This post has been edited to avoid providing evidence of time travel.
Obstacles, on the surface and theoretical level, tend to be deceptive. Some loom large, dominating the skyline and intimidating those who wish to overcome. Others take far more work than anticipated, with the mountain hike turning rapidly steep after miles of uneven footing, or encountering unexpected emergencies in the middle of the woods.
Keep climbing! It’s the planning for contingencies and alternatives that keeps us mentally flexible – if this, then that.
Prompts are similar. “What do I do with that?” sparks a series of ideas, which turn into paths, which morph into adventures.
| re | in re | out re |
| AC Young | The wyvern encountered a jaguar. | Padre |
| Becky Jones | The tiny door just appeared in the tree one morning. | Fiona Grey |
| Leigh Kimmel | The odor wafted through the lecture hall. | nother Mike |
| Padre | “The noise wasn’t coming from our yard…” | AC Young |
| nother Mike | The elf photo-bombed our selfie… | Becky Jones |
| Fiona Grey | There was no place he could be from but the Linear City. | Leigh Kimmel |
Spares are a good way to throw in hiccups for characters that need a bit of adventure in their lives. What mess can be made for those fictional creations who are already glaring at you for daring to consider the idea, hands on hips?
| Spare | Sometimes you need to think inside the box. |
| Spare | The newspapers set a symphony bomb. |
| Spare | He pulled a card from the deck, and got… a clown capering on the table! |
| Spare | The aliens insisted that they left their children here, just a century or two ago… Where were they? |
| Spare | Elementary! Eliminate the impossible, and whatever is left… |
| Spare | The plastic butterfly tried to land on the roses… |
See you in the comments!
Header image by Fiona Grey
More Odds Than Ends 
Err… not a complaint, but last week was Week 40, and this week is Week 33? We hit the time travel switch?
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Yes. 🙂
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Not enough coffee. Fixing it now!
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Let’s do the time warp again! Rocky Horror Time Warp – YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umj0gu5nEGs
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A prompt swap for me again this week. Padre offered up: “The noise wasn’t coming from our yard…”
—
Staffs Building Supplies owned and ran a number of builders’ yards in various places throughout the county. The Lichfield yard was nestled in a long narrow patch of land between the railway line and the road.
At the entrance was a small car park, mainly used by customers’ vans. Next to the car park was a small building that was used for sales, and where customers handed over the money for the building supplies they had purchased.
Beyond was the yard proper. Various supplies were out in the open on pallets. These were all things that were rain resistant. That which needed to be kept out of the rain was kept in one of three sheds.
Terry was employed in the yard proper, helping customers move the goods they’d bought into their vans. Today, Garry was on the main desk.
Terry wasn’t in the yard looking for the red-brown bricks or some roofing tiles. Instead, he was on a noise hunt. Garry had kept hearing an annoying scratching sound – intermittent, but persistent. Garry had heard this sound on and off all day, and so now, mid-afternoon, he had sent Terry to find its source.
Terry looked behind everything he could think of, but he couldn’t find the cause, and then he heard it again. He followed the sound as best as he could, and discovered that it wasn’t coming from inside the yard. The scratching was the other side of the fence.
Terry fetched some stepladders, set them up and climbed up them, and looked over the fence.
No sooner had he popped his head over the barrier than he saw what was making the noise. It was a white cat, a chain around its neck, with a second chain connecting the first to a post in the ground. There was no food or water in sight. It was scratching the fence from its side.
Terry knew that what he was about to do was trespass, but he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t look on and do nothing while a cat in distress starved and pined after water. He climbed over the fence and dropped into the garden on the other side.
He couldn’t see how to separate the two chains, so he unhooked the neck chain and took it off the distressed cat. Then he threw himself backwards in shock.
He sat up once more and looked back. Yes, the cat was nowhere to be seen, with a naked lady in its place. No sooner had Terry removed the chain from around the cat’s neck than it transformed.
She curled up into a ball. Terry took off his coat – long but heavily stained from work – and offered it to the woman. She accepted, and put it on – it didn’t fit very well, but covered everything that it had to.
“Thankyou. That silver was painful.”
“Is this your house?”
She shuddered. “No. Could we get out of here?”
Terry got his mobile out of his pocket and phoned Garry. It took a little explaining, and a short time, but another ladder was found. Both Terry and the lady were able to climb over the fence before the ladder was hauled back over.
The lady was escorted to the yard office. There the woman declined the offer to call the police, but did borrow Garry’s phone to call her family.
As they waited for her family to pick her up, Terry and Garry plied the lady with tea, and some of the story came out.
Elise was a werecat, and while she was exploring the area around her house over the previous night, the night of the full moon, she had been catnapped. The catnappers were clearly aware of what she was, for she was chained in silver, which prevented her from transforming back.
Just before the yard closed for the evening, Elise’s sister drove into the yard. She had brought a full change of clothed for Elise, who quickly dressed herself. Terry was handed his coat back, before Elise and her sister thanked the pair and drove off.
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Oh, my, now. I want the rest of the story, about the workman and the werecat, and their romance!
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[…] Find more at MOTE! […]
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Oho! The screaming candles made it into a tale! With a tiny door on a tree… what fun!
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[…] prompt responses and spares if you want to try your hand at writing a response, head on over to More Odds Than Ends and see what your brain conjures […]
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Yay! Very nice! Hum, there often are Hallmark or something collections where this would fit nicely?
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And now mine is up on my LiveJournal at https://starshipcat.livejournal.com/1421090.html. With everything else on my plate, I didn’t really have the time to turn the idea over and over in my head for a while, and I ended up just sort of throwing out the first thing that came to me.
However, I have a feeling that it will eventually produce a story. Probably just need a couple of other ideas to cross-pollinate with it.
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Leigh Kimmel brought out the smells…
The odor wafted through the lecture hall.
[oho! Who was gathered there, and what kind of odor drifted by their noses? Oh, wait, there was that time that someone splashed the essence of skunk around the University hall, and I got to introduce my roommate to the wonders of tomato juice… nah, that’s grotesque. ]
The odor wafted through the lecture hall. It was faint, but caught the noses of several. There were those who woke up from nodding half-dozes, trying to pretend interest in the droning speaker. There were others who merely brought their attention back into this time and place, from wandering in the far reaches of their imagination. And, of course, there were those who had been concentrating on what the speaker was talking about, who now felt their attention turning away, drifting on the vagrant odor.
It was the odor of freedom, of marshmallows roasting over an open fire, of hot dogs cooking on sticks, of the forest in the fall. And it beckoned to them, making them wonder just why they were sitting inside, instead of being outside under the wide skies, walking in the leaves, free to go wherever their whim took them.
The speaker looked up, as that odor reached him, and smiled. He shook his head, and told them, “I think that’s enough for today. We’ll take this up another day.”
Then, he turned and left. Maybe he would have a s’more!
[whoops, that was odd…]
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Gotta love busy weekends… AC Young offered up a prompt swap this week, “The wyvern encountered a jaguar.”
The night was dark as the beast soared across the prairie. Low-hanging clouds covered the sky, blotting out the moon and the stars. Though there were no thermals to help it soar, forcing it to flap more often than it wanted to, the beast was young and strong. It roared its challenge into the night.
Few things were abroad that could challenge it. Fewer of those could see it as its draconic form plastered dark green against the night clouds. Its rider was pleased. He doubted anything in this new world would recognize it for what it was and that made them easy prey for him and his minions. He smiled a tight, fierce, predatory smile as his mount climbed a little higher, giving him a chance to survey the lands around the portal.
He looked down a strip of darker ground stretching from horizon to horizon. It ran straight and true, not detouring around the hills, but either cutting through or rising up and over. Probably a road of some time. Far to the east, strange lights burned, designating a town or a city. The light was too bright and white to be fire, so probably magic of some type. He turned away from it, no need to warn the people of this world of the threat he posed, if they even recognized his wyvern for what it was.
He looked down at the road again. Something was moving along it, racing at a decent clip from the western horizon, heading towards the town. He couldn’t make out any details at this point, but it seemed to have those same magic lights shining ahead to light its path. He pulled out a spyglass to get a closer look.
He wasn’t sure what it was. It looked like a cart of some type, but sleeker with fine lines. It had a small statue of some cat beast in mid-pounce mounted on its front, probably some type of sympathetic magic lending speed to the vessel or to ward off its enemies. He had seen similar devices in other worlds.
He watched as it ran straight along the road, listening to the steady drone that it emitted as it plowed ahead, oblivious of the predator circling above, then watched as the red lights that glowed on its back faded into the far distance. Whatever the people of this land were, they obviously had powerful magicians if they casually used magic lighting and conveyances like he had seen. The conquest of this land would take some serious thought. He turned the head of his beast towards the portal and home.
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A good twist.
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