A Crash

    I hope you all have a wonderful holiday. I'm using some off time before Christmas to catch up on writing, but (obviously) there's no post today.     Love you all

    Kevin bolted toward the nearest corpse, ducking below a leathery tentacle as he ran.The monster was surprisingly quick for it's massive size, and he was almost knocked from his feet or captured a few times  as he made his way to the fallen security officer, an auburn haired woman who had once been toned and well tanned despite her time in face - she was now missing an arm, as well as most of her abdomen - and ducked under another tentacle as he checked her for ammunition.     Please, please. Not that pocket. Not that one. Please. Roll away from a slamming  tentacle. Search more G ot it!  A thigh holster with a one magazine for the pistol. Helpful, though only in the slightest.     He was shoved back into a wall by a thrashing tentacle - the air knocked from his chest as he was crushed against a server tower. He had been momentarily distracted. The tentacle aimed for him again, attempting a grab, and he flung himself to the floor, pulling ...

    Kevin typed into the console querying an overload procedure. Maybe there was an electrical pulse he could send through the system that would take out the Conglomeration - oh, look, there was the proper noun - and hopefully not fry the ability to send his information. That sounded farfetched as he thought it. Maybe there were explosives...       He looked around the room he was in for at least the fourth time - nothing explosive in here - and then scanned the room behind the glass. There weren't any of the red barrels in the room that signified something that would explode in fire. The hard drives could explode electrically he supposed, but he wasn't sure that he wouldn't destroy what he needed. Looking up... oh, okay, a catwalk. He could maybe drop that down onto the Conglomeration's... Well head didn't seem like the right word, but it was the closest.     Who designed this place?     Okay, so catwalks were usually bolted to somethin...

    Kevin inserted the drive into an open port in the console in front of him, ignoring the horrible sight of the conglomeration eating his friend, trying not to think of exactly what it was. Was it the final form of the fungal freaks he had been fighting? Was it their patron? Their god? Didn't he just  say he wasn't going to fixate on it? Why wasn't the drive connecting?     He tapped the console and the screen - which had been a cheery, compliant blue-green - shifted suddenly to a blazing red. The type of red that exclaimed "YOU FUCKED UP!" while physically saying something calm like: "There has been an unexpected error. Please attempt to blah blah blah. "      Learning about himself some more, that was nice. He evidently had little patience for computers. That was progress.     The "important text" indicated by the aforementioned "blah blah blah" in this case was "Please contact a system administrator for bypass through the ma...

     The databanks through the windows looked the same for the most part. the difference in the room was that every flat surface was covered in some sort of fungus. The racks, the floors, even a small temporary desk he had seen an engineer working at before this all happened.      Worse still, in the center of the banks was another large toothy maw. This one was different than the other monstrosities he had been dealing with since he had awoken - he wondered what time it was - which all had a single mouth, a single set of eyes, and two legs. This... conglomerate was the only word that came to mind, it had an uneven amount of eyes scanning in all directions; at least half a dozen gaping maws, gnashing their teeth in the air; and several flailing limbs, none of which could hold the thing's substantial girth, even combined.     He noticed that around the conglomerate were the corpses of dozens of his of his fellow crew and the smaller toothy monsters...

 Deadlines have often been an issue for me, and when they're self imposed deadlines, they seem a little easier to work around. "I know the guy that made these deadlines and he's a pushover, I don't need to keep up with it." And for a while I did fine, and in fact was ahead for a bit, which I thought would help with moments of writers block or being busy. And so here we are. Writer's block did me in a bit, and then distractions abound. I started playing more Warhammer and painting miniatures and I got deep into Baldur's Gate 3. I've since completed most of Baldur's Gate (over 80 hours played and I feel like I'm barely into Act 3, not to speak of the other playthroughs), and my Warhammer painting is... Well we won't talk about how many models I have to work on still (that's a lie, its over 300), but the desire to paint ebbs and flows. So, I'm starting to gather all the threads again and I've started getting back into my writing. T...

    The doors whooshed open, emitting a foul stench from beyond, and he was reminded of the long dead ground cover of a young forest shortly after it rained.      A brief memory of hiking a mountain trail, looking down over a valley dotted with colorful aspen trees hit him and faded almost as quick as it came on.  He'd apparently loved the outdoors before he woke up.     He covered his nose and mouth to attempt to block the smell as he encountered the small space. Adjacent to this room - the main console of the comms array - was a massive room full of console towers.     "The entirety of the human experience and all of Earth's history" said the tech next to him. "Everything from Norse mythology, to the Chernobyl disaster, to first contact protocol. No matter where we end up, we have it all."     And why are there so many towers? Surely everything could fit on a smaller scale than this?" Kevin didn't know much about computers - ...