Martha.net

1. It’s stormy without being dark, one of those spastic showers with bright beams of sunshine dancing between the raindrops.

2. They really aren’t shy about the fact they think the easiest way to save the world is to kill everyone that falls under their definition of Evil.

3. When she’d said the right music could make you fly, he hadn’t thought she meant it literally.

4. If the house had meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. She looked up, out over the charred mess of the town and tried not to think about how many of them had managed to make it out alive.

5. The dogs, being dogs, were much more interested in rolling in the wonderful stink coming off the dead critter than they were trying to figure out what had happened.

1. Belle was never sure if grape popsicles tasted like magic or if magic tasted like grape popsicles.

2. There was something just downright depressing about having to take out the trash the morning after saving the world. But tide and garbage trucks wait for no man and summoning circles tend to stink if you don’t clean them up asap.

3. “This is where you make up some stupid excuse to leave early and stop returning my calls.” Tod leaned back in the chair with a sigh.

4. The problem with vampire fights is that watching one is akin to following a summer blockbuster with crappy camera work — it’s all movement, too fast and too flashy to follow.

5. “Has it occurred to anyone that this is really bad idea?”

1. The clouds seal off the sky, a grim undulating wall of gray that thwarts her attempts to chart their course. By the fifth day she can only answer ‘at sea’ when the prince asks where they are.

2. Superstition holds that cats walk closest to the spirit world, but even here, where the barriers are thinnest, superstition is all that they can claim. Mice, on the other hand…

3. It’s easier not to try– and the days turn to weeks turn to months and it isn’t until some well-meaning coworker murmurs condolences that he realizes a year has passed.

4. They’d tried creating magical companion animals once, as a way of expanding their mana pools. Melding human and animal into a coherent whole… Their students’ students still whisper tales of the disastrous results centuries later.

5. The downside to waking from cryogenic slumber into a futuristic world is that no one knows how anything works. Kate glared unhappily at her current handler who was honestly confused as to why her charge kept asking such strange questions. If a hovercar worked, why did it matter how?

1. Nothing says ‘I love you’ quite like destroying a national monument, but on the whole she was beginning to regret dating someone who’s superpowers focused on expansion instead of compression… diamonds might be cheesy, but at least they were portable.

2. Old age wasn’t anything to look forward to– at least before scientists perfected Artificial Reincarnation(tm).

3. Being alone isn’t the same thing as being lonely, but over the centuries he’s gotten tired of explaining the difference. So now when mortals look at him with condescending pity when he tells them who and what he is, he just pretends to suffer and everyone’s happy.

4. They’ll build the new world on the ashes of the old– more literally than was pleasant, but they had to make concrete from something…

5. If anyone asks, they’ll just say they found it when they were looking for the ruins. The locals aren’t as familiar with the old technology and chances are good none of them can tell alien tech from human tech anymore…

1. “We’ll go on grand adventures!” the shimmering Plot Bunny promised. “We’ll save the world and bring a thousand years of peace! We’ll kill the evil dragons and rescue princesses! We’ll solve ancient riddles and find buried treasure! It will be such fun!”

The Writer was not impressed.

2. The worst part about being told that you’re the only one who can complete a task that will most likely kill you, is realizing that the person telling you this is a) still an insufferable jackass and b) right.

3. Cooking stew has a certain calm to it, which might be why it was served eight times out of ten when the army was on the march. The scent of the cookfires permeated the camps all day, and it never tasted the same twice since they cooks relied on the hunting and gathering parties for supplies.

4. She could never tell if anyone really believed he was coming back, or if they had simply fallen into the habit of of belief– expecting without questioning that one day they’d open the door as they did every day at noon and this time he’d be on the other side, waiting to come home.

5. This would normally be where the story ends, if this were a story; the world has been saved, the prince has found his bride, and there’s nothing left to do. Only this isn’t a story and the loose ends that are left belong to people that aren’t the prince, or the dragon, or the little goose girl.

1. The news had said pieces of the wreck were scattered on impact, but she hadn’t really grasped the fact that she’d be finding parts of the plane in her fields for years afterwords.

2. One of the more disturbing things about being told the aliens you’d found were roughly as intelligent as pigs, was discovering just how intelligent pigs were…

3. Wishes were supposed to be used for important things– like money or love or happiness or even revenge. You weren’t supposed to use them on stupid things like male pattern baldness or heartburn or the fact that you kept forgetting if you’d left the oven on or not.

4. It was odd what you missed, in a galaxy far far away. He stood in a forest of things that weren’t quite trees in a season that wasn’t quite fall, and tried to remember the smell of the pines.

5. The time to start worrying is when the little voice in your head switches from ‘somebody do something!’ to ‘if I hit him hard enough, he might drop the gun’…

1. The river was wide, but not deep, which meant the caravan could cross easily– at least for values of ‘easily’ that included spending half the day reconfiguring the wagons to barges and back again.

2. The vines had woven themselves throughout the fence and hissed in annoyance as she unwound them from their conquered territory.

3. Patience wasn’t something she had much of, it had been a long year and too many things had gone wrong to suffer fools quietly– Even if she knew the only reason for the mistakes was the same bone-dead weariness they all suffered.

4. Thunderstorms clustered around the mountain where they hid, gnawing at the rocks with acid rains and electrical fury.

5. Loose lips did more than just sink ships, so when a leak was made more than just the speaker paid the price. Secrets are only secret if you keep them with the dead…

1. It always rained in the morning, soft and slow as if the ever-present clouds were shaking off the night.

2. There were no such things as Evil Wizards, not anymore. Susan had found that there were very few limits on what a god could do, even one who’d won her godhood by deeds instead of birth.

3. The air was thick with smoke, coating every breath with the taste of charred pine and scorched moss. The forest might be too wet to burn, but the invading army was still giving it the old college try.

4. Heather was the kind of dog that children dream of having; a fierce protector to ward off nightmares, a ruthless champion to mete out their revenge, someone to love them no matter what they asked of her… but Heather wasn’t real.

5. The soup was little more than flavored water, but there were few ways to make two rabbits feed eight people and damned if he was going to let any of them go hungry tonight.

1. He would save the world or die trying– even if the world was already lost.

2. Of all the things I could remember from that day, it’s the scent of crushed grass that burns brightest in my memories.

3. Some days are meant for bowls of warm soup, nestling in a cocoon of blankets, and pouring what’s left of your flu-strangled brain into a good book.

4. Lie to everyone but yourself, it’s those lies that make everything else real…

5. Sleep is the heartbeats between nightmares.

1. Fate is just as often kind as unkind, but tragic endings make for better press.

2. A writer’s job is never done– which is why, at some point, the editor has to duct tape them to the chair and take away the pen.

3. It would be lying to say a hush fell over the forest because the sharp sudden silence is anything but ‘hush’.

4. Fast Food drive-through is a lot like Russian roulette, most of the time you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting what you ordered more or less in the condition you anticipated, but every so often you end up with a bag with two fish sandwiches, some neon green carbonated soda, and no fries.

5. I’m a wave upon the ocean/I’m a cloud upon the sky/A tree lost in the forest/though my memories are lies…

1. Griffins were unpredictable creatures, more bird than cat in their reactions. Which meant the best you could hope for was that they decided you were just another bird, and treated you as such. You haven’t lived until you’ve been preened affectionately by something the size of a horse.

2. When you know you’re going to die, how long do you keep trying to live?

3. There is something to be said for doing nothing; long lazy summer days where you sit back, relax, and soak in the fact that yes, you are allowed to just be.

4. “Lights! Action! Camera!” He waved his arms dramatically at the life-sized T-Rex, while she rolled her eyes and smiled in embarrassment at the bemused tourists that parted around them like migrating caribou.

5. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results might be crazy, but seriously, how else do you learn a skill?

1. When you spent most of your time bouncing between dimensions, it helps to be self-employed; portals to other realities in the midst of traditional workplaces tend to produce more police reports than paychecks.

2. There are some things that can’t be undone, not with all the time and money in the world. As she looked over the shattered pieces, she realized this might be one of them.

3. In school tests started with a class bell and ended with a ‘pencils down’, outside of school things weren’t so well defined…

4. “I swear, if you start one more sentence with ‘but we’re never going to use this in real life’ I’ll–”
“But we aren’t!” the student whined, “That’s what the computers are for!”
“And if the computers break?”
“Then the computer guy will fix them!”
“And if there’s no computer guy there?”
“Then, seriously, this class is the LAST thing I’m going to be thinking of!”

5. “Are you ready for this?” He held her banner at the ready, but she could see the worry in his eyes. For the first time since she known him, the concern seemed genuine. She’d saved the world, and now it was time to pay the price.

1. She had made them, so she unmade them. Peeling skin from flesh, flesh from bone, she stripped them down to nothingness in a heartbeat.

2. Mankind was sort of like army ants, throwing themselves en mass against obstacles until they overcame them. So it really should have come as no surprise when the rest of the galaxy panicked and started throwing up as many obstacles as they could, in the hopes we’d finally run out of bodies to throw.

3. Stubborn doesn’t begin to describe Benjamin.

4. “I wish for a thousand wishes!”
“Okay.”
“Wait, that actually works?”
“Why not? I’m immortal, I’ve got time.” The genie gave her a long look. “But no wishing for immortality yourself or the deal’s off.”

5. …and then there were penguins!

1. In space, things very rarely settle for going ‘a little bit’ wrong.

2. The trip was plagued with constant rain, from drizzles to downpours and back without a smidge of blue sky in-between.

3. Life might be greener on the other side of the fence, but Chuck had learned a thing or two about being green from Kermit.

4. In most parts of the country the going price for a goat was easily two pigs and a rabbit, but Little Darlington was actually the goat producing capital of the lower fourteen kingdoms and Dorrin was going to be lucky if he could get more than three guinea pigs and a bag of turnips.

5. On the whole, death rays really weren’t that convenient. It’s sort of hard to gloat meaningfully as your master plan comes to fruition when you don’t have an audience.

1. It’s odd how life is rarely about those big important choices, but hinges on the small stupid choices you didn’t even realize were choices until it was too late.

2. History 131 was much more interesting when your teacher was an Immortal.

3. Watch enough movies and you think fantasy worlds are full of horse-equivalents and pseudo-dragons, when in fact the most common recognizable critters are rats.

4. “Think of it as practice for saving the world!”

5. Sometimes I think life is defined by the distance between what you want and what you need.

1. It took Helen three times as long to move, since half her time was spent putting up -or taking down- magical protections. Which said something about the state of the world, or just something about Helen, but Mari was just ready for it to be over.

2. Blue plus red is purple, but blue minus red is a color he can’t quite wrap his mind around.

3. ‘Three impossible things before breakfast’ wasn’t so much a motto as a sad indication that Sam’s life had taken a turn for the downright weird.

4. At least the mob was civil about it, she thought as she packed up her Evil Lab, although this had to be the first time in her life she’d been run out of town by lawyers…

5. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to go, she does with every fiber of her being, but there is something in her that hesitates against the finality of it all.

1. Nothing ever came between a boy and his dinosaur. Of course that might have had more to do with the dinosaur than any hackneyed metaphor, but she really wasn’t willing to stick around and find out.

2. The one thing you can never escape is the bugs.

3. I’d say something clever about never trust a cat when it’s got it’s eye on the mouse, but I really don’t have time for clever. I’m trying not to die.

4. There is something in the shadows, but there is always something in the shadows so it’s stopped be as interesting (or alarming) as it sounds.

5. Nothing beats a nice cold drink in the morning, something to offset the wave of crushing heat that spirals off the sun.

1. I wish we lived closer, but tigers are a solitary breed, weretigers only slightly less so. Even with the easy connection of the ‘net, my sister rarely talks to me and I learned long ago it isn’t worth the effort to force her into conversation. It isn’t my fault I stayed human, just a quirk of the genetic pool thanks to great-grandma Mercer, or that I long for things my family cannot give.

2. The vines climb slowly up the walls, an inch a year when the weather’s good or several feet those times the courtyard is awash in blood.

3. If anyone deserved to be followed around by a neon purple springbok, it was Charles.

4. Dragons, being dragons, were wont to live very close to forever (knights and unnaturally talented squires aside), and that meant a great many of them were bored.

5. Sasha wasn’t meant for this kind of heat, and was sprawled on the water cooled river rocks with something akin to bliss.

1. There’s a sound above them in the trees, a soft low hum that sounds like the rustling of leaves… but not quite.

2. “Anyone have a match?”

3. A slick sheen of ice covered the surface of the boat, dripping from the railings, and splintering into spiderwebs of frost across the bulkheads.

4. Sight and sound are only two of five senses, on this world what keeps you alive is smell…

5. Never turn your back on a cat.

1. In theory it should have hit her when she actually left, but she found herself staring at the suitcase, half packed with memories, and facing the full brunt of her decision.

2. Night rolls in, a stark line of shadow where the world shade blocks the sun.

3. “Have you ever noticed how nothing ever turns out how you expect?”

“Well yeah, but that’s life, right?”

“No, no it’s not.” Henry gave Evan a long look. “When I said nothing, I meant it literally. I can’t think of a single thing you’ve done that’s turned out the way you intended it to.”

“But it’s worked out in the end.”

“That’s not the point, no matter how bad your luck something should have gone right.” Henry frowned, “There’s something not right about you, but damned if I can figure it out.”

4. Another day gone, another shift ended, and all she can think about is how she’s going to make it to the pawnshop in time to get back her grandmother’s bracelet.

5. There’s something about losing your dreams that makes you stubborn– broken, empty, but full of fire against a world that’s turned from environment to antagonist. So she won’t die, not yet, not here, because then the planet wins. Seven generations of traveler blood won’t be denied the stars for long…

1. “Did you meant it?”
“Mean what?”
“When you said ‘only if you were the last man on earth’?”
“That was before I knew you had a time machine.”

2. Dreams are meant to be broken, nightmares doubly so.

3. If anyone had looked, they would have noticed the small yellow-green mouse that sat on the corner of the booth muttering to itself. But in all fairness the sudden appearance of the pink and orange triceratops was slightly distracting.

4. “Some questions are best left unasked.” The dragon’s glare was as far from subtle as a three story carnivore could get, and Jen decided she didn’t really need to know why it was chained to the wall.

5. “If you could have anything, what would you want?” She leaned back against the side of the front-loader, looking out across the development.

“Nothing.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don’t ‘want’ Tabby, it’s not possible, thus regardless of the situation my answer would remain ‘nothing.’”

“You don’t really have a grasp on the ‘theoretical questions’ portion of conversation, do you.” She patted the side of the loader affectionately.

“I would point out that you’re the one having theoretical conversations with a piece of construction equipment.”

1. This is where things change– these next few words control their future. Only it’s not about saving the world anymore, only how badly they’ll destroy it.

2. “Do you know what time it is?” He grinned over the counter, hands conspicuously behind his back.

“I swear, if you have what I think you have–”

“Da-da-da Banana Time!” He unloaded the bag of groceries with a flourish of unrepentant glee. Only Darren could sneak ice cream sundaes into the house without fearing mom’s wrath. Being the baby of the family has its benefits… plus the rest of us get ice cream, so we can’t complain.

3. Cats are well known for being able to see spirits. Mittens was fine with that, it was the part about spirits being able to see her that the kitten found unnerving.

4. There are levels to pain and she worked her way down through each one, unraveling as she went.

5. It was easier to live in forests than the wide open plains. After a decade shipboard they’d grown used to enclosed areas and the unending horizons unnerved them. Yolan took it hardest, always pushing himself to go a little further from the shade, furious when the sense of impending danger finally sent him scurrying back.

1. He has a whole universe in which he can be alone… only it’s not what he wants, anymore.

2. One of the drawbacks to living in a haunted house is fighting with over which color to paint the kitchen. Susan wasted a month stubbornly repainting it blue before giving up.

3. The only rule is ‘Keep Moving.’ There used to be others, she counted them off in her head when things got too real to bear, but they’d left them in the boot tracks and bodies behind them.

4. Her city had no violent crime, and it came without capes and masks and secret identities. Because there are heroes and there are anti-heroes, and then there are psychotic sociopaths with just enough control to accurately weed the out the black from shades of grey.

5. If the universe played fair, a day with a three hour traffic jam really should have more than a broken vending machine to balance. Still, three Snickers bars for a dollar wasn’t the worst way to finish out a shift. Now if only the rest of the evening went as well…

1. I might not agree with his methods, but the results were certainly impressive.

2. Three dogs were two dogs too many –or three dogs too many depending on who you asked– because when things came to a vote the dogs always won.

3. If anyone could make yellow socks and fuchsia shoes look good, it was Edward… and apparently no one could.

4. You could see the lights of the city from miles away, tiny glimmers of civilization scattered among the weeds.

5. There are only so many ways to start a story that takes place in a near-hurricane strength storm, in the middle of the night, on a deserted island, that’s haunted. Did I mention that none of them are good ways?

1. She can’t remember when she stopped being scared, but it’s gone now. Instead she’s just tired and cold and ready to die.

2. “Mmm, smells like rain.”
“You can’t smell water, it’s probably just the ozone from the lightning.”
“No, it smells like rain. You know, a little bit cold, sort of crisp and wet– it’s just, well, rain-smelling.”
“And you wonder why your psych profile has all those little asterisks in it…”

3. It shouldn’t have been hard to invent a wheel, after all he knew what they looking like, but getting two round bits of wood to make the leap from ‘more-or-less round’ to ‘functional wheels’ was apparently a little more difficult than it looked.

4. Some people approached life with the idea that sanity was optional and if they managed to accumulate enough disadvantages the universe would reward them with fame and fortune just to balance the scales. Sadly, life was a lot less like a GURPS game than they imagined.

5. The problem with following deer paths were that deer were inherently fickle animals. He looked down the three foot drop that neatly bisected the trail and sighed.

1. There’s something about the way the clouds are moving that sends shivers down his spine.

2. Most people wouldn’t want to be spending their last moments alive trapped in a mall surrounded by zombies, but Alice had fought long and hard for this movie role and dammed if she was going to let some technicality like actual zombies on set ruin her big chance.

3. “Only the duck can save us now!”

4. “Inconceivable!”

“I don’t think that quote means what you think it means.”

“What?”

“Normally you’d use it when the hero has just done something you previously thought impossible, and technically he hasn’t done anything yet.”

“I wasn’t quoting anything you idiot, I was pointing out the stupidity of the action itself.”

“Ah, right, a bit of unintentional irony there then.”

“This really is a perfect example of why minions should be seen and not heard.”

5. Building a robot girlfriend is rarely a good idea.

Building a robot girlfriend and giving it advanced emotional capabilities is never a good idea.

Building a robot girlfriend, giving it advanced emotional capabilities, and fighting skills the likes the world has never seen is an idea roughly on par with creating the Power Puff Girls: the resulting property damage is hell on your credit rating.

However, building a robot friend who happens to be a girl apparently doesn’t end in quite as many hospital trips for yours truly. Thank God for reprogramming!

1. Other than the lack of air, the planet was actually quite pleasant.

2. Possibly one of the stupider things he’d attempted in his youth, still Yavn was quite proud of the pair of Usslik tusks that adorned the entryway.

3. Quicker than the eye could follow –which wasn’t hard considering the eyes belong to turtles who weren’t paying that much attention to start with– she was gone.

4. Rather than spend the rest of the day arguing, she relented and let him continue on in the belief that nothing rhymed with orange.

5. This is how the world ends… except it had already ended twice this week and the chance that it was going to stay ended were pretty much slim to none. The universe was notoriously bad at knowing when to thrown in the towel.

1. Having something isn’t the same thing as keeping something, which is a truth she would rather not have learned.

2. The sky is raining blood. Deep copper tears of rust run down buildings older than the oldest child, and pools of ruddy liquid gather in the pavement cracks.

3. Down in the depths of the forest there is no light, just a wide leafy ceiling broken by glimmers of green.

4. Everyone goes mad sooner or later, it’s sort of a coming of age party for the recently hermit-ized.

5. Going the distance normally involved doing things that were either a) hard or b) dangerous, and at the moment she wasn’t really in the mood for either.