstruction efforts. By 815, when Quinn left office, the Citizens’ Republic was secure.

The Farmlands were the site of one of the new government’s most controversial programs. Outsider prisoners of war were forced to labor on the farms, whose native population had been decimated by the fighting. Eventually, the manpower shortage–coupled with the recovering City’s growing needs–forced regular, government sanctioned raids for more laborers. Though, according to the City Charter, the Outlanders were eligible for citizenship, in practice local laws and hardened attitudes left over from the Revolution meant that the laborers were little more than chattel.

Despite this, the young Citizens’ Republic underwent a cultural and technological renaissance, with many works of art and new ideas forming a potent and diverse cultural mélange. The stagnation that had dogged the city in the last years of the monarchy had finally been dispelled.

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First she donned the inner liner, designed to keep her circulation constant no matter the pressure on the other side of the airlock. A liquid cooling and ventilation garment was next, to combat the terrifyingly low and high temperatures to be expected outside. A pressure bladder over both formed a temporary seal in case of a puncture, and a restraint layer plus a liner kept it in place. Outside of that was an airtight aluminized insulation layer and an external layer designed to resist micro-meteor impacts.

She could survive with just that, but a hard-shell suit of metal and composites formed the final layer nonetheless. Her eyes were visible behind layers of multiplex for a moment before she swung the tinted visor down to screen out radiation.

“Going out to town for a bit, Pa!” she cried through the intercom.

“Don’t forget them batteries.”

The airlock cycled, and she stepped out onto the surface of the Earth.

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“You know these little settlements, these ditchwater colonies. They don’t even have the ships and pilots to escape if there’s trouble, much less fix their own damn satellites.”

“So that means I get a bonus then, does it?” Stanwicke said. He swiveled his suit’s thrusters to get a better angle on the communications relay satellite. The planet yawned dizzyingly above–or below–him.

“I put the paperwork through, like you asked, but you’re not gonna like it,” continued Ralston in Stanwicke’s ear. “It’s a 417.”

“Charity case,” Stanwicke hissed. “Damn.” Section 417 of the Code stipulated that skilled technicians were required to donate their time to colonists or vessels in distress, at the risk of losing their operating license from the UNSC.

“They can still tip you, you know, and that’s not bound by the union pay scale,” said Ralston, clearly trying to be optimistic. He wasn’t winning the Oscar for acting anytime soon.

“Oh yes, like the time I was tipped with a chicken by that hippie colony,” groused Stanwicke, his complaints lightly fogging his faceplate for a moment. “Or the time that town passed the hat for me and I came up with a whopping seventeen. I did the math on that, you know: it was .000001% of what I needed to cover my expenses.”

Ralston didn’t say anything; Stanwicke could all but see him settling into his chair with a deep sigh. It wasn’t his fault, but that wasn’t enough to keep Stanwicke out of a foul mood.

“There, done.” Stanwicke made the last few plasma welds and connected the power source. A few diagnostics later, and the satellite was working perfectly, re-establishing communications with the ground-based settlement. The triple-thrusters on his suit rotated again, and began to bear the repairman back to his ship.

“Are you sure?” There was a note in Ralston’s voice that Stanwicke didn’t like.

“Yes, and if you’ll give me half a minute, I can get back to the beacon and complain at you in person.”

“Stan, I’m not getting any comm traffic from the colony. None.”

Stanwicke would have shrugged if his suit wasn’t a hard and unyielding shell. “Well they can call anytime they want to.”

“You know what this means, a 417 with no ground contact.”

“Yeah, I know,” Stanwicke sighed. “I have to go down there.”

“That’s not all,” said Ralston. “I’ve been analyzing the imagery you sent, and…well, it looks like the satellite was deliberately disabled. Sabotaged.”

Inspired by this.

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“What shall we do today, Goldilocks?”

Lutea’s fish, swimming idly in her bowl, did not reply.

“Fine then, I’ll think of something myself.”

Lutea paced back and forth on her tiled floor, each tile handmade and unique. She stared at her walls, covered in green wallpaper of her own design and accented with beautifully painted fruits (because why not?). There were so many possibilities, a paralyzing panoply of possibilities in point of fact.

Perhaps arts and crafts? Lutea examined her last project, an umbrella with the same sorts of fruits that covered her wall. She lounged on the wooden bench that doubled as bed and couch, chair and china cabinet. Well, quadrupled as those things anyhow. There were so many unfinished art projects on and underneath it that she’d have to do a mighty clearing the next time she wanted to sleep.

Perhaps best not to start anything new, then.

“Goldilocks, you’re usually so helpful when I can’t decide what to do today,” Lutea said, pouting slightly.

The fish swam about her bowl, blithely fanning her tiny gills.

“All right, I’m sorry about what I said the other day,” said Lutea. “You’re not a silly fish. The walking stick was a very good idea, I just felt like modifying it a little bit since there’s nowhere to walk and you never know when it might rain.”

“That’s better,” the goldfish said, her sweet voice warbled by the waters in which she swam. “Is a simple apology so hard?”

“Harder before you’ve done it than after,” laughed Lutea. “Now let’s hear your idea for today. I can see in your eyes that you’ve got one.”

“We should make some more tiles, Lutea. It may not be as fun as other things, but we can make the place bigger! Maybe even find someplace new!”

It was a simple suggestion, perhaps, but–as always–a good one. Lutea sat on her bench, stretched out her arms, and concentrated. After a moment, the thin outline of a tile, more like a washed-out photograph than anything, began to appear. Following a little more mental effort, the dust of the universe coalesced into something firm enough to be held.

“What do you think for colors, Goldilocks?”

“Raspberry and vanilla swirl!”

“Oooh! You always know just what will work.” Lutea swirled her hands, and as she did so vibrant colors blossomed forth across the plain surface, following the every motion of her hands like a viscous liquid. When the pattern caught her fancy, she froze it and held the completed tile up. Goldilocks flipped her tail in approval, and Lutea laid the tile in a gap at the edge of her place.

One more square looking into the infinite starry void that surrounded them filled up. Lutea looked out over the endless expanse thoughtfully, picking out a few minor bits of debris and a great void-whale to which she waved before turning back.

“If you can concentrate a bit harder, Lutea, we can make more than one at once,” said Goldilocks. “Then we could blaze a bath and see what’s out there, away from our little patch.”

“Someday, Goldilocks. Someday.”

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