The Last to Comment Wins

[JayMark]

*pat pat*

Hiss~

 

[SRB]

Hiss~

*SMACK*

 

[Tempokai]

I'm winning currently by printing a currant like color

 

[JayMark]

*SMACK*

 

[SRB]

Turn back into beef!

 

[JayMark]

Turn back into beef!

Writathon progress - 0%
Backlog Progress - negative 15%

 

[Tempokai]

Writathon progress - 0%
Backlog Progress - negative 15%

Spoiler

As Jay Mark the 80th awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.


Which was odd, given that Jay Mark was a shapeshifter—yes—but not that kind of shapeshifter. Jay Mark could turn into a bull. A glorious, horned, muscle-rippling specimen that had trampled armies and once emotionally devastated a minotaur by being simply better at everything. He was a creature of myth, magic, and mildly questionable ethics. But insect? No. He didn’t do insects.


He hated insects. They were the crunchy granola bars of the animal kingdom—loud, full of legs, and always showing up where they weren’t wanted, like your ex at a funeral.


So when Jay Mark blinked his compound eyes and tried to rise from bed only to hear his thousand tiny limbs scritch-scratching against the silk sheets of his royal suite, he shrieked—a high-pitched, chitinous skreeeeeeeee! that sounded like a kettle boiling in existential despair.


“This,” he buzzed, “is not my doing.”


His voice clicked like castanets in a blender. Even his voice had betrayed him.


He fell from the bed with all the grace of a bowling ball tossed into a trash can, rolling onto his back. And there he flailed. Six legs, maybe eight, he hadn’t counted—flipping helplessly, exoskeleton glinting in the morning sun like a very confused beetle someone had buffed for prom.


Now, allow me to clarify something for the nosy neighbors peeking in from the fourth wall: Jay Mark the 80th wasn’t the 80th of anything in particular. His line just liked to add a number for pomp, like sequins on a used car salesman’s blazer. The truth was far more complicated. You see, Jay Mark belonged to a noble house of shapeshifters—the kind who filled out their own heraldry forms in triplicate, had familial crests featuring Latin phrases like “Mutare est Vincere” (To Shift is To Win), and hosted dinner parties where someone always turned into a raccoon by dessert.


But Jay Mark? Jay Mark was special. The family black sheep. Or rather, black bull. He had one trick—turning into a massive, thunder-hoofed, steroid-happy bovine—and he leaned into it. Hard. He’d never wanted to be a songbird, or a ferret, or that one cousin who insisted on becoming a “spiritual iguana.”


And yet, here he was. A roach. A bug. A cockroach the size of a loveseat with antennae that had better signal than most phone plans.


He eventually flipped himself upright by slamming against the leg of his mahogany four-poster bed with the finesse of a drunk walrus doing parkour. Once upright, he waddled to the mirror.


“By the gods,” he whispered. “I look like a crime scene in a pest control ad.”


And then came the knock.


Not the polite, neighborly kind. Not even the foreboding knock of debt collectors. No, this was official. The kind of knock that brought paperwork, penalties, and lifelong trauma.


Jay Mark scrambled to the door, flung it open with a leg that used to be an elbow, and found himself face-to-face with a bureaucrat.


And not just any bureaucrat—no, this was a representative of the Department of Magical Misallocations, standing there in a beige robe that practically screamed “I haven’t felt joy since the embargo on caffeine potions.”


“Jay Mark the 80th?” the bureaucrat sniffed, flipping through a tome thicker than most moral compasses.


“I was,” Jay Mark said, antennae twitching indignantly.


“Mmm.” The bureaucrat licked his thumb, flipped another page, and looked up with the enthusiasm of a tax auditor at a children’s birthday party. “It seems there’s been a clerical error in the Transformation Allocation System.”


“Clerical—CLERICAL?! I woke up with six asses! You people clericaled me into Kafka’s wet nightmare!”


“Actually,” the bureaucrat adjusted his monocle, “this particular transformation was meant for a Gregor Samsa of Prague. But it seems your file got mixed due to your shared affinity for nighttime anxiety and paternal disappointment. There was also a very unfortunate autocorrect involved.”


“Autocorrect?” Jay Mark’s mandibles twitched with rage. “What did you mean to type?”


“Bovine. It was changed to blatella germanica.” He glanced up, deadpan. “That’s cockroach. German one.”


“Oh, brilliant,” Jay Mark growled, his voice now resembling the sound of someone microwaving maracas. “So I’m stuck like this?”


“Temporarily,” the bureaucrat yawned. “But you’ll need to file Form 17-C, Subsection Omega, under the Department of Species Rectification. Then wait six to eight business millennia.”


Jay Mark hissed. It was supposed to be a growl, but his new mouth betrayed him again. All he managed was the sound of steam escaping from a disappointed tea kettle.


“There must be another way,” he buzzed. “I have plans today! A duel at noon. A sacrificial parade at four. And I was supposed to eat a rival warlord at dinner.”


The bureaucrat sighed the sigh of one who had witnessed the fall of empires and the rise of terrible musical theatre. “Well… there is an appeals process. But it involves the Great Committee of Interdimensional Errors, and they only meet on the fifth Thursday of a month that doesn’t exist.”


“Charming.”


“Oh, and while I’m here,” the bureaucrat said, pulling another scroll from his robe like a particularly annoying magician, “you’ve also been fined for ‘Improper Use of Royal Bedchamber While in Unauthorized Form.’ That’s 30 silver pieces or six pounds of enchanted manure.”


Jay Mark’s antennae drooped.


And so, with the fate of a wrongfully cockroach-ed bull hanging in the balance, Jay Mark began his journey—a journey that would take him across the Nine Realms of Magical Misfiling, through the Isle of Forgotten Forms, into the bureaucratic belly of the beast itself: the Office of Correctional Shapeshifting, located, naturally, inside the stomach of a mildly sentient paperwork dragon.


He would fight sentient rubber stamps, navigate labyrinths made of rejection letters, and confront the Supreme Archivist—a being made entirely of ink and poor decisions.


But that… is a story for another day.


For now, let us leave Jay Mark where we found him: click-clacking angrily across the marble floors of his ancestral home, muttering under his breath, antennae flailing, already plotting a revenge that would make Kafka blush and bureaucracy bleed.


Because there’s one thing the Department didn’t consider:


You can take the bull out of his form, but you can’t take the rage out of the bull.


And now… he has extra legs.

 

[StoneInky]

There's dried garlic?!... like dried fruits?

Yes there are, actually. We have sliced and dried garlic, similar to dried banana snacks.

I know cuz our neighborhood's only pasta place puts dried garlic on every single dish. They also oversalt everything, add sliced veggies, use fake flavorings and flour instead of parmesan, and their sauces have the consistency of toothpaste. And on very bad days, they overcook and burn the pasta too.

 

[Shiriru_B]

Yes there are, actually. We have sliced and dried garlic, similar to dried banana snacks.

I know cuz our neighborhood's only pasta place puts dried garlic on every single dish. They also oversalt everything, add sliced veggies, use fake flavorings and flour instead of parmesan, and their sauces have the consistency of toothpaste. And on very bad days, they overcook and burn the pasta too.

My imagination makes it look like a crime against humanity, how is that place not shut down or in fact how did it survive the pandemic back in 2020....

 

[ElijahRyne]

I am currently winning.

 

[StoneInky]

My imagination makes it look like a crime against humanity, how is that place not shut down or in fact how did it survive the pandemic back in 2020....

It's very fancy, in a nice location. People go there to post on social media, I think. And as I've said, it's the only pasta place in the entire neighborhood. You want pasta, you have no choice. I live in Asia, so you don't get a lot of choices.

In fact, Western food here is so bad that Burger King is one of the best Western places. I heard Americans think it's mid, but I personally would kill for a whopper right now.

 

[ElijahRyne]

I am winning currently.

 

[ElijahRyne]

It's very fancy, in a nice location. And as I've said, it's the only pasta place in the entire neighborhood. You want pasta, you have no choice. I live in Asia, so you don't get a lot of choices.

In fact, Western food here is so bad that Burger King is one of the best Western places. I heard Americans think it's mid, but I personally would kill for a whopper right now.

Apparently BK is better outside of the US, same with McD’s.

 

[StoneInky]

Apparently BK is better outside of the US, same with McD’s.

McDonald's is horrible. Do not dare compare the cardboard and rubber bread sandwich to a burger, you heathen.

 

[Shiriru_B]

It's very fancy, in a nice location. And as I've said, it's the only pasta place in the entire neighborhood. You want pasta, you have no choice. I live in Asia, so you don't get a lot of choices.

In fact, Western food here is so bad that Burger King is one of the best Western places. I heard Americans think it's mid, but I personally would kill for a whopper right now.

McDonald's is horrible. Do not dare compare the cardboard and rubber bread sandwich to a burger, you heathen.

I was gonna ask what you thought about the other food chains but I guess that answers that lol

 

[ElijahRyne]

I am currently winning.

McDonald's is horrible. Do not dare compare the cardboard and rubber bread sandwich to a burger, you heathen.

I didn’t, all I said was that it was better outside of the US. That place is the definition of bland imo.

 

[StoneInky]

I am currently winning.

I didn’t, all I said was that it was better outside of the US. That place is the definition of bland imo.

You don't even have to eat the food to tell it's bland- just see how flat and sad the so called "burgers" are. Just a slice of cheese between bread.

If the US have it worse, I wonder how they got so big there. Americans have so many better options... why McDonalds?

 

[SRB]

We don't have McD anymore. We have "Tasty on Point."

 

[ElijahRyne]

I am winning currently.

You don't even have to eat the food to tell it's bland- just see how flat and sad the so called "burgers" are. Just a slice of cheese between bread.

If the US have it worse, I wonder how they got so big there. Americans have so many better options... why McDonalds?

It is cheap, has persistent advertising, is often the only chain in an area, and was apparently better ‘back in the day’.

 

[StoneInky]

I am winning currently.

It is cheap, has persistent advertising, is often the only chain in an area, and was apparently better ‘back in the day’.

I hope it dies out. Americans must have lots of fast food options, right? Wendys, FiveGuys, Freddy's, etc. If you're gonna be fat, why not at least be fat and happy. :)