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March 8, 2015

From “The NPC Local 983” by Colt Chaplen

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Are you sick of people barging into your home or place of business and ransacking the place without a word of explanation?

Are you tired of being asked the same questions over and over by armed interlopers?

Is your business buckling under the financial strain of customers who demand payment in cash for stacks of 99 crisp basilisk urethras, even though you don’t run a pawnshop?

Then we have good news for you!

We are now accepting applications to join the NPC Local 983, a very special kind of trade union dedicated to curbing the abuses of self-proclaimed heroes and adventurers. Membership is open to all small business owners and employees, local homeowners, police and private security guards, as well as loiterers and hangers-on. Anyone who wants to get on with the business of living their life without interference by outside interlopers is welcome!

Our recent successes include:

– NPCs working at a Pizza Hut on Starbase 37b successfully opposed the efforts of a group of three malefactors in powered combat armor who tried to talk themselves into being given the contents of the cash register.

– An NPC family in Hearthburg was able to lock and bar their home to prevent entry by a man in plate mail after he had entered their property on several other occasions to smash jars and steal anything of value.

– The staff of the Rosina Arsenal was successfully able to refuse to purchase a stack of 99 Cockatrice Scales from a customer who demanded that they be accepted in trade for a brand new Falchion worth 2500 GP. This success was especially noteworthy given that the customer was in fact the King of Rosina and demanded a discount.

Don’t delay! Unionize, fight back, and together we can forge a more equitable shake for the working NPC everywhere.

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March 7, 2015

From “The Enigma Moth” by Levi Paris Schroeder

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The larva of an enigma moth is more commonly known as a riddling worm or riddleworm. They thrive on riddles, puzzles, and conundrums posed by others, but aren’t able to pose any of their own. They tend to congregate in bookstores, libraries, college campuses, and debating societies. Anyone who’s ever handled an old book of riddles has probably seen their empty egg casings and the spidery filaments of doubt they leave behind.

Once enough small riddles–or perhaps just one great corker of a riddle–have been devoured, the riddleworm will spin a cocoon from the threads of stories and pupate, emerging as an enigma moth. They are so named because they must pose an enigma before the end of their ephemeral life, requiring the ensuing raw confusion to lay their eggs much in the same way that the riddleworms feed on it.

Enigma moths whisper their conundrums quietly but so insistently that most cannot help but hear.

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March 6, 2015

From “The Galactic Failsafe” by Bernard S. Roberts

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Civilizations tend to destroy themselves. You’ve noticed this, haven’t you? For every empire of a thousand years a hundred fall, and length is no guarantee. Easter Island supported 10,000 people at its peak, the Roman Empire was 1500 years old when the gates of the Hagia Sophia were battered down, and the Empire of China was heir to 2000 years of intrigue when it was toppled by a few flags in the street.

It doesn’t take much, does it, to project those onto a global scale?

This is as unavoidable as it is inevitable, as the civilization of your choice is always prey to the capricious whims of a few, the lowest and base, who would see everything ground to dust for their own reasons. On a planetary scale, it means that civilizations are inevitably doomed regardless of their level of technology or expansion.

It seems like a closed system, a foolproof system. But what if it’s not? What if there’s a chance—however slight—that sapients might avoid the cycle that has seen galactic empires crumble and the mighty R’de laid low?

Someone, something, has seen to that, too.

There are three possible states of a universe: stasis, growth, and contraction. We know that the former to are untenable given our observations, and a cursory examination of the Vyaeh archives reveals the same. The universe is expanding, and that expansion is, against all that we know, accelerating.

The Vyaeh know this at the highest levels of their Orphaned Court, as do those of them with half a brain. But they, like us, are too busy fighting over the ashes to recognize the conflagration that surrounds and envelops them. Their manifest stupidity prevents any serious inquiry, though I’ve reason to suspect that perhaps there are forces acting upon them, and upon us, that cannot be fully understood.

But the R’de…the R’de are different. Why were they destroyed and enslaved by the Vyaeh? Why, when our scientists, and theirs, insist that there is nothing to learn from them? Their worlds are not strategic, they contain no natural resources of value.

Don’t you see? They were destroyed because they were too close to unlocking the secret. The ultimate failsafe that will prevent intelligent life from thriving and spreading: the heat-death of the universe.

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March 5, 2015

Fr0m “The Nineteen” by Nettie Henne

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Each summer, the city would send forth nineteen of its finest to form a convoy to its sister settlement across the great wastes. The nineteen were carefully chosen, as they were entrusted with the city’s finest trade goods, swiftest steeds, and best arms. Setting off across the wastes at the beginning of the wet season, theirs was a journey of months.

Some years, the nineteen would return, bearing trade goods from the sister settlement–all of the things that the city itself could not make. Some years, they would return in disgrace, having been unable to complete the journey. Some years they would not return at all.

All of the nineteen were volunteers, for eternal glory awaited those who returned with goods, and all of the city’s most important positions were filled by veterans of a successful caravan. Applying was simple: one needed the recommendation of a caravan veteran, the recommendation of one of the city’s guildmasters, and successful completion of a test.

The test was simple, a single question:

You are crossing the desert with your brother, your son, and your greatest enemy. Bandits are ahead, and wild dogs at your heels. Your brother is wounded, your son is ill, but your greatest enemy is in perfect health. There is only food, water, and weapons for three. Who shall be cast out to die, and who shall be armed in the caravan’s defense?

The question is administered in secret, though candidates are permitted to explain themselves, and the answers remain sealed forever. Prospective answers to the question are hotly debated in the city’s public houses among would-be members of the nineteen. For who has never wondered, when faced with the darkness, what they would do to survive?

What would your answer be?

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March 4, 2015

From “Wisdom of the Pulp” by Elwood Fipps Thum

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Our corrected interior accepts the wisdom of the pulp.
How does my editorial sense slip words into structure?
Why is a logical statement logical within the syntax?
Why can’t the referendum smell?

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March 3, 2015

From “The Illusive Elusive Sparrows” by Sandra Cooke Jameson

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In what became an internet sensation, an ornithologist once wrote about a colony of sparrows who, due to a genetic mutation exacerbated by the founder effect on their small offshore island home, could not sing within the range of other sparrows’ hearing. Forced to inbreed, their population grew smaller and smaller due to infertile eggs and the slow arch of time.

These birds–the “loneliest sparrows on the planet” were the subject of a documentary, a Kickstarter, and even some internet innovations aimed at making their high-pitched songs understandable to mainland sparrows (who could presumably then flit over and add fresh new blood to the isolate population dynamics). But the sparrows proved elusive; the island often varied from description to description, and those islands matching the descriptions often contained no sparrows. Those that did typically featured thoroughly natural birdsong audible to human and bird alike.

There was a reason. The ornithologist’s piece had been a fabrication–they claimed it was a piece of fiction, though they’d had no qualms about basking in the adulation of internet denizens.

The elusive sparrows were in fact illusive sparrows, more a metaphor of the longing of human nature to fit creatures into anthropomorphic narratives than anything else.

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March 2, 2015

From “Toil’s Cultivation” by Caitlin Volo Titus

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Should deeply planted and long-cultivated toil fall to its opposite in the great race? Many of history’s most illustrious successes, and even more of its noblest attempts, came from those with the disadvantage of moving quickly, impulsively, without forethought. The masses have oft seen this as undesirable, preferring that success be the reward of toil rather than that of rashness. The swampy morass of history is difficult to read on the matter, its arenas bubbling throughout with echoes of the disunifying clash.

The answer has always been there. You have but to grasp it.

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March 1, 2015

From “The Puzzl3 0f Ta0s” by Y4ARaoa/_75Ttm

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Oh yes, I promised you a puzzle, didn’t I?

Over the last month, I’ve had a bit of fun with this ridiculously pretentious blog. Some of it’s been overt, some of it’s been covert. Look at the various posts I messed with, subtly or in-your-face. There were five, all in the same month and the same year.

So if they were all in the same month and all in the same year, wrap your monkey brain around what digits might serve to distinguish them. D0n’t f0rget the zer0es, naturally, and don’t bother counting this missive–it is, after all, a new month for everyone but the Samoans.

But that’s not quite enough, is it? Numbers are a paltry thing, though I do so enjoy laughing in the face of mathematicians claiming them to be somehow more pure or less relative than the rest of the phlegm coughed up by your psychotic, self-important apes.

No, assuming you can get the right numbers, they need to be incorporated into a URL. I work on FTL fiber-optic ansibles of pure awesomeness, and a URL is a bit like trying to carve quadratics into stone, but it’s a necessary concession to your meager capabilities.

Naturally no ordinary URL will do. I doubt that you can handle anything but an extremely tiny one.

There’s your puzzle then, as promised. If I made it any simpler I’d be spelling it out in mile-high neons, but even so I wonder if even one of you miscreants will solve it.

I’ll be amused regardless. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, and be amused by both.

0nes and zer0es,
Ta0s

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February 28, 2015

From “Betwixt Spheres of Sea and Sky” by Sheskey Spears

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Theirs was a world of tranquil waters and still air.

The waters ran to a glassy and infinite depth, and none who had swum deeper than a few breaths had ever returned. Therefore, they did not concern themselves with the depths save for what they could fish from it or the distances one could travel.

The still air was infinite, and rare was the day it was not lit by an even glow that flared and faded at regular intervals. The occasional crimson-tinged clouds appeared on the horizon around sunset, but those who set of in pursuit thereof never returned. Therefore, they did not concern themselves with the skies save what they could catch from it and how long it carried a shout.

Betwixt water and sky were their homes, great orbs of soft and malleable material that bobbed placidly in the waters. The orbs were easily worked, and if carefully laid out to dry pieces of them could be used to make doors or even boats. In time, they were hollowed out, with many generations of the same family sharing a sphere. Subtle tides amid the waters were always bringing together and breaking up groups of spheres, and it was in that way that they spread far and wide.

One of the oldest and hollowest spheres returned from a long sojourn across the drifts with a curious passenger atop its apex: a portal through which a bright golden light continually shone. It was quite unlike the portals they used to enter and exit the bobbing spheres, which were always circular or oblong, and it always remained at the top of the elder sphere even after curious gawkers worked together to turn it.

But, like the depths of the sea and the horizons, those brave few who ventured through it never returned.

However, unlike the depths or the horizons, one day something ventured into their world from the other side.

Inspired by this.

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February 27, 2015

From “Overheard in an Unlikely Place” by Anonymous

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“What’s your family like?”

“It’s…blended. My grandpa and grandma divorced, and my grandpa remarried and had more kids, so I have three sets of grandparents and a bunch of half-aunts and half-uncles.”

“Three sets? Did your grandma remarry?”

“No, not officially, but she has a…a friend. They’ve been together so long.”

“Aw, that’s cute.”

“Yeah, they’re really cute together. Especially when you remember that he’s shivving her in secret.”

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