Peritract

Prompt: A young orphan is adopted by the local family of spiders living in the Dark Forest. Years later, she serves as an emissary for the new adventure guild nearby.

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Dameron was having another quiet day. A short winter had meant fewer troll attacks than normal, and so fewer guild petitioners. The morning had passed with only one visitor - a farmer with a dire mole problem - and the afternoon looked like it would continue the same pattern.

Sat behind his high desk in a warm room, he struggled to remain alert. Again and again he caught himself drifting, his head nodding drow

Prompt: It's show and tell day at school. One little girl decides to bring her best friend: a cat skeleton that is inexplicably alive.

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Deep in the cold earth, a box. Thin, damp cardboard, torn and spotted with mould. The lid had caved in almost immediately after burial, filling the cramped space with soft dark soil. And in the box, with worms twining slowly through the gaps of ribs and roots pushing insistently against thin bones, a cat.

Not much to look at, now - small bones, long-since picked clean by clicking beetles, stained by the mud around them. A hollow skull w

Prompt: You were supposed to herald the end times, but you overslept.

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Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.

Guys, I am really sorry.

I have had a nightmare of a morning and the traffic has been apocalyptic and I packed the wrong trumpet so...

I have just got why the traffic was so bad.

No, that's on me. Sorry again - I should have been the warning.

Anyway. Bottom line, I'm here now. We can kick off.

Locusts? Have we got the locusts? Where are the locusts?

Jared, the locusts?

Really already? That's very fast.

No, no, you're fine - I wasn't there, you made the call. That's good.

Prompt: You and your buddy are trying to figure out which new evil mastermind to work for after your last henchman job ended with your boss getting killed and both of you getting beaten up by a hero.

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Chuck hated filling out job applications. The whole thing was just so fake, everyone answering the same questions the same way just to show how they were a good 'culture fit'. And after the fluffy personality quizzes, there was always page after page of forms to fill in - repeat your job history twice (even though it's already on your CV!), list every house you ever lived in, jump

Prompt: You, an all-powerful villain, managed to defeat the child of prophecy. The problem is he's literally a child. You now turn your eyes towards the gods who sent the poor soul against you.

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Skirrilax, dread lord of the dark domain, gestured wearily to the basket. 'What exactly were you hoping to achieve?'

The assembled heroes didn't answer, looking anywhere except at the avatar of darkness and the small figure sleeping the basket. Eltor the Just shuffled his feet nervously.

'She's 8 months old. She can't fight - can't even walk. The closest she can get to saying my name

Prompt: One day, every man-made structure on Earth mysteriously fuses to one another. Hallways now blend into other hallways, stairways just lead to more levels of rooms. No matter how far anyone travels in the maze, no one can get outside. If there even is still an "outside."

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It's been three hours since the last twist, which means we're due another one soon. We need to find a safe place to ride it out. Somewhere wide and empty, with no close walls or corners. Somewhere we can't get warped round angles or stretched until we tear.

Right now, where we are, none of us would survive

Prompt: A double-blind clinical trial on the efficacy of thoughts and prayers as a medical treatment.

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This was not supposed to happen.

I mean, it's ridiculous. We only started the study as a bet, and we only did it properly because - well, that's what you do, isn't it? Can't be a scientist if you do science - even joke science - badly.

We woke up that morning (rather hungover) and got to work. We made a proper plan, appointed Jules the lab manager, filled out a risk assessment: the works. We had six months of excess funding to burn through, and a bet to win.

And we were ri

Prompt: You were ridiculed by your family when you believed an ancestor's dairy saying you descended from a warrior race with drawings of golden hair and huge power boosts with near death injuries. Back into the field with the agency after recovering from life threatening injuries, you notice changes...

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I feel stronger, faster - slightly more stupid. My tongue feels too large for my mouth.

That explosion would have killed any normal man, but I am so much more than a man now. The pain and trauma have unlocked my hidden legacy, given me the powers of my birthright.

My parents ne

Prompt: The last living wizard dies to bring back magic to the world. Unfortunately for humanity it all ends up in less than %1 of plants and animals but no people. You work pest control to subdue creatures that are dangerous to people.

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Here's your problem, see?

When your boiler exploded, it burst a water main, and now you've got nixies in the pipes. They play havoc with the plumbing and - while some people quite like a naked water sprite joining them in the shower - your missus definitely wants them gone.

If that was your only problem, then it would be an easy fix; flush salt

Prompt: a story where we love the main character up until the very end

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It's impossible not to love her. Even now, as your hands ease back the final bolt, you can feel the deep pull within you, urging you to go back and look at her one more time. She's so beautiful when she sleeps, so peaceful, and it's so easy to lose yourself as you watch her, hearing her soft breath in the dark and forgetting the outside again.

You lose yourself in the memory for a while, remembering the soft new-baby smell of her hair and the way her arms twine around your neck. You smile to yourself and y

Prompt: a world where there furry.

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Here is smooth and rubbery, as the creators intended. We are a smooth and rubbery people, and we live in the approved (and smooth, and rubbery) way. Our skin is green and slightly elastic. Our houses can withstand earthquakes with ease. We are mighty merchant princes, capable of rapid (and smooth, and rubbery) movement along our well-designed roads. There are no potholes, no hidden snags. We do things the right way.

But at the end of our roads, a horror. A place of nightmares and misery, where barkless rubber trees and even, yielding grass gives way to biza

Prompt: All of humanity wakes up tomorrow with the ability to detect intentional falsities—which are unpleasant to witness. The more blatant the lie, the more foul. Written statement are not immune. Deceptive and misleading statements are similarly cause for recoil.

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At least we have the truth now.

The cost was high - every story, every actor's life's work. Millenia of human culture forever taken from us, glorious singing prose that now tastes of ashes, wriggles like worms across your tongue if you speak it.

And the smaller, human costs as well - the marriages held together by

Prompt: What kind of god prays?

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Your lungs hurts, and your arm is still bleeding, but at least it seems to have gone. You slump in the corner, back against the wall, and try to catch your breath.

You're still not clear on how you got here, or where 'here' actually is. It's not somewhere you've been before - it's not even vaguely like anywhere you've been before. Endless corridors, all lit the same, filled with intersections and dead ends and paths that double back on themselves. Blank, grey stone with no visible joins.

As your breathing slowly starts to ease, you try and make sense of it. You we

Prompt: The only reason we think the angels are the good guys is because of their extensive propaganda campaign.

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I'm sure you've heard all the sermons, seen the stained glass - you think you know what's right. Holy men have told you about the meek, the just, the peacemakers. You've been steeped in scripture until there's not the faintest shadow of a doubt left.

And everything you know is a lie.

To really understand good and evil, you have to see it. You have to watch it happen, powerless to intervene. You have to live with the consequences of salvation. Simply being told abo

Prompt: There’s a reason NASA doesn’t want to go back to the moon.

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We chose to go to the moon. Not because it was easy, but because it was the only place we could think of to put ...the thing. And now it's not our problem, we have no intention of ever going back.

It's difficult to describe the thing. We found it in a glacier, buried under a thousand tons of ice; based on ice-flow science that I don't understand, the thing is at least 200,000 years old. The thing is made of some stone-like (but not stone, not exactly) material; it can't be cut or shattered or torn, but you