Archive for Fiction

52! Part 2!

white-clad apparition laughs as he torments a smaller Caucasian man on the floor.

PART TWO

“Ah, I see the issue now. I neglected to fill in the details.” Pip motions for Hank to hang on to the eerie deck rather than hand them back. “What I ask you to do is to shuffle these special cards, again and again, until you have exhausted all possible arrangements. For example, one arrangement would be new-deck order, such as how they lie right now.”

“Wrong, dummy. You just saw me shuffle … um, twice …“ Hank says, but loses the thread as he spreads the cards in his hands and sees that his shuffles either never happened or he accidentally shuffled them right back into twos through aces for each suit. “Heh, would you look at that.”

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52!

"Angel of Death" character talking with card sharp in old west jail cell, the angel standing while card sharp is lying or sitting on the bunk. The Card sharp character is dusty old west reprobate.

PART ONE

Deadwood Jail, South Dakota, 1877. 

A man lies upon the wooden bench that serves as a bed, running his fingers over a face he keeps shaven even after two weeks in stir. This is the card sharp “Hard Hank“ Hart—“Triple H” to his friends.

Or would be, that is, if Hank still had any. Most of the men he once called friends had preceded him to gallows just like the one being assembled rather loudly on the other side of the cell’s barred window; and the rest, to a man, had ended up shot dead for cheating … or sure looking like they were, anyhow.

Hank would know, too, since he’s the one who pulled the trigger.

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Some Notes on the Biology of the Shoggoths

When the Elder Things arrived on Earth during the Archean Eon, approximately 4.0 to 2.5 billion years ago, the only life on our planet was prokaryotic in nature. These relatively simple bacterial cells lacked organelles. However, the Elder Things used these bacteria cells as raw material for bioengineering. Specifically, this involved a process called endosymbiosis, where various bacterial cells were merged or fused together to make more complex cells called eukaryotes. Thus, many of the organelles in eukaryotic cells, such as flagella, mitochondria, and chloroplasts, were once bacterial cells. DNA and RNA comparisons between living bacteria and the residual genetic material found in these organelles within eukaryotic cells, provide strong evidence for this theory. Animals, plants, fungi and protists are all eukaryotic forms of life and were created by the Elder Things through endosymbiosis.

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Check Your Shoggoth’s Expiration Date (or What to do When your Shoggoth Goes Bad)

Shoggoth’s don’t live forever, you know. They are built specifically for tasks that have timebombs programmed into them, meaning: every shoggoth has an expiration date, and if you thought they they were bad to be around on a normal day, I promise you, you don’t want to be there when they expire.

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Do I hear one-fourty-three?

   “I have a bid of one hundred forty two dollars…further bids? One hundred-forty-two-dollars going once…twice…Sold! for one-hundred-forty-two dollars to number thirty-nine. Thank you Sir. Our next item….”

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