September Writing Prompts 2019

[labrathor]

September is here! A big thank you goes out to sweetcandygirl for hosting the awesome Coney Island summer event last month, and to all the players who participated to make it a carnival to remember! We truly couldn't do it without you all. And As always--

Disclaimer: I never close old writing prompts from previous months. People can and should be encouraged to post on old month's prompts and I highly encourage players to track these posts to catch stragglers or new people writing on old prompts.

Now. With that out of the way, onto this month's prompts.

September's Writing Prompts

1. "The strangest thing happened to me the other day."

2. Everyone lies, it's to what end that people find fault.

3. "I would rob a baby of it's milk just to try that again."

4. Ever found yourself in a place where logic need not apply?

5. How is your character kind to themselves?

Bonus image prompt:

Comments

4 - Logic Need Not Apply

[itmeanstruth]

Itaru was shaken from his sleep by tiny hands and the sound of sniffles. Groggily, he opened his eyes to find Minoru clutching at his pajamas with one hand and wiping his face with the other. It wasn’t hard for a father to quickly put two and two together.

“Minoru… did you have a bad dream?”

The four-year-old nodded. Itaru sighed softly and sat up. Minoru wasted no time whatsoever climbing his way onto the bed and into his father’s lap.

Neither the quick climbing nor the nightmare itself surprised Itaru. Between his two children, Minoru had the most vivid dreams. Most of the time, that meant hearing about some grand adventure over breakfast. Sometimes, though, it meant consoling him from scary things. Chichi was especially good at that, but tonight, she wasn’t here and that, Itaru was about to discover, was the root of this particular nightmare.

“I dreamed that Mama… w..was a cloud… and she floated away… n’I tried to run and jump and catch her… but she floated away…” he sniffled, burying his head against Itaru.

Itaru squeezed him gently.

As much as they both tried to prepare their sons for Chichi’s operation - reading books together, visiting the hospital, playing doctor and talking about how the daily routine would change for a little while - there was only so much four-year-olds can comprehend. Nightmares were going to be inevitable.

“What does Mama say whenever we have bad dreams?” He asked softly.

“Don’t ‘member…”

“Mama always says, you’re awake now. You get to pick what happens next.” He encouraged, trying to change the subject. “Mama was a cloud, you said? What happens next?”

Minoru was sniffling. “I was tryin’ta catch her… I couldn’t reach…”

“What would help you reach higher?”

At first, Minoru just shrugged, but after a couple additional sniffles, he weakly offered, “stairs?”

“Okay. Stairs. Where do stairs come from?” He continued, asking illogically logical questions, just like Chichi would.

“Um… from the stair seeds.” Minoru volunteered, a little bit quicker this time. “I water them with my magic watering can, and they grow super tall, right in… right into the sky so I can reach Mama…”

“What happens next?” Itaru asked again.

“Mama opens up her arms like this…” Minoru stretched his out big and wide. The more he spoke, the fewer tears he cried. “And I run until I’m a cloud too. And I jump off the stairs… right into a super duper big cloud hug!!”

Itaru fell back against the mattress as his energetic little cloud slammed into him, full force.

“Oh!”

“…oops. Sorry, Papa…”

“No… no, that’s quite all right, Minoru. What happens next?”

Minoru climbed off his father and thought really hard for a moment. “I dunno… maybe we float all around the world or maybe we rain…”

“Let’s hope your brother is dreaming about an umbrella, then. He just might need it.” Itaru poked his son’s forehead gently. Minoru’s tears were gone, replaced by sleepy giggles.

“He doesn’t mind, Papa. He’s a duck!”

“Is he, now?”

“And you’re a turtle.”

Itaru nodded as he took Minoru by the hand and led him back to bed. Mission accomplished. Crisis averted. He wife would be proud.

4- the Nexus : A place where logic need not apply

[itmeanstruth]

Minoru had finished with his last patient for the day. He was just packing up his gear for the evening when he felt his PINpoint vibrate in his back pocket. It was work. Or rather, it was his Nexus work.

"Moshi moshi."

"Oh, good..." Minoru recognized the voice immediately. It was the head night nurse, who was just about to start her shift, if he had the timezones right. The tour bus was somewhere between Alabama and Georgia at the moment. "I know you're on sabbatical doing your PTA practicum, but we could really use all hands on deck tonight."

Things sounded especially chaotic in the background.

"What's going on?"

"Group of a couple dozen just appeared outside the plaza. Looks like they came in from some kind of war zone. All humans. About half of them children. Mix of gunshot wounds, burns and magical injuries."

Minoru scratched his head. "Shit, okay, yeah. I can PINpoint in. I'll be right there."

Not one to leave his team at the hospital shorthanded, he quickly keyed in the teleportation code for the Nexus... at the same exact moment he felt a hand on his shoulder.

Two people, not one, teleported out.

...

Minoru appeared in the Nexus, already spinning around to face the accidental stowaway. Immediately, his jaw dropped. This was not going to be good...

Many of the long-time members of Ziggy's entourage knew about the Nexus already. Ziggy, after all, had a townhouse here. The Hammers all participated in Isamu's research. Hell, He'd even dragged Erik to the hospital where he worked at least twice. (The man really needed to stop eating poisonous plants...) But some of the newer acts didn't. And the man in front of him... most certainly didn't.

Jay stood in shock for a second, as he realized he wasn't standing in the galley of a moving tour bus anymore. Slowly, he turned around, eyes darting this way and that at the strange buildings, the stranger people and the even stranger not-people that often frequented the Nexus streets in the evenings.

Minoru immediately shouted, "I can explain!!"

Before he could even say anything, the chaos Minoru was here to assist with came running straight for them.

"Emergency! Emergency! Clear the pathway, stretchers coming through!"

Minoru grabbed Jay's wrist and pulled him to the side, closer to the hospital steps.

"What the..." Of course, the parade of stretchers demanded attention. The night nurse wasn't kidding. Those people probably did come from a war zone.

"Yeah... uh... Welcome to the Nexus. It's kind of like a world between worlds. It's where I really live. And work..." He gestured to the building behind them. "...at the Hospital here."

"DEE!!"

Minoru snapped to attention as Jay suddenly darted past him, into the line of paramedics. "Huh?!"

He scrambled up the wall and over a ledge to catch up. As he ran, he could hear the paramedics shouting at the stranger to get back. He could hear Jay demanding just as loudly to know what was going on, and that man in the stretcher was his fiancé!

Minoru finally caught a glimpse of the patient, and damn if it wasn't an almost perfect match. He was covered in blood, but didn't appear to be injured. He was definitely unconscious, though, perfectly still while the others were writhing in pain and crying out for The Mystic.

"Jay!" Minoru nearly tackled him as he dove from the ledge. "Jay, hold on! It's not what you think!"

"What the fuck, that's Dee they're taking! What the hell is going on?!" He wrenched himself free, but as quick as Minoru was, he was able to grab his arm again.

"Come with me!"

"Not until I know where they're taking Dee!" He struggled, trying not to lose sight of them.

More stretchers followed. There was a little girl, maybe only five years old, terrified and crying, clutching what looked like a small book. And a man, missing his right arm from the elbow down, whose body was surrounded by a strange shadowy mist. And another man... Jay stopped struggling when his own face, his own bullet-ridden body, passed by.

"...What the hell?"

Minoru saw what he saw, and just gulped. He grabbed Jay's arm to make sure he wouldn't run after the paramedics again. "Come on. Come inside with me. I have to scrub in. You're a nurse. You want to help, they're probably not going to turn you away tonight."

"Was that... how was that... what IS this place?" He stuttered as Minoru tugged him toward the side door.

"It's called the Nexus. It's another dimension. But it's like... connected to all dimensions. Like yours." His voice echoed in the hall. He could hear the commotion clear across the other side of the ward. "Or theirs..."

The head night nurse saw Minoru and came running.

"Thank goodness. Start prepping rooms in trauma bay three. We've got more on the way." She looked at Jay's bewildered expression and had to ask, "Is he with them?"

"No. First time." Those words explained everything, at least to her. "But he's a nurse in his world! He can help!"

"Right now, I could use every hand I can get." She looked at Jay, who was still trying to wrap his head around any of this, "Scrub in with Minoru. Let's go! Let's go! I need every bay prepped!"

...

There was something about a busy emergency room that makes everything else seem meaningless. Ten thousand unanswered questions about where he was and how he got here were tossed aside in favor of cutting off robes, starting IVs and applying pressure to wounds.

The oldest woman looked to be around fifty. Her injuries were mild in comparison to some of the others, and her biggest complaint was how this was less than ideal situation. The youngest was a toddler who made strange jellyfish appear in the air when he screamed. His mother was in another bay. Someone said she dove on top of the children during an explosion, and that they were worried she might not make it. The most peculiar was probably the man missing half his arm. Despite a recent amputation, there was hardly any blood on him. Instead, the wound was blue and blackened. One of the doctors said it had been magically cauterized. Jay even caught sight of his "twin" again, asking one of the other orderlies where his bag was, and saying something about healing potions for the Prophet.

Jay froze. The Prophet...

He left that bay and looked into some of the others. He needed to find the man who looked like Dee but wasn't.

"Where's the Prophet?" He found himself asking at the nurse's station, glancing up at the white board. All of the names that had been recently written sounded far too much like Kuro names. The Mourner, The Scribe, The Venom, The Promise... and the ones that weren't were literally Nameless. Nameless, Nameless, Nameless...

"Room 2C. He was one of the only ones uninjured." One of the other nurses answered, as Jay already started looking down the hallways for room numbers. "No idea how. His vitals are all out of whack, but nobody could get an IV in him."

"He wouldn't let you?" That sounded far too much like Dee.

"No, like the needles wouldn't go through his skin." The other nurse shrugged as though she had seen far stranger things.

Jay felt like he was walking through a dream. He swore he heard the name Kuro half a dozen times, and the word Ministry at least three times that many. Scarlet cross. Blackbird. Armor of the Spectres. It was all there. All the things they'd made up for their band's backstory were living, breathing and bleeding all around him.

He came to 2C and froze. The lights were dim, but the curtains hadn't been pulled. The man in the bed definitely had Dee's face. He had Dee's body too, atrophied muscles and all. The blood had all been washed away, and he was in a hospital gown now. But for some reason, he was still wearing multiple large pieces of blue crystal jewelry. It was hardly protocol, but at the moment, protocol itself could be damned.

He approached the bed, and the man opened his weary eyes. They were blue like Dee's but unnaturally brighter. He smiled softly.

"Praise the Blackbird... you're all right... I should have known they'd have you help heal everyone..." he reached out a thin hand, fingers coming to rest on Jay's face, tracing lines in the pattern he usually wore for his stage makeup. Jay shivered under the touch. "I... I don't have the strength right now to detect thoughts. Please.. Did the Ministry follow us? Is everyone safe?"

Jay froze. The man even sounded like Dee, especially when he was exhausted. But, healing? Detect thoughts? Ministry?! Was this...

"You're the Prophet..."

"You say it like I can keep working miracles forever..." he laughed weakly, barely able to keep his eyes open. "But they wouldn't have attacked had they not considered me too weak to protect the Armor of the Spectres. This... could have easily been another massacre."

"But it wasn't." Jay found himself replying. That part, at least, he knew was true. Doctors and nurses were working on everyone still, doing everything in their power to save as many lives as possible.

"No... but if they can open a rift through the veil, if they could find us in the heart of the desert... then nowhere is safe. We have to find the last two armor pieces. We have to perform the Revival. We have to return to the Blackbird... what belongs to the Blackbird... I'm running out of time..."

Jay gulped, not knowing what to say other than, "...You should rest."

The Prophet nodded. Tiredly, he began to sing.

"I'm still trying my hardest to keep time at bay.
Like a court jester my smile won't fade.
Giving it all, rising to fall to my grave.
Answer the call, living in thrall,
You're the ones I was born to save..."

Those words echoed in Jay's mind in an otherworldly way, and not solely from the unknown magic imbued in them. That was almost, word for word, a song that Dee had written. The tune was unmistakable. Jay knew it by heart. He even had a few lines of a later violin part tattooed on his right arm.

He glanced down at the man in the bed, the one called the Prophet. He looked to have passed out again, like he had on the stretcher. He said he was running out of time... Was he dying? Was his body deteriorating just like Dee's had?

This was a dream. This had to be some kind of dream.

He backed out into the hallway, and thankfully right into Minoru.

"Oh, there you are." The orderly breathed a sigh of relief. "I think the rush is pretty much over. Everyone who could be stabilized is stable. They're all being moved into rooms."

"I... I think I need to sit down..."

Minoru caught a stool with his foot and sent it sliding toward Jay. The nurse felt for it as he sat down, looking back into that room again.

"You... this... all of this... This can't be real... none of this can be real..." he mouthed, glancing back toward Minoru, who seemed far too calm. "That man has Dee's face. His voice too. He uses his stage name! He even knows one of our songs!"

"Yeeeeeah... that can happen in the Nexus sometimes." Thoughts of Jack and Ziggy meeting for the first time came to mind. Most of the newcomers to the tour knew them as brothers, but they were really just different versions of the same person from two different universes. "I've never seen another me here. But I know a few people who have."

"Another... you?"

"The Nexus is what connects all the different universes together. At least, I think that's how it works. Which means there's probably a million other Dees out there. Or Prophets, I guess. Or yous."

"The Dogs. Our security team... are they from their world?" He pointed back into the Prophet's room before gesturing toward the rest of the ward.

"I don't think so?" He shrugged. "Damien might be part... uh... part of another world... yeah... But I'm pretty sure no one in his world can use magic! Not the way these guys know it."

Jay nodded. He'd caught bits and pieces of that as he worked on the different patients. The nurses were generally being referred to as healers, but more than once, Jay was specifically referred to as an Acolyte. The ones who were lucid were confused why their healing potions were going into their arms. And he'd be damned if The Prophet hadn't just tried to cast some kind of spell on him with his voice.

"But he IS from another world!"

Minoru sighed. "Yeah. He is. All the Dogs are. And it's not a fun place. I've been there."

Jay still found this all hard to believe. But at the same time, it made a lot of things make sense. How the Dogs could possibly be from an oppressive regime that not a single history book knew about. How they could know about the Ministry. How Kuro's lyrics and overall message struck a chord. Maybe Damien's world had another version of The Prophet somewhere. Maybe The Prophet's world had another Damien. Maybe both of them had another Minoru...

"And Gloria. But she's from an entirely different one from theirs. And from mine."

"Hold on just one god damn minute. You're literally from another world too?!"

"Oh. Yeah..." he scratched his head. "I'm kinda just visiting yours."

If Jay wasn't sitting down, he probably would have fallen down by this point.

"You get used to it after a while. I promise."

"Tom knows about all this?" He eventually asked the obvious.

"Oh yeah."

"Does everyone know about this?"

"Eventually?" He shrugged. "It's kind of a big pill to swallow."

The medical metaphor wasn't lost on Jay. He couldn't exactly disagree with it either. His mind was reeling. He still questioned whether, if he pinched himself hard enough, he would wake up back on the tour bus with the real Minoru kneeling over him and asking how many fingers he's holding up.

"We can go back, right?" He asked, just accepting the absurdity for a moment. "The real Dee is probably wondering where the hell I've been for the past few hours..."

"Oh, that's easy. I've got a PINpoint." He said as though that somehow explained everything. Minoru wasn't concerned at all. "Tom will figure out a good cover. Probably left us at some gas station or something. He'll get the drivers to turn around, we'll finish up here, and then we'll just hop on the bus like we planned it that way!"

Clearly, Minoru had done this before. Probably more than once.

"Right..."

...

And that was exactly what happened. When they disappeared form the hospital, Jay and Minoru reappeared outside a roadside convenience station in the middle of the night, just as two double decker busses were turning in.

A lot of the entourage was likely asleep, but when the doors opened, Tom just stood there with his arms crossed.

"Next time we're refueling, and you step off the bus to use the bathroom, tell someone. We have two hours of travel time we need to make up now."

"Hey, we tried calling, but the cell service out here is awful! I had to climb that water tower just to reach you!" Minoru insisted. It was obvious that all of them, even Tom, knew most of that was a lie. Minoru probably did climb the water tower, though, he reasoned, since they probably had a good hour to kill to make the story plausible.

"On the bus. Let's go." Tom looked at Jay. "...we'll talk about this in the morning."

Once Jay had made his way back to the other bus, Minoru turned to Tom. "So... You know how I said I thought I saw another Dee in the Nexus?"

Tom raised an eyebrow.

"He popped in with a whole tribe this time... all of them fleeing from a Ministry attack. It's a long story."

Tom motioned Minoru back toward the other bus. "I'll get the coffee."