Writingchat Round Robin Story

"Tick tock." Conan

"Tick tock." Fritz

Outside the wind had stopped, replaced by a stifling pause. The trees looked like snap-shots; still and silent. The night sky rumbled. Aaron cast his gaze about the dishevled living room, searching. Conan

"Oh no!", Aaron thought, "did I mail the wrong package to my probation officer?" JR

He frantically ran the day's events through his movie camera memory. "The mailbox! When did I go to the mailbox?" he asked, banging his forehead with the heel of his hand. Heather Mina

Unfortunately Aaron had forgotten to remove the heavy steel glove that the Landowski twins had insisted upon during their passionate nooner. There was a loud clang, then a thump. Aaron lay dead on the floor. wolfpuppy (ever perverse)

Nobody would miss Aaron for several days. With his probation officer in the hospital, and his mother half a world away, there was noone to care whether he lived or died. Heather Mina

But he had died. Aaron took his own pulse and found his wrists empty of throb. He peered into his pupils with a flashlight and found blank dark spots. Dead? Dead? No one would miss him. No one would search for him. Aaron smiled. Mikey

Aaron's smile was like two lips pressed together, with the edges curved upward. Conan

The opportunity of a lifetime. Conscious, yet removed from responsibility. No one expected a dead man to do anything but be dead. And yet he realized that he was still aware of everything going on around him, able to move from one place to another, able to function. What he needed to know now was, just how much effect could he have? Empress Barb

The answer came to him quickly. Ivan, his trusty black labrador, pushed aside his empty dinner bowl and stared at Aaron with a menacing grin. Courtney

He couldn't be dead! Ivan expected Aaron to feed him, to place food in the bowl. Surely, if he was dead, if his body was dead, was decomposed, Ivan would howl. Isn't that what dogs did when their master died? So, if he wasn't dead, then what was going on? Why was he lying here, conscious, but thinking of death? Fred Rosenberry

Slowly, carefully, Aaron sat up. He was amazed at the energy, the vitality he felt. Shouldn't he be weak? Shouldn't his forehead hurt? Aaron stood, turned, and looked at the floor. What he saw there shook him to the core of his soul. Heather Mina

There on the floor lay his body with blood covering his face from his forehead down. "Boy, can I be stupid sometimes. No wander I'm on probation." he thought to himself. Kern L. Napoletano

It was then that he heard a knock at the door. He rushed to the window. Conan

Mom?! What was his mother doing here? The last time he had heard from her was in August, before she left on her tour of Australia with the rest of the old biddies. He flung open the door, his whole body tensed in preparation for the shouting match sure to ensue. Astonished, Aaron watched as Mrs. J. Arnold Greenbaum III threw herself onto the corpse on the floor and proceeded to get messy tears all over its (his?) face. Heather Mina

The tears were flowing so hard they were washing the blood from his corpse's face. "It can't be! I'm really dead!" he cried as he watched his mother go into hysterics. "Why am I still on the Earth instead of where ever I am suppose to go? he thoughtfully said to himself as he suddenly got very somber. His mother really did love him after all they had put themselves through over the years. Kern Napoletano

Still, Aaron couldn't help being angry. He had waited years to get back at her for not hiring a good lawyer for him. It was her fault he was on probation! His mother hunched over his cold, stiffening body. Her cheek was pressed to Aaron's staring face, and her buttocks hung in the air. The temptation was too great. He ran at her, attempting to kick a field goal with her rear end. Instead, his foot passed through her body, and the momentum thrust him into the air. He landed on his back, and he wondered if it was possible to die twice. Melissa Grant

As morning arrived, cold and obscured by fog, a bone-thin woman dressed in black leather, high boots and gray suede was meeting with her people. Her hair was long and as black as her carefully manicured fingernails. He features were squared and smooth, naturally bronzed by her Latin heritage. Most striking were here pale brown eyes, which sometimes glittered gold. This morning, the woman known as Sable was in a very bad mood. The name on her tongue was Aaron Montoya. Conan

"Let's make one thing perfectly fucking clear - I don't give a shit about Montoya being in jail." Sable stared long at every face at the table. Long faces, droopy dog faces. A bunch of damn losers. "He's got Chalice, and I want it. We've searched all the places it should be, but why aren't we looking where it shouldn't be? Huh? GET ME THAT DAMN CHALICE!" Mikey

Sable paused, gathering her composure as the guys fidgeted. She pulled a slender cigar from inside her jacket. Priest, a 40ish man with a neat, dark beard; Priest, the only man in the world she trusted, flicked the lid from his lighter, the one with the Harley emblem on it. She lit the stogie and took a drag. Then she stood before the table, letting her men stew. Above them the distant ceiling of the warehouse showed signs of the growing daylight through rusted holes. Conan

Priest held back a grin as he watched Sable's performance. The other men, one by one, lowered their gazes to the table at the intensity of Sable's glare. When the last one looked down, Priest smiled his lopsided smile and winked at her, cherishing the memory of that whip-strong and supple body wrapped around his. Heather

Priest shook his head, to clear his mind of thoughts about Sable. Just concentrate about the job on hand, he told himself. Find the chalice.

"Ok, Hogan, you search the sewers."

"Hey, why me?"

"Because, Hogan, somebody mighta flushed it down the toilet."

Hogan furled his eyebrows. "If it went down a terlet, THEY'LL know . And they'll be down there already. Lots of them."

Priest and Sable glared at Hogan.

"OK. Ok. I'll go." He licked his lips. "But I get the AK-47. And a walkie-talkie." He swallowed..."and..."

"Don't push it, Hogan"

Fred Rosenberry

Sable looked at Gary. The man hadn't bathed or shaved in a week, and his skin was the dung-beige and gray of a junky in need of a fix.

"Gary's tweakin'," she observed.

Gary looked up to stare at Sable. He was in some internal hell, and sinking fast. Right now he was in more of a merciful daze; sheltered from the real agony of withdrawal only by a buffer of whiskey. He looked away, at the far off double doors, "I'm okay. I fixed last night."

"You fixed nothin'," she shot back.

He looked at her again. "I'm all right," he said with more conviction.

Sable shrugged, "You and Jake pay Aaron a visit. Let him know he's not foolin' anyone, and bring his sorry ass back here -- and Jake, get him something before you go out. I don't need him passed out on Aaron's front lawn."

Jake nodded, leveling a resentful glance at Gary.

Sable turned from the group, raising a beckoning hand at Priest, "You and me need to talk." She glanced back over her shoulder. "That's all, gentlemen. Move!"
Conan
While Sable's group did what they could to rally themselves, and Aaron struggled to understand what had happened to his life, a man was working in the rank humidity of the city's sewers. It was a large, subterranean shelter, removed from the city's gushing waste, where five rectangular entrances, yawning ten by ten feet each, converged upon the doctor's hideaway.

In the center of the room was a Plexiglas cage, linked to dozens of gleaming wires and monitors. His staff worked quietly, collecting and analyzing data on what abided within the enclosure.

Nearby, a bum named Steve Hicks, also waited in a much smaller cage; parched and half starved, he'd given up seeking escape. Conan

Steve twitched as he heard the sound of keys in the lock to his cage. Damn, he thought,Sable's gonna kill me if I don't die first. He'd tried not to tell them what he knew, tried hard, but it was no good in the end. He knew this was his last chance. If he didn't tell them now they'd feed him to the THING in the middle of the room.

Steve saw the doctor draw a small amount of liquid out of a sealed container into a platinum cup. Rough hands pulled him out of his cage and held him as the doctor poured a fiery liquid down his throat. All thoughts of resistence fled. He smiled a lopsided grin. _These people are my friends_. He began explaining to them the story of the Chalice. -- Magician Tim

Staring into a naked Silvania, in the center of the cavern, palms open, Steve tapped his left foot to the slow, steady 4/4 time of distant drips. He opened his mouth, and in a shaky falsetto, sang:

Gather round friends
without fear or malice
and I'll tell you the tale
of the mysterious chalice

It holds the blood of someone
with the waters of life
in its womb of a bowl
beneath lips of a knife

Molded from love
fired by hatred
touched by greed
now it stands sacred

So search if you will
and you will if you must
but know when you find --
a chalice of dust.

Steve slumped to the floor and left the stench of his passing to fade with his memory.-- JR

The doctor looked on as staff members gave up their efforts at recitation. Terry, a young man whose chief occupation used to be as an EMT, knelt beside the body.

The doctor frowned. "Well?"

Terry shook his head.

"Lovely. That's just ... lovely. How much Pheno' did you pump him with? -- don't even bother." He raised a silencing hand and walked away, but Terry hurried along with him. The docter spoke as he walked, "Poetry. I ask for answers. I get poetry."

"My appologies, Doctor Perez. We must have--"
"No bum like that's a poet. I want whatever the hell he just babbled analyzed. Do you understand me? There may be a clue."

"We will. Everything's recorded." Terry struggled to find something reassuring to say. "He was a long-shot anyway, Dr. Perez. The specimen's of far more value to us."

The doctor stopped beside the enclosure, looking in at the inert form of what had once resembled a cat. Now it looked more like a rusted sculpture, laying on the padded floor oozing a black secretion from cracks in its jagged surface, a rhythmic pulsation with each breath its only sign of life "Really. How encouraging."

"We've managed to identify the growth."

The doctor glanced at Terry. "It's rust."

"It looks like rust, but it's actually a fungus of some kind."

"Of some kind?"

"Extremely aggressive. Extremely virulent. Capable of thriving on and in nearly any substance we throw at it. Fungus by nature is highly adaptive. It can survive practically anywhere, only this particular strain makes the species we already know appear sluggish by comparison."

"And the chalice?"

"The chalice ... we're not sure. It may be a genetic code. It may be the missing container... we don't know for certain. We know that its presence coincides with the emergence of some kind of criminal organization that appears to have information about our activities, but that proves nothing, Dr. Perez."

"Find the damned container, Terry. Before we have a global incident on our hands."

"We're doing everything in our power. It's only a matter of time."

"If there's one thing I can't spare, Terry, it's time."
-- Conan

The Galactic space cruizer, Grutzek, settled into a liesurely orbit above Earth's Northern pole. Ignoring the busy hustle of crew members around him, the Commander of Section Fifteen looked at the array of control panels, each providing read outs about the planet. He snarled, revealing razor sharp fangs. This would be a simple enough procedure. He awaited the proper time to release the "open fire" order.
-- Conan

"Blue!" Commander Sklyznk grunted. "Who ever heard of a blue planet?" He turned to the cowering Lieutenant and gave the hand-chop signal. -- Heather

A great white projectile, so much like a streak of lightening that the inhabitants of Earth really never knew what hit them thrust forth from the mother ship. The surface of the world was seared, and the atmosphere was flooded with a blinding haze of dust. All was laid waste as but a handful of humans were left alive to meet the approaching damnation.

It was several months, after the departure of the mother ship before any emerged from the wreckage to ascertain what had happened. In the meantime, the mother ship had suffered some mild technical difficulties which required its return to home base for the next several centuries. -- Conan

"Dr. Perez," Terry began. "Do you think the Chalice survived this holocaust?"

"I don't know," the doctor replied. "But you'd better pray to whatever gods you can think of that it did."

Aaron Montoya followed the two men as they walked down what used to be the highway and argued over what they would do next. -- Heather

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