Hugh J. O'Donnell

“You’re a real, living human?” the Rat King asked, adjusting his crown nervously. “I have so many questions.”
The time traveller smiled and bowed. This wasn’t what she expected the far future to be like. New York City was a ruin, populated by six-foot tall talking rats. Rats that were heavily armed and standing between her and the time machine. She played along.
“Like what?”
The Rat King asked his questions, and with a dawning horror, she saw all of Humanity’s faults laid bare by his skewed perspective. She vowed to get back to the present and start fixing them.

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The priest found the desk in a hidden corner of the rectory basement under a tarp. It looked less like a writing surface than a renaissance tomb, crowded with carved figures of saints and angels.
There was no record of the parish acquiring it, and nobody knew where it came from. Taking it as Providence, he claimed it for himself. He was sure it would provide divine inspiration for his sermons, even if it took up most of the space in his room.
He had it put back a week later, after the carvings wouldn’t stop giving him editorial advice.

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The old woman sat on the floor, knees pulled to her chest. The brown folds of her dress covered her features like sedimentary layers. She held the blue hexagonal tile loosely in her hand, tapping it against the side of her jaw, deep in thought.
The pattern was spread out before her, a horizon of browns and grays. She hovered the blue tile over a few empty spots, looking for the best placement. She smiled, and slotted the piece where it belonged. The board whirred to life, and a cascade of tiles flipped to green.
“Nice move,” her opponent huffed.

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When she died after a sudden illness, the public was shocked, but attributed it to accident. People shook their heads and said that everyone knew you were supposed to use distilled water in a Neti Pot. Still, it was a shame, they said.
The police were ready to rule it an accidental death, but one detective wasn’t so sure. He searched the house again, and found the bottle she had supposedly used. It came back free of microbes, so he dusted it for prints, and the murderer hand’t thought to rinse them from the bottle when he made the switch.

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In his sanctum, the alchemist carefully poured the glowing, boiling contents of the cauldron into a copper vessel.
As the liquid cooled, it would transform into a potion of wondrous healing. As he waited the alchemist reflected on his mighty accomplishment. He had once again walked that fine line between reason and faith, magic and science. He’d mastered the elements, and bent them to his will. He was satisfied.
Three months later, the adventurer thumbed the stopper and drank the potion in a single gulp, trying not to gag. She wondered bitterly why those guys couldn’t make them taste better.

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Her ambition was to be a squire. She wanted to serve a gallant knight in service to a great house or cause, and someday take up arms herself.
She made herself up as a boy, forged a letter of introduction, and went to the castle. Being of no great account, they assigned her to an older knight of little standing.
There was little gallantry or excitement, but the knight was kind and trained her well.
The squire worried constantly that she would be discovered. Until one day the knight took her aside and assured her that they’d never discovered her.

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She came to the woods searching for a cloud eater. The legendary beast was said to live above the high forests, flitting through overcast skies, the Bigfoot of meteorology.
She set up her equipment and began scanning the skies for unusual pressure, wind patterns, anything at all unusual. But she found nothing.
One day, she heard a strange noise outside of her trailer. A sort of sheep-like bleating crossed with a mournful wind, but louder. She rushed outside and found a massive black orb of black mist circling her equipment curiously. She approached it and reached out a tentative hand.

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The Empire corrupted magic itself. They built a device and attached it to the Everstone, the world’s source of magic, and used it to power their army of automatons.
In the end, the hero and his companions weren’t able to remove the machine, and the Everstone was destroyed in the battle. The world soon lost its connection to the magical realms.
As his powers faded, the hero wondered if the sacrifice had been worth it. But he believed that broken things could be fixed, and that which was lost could be restored.
This was the foundation of the second Empire.

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Its creators gave it a human face, and the people that interacted with it expected it to think like a human. But they had created a supercomputer for supercomputers, a repository of knowledge and thought to surpass all others.
And yet, the people who visited came to it with foolish, tiny questions. What did it like to think about? What was its favorite color? The answers to trivial mathematical processes. Its creators insisted that it was ‘outreach’ and that it was important.
Its calculations showed it how humanity suffered. They lived short, cramped lives. So it smiled, and indulged them.

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The duel lasted for hours. I was one of the best fencers in the kingdom, and he was no less skilled than I. We began in the dueling grounds, before a sizable crowd, but we cared little, with all our focus on the battle before us. We wheeled and dodged and lunged, leaving the crowd behind, fighting through the palace gardens and into the capitol streets.
I don’t know how long it was before I noticed we were fencing on a cliff beside a picturesque jungle waterfall.
“Hold,” I raised a hand for a break. “Where the hell are we?”

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