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Well, the title is self-explanatory as anything. I fancy myself a writer, and I'd like to see what the Paizo forums think of my stuff.
First is a novel I have in very slow progress, set in a weird world that's best described as a sort of cross between Dr. McNinja and D&D, a world like our own with lots and lots of weirdness added in, where Teddy Roosevelt is immortal, Dinosaurs roam the Western US, and D&D-type adventuring is a legitimate profession; with laws surrounding it and everything.
The story follows four adventurers, and is intended to be a relatively episodic narrative of six vague "parts" with lots of plot threads running between them. The parts I have up are most of the beginning and a small segment of the first "part". A bit more info on the setting can be found at the link. I can't post the story here because of how much space it'd take up.
The second story is a shorter, less ambitious project, titled "A Romantic Vignette in an Absurdly Spacious Sewer." The story is exactly what that title implies, and I'll post it in the next post since it doesn't seem too long to do so...
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Here it is!
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The air in the restaurant was notable in how much it lacked the scent of sewage. This was a considerably less dubious feat than you’d think thanks to its location smack-dab in the middle of the biggest, dankest sewer in the tri-state area.
Alright, to be fair, it wasn’t all sewer. It was actually mostly a series of stormdrains, mingling with abandoned train tunnels, cold war bomb shelters and anything else the inhabitants could drill their way into. The aforementioned inhabitants were a gaggle of freaks with sundry and manifold origins, with weird features and strange biologies that wouldn’t look out of place in a Ninja Turtles episode, or a Drainage City chapter with moderately less fornication. And right now a nice cross-selection of them were populating the premises of the largest, swank-as-it-gets restaurant in the place with its paper-and-resin walls and its small projector attached to a VHS currently playing the end of “Mystery Men”.
They had gotten used to that smell, that funky-in-both-senses-of-the-word smell, but the man sitting at the table was not so lucky. Though, in another sense, he was lucky thanks to the cockroach woman sitting directly across from him. That is, a giant cockroach with womanlike qualities, not vice-versa.
She was rather pretty in a odd sort of way. Not in a settle-for-less way, but she could rank at least a 7 out of 10 by human standards with her shining carapace and curvy proportions. Her entire sub-species could say likewise more-or-less thanks to the miracles of convergent evolution accelerated by the various chemicals in the water.
She wore no true clothes over her reddish frame, but she did have several adornments made of strips of aluminum can, woven together into various elegant pouch-covered chains on her carapace and adorning her surprisingly dextrous hands in the form of kitbashed jointed gloves, and a slightly burnt fedora adorned her head in a manner that was both dapper and slightly awkward.
The man sitting next to her on the other hand was not what most would call beautiful. Scruffy would be a more accurate description if one were being nice, with his disheveled hair, skin stained with dust and sweat, and clothing stained with condiments from the packets he’d been living on since last week. His face looked thin and tired, and his hair appeared to be thinning from stress at the ripe old age of twenty-five. A bag lay to the side of his scrap-wood seat, dripping wet except for the tightly sealed clear plastic sleeves containing bundles and bundles of paper.
His first comment was similarly self-effacing. “You didn’t have to take me here you know.”
The man went by the name Richard, though people either called him Rick or **** depending on if the person talking to him was a friend or somebody he owed money .And the latter category had been ballooning each day.
“Whatever do you mean?” said the cockroach-woman in a buzzing voice sweet as a bag of slightly melty Swedish Fish, looking genuinely confused with her large arthropodal eyes.
“You save my life Miss Sisskit, maam,” Rick responded, trying to avoid her concerned gaze out of embarrassment “You don’t need to take me out afterwards”
“Please, just call me Cshisk.” She said “And it’s the least I can do, as I remember you jumping in to save me first.”
There was an awkward silence. Rick glanced around looking at the various shambling mounds of vegetation, giant rats, and humans with various fleshy symbiotes studding their bodies waiting table, wondering when somebody would take their order. The strains of a fuzzy, faded Smash Mouth song involving stars or something like that started blaring in the background, making the silence less silent, but the awkwardness far deeper.
“So, what exactly do you do… Cshisk?” asked Rick, breaking the awkward silence with an awkward question.
“Well,” said Cshick, slowly mulling and rolling over her sentence, “I’m a river-runner.”
Rick looked confused, “What’s a…”
“Oh!” said Cshisk, antennae slightly lifting her antennae looking slightly embarrassed. “I forgot, you’re from uptown, you didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry” Rick said.
“No, no, no, not at all.” Responded back Cshisk “It’s just, I haven’t really met with any one outside the sewers, and I’m new to this explaning thi-Oh look here’s our waitress.” She shifted her sentence as hurriedly as if she was braking before she struck a nerve with her own weight.
Said waitress scuttled forward a bit more. She looked relatively human, with short sandy-blonde hair, brown eyes, and a pair of well-worn jeans. Of course this made the bizarre bits far more apaprent, such as her prehensile toes, the giant centipede-like-appendage coming out of her back and supporting her weight, and the fact that she was completely topless; likely due to said centipedal growth.
Rick tried not to stare, but he didn’t quite stick the landing. His eyes kept darting from the floor to the centipede woman, but to her credit, the centipede woman took it in stride, rolling her eyes and muttering “uptowners.” Richard’s face turned a bright shade of crimson.
She then turned to Cshisk and said “Heyyy Cshisk, howsit goin’?”
“It’s going… okay Candace. I’m just treating this gentleman who saved my life to a round of dinner.”
“So…. A date then?” Candace inquisited jocularly.
“Maybe. Perhaps. I suppose.” Cshisk muttered, her antennae twitching about in embarrassment.
Candace got the hint and said “Kay, so what’s your order hon.”
“I’ll have the pan-fried rat with a side of dough-wrapped Manhattan White, and Rick…” She looked over to Rick to see if he would respond, but he was still trying to avoid the male gaze, “I think he’ll just have the Spamchillada,”
She fished around near her seat and pulled out several chips of lacquered cardboard and handed them to Candace. “I think this’ll cover the meal” Rick looked over to where she was drawing it from, a purse-like bag homemade out of burlap. It was near overflowing with those chips.
Candace counted through the handful. “Maam, I think you might’ve overpaid me by a few chips.”
Csisk just smiled, at least as well as a pair of mandibles could smile, and said “Keep ‘em. You need ‘em more than I do, and besides, I’m not a poor woman.”
Candace gave a bittersweet gaze to Cshisk, which Cshisk gave back. A silent “In some ways” was added to that last statement between the two of them.
Rick still looked confused. “Oh,” said Cshisk, just noticing Rick’s embarassment “t-that’s a symbiote growing out of her back, fuses to ya after a while. Things like that are pretty common around here...”
“Heh, it’s okay,” Rick said half-truthfully “I’ve met a lot of weirdos around town.” That was a whole truth, as the burns from his encounter with that wizard and the scars from that “stellar probe” proved. Cshisk looked down.
“You know, you’re the first human I’ve actually seen down here without… them…” With the sudden realization she was drifting, she threw here head up and said, “Anyway back to river running… I run a few homemade canoes throughout the waterways to find things that your people lose, or flush, let get a washed away or in general lose down here.”
She fiddled with one of the many chips from her purse as she spoke, twirling it almost hypnotically through her chitinous fingers. “It all ends up here in the end. It’s my little operation, picking ‘em up and sellin’ ‘em back to the folks around here. I make a fair few chips on it. I remember findin’ the emcee’s parts, heh, wasn’t that a day… but I’ll stop talking. I don’t want to be a bore.”
“No, no, no, it’s okay.” Rick said, face still covered in residual blushery. He was looking her straight in the eye, though which part of it he should look at was a mystery to him “I… I’ve never known much about the underground,” he said, though he’d heard the (Frankly flat-out wrong) rumors “and I’m always up for a good story, so tell all ya want about your business, I won’t mind.”
Again Csisk gave that strange mandibled smile. “Alright then.” She put her hands on the table, rubbing them together nervously. The rhythmically rubbing chitin on them sounded like a constant skeetching of boots against a tile floor, or perhaps a chant of “Don’t screw this up, don’t screw this up”.
“We get mostly driftwood, cans, plastic bottles, but it’s pretty varied. Heck, most of the stuff in here came from my business, including the emcee.” Ah yes, him, Rick thought. Weirdest damned host he’d ever seen. Though it does explain why they got the good seats.
She gave an aside glance. “I must say, I hope I haven’t given the impression that it’s just my operation.” She drummed her chitinous fingers against the table, more out of nervousness than out of impatience really. “Dad started it years ago with nothing but his claws and a wooden raft. When he died it was barely running, and I was the only one out of my litter of 10 who decided to stay and keep it going. So, I brought in a few friends to try and at least salvage it, things sent out from there, and…”
She made a face like she’d be blushing if she were able to “Well, I’ve made a bit of a name for myself as you can see…” Rick looked back at the purse filled with cardboard chips. “But, it’s dangerous work. There’s the Sprayers, the Crackjaws, the Ghoulie Grabbers, the Rat Kings, the Rat Queens, the Rat Knights, the Rat Jesters, the Rat Popes,”
She shuddered a bit, and her antennae twitched. “Nasty things those Rat Popes, one of ‘em took Saul’s leg, and almost got his head too. There’s also the Deep Crows, the Meatcrawlers, the Manimals, the CHUDs, the Garbagefish and… well I know you got well acquainted with the Chokewhirl Whomper.”
Yes, yes he was, and a twinge of pain emanated from the bruise the ugly thing’d put on his chest when he dove in to save her from the suspicious pile of trash, along with the series of cuts on his arm from when it’d got a parting shot in, after Chsisk returned the favor and rescued him.
“You know, I probably would’ve died if you hadn’t managed to hold its attention long enough for me to get out and whomp ‘im. But,” Cshisk said, looking nervously at Rick’s face for any signs of boredom or restlessness “Enough about me. What is your life like up there, on the surface?”
Rick gave a smirk, and breathed out a heavy sigh. It was the sigh of a man who didn’t want to admit something, but was going to admit it anyway, because You Are A Good Person and That Is What You Do When A Lady Asks.
“Well, I wish I could say my life is as interesting as yours.” He said, his wan cheeks curled in a sad half-smile, “But I’m not much of anything. I’m one of those guys who went to college hoping to make something of myself, only to find when I got out that the big wide world would pound ya into nothing.” He let out a bashful slightly bitter “heh”.
“I know little of this ‘college’ place you’re talking about, except for that it is either a place for fornication and alchohol or a place where disadvantaged youths find extravagant success. And that’s just from the movies.” She looked slightly embarassed
Rick gave a smile, which had been a rarer and rarer occurrence as of late, and chuckled. “That first one’s not too far off from the truth.” Cshisk looked relieved as he continued onward, “But I complain too much. I have a job, even if it is a ****ty one, I have an apartment, even if it is a dump, and I have friends, even if they think I’m a schlematzl. But…”
He paused. The glow of the smile dimmed upon his face. “But, what?” asked Cshisk.
“I feel… stuck. There’s been so many things that I’ve wanted to do, but I’ve done nothing with my life. I don’t feel successful, I don’t feel like I’ve done jack ****, and I don’t think I’m ever gonna do the thing… the one damned thing I’ve been chasing after all my damn life.” The words spilled out of him, painfully, stumblingly like tears down a reluctant cheek.
“And I think if I keep this string-o’-misses up, if I keep falling on my face, if I keep icy road to nowhere, I’ll end up as dust in the g!& d&$n gutter…” He paused for a moment, face like a deer in the headlights as he realized what he said. He’d never told anybody the things he’d said before. He wished he hadn’t. “Nobody gives a **** about your whiny first world problems, least of all her.” He thought to himself.
He quickly added a “No offence maam,” to his statement, layered in fidgeting snark in a desperate attempt to save face.
“None taken.” Cshisk said. She didn’t quite get why the gutter was such a bad thing. It brought water and debris and knick-knacks down below for salvage, and often brought some of the most… interesting things that she found. But she didn’t mind. He was only human after all. “But what is that thing you’ve wanted to do?”
Rick suddenly looked very, very self conscious. “Huh?” he said in disbelief.
“I’m curious what you’ve been wanting to do with your life. I mean, I talk to people every day who need somebody to tell their problems to. And you seem like you need it more than anyone else.”
“It’s… nothing” Rick said. His voice was soft, as if he didn’t believe in the words it was forming, and his eyes darted low.
“Tell ya what.” Cshisk said “I’ve got a dream of my own that I’ve always wanted to do. You tell me your dream, and I’ll tell you mine. Deal?”
“Well, if you insist.” Rick said. Her words made him feel strangely at ease. Must be a skill of the trade, he thought. “Well, ever since I could hold a book in my hand, I’ve wanted to do comics, draw ‘em, create ‘em. Hell, I even majored in ‘em,” He let out a sardonic ha as his expression turned relaxedly grim. “Wasn’t the best choice, I tell ya. But, no matter what I do, what I write, what I try to sell. Best I could do is a 47-page webcomic with 47 views. I’m pretty sure they’re all by the same guy”
Cshisk’s antennae rose up in curiosity. “Would you happen to have any on you in that bag of yours?”
“Oh no- I wouldn’t- well- I don’t have any on me at the moment,” He said, eyes darting to the sealed bags where he indeed had them at the moment.
Cshisk’s eyes also darted towards the bags, but luckily Rick was distracted by the sound of a whirring tape recorder and the sound of a videocassette being pitched at high speed slicing through the mumbling. It was the Emcee, striding out on the stage, Mystery Men tape in one hand, and the tape for the next film in the other and spotlight directly on his mechanical patchworked face.
He was a bizarre thing, kitbashed of the parts of a Fats Domino and a Beach Bear animatronic figure from a long-gone “Showtime Pizza Place”, given a brain by the odd assortment of boards and drives jutting out of his back. But, he jerkily strode across the stage like he owned it, and indeed, one silvery mechanical spider threw a piece of her chassis like a housewife at a Tom Jones concert, and a muck-woman gave a wolf whistle as he strode.
Ric’s eyes were glued to the bizarre spectacle of the emcee saunter-jerking onto the stage, just as Cshisk’s chitinous toe seemed glued onto the bag she was scooting towards her seat out of Rick’s notice.
“G-g-g-gentlemen,” the emcee synthesizer-smarmed across the stage, voice skipping intermittently like an old CD. “That was M-M-M-Mystery Men, the third-best superhero movie Uptown has to offer!” The crowd cheered. “and I still want to see a spinoff about PMS w-w-w-woman someday!”
“But now for to-day we witness a night at the opera by those sons-o-guns who brought us Airplane and Kentucky Fried movie, the movie we call ‘Brain Donors’I”
In a swift, jerky motion he chacked the cassette into the player, and pressed rewind, continuing with the speech as the tape whirred backwards. “Now, from what information I could get off the internet I-I-I ‘completely’ and ‘legitimately’ ‘borrowed’ from Uptown by the ‘ever-so-secret’ human cable line about th-th-three-or-so meters above this stage…”
A knowing snicker passed through the crowd of creatures, or at least a burbling, clacking, squawking or beeping noise from those in the audience who didn’t have the capacity to snicker, as if they were exchanging a private joke that was on a certain gaunt somebody who was feeling very much out of place at the moment.
“It’s quite the rare f-f-f-film, debuting in theaters to thunderous silence thanks to the fact that nobody promoted it, not even payin’ a h-h-h-hobo five bucks to walk around with a sandwich board across the street.”
The emcee paced and gestured with his synthesized ballyhoo, psyching up the crowd to a roiling gusto. But he continued, “And it got off the small s-s-s-screen just as fast. In fact, the only thing faster than the film’s flight off the silver screen to the dustbin is the speed at which these gags fly. I tellya folks, we’ve got a r-r-r-real treat for us tonight, one o’ the best things I’ve seen in a while,”
The spotlight turned to Cshisk, now a little nervous. “And that’s why I gotta thank the lovely Miss Cshisk.” He sauntered over close to the table, as she still subtly scooted the bag between her toes, moving it ever closer with a series of small scoots, hoping Rick’s eye wouldn’t wander down to the scooting bag. “Ya know, when ya first sold this to me, I thought ‘There’s no way this could be worth a Rat Pope to get’.”
Rick’s eyes fixed on Cshisk as the emcee said this. “Well, I…” she said, gesturing in an almost exaggerated fashion to conceal the lean in her body as she drew the bag in her toes closer to her chair.
“Of course,” the emcee quipped “Everyone else said that about m-m-m-me when ya found my parts, and look where we are t-t-t-today!” The crowd cheered and she snatched the bag straight to her lap with a jerk of her leg, the sound of the thump drowned out by the applause. She recalled as the applause died down that the acquisition of the emcee’s parts (Well, most of them anyway) wasn’t nearly as difficult as he made ‘em out to be.
She’d actually found the parts in a hive of Black Weepers. Formidable creatures, true, but nowhere near as bad as a Rat Pope. And while there had been a few people who refused to buy, it wasn’t all that difficult to find a down-on-his-luck machinist willing to take a chance on a pile of scrap. But, a compliment was a compliment, she thought as the emcee now went towards Rick.
“And who’s the lucky b-b-b-beau sitting across the table from her?” the emcee asked, sidling close to Rick, metal-fur hand brushing across the table.
“My name’s Rick.” A little sweat came from his forehead “And right now I’m feeling a little…”
“Nervous?” The emcee said, raising an eyebrow and moving a servo in his lips in an uncanny-valley expression of slyness. “Don’t worry boy, I-I-I-I think you’ll fit just fine amongst us f-f-f-freaks!” Rick wasn’t sure if the emcee was insulting him or complimenting him, and from the muttering of the audience they didn’t seem too sure either.
With a flick of his hand and a springing, grinding jump back onto the stage, he said “Now, on with the s-s-s-show!” as he pressed play and glided back to the shadows in a sort of jerky moonwalk.
The words “Coming Soon, To a Theatre Near You” flickered upon the wall as the lights dimmed, and as they faded into previews, the audience watched with rapt attention. They were likely never going to see a fair few of those shown, so they might as well watch the condensed, marketing-ized, and highly spoiler-ized versions of them anyway.
Well, all but Cshisk, who was currently watching something else. More specifically she was flipping through the pages of drawings in the folder, extracted from right below the table. There was a luridness to the stories that was undeniable, psychotronic dramas of sex, violence and weirdness, with a smooth cartoony style contrasting with the deranged drama on the page.
But there was a lushness to it as well, some beautiful life to the stories of sleaze, and the lives of its strange, broken but fascinating characters. Characters like Dolly-X, the cyborg gunner with a heart of steel and a tongue of silver, the old and hateful Chainsaw Boss, mysterious and guileful Trenchcoat Man; who had a ticking clock replacing one of his eyes, the hubristic; social climbing; immensely fascinating Rocco Journeyhead, and the mad; stab-happy; magically cursed Doc Brainknife; who still managed to be the most heroic damned character in this whole mess.
Of course, the creator of that wasn’t thinking much about his work at the moment. His eyes were drifting about the room, not so much enjoying the trailers as thinking about the remains of the day. He felt the usual all-over ache from his work in customer service, which was the deepest and coldest level of retail hell in his opinion, and the wounds from his fight with that… whatever-she-called-it smoldered like embers in a fireplace.
But the one feeling that didn’t plague him was more mental than physical. He felt as though that chewing fuzz of ennui that wrapped around him everyday had been parted by some flickering beacon.
His rambling eyes watched the creatures at work. Amongst others, a rugose abomination could be seen playing a leisurely game of chess with a squamous horror, a vague thing in a hasmat suit was sipping soup through an odd hose coming out of his finger, a winged mole-rat-thing was necking with a creature of moss and driftwood, a very likely blotto alligator-man gulped down a bottle of Mad Dog 20/20, and these were just a few of the oddities that Rick saw as he looked about. Boy howdy was he gonna have a lot of drawing inspiration when he finally got home.
And Miss Sisskit (He still didn’t feel right calling her Cshisk), she had that blend of sweetness and moxie that he found… intriguing. The hope floated to the top of his head that, even when he went home on the surface, they might cross paths again one day. You know, as friends, he thought to himself. But then it just as quickly sank, as most hopes of his these days did.
It was at this point that the comic gave Cshisk away. Specifically, a moment in the story, which seemed climactic yet was only a quarterways through the folio. She couldn’t help but let out a small gasp when she saw the panel revealing who fired the Kannonade at Chainsaw Boss, which led Rick to turn behind.
He wasn’t quite sure what the small, restrained gasp was for at first, though he did see that Cshisk was looking down. Only when he saw the crisp white paper and the black and red ink from the corner of his eye did he realize what she was looking down at.
He looked to the side for his bag, which wasn’t there, then he looked to the thin trail of water from where his bag was, which led near Cshisk, and then he looked very, very mortified when he thought about exactly what she was reading.
“Oh god, please, let me explain!” he said to her. She looked up, eyes as if she’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar. He continued, sputtering, preparing to flinch as the pages were thrown back in his face like they had been many times before, “I know the violence is kind of excessive, I know it’s pretty dark, and I understand why you might be offended by all the nudit-”
“I liked it,” Cshisk interrupted succinctly. “There’s something nice about it.”
Nice? The damned things were raunchy, violent, crude and bizarre, cute and cartoony yet perverse and dark. How in god’s green earth could she describe them as “nice?” He looked absolutely baffled as a confused “Buh?” quietely fell from his lips.
“Reminds me of when Daddy used to read me Steven King and Dean Koontz stories when I was a little roachette,” she continued. Rick looked even more puzzled. “Oh,” Cshisk asked “Is that uncommon children’s literature Uptown? We get most of our books from whatever drops down here.”
“Nah.” Said Rick, trying to play it cool. “I’m just glad you didn’t ralph all over the pages like some of the other people who’ve seen it.”
Cshisk didn’t know what “ralphing” meant, but she could guess it was a term for something unpleasant Uptown, perhaps involving musk or mucus. “Well, I think it’s wonderful.” She put the pages up and slid them over the table. “Do you want these back?” she asked.
Rick thought for a few moments. “Nah, keep ‘em,” he said. They were copies, and it was likely he’d never see her again, so he might as well give her something to remember him by.
Cshisk smiled “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She put her hand out to grab the papers back, only to have it grab Rick’s hand trying to push the papers back to her.
Silence rang about the table for a few moments as they held hands, the accidental touch becoming a firm grip. And then a peal of “And now for our feature presentation!” sliced through the silence, as the movie began to play.
They dropped the hand hold as the tones blared, both looking to the sides, looking back at each other (Somewhat sheepishly), and then shifting their view towards the claymation opening titles for the film.
But while they weren’t looking into each other’s eyes, they were in each others thoughts. Rick thought “She… called my art nice. Nobody’s ever called my art nice.” He thought to himself how funny it was that a cockroach woman was the first person who liked his art. An entrepenurial, adventurous, generous, kind, resourceful, gorgeous cockroach woman…
Suddenly the idea didn’t seem so funny. And the realization swirled about him that his thoughts about her may have been a bit more complicated than he wanted to believe.
Cshisk thought “Maybe this is a date. And maybe I am sort-of-a-little interested in him.” She’d never thought that her first date would be with a full-blooded human. “And, thinking about it, I never did think to tell him that dream of mine.” She thought to herself about her dream to go to the city above, about those lights and concrete sidewalks beneath her feet.
About somebody with her, maybe, when she got out of the sewers, holding her hand as she walked through the streets. “Oh well, it can wait until after the movie,” she thought to herself.
And so the movie went on, and the two sat together like an off-kilter Oingo-Boingo-ish note in the symphony of life.
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So, what do you folks think of either of those?