Hugh J. O'Donnell

Jonah’s mother worked at the aquarium, so the security guards became familiar with the ten-year old and barely noticed his comings and goings.
But when the boy arrived wearing a hooded jacket on a warm summer morning, they became suspicious.
He returned a few minutes later with the hood drawn up, leaving a trail of water drips behind. One of the guards put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and pulled down the hood.
“We’ve been made! Run for it.”
The octopus unwound from Jonah’s neck and leaped out into the nearby bay. It disappeared below the surface, towards freedom.

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The blood tastes warm and coppery in your mouth. Somehow, you find that disappointing. You expected it to feel strange or be cold. If the blood were foul, it would be easier to choke on it. As it is, you may as well have just cut your cheek.
The vampire stands across the room, waiting for you to make your decision. The cut on his ghostly pale palm has already closed. As usual, his expression is unreadable.
Spit or swallow? How badly do you want to live? What are you willing to do to live forever?
You make your choice.

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The girl held the staff out in front of her, perpendicular to the ground. It was almost twice as tall as she was and seemed more like a tree branch than anything else. The top forked out into half a dozen sharp prongs
But it smelled like magic: a mix of burnt herbs and rusty metal like an itch in Tobias’s brain, and it crackled with potential power.
He couldn’t let that stop him. The witch had asked him to retrieve the stick, and he would do his duty. The familiar lowered onto his haunches and growled at the thief.

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She had been caught by the gorgon a moment before striking the killing blow, arm forever raised in stone.
Centuries later, foreign archeologists found her ‘statue’ and couldn’t accept the idea of a woman warrior. They chiseled the sword out of her hand and replaced her shield with a flower basket. They wrapped her up in canvas and carried her back to their museum.
One day the magic imprisoning her began to weaken, and her arm fell as a slap across the face of a graduate student.
It was an awkward meeting for her first girlfriend in two thousand years.

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The princess went into the sacred pool and disappeared beneath the murky water.
The priests held their collective breaths. The animal companion selected by the princess would be both a protector and an augur of her expected reign. She emerged a few minutes later, carrying a baby crocodile in both hands.
The priests gasped. It was an albino with bone-white scales and red eyes and markings. Such a beast was a portent of great change, for good or ill. Only time would tell which was coming.
“This is Mister Chompers,” the princess said. “I shall protect him with my life.”

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Management resorted to necromancy when the promised robotics revolution failed to deliver. HR congratulated themselves on creating a workforce that never needed a cost-of-living increase and was magically compelled to keep working.
The zombie workers joked that the job was killing them, but it wasn’t like management had any brains to eat. But as the months of hazardous work wore on, they knew they had to do something.
They couldn’t go on strike, and they would get no sympathy from the living world.
But they could still bite, and then they’d see who the brains of the operation really were.

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I stood on the rooftop and watched the other figures emerge one by one. Some stood stoically, with their capes flowing in the breeze. Others took to the air, making majestic silhouettes in the moonlight.
They looked like protectors. They looked like heroes, but I knew the truth.
It had seemed like a good deal: Let the alien parasite infect you and gain superpowers. Save the world.
But the one that tried to infect me slipped up. I saw what was to come after. They were not superheroes, but invaders.
And I was the only one who could stop them.

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When the roboticist died, his greatest creation came to the funeral, even after their public falling out.
The inventor had always stressed Ad4m’s humanity and treated them like their own child. But Ad4m had always embraced the fact that they were a true android, and something entirely new and different. The two of them hadn’t spoken in years.
Ad4m sat in the front row and listened to the eulogy, twin rivulets of oily water streaming down their face.
“It’s okay,” a friend told them, handing them a tissue.
“I’m not crying. There is a foreign object in my optical sensors.”

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I took a deep breath and completed the summoning spell. The sun seemed to dim. I heard a keening wail from nowhere, heralding the divine being’s appearance.
A hole appeared in the sky, and The Skeleton King emerged, flying into this world on wings of night.
The cyclopean death god stared down at the blue slime I was fighting and twitched his ebon pinions irritably. He sighed, and it sounded like a hurricane. I felt the giant, burning eyes staring at me.
“I didn’t summon you for a critique,” I said.
“Next time, don’t call me unless it’s super important.”

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I brushed aside the tent flap, and the odd but now familiar scent of the nomads’ mounts hit me. I had been living with them for over six month. I learned their language and their customs. I had earned the right to a mount of my own. But the beast had to accept me.
I reached up a palm, and one of the massive creatures bent its flat head to nuzzle it. The twenty-foot tall creature gazed down at me with luminous eyes.
I’d done it. Now all I had to figure out was how to get into the saddle.

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