Chuck Wendig's Flash Fiction Fridays: Roll For Title.

Chuck Wendig has posted the first Flash Fiction Challenge of the year. This challenge is called "Roll for Title" where you roll ( or generate ) 2 numbers between 1 and 20 and consult a chart to get your two ( or three if you want to use "The") word Title. I used random.org and got 11 and 3 which makes my Title "Orbital Angel". I hope to have it done this weekend.

Flash Fiction Challenge: 200 Words at a Time, Finale

This is a piece that was started by J.D. Fitch, then continued by Doreen Queenand Paul Baughman, and Joanna Horrocks. This is for Chuck Wendig's Flash Fiction Challenge where 5 people each write 200 words of a story. My portion is at the bottom. 

God, how she hated dance music. Tony blared that crap every day at work, and after four years, she couldn’t take it anymore. Most had their I-phones or mp3’s and earbuds to stuff in their heads. The rest of them had to suffer. Her fist smashed the bread dough with a vengeance. One fist beat the soft, yeasty mass over and over.

“Screw this.” Gloria reached and ‘touched’ the electric plug that asshole’s antique radio was plugged into. Sparks crackled from the outlet, the acrid smell of burnt plastic ripped across the room.

“Judas Priest!” The shift super rushed over and yanked the cord from the wall. “Tony, this piece of crap is gone. You understand me? Three times in one week? Burn it, burn your own house down, but keep it out of my bakery.” Allen rammed the offending device into Tony’s chest before stalking off.

Gloria could not help the smile that crossed her lips. Then common sense took over. Shit. Why did magic have to be so unpredictable? Two years, and she still could not predict the outcomes, not like her teacher. Who would no doubt taste the magic in the air around her.

Life sucked chunks.

^^^^^

She had to be more careful or else be caught by the Authorities. They might taste the magic she leaked after tweaking the radio.

Most kids were screened by preschool to see whether they had talent – somehow Gloria had been missed.

Good thing Claudia had seen her magician’s performance at a child’s birthday party. Everything had gone wrong that day – instead of a rabbit, she pulled a python out of the hat. Of course, the party had been for boys, so that went over well. But it didn’t go over with the parents when her bra and panties had pulled out of her sleeve along with the handkerchiefs. Not sure how that happened.

Claudia had tasted the taint and offered to tutor her if she promised to stop playing magician.

Gloria needed to control herself first if she wanted to control the magic. Otherwise, some Telemage would catch a whiff and she would be slammed into a Control Chair. Then some Docmage would fry out her brain section that created magic – and they weren’t too careful about what else was around, like body functions or reasoning. She didn’t want to spend the rest of her life drooling in the corner of a closed ward, finger-painting.

^^^^^

It hadn’t always been this way. Once magicians had been an accepted, if not welcome, part of society. The Magic War was hundreds of years in the past, but the results had echoed down the years into the present. The old saw about bad apples still applied.

Time to try out some of Claudia’s tutoring before a passing patrol sensed what she had done. Gloria let her hands continue working the bread dough on autopilot. She let her mind drift until she could sense the magic crackling in her skin, vibrating in her bones, and even curling off the end of each hair. When she had the feeling solidly nailed down, she sucked it all into her hands and grounded it to the earth.

The sense of magic vanished. It worked! She smiled happily. It was the first time she had successfully used one of Claudia’s techniques on her own. Maybe now she wouldn’t have to worry so much about getting caught.

The happy, proud feeling faded as she realized the bread dough she was working felt odd.

She opened her eyes and looked down to find her hands buried to the wrist in the finest cake she had ever seen.

^^^^^

Every other baker and apprentice in the shop saw it too, a multihued, multi-tiered swirl of impossibly delicate buttercream butterflies and roses. Gloria licked a finger and found the rich filling studded with blackberries and pears. She smiled in spite of herself. She knew she was screwed, but at least she was going down in style.

Gloria looked up; her coworkers were staring at her with terror in their eyes. She wondered how many seconds it would take before someone would start to scream, how many minutes after that until a patrol arrived with their magic-damping nets and their wands set to stun. She wondered whether finger-painting would turn out to be fun.

A deafening blast of dance music rent the air. Gloria grimaced along with everybody else, involuntarily shutting her eyes against the pain. When she opened them again, the cake was just an ordinary lump of bread dough again, and everyone else had gone back to work as if nothing had changed.

“Babe, that was one crazy spell you threw there,” she heard someone say. “Don’t ever do that in here again.”

She turned and found Tony standing next to her.

“And stop frying my radio, hear?”

^^^^^

“Cause if you do it again, I am going to tell Claudia. I know she is going to be displeased.” Tony said.

“How…” Gloria stuttered.

“Didn’t you think that Claudia would allow you to work in such a public place without surveillance?”

“No I guess not, But why must you insist on playing that damn music all the damn time. It is so repetitive.”

“I happen to like this music, plus it gives Claudia plenty of chances to watch you in action and see if you can handle yourself, I must say that the cake looked quite scrumptious. You forgot one thing, you need channel the energy through your feet not your hands. Feet are magically dead and safe to channel through without setting anything off.”

“Of course, Claudia keeps going over that and I always forget.”

Just then the door opens and a Telemage walks thru the front door. The color drains from her face as the mage approaches.

“I am here to pick up an order for Parker,” the mage says.

Gloria breathes a sigh of relief as Tony helps with the customer. Later Tony starts up the music again, but for whatever reason, Gloria doesn’t find it so bad this time.

Nier Game review.

I picked up Nier over X-Mas as part of a buy 2 get one free deal at GameStop. It was the free one. As the disc started playing I notice that it was by cavia, the people that did Drakenguard and Drakenguard 2. Both of those games had a great atmosphere as well as some strange takes on things (especially the first one in alternate endings). The first thing I am presented is a tirade from a woman with a really foul mouth. It was quite stunning. Then the game begins, its a standard hack and slash. The one thing that stands it apart is the magic. The game has 8 different spells that attack (or defend in one cast) in various forms from hands to spears. After the tutorial ( in which I reach level 30) I am transported 1312 year into the future where the game actually takes place. My first task is going to the library to talk to Popola. This is a task which I will perform countless times, as she is the one of the people the game that actually know what they are doing.

The main character is a father who is looking after a sick daughter. This leads him ( his name is Nier, but you can call him anything) to a Lost Shrine when his daughter, Yonah, runs off there to find a rare flower. Here he encounters Weiss, an age-old grimoire with an attitude. Weiss likes to think of himself to be all important, but has lost memories of exactly how he is important. He is always harping on Nier when Nier helps townspeople with some of there more mundane tasks. The back and forth between Weiss, Nier and Kaine (pronounced Kai-neigh), the woman from the opening sequence, is one of the things that makes this game great.

Kaine is a foul-mouthed warrior woman who is possessed by a Shade, the nasty things that pass for enemies in this game. She is wearing fairly standard JRPG wear, that is a collection of bandages and lingerie. They poke fun at themselves for this a couple of times in the game. They also poke fun at Legend of Zelda games, by having the player throw bombs in a bosses mouth and the next dungeon a young prince acquires a mask and strikes the famous Link Item-Acquisition Pose.

Again cavia serves up the atmosphere with great locations, including a xenophobic cliff-dwelling village, a forest where words have power (most of the events here are in the form of text) and a desert kingdom with 120,000 rules( which cover everything from the mundane to the profound).

The game does have a new game plus feature, but the games starts over half way in. There are 4 endings to the game. Two of them are gotten just by playing and two by collecting all the weapons in the game. However, this game does something radical. In order to watch the final ending, all of your save data is deleted. When they say all they mean all, not just the save file that you were using but everything. It pretty fitting considering that Nier is sacrificing himself to save Kaine. I thought it was a nice touch to a very good game that I got for free.

Introducing Me

Hello, My name is David Wilson and I live in Blacksburg, VA. I have started this blog to document the expansion of my world through my own efforts. The title is a takeoff of a Nintendo DS game. The main point of the story of the game is that the world is as small as you make it and that you should push yourself into new territory. I shall be using this blog to talk about such expansions and other things I see fit. So let see where this thing goes