We Are All Mad Here

thank you so much! the prompt was very heavily needed - as much as a full-length star wars fic was indeed a bad idea, i cannot let go of the concept, so here is the progress:

Obi-Wan frowns.

The Force twists all around him, like desert wind. His own mind feels awake for the first time in years. He thought he’d cut himself off – so long ago that isolation comes like second nature; he is a hermit, after all, with everything that it entails. Right now, though, it seems as if the barrier was never there.

In a moment of terrible, overwhelming clarity, he can feel every grain of sand in his home and outside, each possessed of its own minuscule, coarse, grating, irritating signature – so he grits his teeth, takes a deep breath, and quickly builds up a proper set of shields before turning his attention to the intruder. His skills in such communication are as rusty as everything else on this all-forsaken planet, but needs must.

With a mental gesture that falls woefully short of his former grace, he brushes his consciousness against the stranger’s – and it is as if the sky cracks open.

An avalanche of horrors crashes into his mind. It starts with screams, and the sound of a starship crashing into the ground – followed by the screech of tearing metal, and a smoking wreck. A cold, dark corridor – the hiss of a lightsaber slowly burning into flesh – a terrible, howling scream; the images, sounds, smells, all come in quick succession – and Force, it hurts like nothing else.

It is as if the world’s gone red. It bleeds and bleeds and hurts and screams and dies, over and over; a sickening, overwhelming, foreign fear engulfs him, like a torrent. For a moment, before he has the presence of mind to separate his own sensations from the stranger’s, he thinks that he’s gone mad.

The stranger must be mad, he decides, as he forces his consciousness into some semblance of dignity. A sentient being would not survive that sort of agony otherwise.

He shudders before he reaches for them again.

thank you so much for the prompt! M285 is the working title for my original sci-fi novel, and it's been a toil thus far. Here's the progress:

Benjamin rolled his eyes when I turned around.

“You know,” he said, in a falsely chirpy tone – “if I wanted you to take a year, I would’ve said so.”

“There was a spider,” I said. “I got distracted.”

He sighed.

“They’ll hire anyone for security these days.”

“Hey! What’s that supposed to – ”

“Oh, just go sit down,” he told me, and so I went and sat.

Whatever you are thinking on the subject – Jiang’s already said it; and if he hasn’t, I’ve heard it from a shrink.

hi hi hi! M285 is my original sci-fi horror novel, and I have been trying to get past chapter 9 for a hot minute by now, so thank you for the prompt <3

I left the knife by the sink and squatted down to rifle through the cupboard underneath. The medkit was indeed there, as promised – surrounded by a neat collection of standard cleaning products. A little Earth spider sat in the corner just above them.

I remember that this shocked me at the time; but if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the course of my career in the fleet, it’s that there is no escaping spiders, even in the furthest reaches of deep space. They followed along with us when we left our planet, and hell knows what sorts of creatures they’ve devoured since.

It’s a bit of an environmental concern right now, I believe. However, at the time, I was unaware of the implications, and thus merely smiled with recognition.

The spider did not share my enthusiasm, and was only further displeased when I reached out to take the medkit from its place. As it turned out, the case had been providing it with a load-bearing support – so, upon losing that, it scrambled up the web to rebuild, and I decided not to bother it further.