At SitC 2012, we hosted the event in a venue with a capacity of 2,500. On the Saturday of the weekend-long event, we were forced to turn away almost 1,000 people who had queued at the door for a couple of hours, because the venue was just too full.
In September of this past year, YouTube user…
For a while nothing happened.
Tom irritably let a slow breath from his nostrils as he let nothing keep happening.
The less things happened, he reasoned, the greater the potential would be for things to happen later. The longer he waited, the greater the results.
He gingerly flexed his fingers, which had for the most part of twelve minutes, been digging dangerously into his palms. Nothing happening was soon to be a thing of the past.
He took a pause from his pausing with a swift and violent chop as he swung his arm upwards and thrust his fist forwards into the empty air before him.
On the other side of the kitchen an innocent stack of soup tins fell over. Tom smiled and blinked away the imprints the flash had left on his retinas.
*
In another town, where the sun hadn’t risen yet, The Detective was entering another sleepless hour. He even watched in aggressive silence as the second hand ticked across the twelve and then kept going with a vague aura of disapproval. Of course time stood still for no man, but The Detective wished sometimes that it would at least slow down.
He sighed.
“The blame…” he murmured to himself, his eyes still fixed on the second hand. He brushed his fingers around the smooth plastic of the clock before returning it to the empty desk where he had found it.
Page 4
“Brain Leak” a new comic-in-the-making by ScarfDemon.
(scarfdemon.tumblr.com)
(Source: agoworld, via scarfdemon)
Bacon, Motorbike, Thor, Implosion, Guitar-solo, Cucumber
Down in the deeper, even more treacherous depths of hell, where the thick air smells like rancid bacon and creeping death plays a violent symphony of destruction, a great riff of electricity ripped through the fetid smoke. It was…
Chapter One
The Clock That Wasn’t Important
It was the height of summer in Great Britain. So naturally, it was raining. Which wasn’t too much of a shame, and in many ways people had been expecting it.
That was the lovely thing about the quiet, homely town of Larkstone- nothing was ever unexpected. People liked how predictable everything was and how usual and comfortable their lives were. And this particular rainy, summer day was no different.
The bulky, dark clouds were unspectacular in both darkness and bulkiness. The way the rain came down from the sky in sheets was not remarkable. And whilst the sickly orange-grey light had cause for comment, these comments were mostly “The light today is rather sickly and orange-grey.”
Beneath the clouds, near the town centre of Larkstone, a large stout, brick building sat sternly between a field and a railway track. The building was as old as it was tall and looked exactly the way a building should.
The building was called Platt Sixth Form College. And it was in a hot, humid classroom in the grander, older part of this institution that there was hanging one of many clocks.
This clock was not important.
The person who happened to be looking at the clock at that moment was not particularly important either.
The girl seated several tables behind that person, staring distantly through the window however, was. The girl’s name was Cleo Thompson.
Cleo Thompson didn’t feel important. Different. But not important.
She was about seven months away from her nineteenth birthday. Only four months from starting University. And about one day from taking her final exam.
She was also hours from learning that she was not human.
Indeed, Cleo, sitting in the classroom, underneath the bulky grey clouds, watching not the clock but the rain, and fanning herself in the heat, had very little idea just how important she was.
I wonder what the most meta novel ever written is. I hope it has a character called Third Person who just follows the other characters around and describes what they’re doing.
Scar Demon: The Silver Lining- Chapter Four, Page 1
Everything is Wrong
For the fourth day in a row, Tamryn Lowe was sitting shakily in his drab office, picking up phones and pretending nothing was wrong.
But of course everything was wrong. A young and popular socialite, a minister’s daughter no less, had disappeared apparently over night just two days before. And the Felduan government was in uproar. How could Earth be so clumsy as to lose such an important young woman? And it wasn’t the first time of course, so now it seemed like the entire human planet was managing to lose famous and important young Felduans left, right and centre. It was a diplomatic disaster.
No one wanted to travel to Earth anymore and now the Felduans were trying to call it “unsafe”. There was talk of Demon attacks and kidnappings, and that the evil Ven Diodatus had somehow returned, which was all nonsense of course.
But people were panicking. And as the Felduan ambassador on Earth, it was his job to sort it all out.
Tamryn Lowe picked up yet another phone.
“Hello? Yes, Mr. Gracious. No, Mr. Gracious. Yes of course I understand. No I haven’t spoken to the press at all, not even here in Faeria Dell.”
Another phone rang. Tamryn flipped papers out of his way, picking up each of the many telephones in turn as the ringing continued. He had upturned several large folders and a pencil pot before he had found the right one and answered it.
“Hello? Yes?” Tamryn waved away a young and pretty receptionist who had at that moment opened his door to bring in a hot drink.
“No I’m not going to give a statement. No comment. What? Well you can tell your editor that…Hello Mr. Gracious? Yes it’s the press on the other line.”
Earth had always been considered by faeries and Felduans to be a fairly wonderful place to live. Though it lacked the splendour and magic of native, faerie planets, it was not without it’s excitement and beauty, and as such, every year, thousands of holidaying faeries flocked towards it.
One such faerie was a young woman of twenty-five and the daughter of Bardon Fiyre. She was bubbly, kind, energetic and reliable. She was often in the spotlight for her charitable works, which made her well loved and admired by the public.
She was also missing.
The daughter of Bardon Fiyre had never even reached Faeria Dell and had disappeared within three hours of arriving on Earth. Who could feel safe on a planet like that?
“Look, I said I’m not commenting on the matter of Miss Fiyre,” Tamryn shouted through his beard and down the telephone.
“As for your crackpot theories, I can assure you sir, that no Demon attack has been recorded on Earth for months, they are simply not hunting at the moment! Come now! The Earth branch of The Service are the most loyal, most trustworthy and quite frankly the most advanced in the entire galaxy! I think I’d know if there was a Demon right under my very nose!” he yelled as Arxhan barged through the door.
Stone Kent Reports: Part Seven
Stone didn’t miss a beat.
He had briefly been slowed in his tracks as the woman walked away from the ship, and he had slightly delayed the start of what would have been a convincing conversation.
He couldn’t help himself. She was more beautiful than his mind knew how to cope with.
But all the same his brain had never stopped ticking; never stopped improvising new angles for his lie to take. And the sudden appearance of this tall, siren of a woman had not made him abandon his plans, simply alter them. He could get money and compensation any time he wanted. This woman was once in a lifetime.
He arranged a warm smile on his face as he stepped out from the shadow of the ship and brushed his hand backwards through his brownish, tousled hair. The walk was perfect, the friendly, cheeky grin could melt any heart. He strode with confidence as the woman continued to walk away from the ship with her back to him. She had reached the middle of his field, calm, composed and with a slight saunter as Stone prepared to launch himself into a conversation that could take him anywhere.
So close.
He took a deep breath and reached forward to tap her shoulder.
That’s when she started screaming furiously.
