Hark! Belated prompts await!
Normally these come out on Wednesday, or whatever day we apparently decide is Wednesday. Odd? Of course. Send ideas and input to oddprompts@gmail.com for perusal and continued malarkey.
| Prompter | Prompt | Promptee |
| AC Jones | Person 1: “That’s a strangely shaped cloud.” Person 2: “That’s not a cloud. It’s a dragon – possibly a Small White or a Draco’s Grey.” | Becky Jones |
| Becky Jones | The stars winked out, one by one until there was only velvety darkness. A heartbeat later the sky exploded with color. | nother Mike |
| nother Mike | A rhinoceros cautiously descended the stairway. | Fiona Grey |
| Fiona Grey | “They’re planning to clone the ancient warrior army to assist with biohacking.” “Seriously, have they never watched television?” | AC Jones |
| Cedar Sanderson | The dog and the raccoon had an understanding. You could tell, because… | Leigh Kimmel |
| Leigh Kimmel | As you are cleaning out the flowerbeds, you notice the pixie house has a new occupant. | Cedar Sanderson |
Need something different? Don’t want to trade, and will you please just leave the introverts alone to do their thing? Absolutely. Here you go.
| Spare | The oven held a chicken pot pie of unusual size… |
| Spare | When the 3.5 meter pet python escaped from the apartment, the owner was relieved… |
| Spare | “Don’t follow that map. It’s deliberately wrong.” |
| Spare | The jar full of pickles held an unexpected surprise. |
| Spare | “Trust me. You don’t want to know what will happen if I let my self-confidence out.” |
That’s it for now. See you next week in the comments, or whenever the time warp dance stops.
Header image by Fiona Grey, Alpha, Ohio
More Odds Than Ends 
This week’s challenge was set by Fiona Grey: “They’re planning to clone the ancient warrior army to assist with biohacking.” “Seriously, have they never watched television?”
The suggestion is that whoever it was hadn’t seen the television shows that would have warned them that what they were planning wasn’t necessarily a good idea. I couldn’t see a way into the tale until I thought of a reason why. The whole setup followed.
—
It was morning on Imperial City, and Alexis and Bertha were just starting their day in the Imperial Scientific Experiment Authorisation Authority. They shared an office, and as they took their seats at their desks they each found the usual pile of scientific experimentation requests – it frequently took them all day to get through them, and the next day another pile always awaited them.
Bertha started on the first request on her pile. It was a request from a team on Phobos I to build an improved planetary scanner and test it out on Phobos IV. She finished her review, and was seriously considering refusing authorisation – the Asmothus Space Empire had more planetary scanners in its storage facilities than it used in a decade, and the proposed improvement wasn’t significant enough to justify producing any more – when Alexis started laughing out loud.
“What’s so funny?”
“You know that archaeological dig on Garanthicus V?”
“Didn’t we authorise an expansion of the dig site a couple of months ago?”
Alexis smiled. “More like three. The dig team found evidence of a mass burial ground. An army of Garanth warriors.”
“So what? We’ve found burial grounds of at least thirty extinct alien species within the bounds of the Empire – some of them we’ve exterminated ourselves.”
Laughter came from the other side of the room. “True. It seems that the Garanths practiced biohacking, to a level far beyond what we’ve been able to achieve.”
“Let me guess. They think that this find might deliver us a breakthrough.”
“Yes. They’re planning to clone the ancient warrior army to assist with biohacking.”
“Seriously, have they never watched television?”
“Not the helpful type,” smirked Alexis. “The Imperial Science Corps insists that all its non-administrative employees only watch factually accurate programmes and read factually accurate books.”
“You’re joking!”
“I’m afraid not, Bertha. We’re the lucky ones. We get to enjoy ourselves when we go home.”
“So they’ve never seen ‘Yesterday’s Aliens’ or ‘Invaders from the Next Galaxy’.”
“No, nor ‘Andromeda Reborn’. Or any of the other classic alien invasion series. They have no idea how dangerous unknown aliens can be.”
“You’re going to decline.”
“Of course. Far too great a risk of something going wrong and putting the Empire in serious danger.” Alexis grabbed one of the two stamps on his desk, inked it thoroughly and stamped ‘DENIED’ in big letters in red ink on the front of the file.
Bertha did the same with her first file. The good thing about her job was that she didn’t need to explain her decisions. The bad thing was the requirement to use such horribly antiquated means to signal them. Oh, well. Onto the next file.
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And you know, somewhere, a research assistant has already started the clones cooking, since those silly bureaucrats always take too long with their stupid paperwork… and out of the cloning tanks, comes… YAY!
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[…] we are at Week 19 at More Odds Than Ends. A story appears to be working its way into these prompts so I’m rolling with it. I am sort of […]
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Oooh… I wanna know what happens next! I’ll be patient, really I will… here come the dragons! Yes!
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Becky Jones prompted…
The stars winked out, one by one until there was only velvety darkness. A heartbeat later the sky exploded with color.
Which reminds me of camping, and having a storm front roll in, and the sky go black… of course, we got lightning next, which was a wake up call. Exploded with color… aurora?
A quick snippet from a beginning pilot…
Hank took a deep breath, and tried to relax. In moments, he’d be crossing the threshold, and become an interstellar pilot. Still, everyone warned that the first crossing was always a shock.
As the engines revved behind him, the stars winked out one by one until there was only velvety darkness. Hank smiled, even as he heard the next stage engines begin their whine. A heartbeat later, the sky exploded with color.
Red, blue, green, purple, orange… the colors shifted and flowed, like an aurora gone crazy. His eyes burned as he stared at them, and even when he closed his eyes, he could still see the colors somehow. They had reached into his brain, and were shifting behind his closed eyes.
Hank shook his head. Whew, the space in between really was a mad splash of colors, like the worst dreams of the modernist painters or something. He tried to find an anchor, then bit his lip. No, the lectures had all said there was no anchor in this space, and that they had to trust their guidance computer. Which was feeding him coordinates… ah, there, spin, right, up, over… and the colors spun around him, the sky blazing.
He had done it! He was flying, interstellar. Now if he could just handle getting them to the return point…
(off we go, into interstellar space, flying high…)
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Evocative!
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[…] and the tropes of television that teach us (very occasional) wisdom. Check out the comments of Odd Prompts for […]
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Oh! Now I want In Defense of Dragons to see where this little teaser fits in!
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[…] You can read all the responses, or take part yourself, at More Odds Than Ends. […]
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I’m literally stumbling tired. The good news is this should be the last of my extremely hectic weekends, and the writing brain should return to something near normal. https://www.cedarwrites.com/2021/05/18/odd-prompts-odder-than-usual/
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And now mine is finally up at my LiveJournal, https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/957291.html. I went space opera with it, because the literal reading seemed to go into too many obvious directions.
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