New Testingstan

Oxymoron wrote:I doubt I would have been able to launch here the "writing game" like I did other there and get as many responses in such a short timespan.

... Hell, you know what, I'll do it and we'll see.

So here it is :

me wrote:So, I've been wanting to exercise my writing for a while, but the problem is that I always end up having ideas for huge stories and epic adventures and things like that ; and these ideas are so huge that I don't even know where to start, get discouraged, and finally do nothing. So I think it's time to take the problem from a different angle.

Most of you have probably heard of that "30 minutes challenge" thing on Tumblr, where artists have to draw in only 30 minutes something based on just a picture, or a phrase, or a basic concept. The idea I have here is something similar.

I'll be trying to write at least twice a week, depending on my availability, short blurbs of text to exert my writing muscles, at least one Word / Libre Office page long (standard font and character size), and up to 2000 words long.


So, why do I talk to you about this ? Well, two things :

First, I need inspiration. By suggesting ideas, submitting pictures, or things like that, you're going to help me with that.

Second, by reading and criticizing what I'll have written, you'll help me improve, and motivate me to continue with this idea.


If anyone else want to also participate in this writing thing by posting their own written blurbs, feel free to do so. Maybe we could turn this into something, I don't know.


Anyway, here we are. If you have any idea you want to propose, well, what are you waiting for ? Submit !

Here's the few prompts that have been offered so far, for people to get inspiration from :


1/ http://madmothmiko.tumblr.com/post/5764 ... -on-tumblr

2/ http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/ ... 6gzubi.jpg

3/ Rolling thunder ; white plains.

4/ No matter how shitty my life could be, at least I knew there was one thing that would never let me down : _______

5/ "It's as easy as one, two, three."

6/ http://i.imgur.com/r70gtKZ.jpg

7/ http://i.imgur.com/chP1SyU.jpg

8/ http://i.imgur.com/Dj4hJw0.jpg

9/ A dumptruck, unexpected villainy, and what is really important.

10/ http://fc05.deviantart.net/fs51/i/2009/ ... anDize.jpg

11/ http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs51/i/2009/ ... anDize.jpg

12/ The muffled sound of (a) flag(s) flying in the wind.

13/ Engine noises

14/ The legacy of a long lost Human Kind

15/ The social circle must be broken

16/ The distant sound of laughter

17/ http://i.imgur.com/7mWp7f8.jpg

18/ "Why did Daddy have to kill Mommy ?"

19/ Astronaut breaking his spine the day before launch.

20/ Power from beyond the veil grants wish. Unforeseen consequences.

21/ "This is my _____ ! There are many like it, but this one is mine." (etc)

22/ http://i.imgur.com/qCfhh7c.jpg (from http://www.abandoned-places.com/flandre ... ed-01.html )

23/ https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/575 ... on/wow.jpg

24/ http://fc06.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/ ... 6aknbh.jpg

25/ http://i.imgur.com/aqcV2NN.jpg

26/ http://i.imgur.com/PNR0GyZ.jpg

27/ The ordinary life of a garbage collector.

28/ "I looked into [her/his/its] eyes, and only saw myself."

29/ Any of the songs in this playlist

30/ http://i268.photobucket.com/albums/jj10 ... 1376348213

31/ Mighty Horn

32/ Nothing.

33/ http://i.imgur.com/Mgti5Rv.jpg

34/ Dancing on the plains of Meggido

35/ Wielding power(s) beyond my/your/their control

36/ http://24.media.tumblr.com/1e2eb706863c ... o1_500.png

37/ http://th06.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/f/2 ... 67axvh.jpg

38/ "It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points."

39/ "This is the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine."

40/ image + text : http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=251
transcript : 41/ "Because sometimes we let things die but wish they would come back." [an out of context quote from another forum, which i found oddly inspiring]

42/ Any of the pictures from this link : http://theartofanimation.tumblr.com/pos ... ura-bifano

And here's one thing that I did already with idea #9 : link

I might have a go at this

You're very much welcome

33/ http://i.imgur.com/Mgti5Rv.jpg

34/ Dancing on the plains of Meggido

So like this thread on SB (I trust you don't mind if I post it there too, do you)?

I must admit to cheating a bit on this, I spent a bit more than 30 minutes on it:

Oxymoron wrote:2/ http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2013/ ... 6gzubi.jpg

So this is Paran. Ancient, grand Paran. A world with five thousand years of industrial civilization, a world that was building cities of glass and steel and concrete while my ancestors – and Jean’s – were building their first cities of mud and brick.

I expected something more glamorous.

They make it seem glamorous, the stories, the soap operas. I wonder if anybody thinks my world looks glamorous. I don’t think so. What people here seem to have heard about us is that we live in dirt, we’re poor, and our husbands beat us. Jean says on Earth, people there think about the same things about us too.

Jean smiled in that way he does when I told him about this. He says he noticed, on Earth, TV shows always show everybody as rich. You only ever see the insides of nice homes. Nobody wants to see a show about people living in a small apartment. So with Paran. All the shows we see about it are about the rich. And I suppose, the rich parts of it do look something like the shows. I can see the Table, where the rich people live, from the back window. They call it the Table because the buildings remind people of glasses, like you’d serve fine wines in. The Table does look like what the shows show Paran as. A huge city of glass, the buildings very elegant and very tall.

Nothing at all like here. Nothing at all like the way the masses on Paran live.

Here, here is the way nine out of ten human beings in known space, the masses of Paran, live.

The great buildings here are so old, they aren’t really proper buildings anymore. The old, the ancient cores are skyscrapers, built thousands of years ago, but they’re covered in encrustation. Paran’s megacities don’t look like modern cities. They look like ancient cities, primitive cities, no central planning, people haphazardly adding a house here, a shop here, an alley there, as the population grows. Except here all that haphazard construction doesn’t happen on the ground, it happens in the air. The cities grow by people adding one slapdash addition after another to the skyscrapers, until the ancient skyscrapers are just buried cores, buried deep in the heart of centuries of accumulation like old wood buried deep in the heart of a tree, groaning under the weight of all that messy mass.

Some of the people who live deep in the old buildings, the old cores, they’ve never seen the sun. Each building could be a city onto itself.

The cities on Paran grow haphazardly around the buildings, but they don’t grown to the sides. Only by Imperial decree do they grow to the cities. It’s ironic – Paran is the most populous world in known space by far, but most of its land is thinly populated. Its lands are a sea of vast, efficient farms, from which the cities rise here and there, like islands, mountains of humanity piled on top of itself. Vast efficient farms everywhere, the deserts irrigated and made to bloom, the mountains carved into terraces. Only the worst terrain escapes. The Badlands, the Paranese call them.

There’s a soldier on the billboard hanging off the building outside the window, just standing on the billboard, just standing on a narrow edge of metal with a mile-long drop on both sides. He must be a Badlander. My Paranese neighbors who’ve never left the city or touched true ground wouldn’t have that courage. Jean wouldn’t have that courage. Only somebody like my mother would have that courage. Only a Badlander would have that courage.

The city-dwellers don’t like Badlanders. They’re the fist of the Empire, the face of power, barbarians brought in from the bad places where, on the richest, most advanced world in known space, some of the galaxy’s poorest people scratch a hard living from land so poor that even on a world where every square meter of good land must produce nobody wants it.

When the Empire sends people into the Badlands it sends city-dwellers. To keep a lid on the cities, the Empire sends people from the Badlands. Of course, there are so few Badlanders compared to the vast meat mountains of the cities, but then the Empire doesn’t need many soldiers to control the city-dwellers. If they get out of hand the food can be cut off, the water can be cut off, the electricity can be cut off, the safety doors can be lowered, in the hearts of the buildings even the air can be cut off.

I remember words Jean’s people have for this kind of order. Oriental despotism. Hydraulic state.

I remember Jean smiling at me and telling me about something called the demographic transition. Isn’t it funny that on every world when people become rich they stop having so many children, the population stops growing – every world except this one, where this arrangement works so well for the Emperors, and people need it because there are so many of them…

The soldier out the window watches the air-car traffic, seeming indifferent to the precariousness of his perch, like a bird that knows if it falls it can fly. But of course he’s a man, and can’t fly; if he falls, he dies. I can see he’s a young man, but he has white hair, the hair of the Badlanders, so often white from birth, which sets them apart from the masses of the cities, with their black hair…

Part of me wants to talk to him. I think he might understand me better than the neighbors, those ant people who’ve never been outside their city-mountain, better than Jean, who understands the ant-hill people better than he understands me.

I am surrounded by a nation’s worth of souls jammed into an area the size of Hatan Island, and I am lonely.

Pretty cool, I like it.

Just a thing : there isn't a "30 minutes limit". Only vague limitation is "keep it (relatively) short" ; and evej then it would be more of an advice than an actual... Well, limit for lack of a better word. It's the goal that's important : motivation / inspiration to write at least twice a weak, and maybe daily.

Oxymoron wrote:Pretty cool, I like it.

Thanks.

Well, here's mine:

The Distant Sound of Laughter

It was one of those days at the tail-end of Autumn, where the sun shone bright but cold and set quickly in the evenings. It was six in the afternoon, already a sort of twilight, and I was walking the dog.

Exactly where I was living at the time is not important, but it was one of those large-ish English towns (and I do mean English rather than British, and if you don't understand the distinction then I can't explain it to you) that combine easy access to a nearby city with the presence of green spaces. Ten minutes in one direction was a supermarket, and ten minutes in the other direction was a farm, but at this moment I was walking through the woods.

Everyone called it a woods, and I suppose it was (is; I haven't been there for close to a decade, but I'm sure it's still there). You could walk from one side to the other in five minutes though, so it was a very small woods.

Of course, that's the time it would take to cross the woods in the day-time. When your dog starts barking and then runs off into the undergrowth and you stand there shouting "Jack! Jack, come here!" with increasing worry in your voice as the sun sets and goosebumps begin to form on your arms from the cold, it can take a much longer time.

It became a much different place. Although there was large dirt path running from one side of the woods to the other, there were many places where tree roots broke out. These were not a problem in the day, but in the dark I was constantly stubbing my foot, and eventually I fell.

I was on the edge of a ridge, so I fell a good three feet. I swore; my hand was cut a little, and now I had dirt all over my clothes. I was ready then to leave: the dog could fend for himself for one night, he would probably even enjoy it, I would come out in the morning and put up signs. There was a sound in the distance; for a stupid moment I though it was a bird singing, but it was clearly laughter.

I looked up; the laughter sounded like it was originating from high in the trees, but there was nothing up there. Besides, these weren't the kinds of trees someone could climb; I thought it must be some kind of echo. I called out:

"Hello?"

The laughter stopped for a few seconds, but then it started again. This time it seemed closer. I shivered, and not from the cold. I got out my mobile phone, to use as a torch, but it was dead -- which was impossible, it'd had a half-full battery when I had started the walk. I put it away and climbed back onto the path; the cut on my hand stung when it touched the ground, but it was not really a problem.

I walked along the path slowly, trying to ignore the laughter behind me, trying not to trip again. I had a feeling that if I fell I would have to worry about more than some creepy laughter. This was a stupid superstition, as it turns out, a little lie I told myself to keep from screaming.

Even at the slow pace I was making, I should have reached the edge of the woods pretty soon. The path simply ran from one side to the other, so it should have been impossible to get lost; and yet I was lost.

Of course things always look different at night, but trees do not grow to twice their heights and block out the stars, and a single, straight path does not split into three.

The laughter stopped, and it felt like my heart did too. A cold breath blew across my neck; I spun around, but there was nobody there. I told myself: it's just the wind. And then I felt a finger mark a trail down my cheek.

I turned around again and stumbled backwards. There was a man -- no, more a boy, he looked about seventeen. And he was beautiful. You must see them occasionally: those truly, profoundly beautiful people who look like they've climbed out of a perfume advert, who always look out-of-place in the mundane world of the Saturday shop. He was sporting the haircut of a 1920s flapper, and his eyes... they were ocean-blue, and under his gaze I felt like I was being weighed in the balance, and I knew I would be found wanting.

He smiled, and all I could think was: why, Grandma, what big teeth you have.

"Hello," he said, and if I had had any doubts that he had been the source of the laughter they would have been ended by the sing-song sound of his voice; "What's your name?"

"Dan," I said, and I didn't think to ask for his.

"Ho, ho! Daniel -- that's not a good name, not here. How did it go? Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin. Numbered, weighed and" -- he raised his arm to the side and a blade, a long bronze knife, appeared in his hand -- "Divided."

I wanted to run, but my feet were stuck to the ground. I raised an arm to try and ward him off, but as he stepped towards me he grabbed it with his free hand and twisted it effortlessly to the side. He brought the knife up in front of me and held it there. I was helpless and terrified, and he knew it, and I think he was savouring the taste of it.

He breathed in deeply through his nose; I was sure that he was going to kill me then, but instead he shouted and let go of me. I fell backwards; I could see him kicking. There was a little growling white-furred monster clamped onto his leg. Jack.

The man kicked once more, harder, and Jack went flying into a tree. He let out a yelp and tried to stand. The man stalked towards the dog, and I spotted a rock on the floor.

"Nasty little thing," he said, and Jack growled in response.

"I'm going to kill you. Then I will kill your master, little doggy. Then I will skin you, and I think I will turn you into a--"

I didn't get to hear the end of his threat; I aimed the most pointed bit of the rock at the back of his head and brought it down as hard as I could. He collapsed onto one knee and looked up at me with hatred in his gaze.

"Bastard," he snarled, and I hit him again, with all my strength, right in the face. He fell onto his back. He wasn't moving; I hoped he was dead. I tried not to look at the man's face. Jack whimpered at my touch, but he let me pick him up.

Whether the man was alive or dead, I had to move. I didn't want to be there if he awoke, and I didn't want to stand next to a corpse. I chose a path at random and started walking.

Oxymoron wrote:7/ http://i.imgur.com/chP1SyU.jpg

A sort-of sequel to the previous effort:


It looks like it may rain. The clouds are rolling in over Nahan Maga, big, fleshy, dark and substantial in the sunset. It’s beautiful. In the sunset the Works become beautiful. The big exchanger towers look very dramatic, rising above the cityscape, toward the dark cloud coming in over the city.

It’s a landscape of city. Nahan Maga is so big, even here from this high tower it stretches beyond the horizon. I wonder how many billions of people live in Nahan Maga. Nobody knows. Not even the Emperors know. They long ago stopped trying to count the people in the cities.

Nahan Maga. Meaning the Navel of the World. The biggest city on Paran. The imperial city for more than five thousand years. There are supposed to be very old palaces, of stone, somewhere down there, buried deep inside Nahan Maga, where the sun doesn’t reach, where nobody goes except the scavs.

Somewhere out there, beyond the horizon, there’s the wall. The city drops off and there’s the wall, and beyond the wall are farms. Every city on Paran has a wall. I’ve been on the wall, you can look down from it and see the farms, the rows of crops planted right up to the wall, lapping up against it like still green water. A sea of green rows, to the horizon, far beyond the horizon, it goes on and on, I know, a sea of green stretching from the eastern shore to the western shore, thousands of miles. A sea of food, for the mountains of people. It goes over where forests used to be, where grass used to be, where desert used to be, where the land’s too dry they have huge pipes that bring water from the sea after they take the salt out. It climbs the mountains. Only in the Kazmari Mountains does it stop. Only in the far north does it stop, so far north it’s too cold to be worth growing crops, and there’s a forest, a forest they go into and take wood from, a forest where Badlanders live.

Chamagi is eating. She makes a face. She doesn’t like our rations. I don’t think they taste bad. The Sergeant tells me they’re recycled shit. There are machines that turn that back into food. It’s most of what the city people eat. Even that sea of farms couldn’t feed Paran on its own.

Every year the Empire would send a man to our village. He’d come in a sky wagon, with soldiers with guns in masks that hid their faces, and he’d give us medicines and tools, and he’d tell us to hand over our young men for them, to become soldiers. It’s the only thing we had that was worth taking. We hated that man. Now I am that man. To the city people, I am that man. To the Badlands, of course, they send people like Chamagi. To the cities Badlanders, to whom the city people look like ants. To the Badlanders, city people, to whom the Badlanders look like wild dogs.

Badlanders. I use the city people’s name for us. But we don’t have a name for ourselves. In our pockets, our forests and our mountains, we’re too divided to have a sense of ourselves as ourselves. We’re just people.

The city people hardly seemed human to us, in the Kazmari Mountains. They were human-shaped things that came out of the sky wagons, waving guns, wearing masks and armor that hid their bodies. Only one of them ever showed his face.

Chamagi isn’t pretty, but sometimes I’d like to be close to her. The Emperors demand sons only from the Badlanders, and the only city women who will have anything to do with us are the soldiers and the whores, and for the money we are given the whores will let us screw them, but won’t pretend to like us. Chamagi sort of likes me, I think, she seems friendly. It would be nice…

The city people are very cruel to their women. They treat them as men who can get pregnant.

I wonder if the clouds will part enough to let me see the stars tonight. The city people talk about other worlds. I wonder if they’re better than this one.

It starts to rain.

35/ Wielding power(s) beyond my/your/their control

I write poetry better than mini stories, but here's the idea I had for "It's as easy as one, two, three."

Starts off with "They say that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Well, I'm sure as shit not any stronger."

A guy is dying of some disease that isn't mentioned but it's described to make the reader think. He recalls his triumphs and failures in life. He remembers his past loves and laments that there won't be any in the future. There's a description of a chamber being loaded and he offs himself. "It's as easy as one, two, three."

36/ http://24.media.tumblr.com/1e2eb706863c ... o1_500.png

37/ http://th06.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/f/2 ... 67axvh.jpg

can I add another prompt

38. 'It turns out that people will do anything for fake internet points.'

yes you can

39/ "This is the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine."

40/ image + text : http://asofterworld.com/index.php?id=251
transcript :

So in a moment of madness I've decided to do every one of these prompts, in order, as flash fiction pieces.
Here's number 1 (prompt):

Tupping Robots wrote: Saul tapped the glass a few times with the handle of his screwdriver, producing a few pleasing pangs and a low hum. He sucked in air like a car mechanic and took a step backwards.

"I reckon you're right, mate," he said.

David sighed and shook his head.

"Are you sure?"

Saul shrugged.

"Ain't no way to be sure, chief. But, I mean, it's pretty textbook. I mean, look at it."

David looked at it: the foot-and-a-half glass capsule, amber-coloured, transparent on the outer layers but clouding to opacity at the core, sitting there on his coffee table. An Inverted Egg -- the only one he'd seen outside of a museum, and even the best of those only had fragments. This was alive. It wasn't moving or making any sound, apart from the hum still echoing around it from Saul's tapping, but it had a warmth to it.

He considered what to do. There were those who would pay good money for something like this. Very good money.

"Not worth it, mate. Not worth the hassle."

David looked up at Saul again, who seemed to have read the expression on his face. David brought his hand up to his lips, considered for a second -- but he knew his friend was right.

"What should I do?" he said. Saul shrugged again.

"I think you've got to, you know, call them."

David groaned and slumped down on his sofa, placed his hands over his face. Saul sat down next to him.

"Yeah, I know, mate. They creep me out too."

"Bunch of tupping perverts," David grumbled, "creepy old men camping out in the bodies of teenage girls..."

"Yeah, I know. But you've got to call them, mate. You should have done it as soon as you found that thing, really."

David snorted. He knew that. He knew the rules. He reached out and clicked his fingers twice, and a slim little tube appeared in his hand. He looked at his friend.

"You can go, if you want. I shouldn't have dragged you into this."

Saul smiled, tossed back his head, let out a bark of laughter.

"What do you think's going to happen, mate? Nah, they're creepy, but that's it. Make the call."

"All right," said David, and he brought the tube up to his lips; "I've got an Inverted Egg. Get someone to pick it up."

The tube didn't respond. It didn't need to: David knew for sure that the message would get through. They sat there in silence for nearly a minute, and then they heard a thump in the street outside, and another, as two bodies fell from the upper atmosphere and hit the ground.

"That'd be them, then," said Saul, standing up and dusting himself off. "I'll put the kettle on, mate. Milk and one sugar, right?"

(for a moment my reading comprehension failed and I thought you had actually written a single piece using each and everyone of those prompts )

Good job anyway. I'm eagerly awaiting the rest.

Oxymoron wrote:(for a moment my reading comprehension failed and I thought you had actually written a single piece using each and everyone of those prompts )

I might do that at the end, if this attempt doesn't kill me dead.

Number 2 (prompt):

Oh Wow the Future Gee Whiz wrote: Jackie sucked in the triple-filtered air her mask provided; it tasted like ash. She folded the list into a little square and tucked it away in the inner pocket of her overcoat. It was a hot day -- moreso than normal. Jackie wondered if they'd finished another Craft up in the sky, maybe its exhaust was heating things up.

She laughed at herself. As if you know anything about anything, she thought. The sound of her laughter echoed around inside the mask; it almost sounded like a cough. She looked up: on a day like this, she ran the risk of heat exhaustion. Or of going mad and taking off the layers of clothes protecting her from the air -- a slower, more painful form of death. Jackie considered hailing a taxi... but she only had enough money for one way. Better to save it for the return journey.

"Right," she said, and started the walk down the street. It was quiet: through the smog she glimpsed the occasional traveller, but always far away. Nobody liked to be out on the streets: by day you risked roasting alive, by night you risked meeting the kind of people who went out on the streets at night. It wasn't safe. The news broadcasts had told her as much.

By any objective measure it wasn't far at all. Jackie had travelled many thousands of kilometres virtually, on her little treadmill linked up to the holodisplay. She had seen the world. Her friend Aisha had managed to earn a second-hand bicycle machine, but under the rules of the game they were half a continent apart; it was not a resource they were allowed to share.

She looked up again, at the skyscrapers. She could not see more than a metre in front of her, but the giant flashing billboards of the higher levels were perfectly visible. Jackie soon found her landmark. It said: 'Eat. Drink. Be Merry.' She nodded happily: she was outside Berlusconi building. Named for one of the great pre-Diaspora European politicians, she thought, happy with herself for knowing that nugget of information.

Jackie felt her way along the wall until she reached a door. She pushed -- it felt like it was stuck, and sweat was pouring down her back, and she could barely breath in her cheap filtration mask, and she was starting to panic and just then the door gave way. She collapsed in a heap on the floor, coughing with exhaustion.

"Right," she said, when she had caught her breath as much as she could, and stood up. She'd made it -- she was indoors. Safe. The door clunked closed behind her, sealing out the poisonous smog.

Jackie took off her mask and looked around, confirming that she was in the right place. She smiled and laughed, only stopping when the laugh threatened to become a cough. I'm alive, she thought. She reached into her overcoat and pulled out the list.

"Eggs, soybeans, realMeat..." she read, walking into the supermarket.

Number 3 (Rolling thunder ; white plains.):

Castles in the Sky wrote: "This is a bad idea," said Maria, wringing the front of her skirt. Hussein laughed.

"What's the worst that will happen?"

She opened and closed her mouth a few times; it was such a stupid question that she didn't know how to answer it. Hussein carried on his work, double- and triple-checking his equipment.

"Well you could die for one, and then I'd be stuck out here in the middle of nowhere."

Hussein shrugged.

"There's the truck," he said.

"I can't drive. You know that."

He shrugged again, bigger this time. Maria recognised the meaning of that: I offered to pay for lessons.

"I've got to do this," he said. Maria snorted.

"No you don't. We've got a good life. You don't need to go chasing after castles in the sky."

Hussein stopped what he was doing and turned to look at her. His expression was entirely serious, and Maria recognised the meaning of that too: I don't want to talk about this any more.

"You know who pays for our good life, my love. I have to do this."

They stood there for nearly a minute, looking into each others' eyes. Maria could see some fear there -- it was hidden well, and anyone other than her would never spot it in a thousand years, but it was there. Of course Hussein knew the risks. His brain could be fried by the lightning, or his soul could be ripped out of his body, or they could follow the signal here. That would be the worst outcome -- that would mean a death stretching over decades for both of them.

Maria broke first, looked down at the floor. She wanted to scream and shake him. She wanted to hug him and tell him it would be OK. She turned and walked out of the door, unable to do either, suppressing tears of fear.

The landscape was beautiful, if monotonous. There were fields of white flowers stretching out as far as Maria could see, and no sign of people in sight, save for their little shack, their truck, and the twin tracks of crushed flowers they had made on their journey here, three weeks prior.

The air was warm and humid. Dark clouds were forming overhead. The storm that Hussein was going to use as cover was almost upon them. Maria crouched down and picked a flower; she held it to her nose and sniffed. It smelled of nothing at all. She looked up at the object in the sky: it almost looked like a cloud itself, the upper part of an hourglass hanging impossibly in the air, but Maria knew better.

"The city of the gods," she said, and wondered if its inhabitants even had a sense of smell. If they did, why had they made these sterile imitations of life? As a joke?

Thunder rolled in the distance. Maybe he'll find out, she thought, and turned to go back inside.