Prompts

So Lois uses prescription meds recreationally? #FamilyGuy

I guess it’s easily explained. She has gone through quite a bit during her marriage to Peter. He is simple-minded man that indulges his every reckless idea with no thought to cost or consequence. As a result, she has to stress nearly every week about losing the family home or a even a member of the family.

She spends the bulk of her time with toddler Stewie. He grew from a bad-tempered baby that actively seemed to dislike her to someone that has his own life and opinions. She spends all day with him, but then he always seems to be someone else’s responsibility. She loves him, but she’s given up on caring for him.

Beginning with daughter Meg–the sexual predator–she’s experienced some true parental failures. Enough that I could imagine her looking at Stewie and knowing that she’s going to screw him up.

Too much of Lois’ nitpicking and Meg is a very unhappy young woman. She’s desperate to get out in the world and have adventures, but her interactions with others are stunted and awkward. She makes other people uncomfortable, so they leave her alone again. But she does have a history of violence and property destruction, not to mention a horrible family–things that might make her hesitant to meet new people.

Who would want to see their brother perving on their new friends? Chris doesn’t even bother going somewhere private before he starts masturbating. He sits around in his underwear irregardless of who’s in the house. And considering some of the things he says? He may grow up to be a serial killer. (“You’re never getting out of that bag.”)

Lois trusts Stewie to the care of the family dog. And while he sometimes gives in to his nature–eating things … Read the rest “So Lois uses prescription meds recreationally? #FamilyGuy”

“Let me out, you bitch!” I screamed, throwing myself at the door.

1. “Dude, that’s your mom.”

1A. “I don’t care. She’s keeping us here. *Starving* us.”

1B. “She doesn’t want you going out, finding your own brains, possibly killing a family with small children.”

1C. “You *have* been playing a lot of video games lately. Maybe she has a legitemate reason to worry.”

2. The nurse turned her head. Her eyes met mine. The lipstick red slash of her mouth curled up.

2A. I felt a cold chill. I was never going home.

2B. “Go back to bed. You’ll get your meds in an hour.”

2C. Her uniform was pristine, either a perfect recreation of an old-timey nurse’s uniform, or an expensively maintained original. It sent a chill down my spine to see it. What kind of person had kidnapped me? Where was I?

3. Everything had gone wrong. I should have turned the job down the minute I got those first details.

The Portuguese man o’ war is a fascinating organism.

From Wikipedia: “The Atlantic Portuguese man o’ war (Physalia physalis), also known as the Man-of-war, bluebottle, or floating terror, is a marine cnidarian of the family Physaliidae. Its venomous tentacles can deliver a painful sting. Despite its outward appearance, the Portuguese man o’ war is not a common jellyfish but a siphonophore, which is not actually a single multicellular organism, but a colony of specialized minute individuals called zooids. These zooids are attached to one another and physiologically integrated to the extent that they are incapable of independent survival.”

But what really caught my attention was this line in the “Predators and prey” section of the article: “The blanket octopus is immune to the venom of the Portuguese man o’ war; young individuals carry broken man o’ war tentacles, presumably for offensive and/or defensive purposes.”

And that’s where this Prompt comes from. The idea that an alien race might use biological weaponry to go against human technology.

I imagine a human ship meeting an alien race with chitinous armor covered with luminescent circles and stripes. One touch incapacitates, and the human crew is quickly overcome. They are taken back to the alien ship where they are examined and dissected by the curious aliens that communicate via pheromones and don’t recognize human speech as a language.

As a result of that first disastrous meeting, humans attack the alien ship. It becomes a catastrophe when the aliens respond to the loss of their scout ship by sending in the Armada (swarms of ship able to change color and block all radiation, rippling to match the space around them, seeming to disappear). Every meeting between humans and the aliens result in the humans losing, either when their ships are destroyed or when the … Read the rest “PROMPT: Man o’ war”

“Shower buddies” –The showers are side-by-side, so two men that have never seen each other end up singing together every morning.

*

A. “Did you know that every morning he gets up to take a shower at seven in the morning and sing with his neighbor? Shower buddies, he called it.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. It blew my mind for some reason. I’m okay with it now, but at first it seemed so weird.”

*

B. It freaked him out at first. One minute singing alone, the next in chorus with the guy from the neighboring apartment.

And then it was kind of cool.

In the mornings as he lathered up, he’d sing along with his neighbor, songs he never would have shared with anyone else.

B1. It was romantic, but in a nonsexual way. This was his singing buddy. This was his beautiful friend whose face he never wanted to see.

How horrible was that?

But he’d been hurt before. He’d fallen out of love with plenty of people when he *got* to see how they truly lived.

His step-sister had delighted in taking all of the magic out of his world when he’d been twelve years old. It was the one stark memory of his childhood that he maintained: that monstrous figure looming over him. He’d thought she’d been demonically possessed.

Always so quiet and still, she’d leaped out of her chair and begun screaming out answers to every question he’d interrupted her with all night. Bulging eyes and raging mouth; he’d been completely terrified. And ever since then, his every bogeyman-moment was tied to that fear. (He wished he hadn’t posted his worst fear in his profile. It would have been better if he’d made something up.)

He couldn’t handle it if his singing buddy was horrible to look … Read the rest “PROMPT: Shower Buddies”

Through a window darkly gazing
At a sight afraid to see
Breathing deep the salted water
Dreaming dreams, of you and me.