You are a space traveler from Earth. One day you land on a seemingly advanced planet where the aliens are friendly. You decide to live there and learn their language, and with their technology it takes barely a day. However, you soon offend the wrong person by accident and become arrested. It is decided that your punishment is death, and you are brought a vial of liquid that you are told is of the deadliest kind. Terrified, you drink it only to find out it’s water. Turns out that the very substance keeping you alive is deadly to these creatures. Write what happens following this discovery.
Explorer’s log. Cycle thirty, Day 12, 0800 hours by Earth time.
Today, I was scheduled for execution in the high court for something I have not been told. As far as I can figure, I must have insulted a very important person in the Kathraxian society. Unlike Earth or any Earth -order planets, this population is a kind of hive with a strict hierarchy. I wasn’t given a trial, just escorted into the chamber before a row of judges, made to sit, and then given one of their liquid containment spheres. Unlike the normal ones which are colored depending on what hyper-concentrated gaseous element they used in making it– I was a bit alarmed as I’ve only seen them use it for industrial chemicals and rocket fuel– this one was clear.
“Drink!” the honor guard holding my chains commanded. I took notice that they were each a good two meters away from me, rubbing their mandibles together nervously This was going to be how I died then.
With my heart thundering in my ears, I bit lightly at the membrane of the pliable sphere, sucking at the section between my teeth until it burst. I jolted when it hit my tongue. Instead of burning acids or bitter base fluids that might have seriously harmed or killed me, the flavor was neutral, cool and clear and familiar. My body knew even if my anxiety drowned mind didn’t; this liquid wasn’t harmful. I drained the whole container until the sphere was only a deflated plastic-like skin between my fingers. My thirst only partially quenched from three days in confinement; I was severely dehydrated and sleep deprived.
While the sudden quart of water rushing into my stomach did make me a bit nauseous, I was able to stay seated and observe the nervous looks around me. They were waiting for something.
We all sat in silence for nearly twenty minutes before one of the judges hissed, her frill fanning out in frustration. “Guard, how could you fail to bring the correct poison?!”
“Your eminence,” he clicked in alarm, “I swear by the great queen I have brought the dihydrogen-monoxide distilled, as you asked!”
I laughed. What should have been an intimidating display was hilarious to my addled mind, my wits slowly returning to me. “Water? You gave me water?” I grinned through my laughter momentarily forgetting that baring teeth was considered a threat in most of the universe, I was well out of it. “Water!” I howled at the closest guard as if it was the funniest thing in the galaxy, and for me at the moment, it was.
“Terran!” the judge boomed ”I demand you explain this outrageous behavior this instant!”
As my giggles subsided, and with the thin atmosphere finally passing through my lungs enough to get the proper amount of oxygen to my brain, I coughed and stood. The guards moved back, abandoning the chains, which I now realized were made out of a hardened crystal like salt. With a quick tap on my wrist mounted relay, my retinal scan implant informed me that this was indeed a sodium chloride crystal array. If I twisted my writs around like so- and they were broken right off with ease.
“My dear matriarch, you are the paragons of an advanced collective, but in your advancement, you have not studied the other races around you. My world and my people are suffused with water. We inhale oxygen regularly and water vapor is in our breath. Earth,” at this point the reader in my artificial eye created a hologram with a live feed from one of the older space stations back home, “is a blue planet. What you call poison, we call necessary for biological life.” I couldn’t hide the smug look on my face any more than I could hide my obvious survival.
She clicked in alarm, frills flattening to the sides of her wide head. In a quiet voice, she hissed, “What are you, foul creature?”
I assumed the typical space federation stance I had seen in so many movies since the explorations core began. “A Human, your eminence, habitant of the third planet from Sol. Designated: Explorer One of the United Earth Celestial Forces, Explorations Core.”
“There are more of you?” her disgust was palpable. I resisted the urge to damage any further interracial relations.
“Approximately twelve billion including the Venus and Mars colony efforts. If successful, our scientist project our numbers to rise into the triple-digit billions by the next millennia.”
There was a moment were they debated among themselves in High Speech, not something I could mimic with ease, nor was permitted to learn. It seemed really heated, though I did catch words like “War” and “Foolish” in the same sentence, so I only hope they wouldn’t try to wipe us out. They might have advanced technology, but they weren’t a warrior race so weapons technology wasn’t that far ahead of Earths, nor did they seem to focus on projectiles so much as heat weapons. If they tried deploying water as a weapon, or if they were counting on it as their version of the H-bomb, well…
“Terran,” she finally broke up the argument among her fellows, rising from her seat on four of her six limbs. “You are to leave this planet immediately and inform your people’s queen that we would like to negotiate a treaty of nonaggression with your race in exchange for a pact of minimal contact. The facts remain that your very presence on our world is a bio-hazard and we will not jeopardize the safety of our hives any further.”
I nodded, was escorted back to my ship, and given fuel to leave. Their scientists had been waiting for my execution to reverse engineer my ship, staring at the readings for oxygen levels in pure horror as I walked by. Once cleared for takeoff, I radioed my satellite jump station in the planetary orbit. As soon as the AI returned signal I knew I could leave safely. It’s a bit odd they didn’t try to confiscate the data I collected during my stay or any of the tech they’d gifted me while in the three months on their world, but I wasn’t complaining. I wondered what the other explorers had found on their trips while entering hyperspace.
Listen… my entire personal life is fucked… but I have written over 2000 words without using the letter ‘i’ even once… does that count for anything…
This is… I mean. Incredible. But terrifying.
You’ve written over 2000 words with no ‘it’. No ‘ing’. Oh God, no ‘ing’.
You’re a force to be reckoned with.
No ‘it’, no ‘is’, no ‘-ing’, no ‘in’, no ‘I’. I’m on 2,700 words now, and I’m… not sure how I’ve managed to do this. Dialogue is proving the biggest challenge, unsurprisingly. Why did I do this to myself?
So this is going to be like 15-20k when it’s done… um
If I finish this, I will probably count it amongst my greatest achievements.
Op you’re the most powerful person on writeblr right now
That’s good to hear because I’ve lost all semblance of control with respect to every other facet of my life, but
I’m maybe a third of the way through now?? So that’s good???? And now I’m going to have a very relaxing bath??????
I probably have about another 14,000 words to go and honestly, when I hit 10k (the expected halfway point), I’m going to treat myself to writing 100 words of something else that has the dang letter ‘i’ in it
Nearly wept when I realised I couldn’t use the word ‘frantic’ earlier, but
7.5k is my next milestone, and it actually might happen tomorrow, which is unnerving. How should I celebrate??
Getting really bad impostor syndrome today and feeling 95% sure that I will never amount to a thing and will probably never finish this story, and so in response to that dumb brain thought I did this
Suck it, subconscious.
You are a force of nature and I am both impressed and terrified.
Please publish this somewhere when you a e done so we can read it holy shit
I absolutely will!! In other news I hit 10k today and that’s without a thesaurus and oh golly, my poor think-box
This author is a sleeping God among mortals
The Earth fears their awakening into their full powers
Full powers yet to be confirmed, but after a short hiatus, I have returned
When I get to 12k, I might do a very elaborate jig
How I think I’m writing: Using eye contact, or lack thereof, to display emotions such as intimacy, shock, denial, or nervousness.
How I’m actually writing: She looked at me, and I looked away. I tried to look back, but she was already looking at the sky. “Look,” she sighs, looking back at me for a split second. “I don’t know how to say this.” We looked at each other and time stopped, but then she looked her lookers at something else to look at, looking tired.
Legolas’s friends beg him to
leave for Valinor early on. They know that he is fading, they know that he
thinks of their deaths more than anything else, and that it kills him. They are
terrified that he’ll die before he sails, and that he will remain in the Halls
of Mandos for a very long time. They’re afraid he’ll choose the void.
It’s an unspoken rule that
Legolas can never be left alone, that
someone must always be with him. They
don’t want him wandering somewhere to fade and never return (he nearly did it
once).
And before he dies, Estel makes
Gimli promise that he’ll see to it that Legolas will sail, and jokingly says, “Even
if you have to go with him”.
(i hope you don’t mind, but I ficletted 🙂
Frodo was first, and Gandalf with him, gone for so long now. Then Imrahil is dead – old age – and then Sam leaves one day, with little fanfare and less notice. Gone into the west.
Then Merry and Pippin make their last journey, and they are sleeping in the tombs of the great Kings of Gondor, two small hobbits lying in state. Eomer dies that same year.
Then Faramir is lost to them. Gone into the earth, and Aragorn will not be far behind them now.
Gimli eases himself into his chair, and holds his friend’s hand.
“I can choose my time,” Aragorn says, and Gimli nods. It was a gift granted to those of the ruling line of Numenor, that they might pass in the fullness of their prime and not suffer the dwindling of old age. “And it nears. Eldarion is full ready for this throne, and I am weary.”
“You’ll be making us the Two Hunters, then,” Gimli says, and clamps his teeth shut around his next words. His voice will fail him.
Aragorn studies the old Dwarf’s hand. Still powerful and strong, but as an ancient, gnarled tree-root is powerful and strong. He would wield his axe no longer, with hands such as these.
“You must make him sail,” he says, and he does not need to say who he is. “Merry and Pippin’s passing nearly finished him. I cannot be the loss that takes more than myself from him. He cannot hold, not with our number falling around him like mayflies! His eyes are already dimmed and he sings no more. Gimli, you must promise me. You must promise me: you must make him sail. You are the last of our number. The task falls to you.”
Gimli is silent for a long moment, and then he looks up at Aragorn with eyes that despite their age, are clear and bright with a proud warrior’s determination. “Aragorn, lad. I’ve followed him into golden wood and stinking fen, through mines and up mountains and down rivers. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: where Legolas goes, I will follow. If I cannot make him sail without me, then I’m getting on the damned boat with him.”
Aragorn holds the gaze, and then closes his eyes. “Good,” he says, and sighs. the relief settles into his bones. His last friends shall be together after his death: Legolas will not fade, Gimli will not be forced to mourn them both. “Thank you, Gimli.”
There is a soft snort, and Gimli’s great gnarled hand squeezes Aragorn’s with surprising gentleness. “You daft Man. As though you needed to ask.”
One unfortunate side effect of the “your first draft is shit” rhetoric (which is mostly meant to encourage the understanding that you will need to edit and that having problems in your first draft doesn’t mean you can’t write) is that people tend to feel like they shouldn’t like their writing. They should only be critical of it, only see the flaws of it, and so be unhappy with their writing.
Being critical is good, but keep in mind that you’re not only allowed but encouraged to like what you’ve written. You should like it because that means it’s something people enjoy reading (because you are a person), but also because you will write better if you enjoy what you’re writing. Reread your old writing and smile at the lines that you love. Enjoy your fun scenes, laugh at your own jokes, cry at the tragedies you’ve written particularly poignantly. It’ll make you feel better. I promise.
Yes, to all of this. “Your first draft is shit” means “it’s ok for your first draft to be shit, you have permission to not be perfect, especially the first time through, tell the Perfection Weasels to suck it.” And being critical when you look at that first draft is part of how you’ll make it better.
But yes, enjoy the good bits. Because there surely are good bits. Be proud of them, like them, roll around in them when you need to.
I couldn’t resist this. The idea of space sirens and starmaids just make me want to grab pen and paper instantly. So, this is how I enjoyed my free Sunday. ❤ My thanks for @quietpinetrees for the wonderful inspiration.
Scanned and coloured version, traditional media, A4-ish
As a writer, very little brings me as much joy as being the inspiration for someone else’s creativity. I want to thank @drachenmagier for sharing this magnificent art with the world.
I hope everyone inspired by my writing to create something of their own is kind enough to share it.
AU where people age until they reach 18 and then stop aging until they meet their soul mate so they can grow old together.
i’d never die
but imagine already being in a relationship at 18 and then at 22 you’re both sitting there looking at each other and realizing that you both haven’t aged a day
imagine platonically moving in with ur best friend at 18 and then realizing a few years later that you’ve been aging together
imagine purposely never finding your soul mate so you can reign eternal
holy shit i think we may have stumbled upon the greatest romance/adventure concept ever
What if you killed your soul mate so you’d make sure you never aged.
This just makes me really want a story where the main antagonist is someone who has been killing their soulmate for centuries whenever they find them, and the main protagonist is the newly re-incarnated version of their soulmate
okay but you guys dont realize the potential.
imagine meeting a handsome young man who’s seen as a player and sleeps around a lot and you notice a scar along his arm and ask where he got it. he just look down at his feet and said “i used to be a soldier in world war one”. He’s been sleeping around and hooking up so much cause he’s been trying to find his soulmate for years but hasn’t yet.
Imagine going on your first date with someone and you really hit it off and then the next day you notice a grey hair and call them on the phone excitedly screaming and they both just sit on the phone hysterically crying and laughing.
Imagine sitting in silence with your partner and having them say out of the blue “i feel so old when im around you… but… in a good way” and thats the moment you know that they love you.
imagine having a dog thats 18 in human years and it starts to get gray patches of fur because they loves you so much.
imagine noticing you look older and freaking out but then stopping and getting super confused because “im not dating anyone right now…. which of my friends is my soulmate… WHICH ONE IS IT!?!?!?” and then they hopelessly date everyone they know in order to find out which one it fucking was. it was the pizza delivery guy the whole time. they went on 27 dates that all ended in confusion and heartbreak and it was the god damn pizza delivery guy from a month ago the whole fucking time.
imagine someone dating their partner for 5 years and then having an affair. only after the affair do they start aging.
imagine nuns who start to age after they ceremoniously “marry god”
imagine people getting surgeries to look older cause they dont want people to think theyre alone.
imagine having parents who wont let you date anyone but they start to notice you aging and then you have to have a terrifying “surprise im gay and i have a boyfriend haha oops” conversation
imagine seeing couples with teenage kids and the couple both looks 18.
i could go on for hours.
imagine immortal aromantics/asexuals
Ahaha guess who gets to be immortal lol aha
I’ve added this twice already but I’m adding it a third time in case any of my followers haven’t seen it yet.(I’m rly proud of it)
Okay but also
Age based laws like drinking age and senior citizen discounts would be fucked. “I’m sorry sir you have to be at least 21 to drink” ‘I’M THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY ONE I PROBABLY HAVE WHISKY THAT’S OLDER THAN YOU” “Sir, it’s the law” “WHEN I WAS TWENTY ONE THEY DIDN’T HAVE STUPID LAWS LIKE THIS” b/c this stuff is based on physical age not time lived.
The age hierarchy would disintegrate. “Don’t tell me what to do what are you like 12″ “I was doing this while you were in nappies shut up and listen”
Aromantic ppl would be like royalty or something by virtue of outliving literally everyone else. “Wow you speak a lot of languages” “Ofc I do I’ve been learning since 1131 A.D.”
How do linguistics and clothing and etiquette and culture evolve, when people are still lingering from the year the waltz became popular? History lessons from people who were there. English lessons from someone who saw the original Shakespeare performances and talks like they’re from straight out of one of the plays. Latin lessons from someone who gets all snobby about French and Italian being bastardizations.
What happens to people whose soulmates die before meeting them? Eternal life or aging alone? Does their soulmate reincarnate? Let’s go with that second one.
What are generations? Your mom’s best friend from childhood is your age. Your mom is middle aged. Or, weirder, your mom got knocked up outside a soul-bond and now, eighteen years later, you are physically the same age. Then you meet your soulmate and are ten years older than your mother.
Family trees are a wreck. Your brother’s husband’s nephew and your sister’s great-great-great grandchild are the same age and turn out to be soulmates. At the wedding, you are 18 and your brother is 46 and your sister is long dead. You’ve married outside your soulbond twice. The marriages lasted 21 and 43 years respectively. Only your first partner has started aging now, half a century after your divorce.
You’re 16 and an 18-year-old is flirting with you. Is he two years older or twenty?
U.S. Government paying reparations today to the still-living victims of American atrocities, to the slaves freed after the Civil War and to Cherokee who survived the Trail of Tears and to the Japanese Americans who were put in Internment Camps. Slaves having been freed after a century of enslavement b/c their owners prevented them from ever meeting their soulmate and thus kept them in perpetual young adulthood. Survivors who will take no shit because they were there and they know exactly what happened.
Doctors having to get a new degree after set amounts of time b/c STOP USING LEECHES TO BALANCE THE FOUR HUMORS MEDICAL SCIENCE HAS ADVANCED BEYOND THAT.
Trans ppl being born in the 1700s and wanting to transition and not being able to the way they are today and living long enough for HRT to be developed.
Poly ppl meeting one partner, aging for a year, and then stopping again like wtf??? And getting three more partners before the aging starts and doesn’t stop. Living eighty years as 21 year olds waiting for one more person.
okay but imagine people starting to age once they discover their true passion
like maybe there’s an aro/ace kid who isn’t in love with people, but takes up music or pottery or knitting and falls in love instantly
because even if it’s not romantic, it’s still love, right?
this is also a good time to mention that soulmates are not necessarily romantic
willowfoot 