Fionagreywrites

Week 51 of Odd Prompts: 2023 Edition

The end of the Gregorian calendar approaches the end of another cycle, and with it, this year’s prompts and resolutions. (Let’s face it, some of those may have gone better than others.)

But there’s still time to join in on this year’s offerings! Got something in mind? Send it in, either as a trade or a spare, and see what happens when someone else creates goodness with your idea. Or give it a whirl, toss your creation into the air, and see what splash of magic you create!

PebblePondRipple
Fiona GreyIf he knew half the answer to the riddle…nother Mike
AC YoungWhen the toy dragon came alive…Fiona Grey
Leigh KimmelIt had seemed so easy — but what was on the screen was a pale shadow of the image in my mind.Padre
PadreUnexpected visitorsLeigh Kimmel
nother MikeZombie chihuahuas were not what we needed for Christmas…AC Young

And if your Yuletides are filled with zombie chihuahuas, perhaps you could chase them off with a few spare prompts as well.

SparesThe egg hatched into a really awful little…
SpareAfter that incident, the usual pitchforks and torches escalated to trebuchets and battering rams.
SpareIt was the sound…of disappointment.
SpareEighteen years wasn’t a long time to wait for his kind.
SpareYoung guys think they want a nymphomaniac, or a few. After getting mixed up with a sorority of them, I no longer thought I’d died and gone to Heaven. I wanted to die and no longer cared much about the destination.
SpareOn the very tip of the Christmas tree sat a tiny little …

That’s it for this round. Will it continue? If you didn’t chime in last week, let us know if you’d like these to ring into 2024, or suggestions for changes.

Header image by Fiona Grey

13 comments

  2. This week nother Mike tossed me: Zombie chihuahuas were not what we needed for Christmas…

    —

    Haxix was a necromancer. Or at least he wanted to be. Unfortunately it wasn’t something that could be learnt easily, as that particular magical art was illegal.

    Raising the dead was the classical pinnacle of the necromancer’s art, so it was the thing that Haxix felt that he had to master. It wasn’t going too well. He had with some difficulty obtained some teaching materials, but it seemed that without information he didn’t have, much of the works were incomprehensible.

    He had started with small animals. A reanimated mouse was his first success, but it had lasted only a few hours. He then moved on to rats, but these only held together for just over a day. The next creature to work with would be a cat, but Haxix wasn’t that fond of cats, and the feeling was mutual, so he moved on to dogs.

    Haxix had managed to get his hands on an ancient chihuahua. As he had had expected it wasn’t long before the dog died a natural death. Then he had gone to work, and reanimated the corpse. It was a success! Perhaps next time he could try to reanimate a larger breed.

    Then… The Magical Council sent him a note to inform him that he had been randomly selected for auditing, and he had two weeks to prepare.

    If they found evidence that he was experimenting in necromancy, the consequences would be severe, and perhaps even permanently career- or life-limiting. Fortunately he’d prepared for this and stored his printed and handwritten documents somewhere safe elsewhere, where the Council shouldn’t be able to find them.

    The problem was the zombie chihuahua. All the lore suggested that reanimated beings left a trail behind them which a competent investigator could sense. The longer it existed in a place, the longer its previous existence could be detected. Ideally he’d let the dog fall apart on its own timescale, but that risked detection.

    There was a possible way out. His sister had invited him to hers over Christmas and New Year. He hadn’t planned on going for very long, or on taking the dog with him. But under the circumstances both would be good ideas. The Magical Council weren’t allowed to investigate relatives unless wrongdoing was sufficiently likely – and if it reached that point he was already flying against the wind on a broken broomstick – and removing the beast from his own domicile before Christmas should ensure that all signs of its presence there were undetectable during the audit.

    So the next day, Haxix persuaded the walking corpse into a dog crate, put the crate in the back of his estate along with the rest of his luggage, and drove to his sister’s.

    “Henry! I didn’t think you were coming.”

    Annabelle was most effusive, as always. And she never could remember that he’d changed his name a few years back. ‘Henry’ was not the sort of name one associated with a great and terrible magician, ‘Haxix’ on the other hand might very well be.

    “My plans got changed at very short notice. I hope you don’t mind.”

    “Of course not! Come inside.”

    Haxix headed in and was soon re-acquainted with Annabelle’s pet cat, Felix, who hissed and headed out of the room as soon as possible. He didn’t mind as he disliked the hairy thing as much as it disliked him.

    It transpired that Annabelle was between boyfriends. This was beneficial from Haxix’s perspective, for the fewer people who came into contact with his zombie dog, the fewer people who might accidently let slip to the Magical Council that Haxix was breaking the law.

    Haxix headed back out and unpacked the car. He introduced Annabelle to Jose, as he named the dog on the spur of the moment, and shut the thing in his room.

    The day after was Christmas Day, and Haxix’s plan started to unravel very quickly.

    Felix managed to sneak into Haxix’s room, and Jose didn’t react very well to the intrusion. This would have been fine, except that Jose was quick enough to bite Felix. And Haxix didn’t realise it had happened as he wasn’t in the room at the time.

    By the time anyone realised that anything was going wrong, Felix was too far gone, he was already a zombie cat.

    Haxix privately berated himself for not realising the danger. Zombie creatures could infect others. Smaller creatures were almost always infected by a single short bite. But even larger creatures could be turned if enough of the infected saliva got into the bloodstream. That was why he’d only experimented with one animal at a time.

    Now, Felix was a zombie cat, and he’d go around the neighbourhood biting other creatures. If it wasn’t nipped in the bud quickly, there would soon be a full-blown zombie outbreak – a zombie pet-apocalypse.

    So, he needed to ensure that Felix was kept inside for the rest of his unnatural additional life. Except that Annabelle insisted on letting the cat out for the day as normal.

    Haxix resigned himself to being in serious trouble. The only way to keep the zombie population under control now was to call in the Magical Council – the very group he had been trying to avoid.

    He sent out the message, hoped it was received in time, and accepted that the consequences would be what they would be.

    Liked by 1 person

    Reply

  5. Fiona Grey tossed this one into the pond…

    If he knew half the answer to the riddle…

    [and if that doesn’t start a ripple… ]

    [okay, one part of me wants this to be the tale of a youngster who knows half the answer to a riddle, and one of his or her classmates knows the other half, and they need to get together to answer the riddle. An exercise in sharing, kind of. Which also suggests that the kid has got a piece of a jigsaw puzzle, and needs to figure out how to share it with the other people who have the other pieces of the puzzle. How do you share secret pieces? Guess you’ll have to trust, huh? Of course, given singing in the Christmas choir and playing Santa, time to write has shrunk… so, maybe I just tell you the main threads, and let you write your own tales of wonder about the half-riddle and the spread puzzle? That could work…]

    [while you’re thinking about that, here’s what one little girl told me…]

    Henrietta looked around her classroom. Her mom and dad had just moved into this place a couple of weeks ago, and she still didn’t really know anyone. So today the teacher handed out pieces of paper to each of them, and told them that they each had a riddle and half the answer to the riddle. But someone else in the class had the same riddle and the other half of the answer. So all they needed to do was find the person who had the other part of their riddle.

    How could she do that when she didn’t know the other kids? She bit her lip, and thought about it. Well, the other kids would be trying to get matched up, too. So… maybe… what if… then she had it.

    So she walked over to one of the other desks, laid her paper on it, and said, “Hi, I’m Henrietta. This is my riddle and my half an answer. Do you have the other half?”

    Of course, the girl blinked at her, then shook her head.

    “No. I’m Wendy.”

    So Henrietta thanked her, grabbed her paper, and walked to another desk. The boy sitting there grimaced at her, but she laid her paper down, introduced herself, and waited. If he knew half the answer to the riddle…

    That’s when the teacher clapped her hands and said, “I want all of you to pay attention to Henrietta! She’s taking a chance, trusting that the other person will help, and…”

    The boy looked at her paper, then grinned.

    “Hey, that’s what I needed! I’m Bob, and here’s the other half of your answer. Now, together, we can answer the riddle.”

    Henrietta looked at his paper, and she blushed as the teacher clapped again, and the other students clapped, too.

    [there we go! A dose of trust, and sharing the answers, goes a long way!]

    [say, you don’t know the ending of the story, do you? I mean, I might have the beginning, and we could probably find someone to fill in the middle, which could give us a whole story, if we had that other part… it’s a riddle!]

    [If you want to do the one about a jigsaw puzzle, go for it! I think it could be fun… but not today!]

    Like

    Reply

Leave a comment