Did you like today’s prompt? It was in celebration of the second round of edits from my editor that I’ve been going through the past few days. I’m just tickled pink with how it’s coming together. Especially since so much of it this time was line edits rather than big-picture things. It’s beginning to look like a real book. YAY! Now I have to write the next one. 😉

This is Thea's newest book. Check it out!

In the meantime I’m basking in the satisfaction of this round.

Y’all obviously enjoyed the prompt. I love the way you people’s minds work.

So, it made it quite a job for Thea Atkinson, @theapatra to pick only five finalists, but pick only five she did. Here they are:

RBWood, @rbwood

Aden, @adenpenn

Stuart Nager, @stustoryteller

Kadin Seton, @kadinseton

redshirt6, @redshirt6

Congrats to them all. Don’t hate them too much. It’ll be you next week. 😉 In the meantime, read their entries below, vote, send friends, neighbors, and little children to vote as well, and then come back tomorrow morning at 9:00E to see who WINS!

RBWood, @rbwood

Being a consultant is not a bad way to go through life. Yes, for the most part, you are treated like a ‘disposable resource,’ but let’s be honest. In this day and age, who isn’t?

Even knowing that, sometimes people just get under your skin. My current gig is as a technology construction advisor for a high-tech laboratory being built for a chemical weapons research facility in downtown Indianapolis. It’s an all-boys club.

And please don’t preach to me about the evils of chemical weapons research. It pays the bills.

Anyway, people tend to abuse contractors, like I was saying. Normally I just sit back and take it…for $150 an hour. But this…complete bastard…goes above and beyond any sort of abuse I’ve ever experienced. And that includes an ex-husband whose only form of exercise was to drink and slap me around. And he’s the site supervisor.

The verbal assaults were never ending. “Hey babe, I know you’re a woman, but can you actually document your piece of the project using words we all can understand?” Or: “Yo tits, wear tighter jeans tomorrow. The boss is in for a site review and I want to give him something to look at.”

What a douche.

One evening when I was working late, the SOB supervisor came up behind me smelling like cheap beer and tried to play a little grab-ass. That’s when I realized the gravity of the situation.

I told him off of course. That’s when he punched me.

I honestly have no memory of what happened next. The only thing my brain processed is that the next morning, one of my co-workers woke me up at my desk asking me if I knew how an extra eight feet of concrete sidewalk had been poured overnight…

Aden, @adenpenn

The room that they kept Kyle in was stark white and freezing cold. There was just one table and two chairs. Everything was so clinical, and it didn’t do much to keep him from being afraid. Of course, most of the fear came from the fact that his hands and legs were tightly held to the chair, using these weird gaunlets of metal. When they put them on him, there was a weird feeling that came over him. A sudden rush of calm, and he was almost instantly weak. There was no fighting, not now. All he could do was sit there and wait, but he knew he wasn’t alone. Kyle knew someone was watching him, that’s why he kept his eyes level with the mirror in front of him.

“How long ago did you find him?”

“A few hours, he was in pretty bad shape, but the other guys looked a lot worse. Well the ones we could find.”

“Does he know what’s going on?”

“Not exactly, he was asking us to help him as the sedative started to work.”

“And from your on the scene assesment, what is his ability?”

“Gravity control sir.”

“Excellent, he will do just fine in our program.”

Stuart Nager, @stustoryteller

LOOK AT ALL THE PRETTY STARS

“Twinkle, Twinkle, really big star..don’t blow up until I’m afar,” Jake hummed-sang to himself, as he cut the side thrusters, the life support, all the unnecessary instruments in the ship…all the unnecessary ones. At this moment. At this moment, when he needed to get the fuck away into safe dark space before this one blows the shit out of him.

Jake’s job was to collect energy, causing near dead suns to give off their final energies in one great Battery Recharging sublimation into final flame out. All he had to do was fly the Collector into the right area (“alignment with Federal Central still a go” said Leeza, his co-almost dead cohabitant), drop the Servilenuke right into the heart of the sun (Pink Floyd blasting away as he did so..”oh, the oldies are still the best) and then getting the hell out of there. Let the Collector collect the energy blast. He just wanted to keep collecting heart beats at this point.

The ship was crippled. He waited too long, concentrated too long on screwing Leeza for a “job well done”…and now they were both screwed. He put all the energy into the drive to get them out of here, pushed this and pulled that and commanded the computer to haul ass…

Nova, so bright.

Kadin Seton, @kadinseton

As I walked outside, the blinding glare of the sun hurt my eyes. I had my protective gear on, but that didn’t do much to cut the intense heat and light from too much solar energy. The Earth’s gravity was different too. My body felt heavy and sluggish.

It had finally happened. Many left wing radicals had predicted that we would eventually do ourselves in. Roughly 80% of all species had been destroyed – the government had reported. Of course, we humans managed to make the cut.

The air was thin and my feet felt like I was wearing cement shoes. The short walk to the local food station wore me out.

The funny thing was – it wasn’t something that we did to ourselves, it was something that was done to us. Well, we didn’t help matters with our carbon emissions, oil spills and general abuse of toxic substances. But, the real culprit was a random sun flare – just a haphazard burst of gases that shot out into space at a million miles per second. It wasn’t headed towards Earth, but our gravitational pull reeled it in, just like a big fish. The flare instantly chewed up the outer layers of the atmosphere and changed the magnetic core of the plant. We were left exposed to the radiation of a cruel star and an altered gravity.

Lucky for us, the government had the answer – drill for more oil.

redshirt6, @redshirt6

“So what you are saying is that you believe our existence is some kind of anomaly, some kind of quirk of nature so to speak?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “In the tiniest of nutshells, that is precisely what I am saying.”

Fiona’s eyebrows rose as she cupped her hands around the steaming cup of tea. “And it is time that is the cause of this…, this… ‘incident’?”

“Well, no,” Jonathan replied. “It is not time itself that is causing this quirk. Rather time itself, as we sense it on a daily basis, is caused by this, uh, incident.” His hands were damp with perspiration and he wiped them on the thighs of his trousers as he continued. “You see, time is has no direction. It merely is. And what we call our reality is an anomalous quirk that has caused time to become focused. It’s as if there were some kind of gravity lens drifting through a universe in which time is un-ordered and just by chance, just by a may-haps arrangement, it has caused time to become focused. But it is only for a brief period of time.”

Fiona stared at the young man. “And by a ‘brief period of time’ you mean…” she queried.

“Several billions of years,” Johnathan responded.

“I see,” Fiona replied.

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