2019 Short Stories
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One-Shot: An Innocent Question
‘So I’m immortal, right?’ Curt lifted his head, glad of the break from the paperwork, but his mood immediately dropped again as the words fully sank in. Nothing normal ever followed Stef asking a question like that. ‘Every time,’ he said slowly, ‘you ask something like that, I wish the Demolition Man expanding foam stuff was real.’ He looked around the office – nothing was out of place – so there was nothing that he needed to immediately yank her away from. But Newbie with weird ideas in her head was equally as dangerous as a Newbie who wanted to pick up a live wire because “electricity can’t hurt me,…
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00 – Cover
Deep in Faerie, where angels fear to tread… A black tie event. A black market auction. A kidnapped agent. Six months before Mirrorfall, The Auction is a follow-up to Newbie. Currently being serialised exclusively on Patreon.
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09 – Expanding Vocabulary
If there was one kind of person Curt hated more than agents, it was people who said that “everything happened for a reason”. People who stuck by that platitude when some minor inconvenience, but who could only gawp like a dying fish when you asked about something awful.Reasons seemed to vanish if you brought up childhood cancer, family members dying, people abusing animals or the utter inhumanity that humans were capable of. Things didn’t happen for a reason. Things just happened. Petersen had insisted on one condition. One test that would determine whether or not he would be allowed to be a recruit. Petersen had dragged him into Fairyland and…
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08 – Twisted Prescription
His eye was cut out. His skin was melting. The floor was black and sucking his body in. Strips of flesh, shaped like words he couldn’t read rent themselves from his skin. Petersen laughed, held his face and told him he was going to die. A wall of blood crashed down, blood turning into bricks turning into- Curt heard himself screaming. And the scream cut into the dream. He opened his eyes and let the scream turn into a whimper and into tears. The bed was drenched with his sweat, and there were spots of blood from where he’d been clawing at his chest. After three tries, he managed to…
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07 – Mirror to Be
Until Magnolia returned, there was nothing to do but study. Curt read through all of the required departmental books – familiarising himself at least a little with the faces of those people he’d be working with. After going through each of the photos, he required the recruit-accessible versions of the files for the three department heads. He quickly pursued the file for Combat – Agent Taylor – there was only so much you could assume from one photo. Still, Taylor looked like one of those rough-and-tumble guys who played rugby on the weekends. Big, tough. The kind of agent who could punch someone’s head from their shoulders. Red hair was…
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06 – The Beginning of New Normal
After the paperwork was done, Magnolia escorted him to the primary Field floor – Field Operations was spread out over three floors, and their primary floor contained most of the communal facilities – the recruit rooms, the gym, and the common areas. With a look of annoyance that he was beginning to understand was somehow her base state – or maybe it was just how she was when she was made to babysit monsters – she explained that rooms generally weren’t given until placement tests had been done. ‘But either Ryan figures you for Field, or he’s labelling you his responsibility and wants you close like a new pet in…
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05 – The Boring Bits
Once he was sure he looked as normal as he could – that his eyes weren’t red, that there were no little bits of puke still on his chin, Curt left the bathroom. The boardroom was easy enough to find – as the girl had said, it was labelled. He pushed it open, sure that knocking when expected would be annoying, and the less trouble he was, the less pain he was going to bring on himself. She sat across from the door, working on some huge franken-binder of stuff, with huge folded-out pieces of paper that had to be schedules of some kind. She looked up as he closed…
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04 – Observations
The world went fuzzy. Curt tried to keep his grip on the bag Farnshaw had given him – he wasn’t sure what it contained, but the agent seemed to be under the impression it would be weird if he showed up with nothing but the clothes on his back. At least they were new clothes – the dirty grey t-shirt and track pants had been replaced with the snap of Farnshaw’s fingers – he now wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt, in a dark, Agency navy, which he was grateful for – if the shirt had been white, then his tattoos might have shown through. And as awkward as that would…
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03 – The Oracle
Sometimes, juggling everything she needed to do was hard. Sometimes, it was just fun. Magnolia tried to set her face into a frown, but the grin on Merlin’s little face made it near impossible. His goggles sat on his forehead, a sign that he was willing to interact with the world without a filter – which for him was the first and most obvious sign that he was having a good day. With Merlin, the bad days could really bad, so every good day had to be cherished. It was such a good day that she was having to explain to him exactly why riding a bike around the lobby…
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02 – Operational Boundaries
There was no light switch in his cell. That particular right to choose, along with so many others, wasn’t one that he had earned back yet. Curt looked up at the bright fluorescent light and barely noticed the headache that was already forming. The pillow had fallen from his face in the night, his woeful attempt to get enough darkness to sleep, and now it lay abandoned beside the uncomfortable camping bed that was the one piece of furniture in the cell. A camp bed with hard green canvas, a thin pillow that provided no support, a thin blanket so scratchy that it was almost more painful to use than…
