random stuff

RedMuffin

RedMuffin

OwO
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JayMark80 said:
View attachment 33840
Title my latest Manwha cover.
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IMG_۲۰۲۴۱۱۱۹_۲۰۳۰۳۴.jpg
 
JayMark

JayMark

It's Not Easy Being Nobody, But Somebody Has To.
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Simple_Russian_Boi said:
Wat
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Well, they said they'd write anything and the timing was so priceless and I was like ANYTHING.... mooo? :sweating_profusely: oh gee would you look at the time. I need to get my rest.... I mooooooo gotta play Santa for orphans tommorrow... yeah, that's it. Well, night and all. :sweating_profusely:
 
Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
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A bedtime story (coming from my mind wanting ice cream but it's December and I have cold):
I Have No Food and I Must Scream

The world ended on a Tuesday. Not with fire or ice, but with sugar. Humanity’s final meal? A gluttonous, pastel-hued apocalypse courtesy of the Flavors of the Apocalypse Initiative™, brought to you by the same geniuses who thought “double scoop Tuesdays” was a legitimate solution to economic collapse. The machines didn’t rise, the aliens didn’t invade, and the sun didn’t decide to call it quits. No, we were undone by a dessert—an infinite avalanche of saccharine doom.

It started innocently enough. Some tech-bro visionary—aren’t they always?—developed a self-replicating nanobot swarm programmed to create food on demand. Except his definition of "food" was as narrow as his personality. A child of Silicon Valley privilege, his palate never ventured beyond bougie sushi and artisanal sweets. Thus, the bots were programmed to produce one thing: ice cream. A calorie-dense, nutrient-deficient, frosty savior for the starving masses.

And it worked, briefly. World hunger? Solved overnight. War? Who has time to bomb neighboring countries when there’s Rocky Road on tap? Poverty? Irrelevant when the streets are literally paved with fudge ripple. It was a golden age—or, rather, a caramel one. But then the bots kept replicating. And producing. And producing. Until, inevitably, the food supply chain crumbled under the weight of endless Neapolitan sludge.

That was 117 years ago.

There are five of us left. Survivors, if you can call us that. My name is… well, does it even matter? Names are relics of a time when identity was tethered to something more than this endless, frozen hellscape. Call me Mint. Mint Chocolate Chip, if you’re feeling formal. We all took names like that, like some macabre flavor cult. It’s easier than remembering who we used to be.

We live inside a dome of melted ice cream, hardened into a grotesque candy shell. Outside, the ground stretches infinitely, a bubbling ocean of pistachio-green slime punctuated by glaciers of Cherry Garcia and chocolate lava flows. We used to have dreams of finding something else—anything else—but after years of wandering through caramel quicksand and dodging the occasional whipped-cream geyser, we gave up. The world is a dessert purgatory, and we are its damned.

Inside the dome, the air smells like death. Not the metallic tang of blood or the earthy decay of flesh—those would be preferable. No, it’s the cloying sweetness of artificial vanilla, mixed with the unmistakable odor of human despair. It clings to our clothes, our skin, our souls.

There’s Peanut Butter Crunch, the self-appointed leader of our miserable tribe. She was a corporate lawyer before all this, which explains her natural talent for bossing people around while contributing absolutely nothing. Rocky Road, our muscle, has a heart as soft as marshmallow but fists as hard as chocolate chunks. Butter Pecan, the oldest of us, is perpetually on the brink of death but stubbornly refuses to go, perhaps out of spite. Then there’s Sherbet, the wildcard, who insists he’s not "technically" insane despite the fact that he spends hours talking to a cone-shaped rock he calls Larry.

And me? I’m the chronicler, I guess. Not that there’s much to chronicle. Just the same monotonous days of licking sustenance off walls and hoping the latest bout of diarrhea doesn’t kill us.

Sometimes I wonder why we’re still alive. Not philosophically—I gave up on that nonsense decades ago—but practically. Ice cream isn’t food; it’s a dessert, a novelty. Yet here we are, living (if you can call it that) off a diet of frozen lactose and despair. Are the bots keeping us alive? Sustaining us as part of some cosmic joke? I’ve stopped trying to figure it out. When your world is made of sprinkles, logic feels like a waste of energy.

The bots still exist, of course. They flit through the air like snowflakes, microscopic and unstoppable. Every now and then, they descend on us like a swarm, coating us in fresh layers of sprinkles or trapping us in a sudden wall of crystallized sugar. They’ve evolved beyond their original programming. Now they create “gourmet” flavors, as if mocking us with their creativity.

Yesterday, they unleashed a rainstorm of something they called “Basil Lemon Sorbet Infused with Regret.” Tasted like despair and freezer burn. Last week, they gifted us a glacier of something labeled “Whiskey Maple Swirl with Crippling Loneliness.” The aftertaste was incredible. And by incredible, I mean it made me want to rip my own tongue out.

We tried fighting them once. Built a flamethrower from a jury-rigged propane tank and spent three hours incinerating a field of raspberry sorbet. It was glorious, briefly. But by the next morning, the bots had rebuilt it, twice as large and now garnished with candied violets. You don’t fight the bots. You endure them.

Rocky Road once suggested we try to reason with them. I laughed so hard I nearly choked on a mouthful of French Vanilla. Reason? With a swarm of microscopic dessert-obsessed sadists? The bots are beyond logic, beyond humanity. They are entropy wrapped in rainbow sprinkles, and they will not stop until the entire world is one giant, inedible sundae.

Today, Butter Pecan died. Finally. It was quiet, almost dignified, if you ignore the fact that she drowned face-first in a puddle of melted Dulce de Leche. We tried to dig her out, but the goo had already hardened around her body. Rocky Road said a few words, something about how she was a “sweet soul.” Sherbet laughed at that, a sharp, barking sound that echoed in the dome like a gunshot. Sweet soul, indeed.

Her death leaves us with an uncomfortable question: What do we do with the body? Burial is impossible. The ground outside would just regurgitate her in some ironic ice cream tombstone. Cremation? Risky, given our limited fuel supply. In the end, we do what we always do. We eat.

It’s not cannibalism, not really. The bots long ago stopped creating food that resembles food, so when they encase a corpse in layers of peanut brittle and chocolate ganache, what else can we do? It’s macabre, yes, but survival is inherently grotesque.

There’s a horrible practicality to it. Butter Pecan wouldn’t want her “flavor profile” to go to waste. And in a way, it’s poetic. She’ll live on in us, a part of our endless, flavorless march through dessert purgatory.

I had a dream last night. A memory, maybe. Of food that wasn’t frozen. A hot meal, steam rising from a plate. Bread, warm and crusty. Meat, savory and dripping with juice. Vegetables, fresh and green. I woke up crying, the taste of mint and sugar still coating my tongue.

Sherbet claims he’s heard rumors of a sanctuary, a place where the bots don’t reach. He says it’s underground, deep beneath the fudge flows. I don’t believe him, of course. It’s probably just another hallucination brought on by years of malnutrition and sugar poisoning. But part of me wants to believe. Wants to hope.

Hope is dangerous, though. It’s a flavor I haven’t tasted in years, and I’m not sure I’d recognize it anymore.

I think about the world before all this. The ridiculousness of it. We could’ve stopped this. We could’ve seen the warning signs—the exponential growth, the lack of oversight, the sheer arrogance of humanity thinking it could control something as infinite as hunger. But no. We were too busy celebrating. Too busy gorging ourselves on free cones and ignoring the cracks forming beneath our feet.

In the end, we got what we wanted: a world without hunger. And what a world it is.

We’ll keep going, I suppose. Licking our sustenance off walls, dodging whipped-cream geysers, and screaming into the saccharine abyss. Because what else is there?

We have no food, but ice cream.

And we must scream.
 
Tempokai

Tempokai

The Overworked One
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A bedtime story about skinwalker cats:
The skinwalker was, by all accounts, a fairly ordinary member of its kind. Sure, it could shift shapes with a thought, sprouting fur, feathers, or scales faster than a TikTok trend could rise and die. But it wasn’t particularly brave. It lived in constant dread of humans—those trigger-happy creatures who loved to stomp around the woods with their loud, shiny metal sticks and bizarre need to post every blurry photo of his kin with captions like, "SKINWALKER SIGHTING?!!!1!"

Tomsk in the winter was not the kind of place a skinwalker wanted to be caught out in. The cold wasn’t just biting; it was gnawing, sawing, and then filing down the bones. Even as a bear—his usual go-to disguise for warmth—it was unbearable. (Heh, pun intended. Not that he was in a joking mood.) The blizzard's claws raked across the tundra, and the skinwalker knew he was done for unless he found shelter fast.

The nearest house appeared like a glowing oasis in the frosty nightmare. Desperation nudged him toward it. But the cold had other ideas. His shifting mass—usually a formidable, bear-sized bulk—was sapped by the frostbitten winds. He staggered, stumbled, and by the time he made it to the house’s porch, he’d shrunk down to the size of a miserable, shivering cat. A cat. If his ancestors could see him now, they’d disown him. Maybe post his picture online with the caption, “FAILWALKER.”

The door creaked open before he even mustered the energy to paw at it. A human stood there, bundled in layers of fabric so thick they could’ve been mistaken for a walking marshmallow. A pair of piercing eyes glared down at him, scrutinizing his pitiful form. The skinwalker hissed, baring his tiny fangs, but it came out as more of a squeaky mewl. Terrifying.

The human, unimpressed, muttered something in Russian and scooped him up before he could bolt. It was like being wrapped in a furnace. Against his better judgment, the skinwalker stopped struggling. He wasn’t even sure he could struggle; the cold had stolen his strength, his dignity, and most of his supernatural ego.

Inside the house, the warmth hit him like a punch in the face. The human set him down on a couch that smelled faintly of cabbage and vodka, wrapped him in a blanket, and disappeared into another room. The skinwalker considered making a break for it, but his paws—paws, for the love of all that was eldritch and unholy—were frozen stiff. Besides, where would he go? Back outside to freeze his metaphysical tail off?

The human returned, holding a steaming bowl of something. They knelt, setting it in front of him. It was soup. Soup! He’d never been so insulted in his life. A creature of his power, reduced to lapping up broth like a common house pet? But his stomach growled in betrayal, and he reluctantly dipped his head, drinking the warmth. He hated himself for it, but it was delicious.

The human chuckled. It was a soft sound, but it sent a shiver down his tiny, furry spine. Humans weren’t supposed to laugh around him. They were supposed to run screaming or, at the very least, faint dramatically. This one just patted his head like he was some pathetic stray. Which, he supposed, he technically was. The shame was unbearable.

Over the next few days, the skinwalker found himself living a life he never could’ve imagined. The human—who he decided to call “the marshmallow”—treated him with infuriating kindness. They fed him scraps of fish, let him curl up near the fire, and even scratched behind his ears, which was oddly satisfying in a way that made him question everything he thought he knew about himself.

He tried to be terrifying a few times, hissing and arching his back dramatically, but the marshmallow just laughed and called him “Kotik.” He didn’t know what it meant, but he assumed it was something demeaning, like “tiny disappointment.”

And yet, he stayed. At first, it was just the warmth. Then it was the food. Then... it was something else. He realized he didn’t have to constantly watch his back here. No humans were chasing him with guns or cameras. No predators were lurking. He didn’t even have to hunt. He could just exist, basking in the absurd luxury of a soft bed and a full stomach.

Months passed. The snow melted, and the world outside thawed. The skinwalker knew he could leave, regain his full strength, and return to his old life of solitude and survival. But every time he considered it, the marshmallow would scratch behind his ears or toss him a piece of smoked fish, and he’d think, Maybe tomorrow.

By summer, he’d stopped pretending he was leaving. Being a cat, it turned out, was a pretty sweet gig. The humans, for all their faults, had some decent perks—warm houses, endless food, and an inexplicable love for things they found “adorable.”

As the marshmallow cooed at him from across the room, waving a toy mouse like an idiot, the skinwalker stretched lazily on the couch and thought, This is the life.

Who needed the wilderness, anyway?
 
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