Friday, January 4, 2013

Very Beginning of a tentacly story

[Originally posted at Off Topic Productions forums years ago]

Since this thread is full of random, I give you a thing I wrote last night that has no connection to anything. It seems clear to me that it is the beginning, or rather the beginning of the beginning, (in fact it is short enough that you can probably add an arbitrary number of "of the beginning"s to the end of that phrase without compromising its truth value) of whatever it should be. It looks like a beginning, it sounds like a beginning, it even smells like one. But, given that I have no followup whatsoever, it will be forced to stand alone.

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When you've been shot and left for dead you find yourself asking a lot of questions. Questions like: Why did this happen to me? Why would anyone want to shoot me? How long before I bleed to death? Are the tentacles growing out of my side natural? Am I really an Eldritch Abomination? What exactly is the derivation of the word Eldritch? You know, stuff like that. The question that got me out of that fugue was, is that a Coca-Cola bottle?

My longest tentacle had discovered it. I touched some more, felt around it. The feeling wasn't quite the same as touching it with my fingers, but it was definitely a Coca-Cola bottle. The cap was still on it. I wrapped the tentacle around it and lifted it. Then I smiled; it was still full. I opened the bottle with my upper tentacle and brought it to my lips. I thought, these could be really useful, if I weren't about to die. But as I drank the soda I became aware of something. My life didn't seem to be fading away anymore. The pain had passed and I was feeling better.

I rolled onto my belly -I had to roll leftwards because of the tentacles- and pushed myself onto my knees. At first I was lightheaded, but the moment passed. When I got to my feet I wasn't as steady as I might have liked, but I was more than capable of getting myself the hell out of there.

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[Original Work Index]

5 comments:

  1. I'm not sure where you'd take it, but I like it. It would fit right in with some of the stuff I'm currently writing, which - have I mentioned this before? - was at least partly inspired by your A World Without God stuff.

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  2. Which - have I mentioned this before? - was at least partly inspired by your A World Without God stuff.

    I believe that you have mentioned that before.

    I need to get back to A World Without God, and various other things.

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  3. Why does "tentacly" sound so cute? Much cuter-sounding than "tentacle-y". When I think of "tentacly" I get a mental image of a baby Cthulhu waving hello with several tentacles at once.

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  4. "How is that tentacle managing to lift itself without tearing itself out of my side? Must be joined to the bones somehow..."

    Interesting. Would be happy to read more.

    Incidentally the body of the post comes out as grey-on-black on this version of Chrome.

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  5. Incidentally the body of the post comes out as grey-on-black on this version of Chrome.

    Usually when I'm copying something I paste it as formatted text, that way I don't have to worry about going through to make sure that I've preserved every italic and such. Sometimes, though, it carries over more than I wanted.

    I don't mind it bringing in different fonts, in fact I embrace that, but in the case of stories from Off Topic Productions Forum the result is the grey on black text. In previous things from there I converted to a more here-like style (for example the Zombie story that includes The lack of cold medicine and its follow up, and the Mech Story beginning) but this time I decided to keep the original look. At least as much as I could, to really have it keep the original look I'd need to change the color of the entire page to dark and all text on it to light.

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