Breaking In Was the Easy Part

Shadows kept what shadows veiled.

The security guard’s shoes clapped against shiny, marbled floors. He stopped by one of the tall windows, overlooking the glittering skyline of Rome by night.

He stared outwards. Sniffed. Scratched his butt.

Hiding in the shadows nearby, where this oblivious guard ran risk of glimpsing her from the corner of his eyes, Chloe Grant held her breath. Frozen, still, like a statue, she waited in the dark.

The guard remained oblivious. He continued staring out into the night. He stood there for so long that Grant’s lungs began to ache from holding her breath, and a frustration, welling deep down, started budding into anger.

She had already broken into the building without him noticing. Now, he just needed to get the hell out of her way. Preferably before she needed to gasp for air, or the anger bloomed into fiery rage.

In the drop of a hat, she could have switched his lights off, just like that. The silenced pistol in her toolkit had a bullet with this guy’s name on it. She wasn’t one to snuff out some rent-a-cop if she could avoid it, but he was taking his sweet time.

The temptation to go for the gun rose while the burning in her lungs blossomed alongside her frustration.

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My only real and valid writing tip is that you google every word you make up for your fantasy stories. That's It

there won't be any results though because you just made it up

One time I made up a name for a character and after googling it discovered it was a Zimbabwean slur

Imagine believing there's no way words you invent don't exist in some other language, or somethikg that looks or sounds like it

I even do this in editing, and warn writers what results the Google search turns up.

Ain’t Gonna End Well

Blood circled the drain.

This time, it wasn’t someone else’s blood. Pinching her nose only proved that it came from her own nostrils.

Though Chloe Grant wanted to chalk this up to dry air, stress, or a whole host of other common things, she wondered if it wasn’t related to her experiencing reality itself warping around her. Changing around her with every alteration of the timeline.

There had to be side effects. Right?

Enshrouded in the heat and steam of her shower, she watched in stunned silence as the drips of blood mixed with water like a cloudy red mist on their way down the drain.

The doorbell rang. She cursed.

With a swipe of her hand, the water’s flow cut out and she pawed at a towel outside the spacious shower cabin.

The doorbell rang soon again, well before she had any realistic chance at getting dressed. Watery footprints marked her way out of the bathroom, and her wet hair would soon soak the back of her shirt.

Her pulse began to race. Not out of frustration or fury, but something else. Something that didn’t fit. A strange anxiousness, or even a creeping sense of dread—the same heart-pounding anticipation that had accompanied her upon her last crossing of time, the same uncertainty over what lay beyond an Anomaly. Like something else had wanted to cross over. Like it had always wanted to cross over and enter the past, or present, or future. And change whatever was supposed to come.

After a long and patient wait, the doorbell rang a third time.

Like destiny itself was knocking at her door.

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The Impossibility of It

Chloe Grant could hear the thunder of rotors through the soundproof glass on the twentieth story of Future Proof’s headquarters.

A black unmarked helicopter, landing atop the skyscraper, had captured her entire attention.

Or it happened to be a convenient distraction from the conversation at hand. An uncomfortable conversation that Grant had sought out herself, and also been dreading all the while.

“Would you rather reschedule?” asked Rebecca Chao. She couldn’t quite finish the sentence without a hint of sarcasm.

Grant chewed on her lip until she spotted Chao observing her nervous tic, then made a conscious and forced effort to stop doing that.

She peeled her gaze from the vista of Austin’s skyline. The chopper had landed, though the noise of its thundering rotors still reverberated through the panes.

“No, uh, no,” Grant stammered out, sighing in between, “Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”

Chao folded her hands on her lap. She stared at Grant with a perfect poker face.

“We’re not wasting any time here. Not to step on your toes, but I think you were long overdue for a session. There’s only so much mental stress our field operatives—or really anybody—can tolerate before it starts affecting their—our—private lives.”

Grant sighed again.

At this point in time, she wasn’t sure what her private life even was.

With the way reality kept shifting with each change of the timeline, her own life felt alien to her.

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Too Afraid to Protest

With a twist of the keys, the lock clicked into place.

Evening’s growing dark turned the window panes of the store’s front door into reflective surfaces. Maisie Williamson, owner of Amazing Maisie’s Beauty Salon, lost herself in the mirror image of her store.

It looked great. She looked great, too. Felt a way to match.

It had been a good day.

Little did she know what awaited her that eve.

She flipped the sign on the storefront windows.

WE’RE CLOSED.

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As a former humanities student, I feel it is my duty to reblog this one.

A tech bro tried to convince me AI was amazing cause "you could make 30,000 screenplays in minutes" not realising that every single one would be shit, you'd have to sift through everything just to find some good bits, time wasted that could've been spent just writing a screenplay.

Technology Brothers know nothing about what goes into creating a work, other than the fact a work has been created to be exploited for cash. They see creativity as an investment opportunity, not a love for humanity.

Matthew Dow Smith: "Just remember: Arts & Humanities are so useless and pointless that Tech Bros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something Arts & Humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date."

The Only Thing Unraveling Is You

Reality had shifted again.

Chloe Grant had not dared to ask anybody about any details. The drive home from the inner city was a blur. A dizzying fog of broken memories, offering her no way to glue the shards of her shattered reality back together.

She had rushed straight out of her debriefing at Future Proof’s headquarters. Shrugged everybody and everything off. Someone had even asked if she was alright. Only an hour ago, she didn’t even remember who had asked that. Shrugged that off, too.

She had been feeling sicker and sicker by the minute of spending any time in that glossy tower of glass and computers and steel.

Unlike in the previous timeline she had known, Danielle Bennett no longer worked at Future Proof. She had quit her job a few weeks prior. Rida Singh now filled Danielle’s shoes, heading the communications and IT department in the corporation—as if he had never been imprisoned under suspicion of national treason.

The whole incident in Midland, Texas, must have played out differently somehow. Grant was too confused, reeling with the staggering realization of all that had changed in the timespan of a few minutes, just by having passed through several Anomalies to lure the pterodactyls out of present-day Appalachian woods.

And Max Carter was alive again.

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Teeth Glistened in the Gloom

Large, leathery wings flapped. Every flap thundered with tremendous force. Every flap produced a gale, whipping up chunks of frozen earth and pine.

The pterodactyl screeched again, having mounted its prey on Appalachian soil.

Mischchenko’s arm broke. A bone’s audible crack blended into the cacophony caused by the prehistoric creature. Then the woman’s pained scream joined the choir.

It all happened so fast. In the blink of an eye, their relief over having survived a swarm of mutant insects was erased by the big winged beast attacking them.

Both Chloe Grant and Valentín Ruiz acted on pure instinct. Former soldiers, drilled and disciplined as they were, they responded in kind to the animal’s brute force. The futuristic, silvery rifles in their hands flared up, discharging electric blasts. The EMD batteries whined after every shot.

One, two, three, with a deliberate delay before the fourth blast. Grant and Ruiz pelted the pterodactyl, causing it to stagger and stumble, backing off its prey while its body jiggled and jittered from the havoc the EMD’s were wreaking upon its muscles and nervous system.

Mischchenko was crawling away from the animal as the shots landed, and the beast reeled.

Then, like a dark angel, the menacing silhouette of a second pterodactyl swooped down upon them from the mist and the treetops.

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Crossroads

Chloe Grant saw stars.

Their blind leap of faith rewarded her with a coppery taste of blood in her mouth. It was, as is said, not the fall that kills you, but the landing. In their case, the landing itself didn’t serve to kill anybody, though, it just hurt like hell. The kind of fall that would cover you in green and blue spots.

To escape the living tide of a swarm of dog-sized insects surrounding them, they had backed up and ran through the blinding light of the Anomaly. Mischchenko gasped in surprise, Ruiz shouted in pain, and Grant herself felt the world spinning all around.

The Anomaly, connecting two different points in time, failed to offer them stable footing on the other side. In the Appalachian mountain woods of 2024, the glowing orb of light had been hovering inches off the forest grounds. On the other side, the Anomaly must have been hovering several feet above the ground, because their combat boots found no solid footing after their leap of faith, and the three field operatives from Future Proof immediately tumbled down a grassy knoll.

That’s why Grant saw stars. Bit the inside of her cheek. Black-gloved fingers tore up loose earth and turf where she grabbed the ground in a futile attempt at braking her fall.

The bright spots and blinding light refused to subside. She not only saw stars, but something far more breathtaking.

Light. Everywhere.

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This is proof that capitalism is not about freedom. Not even close.

In a system that values freedom, it would be expected that people would value living over working.

This is the same mentality as those who claimed to value freedom but owned slaves. They want freedom for themselves while everyone else serves them. They still haven't grown out of that.

For the record, Gen Z is smart to do this. To any generation out there reading this, live your life. Do enough to keep the job, and devote as much time and energy leftover to your life. Do not give your all for a company that cannot and will not love you back.

High Noon, All In

Valentín Ruiz leaned against the kitchen counter. He slipped his leather jacket open, exposing the holstered gun on his belt, like a gunslinger in a Western movie showing his opponent he was armed and a force to be reckoned with. His gaze swept over Chloe Grant’s belongings, stopping on another cardboard box in the corner, and locking onto the contents he could spot in its open topside.

She had still been unpacking. Still moving into this new home. The knife block sat at the top inside that box, still wrapped in newspapers. Both of them could see hints of knife handles through the crumpled paper.

He peeled his sight away from the open box, and their gazes met. He scratched the stubble on his chin, then sighed. A long, weary sigh.

Though she remained speechless, Grant’s most prominent thought echoed like a scream inside her mind.

Her gun was upstairs. His was right at his hip.

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None the Wiser

With walls so white that fluorescent lights made them blinding, Chloe Grant soon started seeing bright spots everywhere. Ghostly echoes danced about her field of vision, around her own reflection in the bulletproof glass surface. Instead of bars, clear windows separated visitors from the inmates in their cells, with thick glass plates reaching from floor to ceiling, and tiny breathing holes that wouldn’t even permit anybody to poke as much as a finger through.

Automatic lights turned on everywhere they wandered. Stern-faced and square-jawed guards kept close watch, sporting glossy body armor, and electric stun batons hooked onto their belts. Doors here never opened to traditional keys, their magnetic locks only yielded to plastic cards with RFID chips. Electric buzzing came muted and quiet from those devices, with tiny red lights turning green, and dim touchscreen interfaces flanking the sides of every cell.

Low ceilings swallowed all echoes and suggested floors upon floors of other tracts, and the overall oppressive atmosphere made it less inviting to say anything than in a church during a sermon.

Though security here was as high as it got, this whole place felt less like a prison, and more like a strange sanitarium, transported from a dark past into an even weirder future.

On the way in, Chloe Grant had half-expected to see a real-life Hannibal Lecter standing inside one of the bright chambers, bound in a straitjacket, goading them to step closer.

Instead, Singh paced back and forth inside his cell. Dark rings underlined his haunted eyes, and every joke the thin man cracked to lighten the mood felt forced.

Grant recognized this brand of despair. Their former colleague was on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

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Only Echoes Remained

The dark of night was still hours away. Even so, the pine trees in these Appalachian woods conspired with a thick fog and gray skies to suffocate the light, coating their world in a gray mist.

Despite the wintry cold trapped inside the car, and the stench of cigarettes caked into every piece of fabric, Braylon Turner was sweating bullets. Leroy had told him to keep the old car’s lights off while they drove through the woods, up a meandering and narrow path into the dark heart of Bumfucksville, Nowhere.

Leroy was also sitting on the backseat with Jimmy “Changa” Chance, keeping the muzzle of a revolver jammed into the spot where Jimmy’s jawbone connected to his wiry neck.

Gun metal had scraped the skin raw there, turning it a deep an uncomfortable red. The skin around it glistened with sweat, just like Braylon’s creased forehead.

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A Willy Wonka pop-up event in Glasgow had attendees calling the police after they paid £35 and the event didn’t deliver what was promised.

Event goers were promised a whimsical adventure all themed around something Willy Wonka might create in his factory.

Source

The keen-eyed amongst you might have noticed something a little bit…wrong.

Imagnation Lab. Encherining Entertainment. Catgacating. Live perforrmances. Cartchy tunes. Exarserdray lollipops. And my favourite “A pasadise of sweets teats”

But what did the event actually look like? WELL.

Feel like the marketing team got a bit carried away.

“What do you mean, ‘We can’t just 3D-print the stuff to make it look like it does on those pictures?’ What am I paying you an intern’s salary for? Anyway, you deal with it, I’ll be on vacay in the Bahamas.”