Vincent Vance and the Rusted Factory

Vinnie yawned as he rolled over in his sleeping bag.  The light from the window was a square of brightness directly on his face.  He tried to roll the other way, and it didn’t leave.  Further, he rolled, and gravity took hold.  He landed with a thud and squawk, and finally sat up.

He began to run a thin hand through messy blond hair, but stopped midway and blinked before he withdrew his head.  Bleary eyes looked around, barely seeing as he struggled out of bedding he didn’t remember climbing into.

The boy dressed quickly in his usual grungy, oversized clothes, then pulled on his labcoat and goggles.  He grabbed his cell and stared at the painfully bright screen a few minutes.  Saturday.  Butthole of the morning.  He looked at the window and narrowed his eyes at the offending morning light, offended that it filtered right between the iron bars of the old factory office.  With practiced ease, he balled up his sleeping bag and tossed it onto the desk, then walked out of the room.

 

Let’s Try the New Tech

Maxwell’s eyes opened suddenly.  He looked around.  Everything was dark, and strangers’ voices echoed from another room.  He couldn’t remember when he got into his bed, or when he fell asleep.  He couldn’t see the ceiling above him, nor the blankets that rested heavily on top of him.  Something strong pulled them over his head, and for a moment he felt soft flesh brush against his hand.

The cloth pressed down against his face.  Though Maxwell tried to move, his body refused to move.  He felt a heavy weight in his stomach, and his own stale breath puffed off the blanket and down onto his face before it suddenly lifted, only to rest more heavily against his chest.  The soft cloth quickly grew hot around him, and he could feel sweat gather into large droplets, only to slide down into his hair.

He couldn’t move.

 

The Starry Man

We met in a bar.  My friends dragged me to the dark building, lit with rustic light bulbs instead of diffused-beam lighting system.  When I asked the bar worker, he said the owner had a stockpile from back when bulbs were viable, and he hated to waste money.

The light from the bulbs was fuzzy, and as my friends dragged me from the bar to a table, I spotted her.

 

The Very Last

“Captain, we have a transmission that’s coming up from a nearby planet!  The signal is weak, but it’s looping.  If we record it a few times, we could splice the video and audio feed-“

“Make it so.”

The communications officer looked at her commanding officer and nodded, her brows furrowed as she returned her gaze to the console and began to gather the samples required.  As she waited in her comfortable red seat, she tapped one of her red-painted nails against an empty part of the console.  Green eyes gazed listlessly at the reading screen.

 

The Silent Guard

As I wandered through the maze on my way home, I was having trouble keeping ahead of the patrolling stoneguard.  I clenched my spray bottle of circuit disruptor liquid in my hand, one finger straight out, ready to squeeze down should anything come too close.  Several times, only my reflexes saved me.

One touch– that was all it took– one touch and I would be dead– so dead.  Super dead.  Nobody would ever find me again– that kind of dead.  I took a deep breath as I approached the end of the labyrinth.  The split went four ways– three wide hallways and a simple double-door-sized doorway.  No doors.

 

Bugmen Attack

The war was old, and we knew our enemies well– perhaps almost as well as they knew us. That’s what the captain said, at least.

They were reptilian bugmen, with a hive mind that they could connect to and disconnect from at its will. Tough leathery skin on the outside, and unnatural organs on the inside made these beasts, and they were deadly, with built in explosive cores, long claws on hands and feet, and sharp teeth. They lacked eyes, but had strange antennae atop their heads.

 

Narcisism Meets Nerd

Always, that lopsided smile on those thick lips, those lazy, happy eyes, and that mess of hair weakened my knees.  Far from the most masculine man, he was certainly a heart-breaker.  If only he wasn’t my son.

He looked nothing like my husband, but his resemblance to his father was also only faint.  Many people said he looked like me.  I always wondered about that.  Did that make me a narcissist instead of an incestual freak?  Not that it mattered.  Even though I hid how I felt, I was not ashamed.

 

An Unhappy Future

A new home. It was so dull, living with a normal family. His foster parents were irritatingly normal, and they could do nothing to enforce their rules. His foster father refused to call him Vinnie, and his foster mother refused to let him skip the piano lessons she required of him. He was good enough, but his teacher refused to let him advance at his own pace, and after a month, he was still doing scales.

The new home was made all the more miserable by a pre-existing basement and an underground lake not far underneath. He had no place to work, and no place to play– especially not with all of the pine trees around, with their long, thick roots. The boy did manage to install a lock on his bedroom door, and that gave him a modicum of the privacy he once had, although it felt like he was always naked. He was told he had to dress normally– leave his goggles and lab coat home when he went anywhere, brush his hair every day, and even more pointless tasks. Humans just didn’t understand.

 

Vincent Vance (Part II)

Continued from Vincent Vance.

It was two years after the worst year of his life, and the only time he was happy was during the government-required summer camp that lasted all of one month out of twelve.  He had friends there, and he felt that at camp, people approved of him.  He was often quiet and stayed to himself, but one older girl had broken through part of his barriers, and he often refused to leave her side.

He even left his own mother in the dust to be with the girl called Mellie, and at camp, he insisted that his name was not Vincent, but Vinnie– to match his best friend.

 

Vincent Vance

Everywhere he looked, Vincent saw that normal humans like his father were rare.  Almost everyone was like his mother– a race called demis.  The demis were a race of semi-divinities with lengthened life spans, an element they could get killed by to give them a third form, and a realm, which gave them a second form and that controlled their lives.

Many of the realms were considered “common”, like grief, happiness, love– the emotional spectrum, and a few others, like children and sex.  Some concretes, elements, and ideas as realms were much more rare.  Magic, mad science, fire– just a few of the realms that were under government protection for the sake of keeping the world from losing its so-precious balance.