Fantasybits

This is how the monthly contest works. I set a topic (usually the first topic of the month, but I may choose differently). Then members will have until the end of that month to post on it. After the month ends, I will pick the entry I liked the most. Also, there will be a poll with all the entries entered that month, open to all members for one week. Whichever entry gets the most votes will also win. The winners will each be rewarded a $5 online gift certificate of their choosing. If one member wins both my pick and the members' choice, they will receive a $10 gift certificate. Amazon.com is the default size, but if there is another site the winner would prefer, we can try to work something out.

Incase you are wondering, I will not need any personal information for this, only the email address you wish it to be sent to. Also, if you are from a country that has it's own Amazon site (like Canada has Amazon.ca and Japan has Amazon.jp), feel free to let me know and I will make the gift certificate from that site. I will send a message to the winner after announcing them and ask for the email address.

Other example sites you can redeem your prize from:
2 months paid livejournal
2 monthly items from Gaia
1 exotic credit or 1 donation box from UniCreatures/UniFaction
any site that has gift certificates of $5

If a winner does not accept their prize within one month, it will go to the second place and so on.

This month's topic is: a shape in the clouds. All posts must be submitted in this thread by midnight March 31st EST.

Good luck and have fun! I can't wait to read your posts!!

Marcy lost her gravity on an ordinary Monday morning the year she turned 29. She was just sitting down to eat her fat free muffin, drink her artificially sweetened coffee-like substance, and read a magazine. The magazine promised she could get her sexiest hair ever AND lose 20 pounds in 30 days. Marcy was just about to take a look at “Six new looks to make men weep (under $800!)” when she felt a strange sensation beneath her feet, that is, the sensation of nothing underneath them at all.

Marcy looked down to see she was hovering six inches off the floor.

“What the heck is happening?” she thought, and her feet lowered by an inch. She wiggled her toes, and stretched them downwards to brush the floor. As she did so, one of her expensive pumps fell off.

“My Jimmy Choos!” Marcy cried out, and promptly shot five feet into the air. The motion was enough to knock off the second shoe, and she cried out again, shooting her up another five feet, and thereby pushing her head through the ceiling, where it met so little resistance she might have been a ghost.

Had anyone been there to witness, they would have seen Marcy ‘s body dangling from the neck down, while her head was stuck inside the roof, and her eyes were closed so she couldn’t see the dark.

“This is not good,” Marcy thought, and sunk down about an inch. If she had any imagination, if she had read, perhaps, an actual novel since high school, her worries could have been much more specific. What, for example, was the ceiling she was stuck in made of; what was she breathing in—insulation, dust, even nastier stuff? Or, more critically, since she hadn’t crashed through the roof, but her head and the roof were occupying some of the same space at the same time, wasn’t this impossible, and would one of them thus explode from the contradiction? But neither of these possibilities occurred to Marcy, who worried instead (practically) about how she was going to get down, and (impractically) about the status of her lost shoes, and she shot through the roof out into the sky.

It was a beautiful spring day, complete with cerulean sky and those fluffy white clouds.

“Do I mean cerulean or do I mean vermilion?” Marcy thought, “I always get those two mixed up.” These thoughts shot her up a few more feet, and whirled her about rather dizzily for a moment. She looked down, and saw her house below her; her stomach dropped out abruptly, and she fell by about a foot.

“Better not do that,” Marcy thought, descending six inches from the practicality of it all, and instead she looked up (losing 4 more inches). She was pretty abysmal at judging distances, but noted with some relief she was bird high and not airplane high (she gained three inches for not noting that airplanes must ascend and descend, and thus at some point were only as high as she), though this fact was of little comfort if she couldn’t actually get down.

“I’m too high for anyone to look up my skirt, at least,” Marcy thought, and rose two feet. And then another two for suddenly worrying what people would think if they saw her floating in the air with no visible means of support.

Humanity has, since the days of Da Vinci, since the legends of Icarus and his wings of wax, dreamt of flying, a dream which modern air travel comes nowhere close to approximating. An imaginative soul would have marveled at being in Marcy’s situation.

“Oh, a cloud,” Marcy thought, rising a few inches. It was, in fact, a cloud she had noticed earlier when she went out to get the paper. (Down six inches for subscribing to the newspaper; up six again because she only subscribed so she could go outside to get it, and catch sight of her cute neighbor in his very short robe). Marcy remembered the cloud because it looked like a wedge of Swiss cheese.

“Wouldn’t ricotta be a more cloudlike cheese? Ow!” Marcy floated upward until she had actually hit the cloud in question, and while her kitchen ceiling, which should have been solid for her, wasn’t, the cloud somehow was. Her head was actually pressed up against the Swiss cheese cloud, and when she tried to look at it, she was too close to get a good look. It seemed less diffuse than clouds should be, a thought that lowered her six inches.

“Funny word, ‘diffuse.” Is it like defusing a bomb, or is it like one of those hairdryer things? Ow!” She banged her head against the cloud again.

“It would be better if you didn’t think at all,” said a tinny, androgynous voice (like the one on my voice mail, thought Marcy, then “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“What is your name and address?” the tinny voice demanded.

Instinctively, Marcy replied. “I’m not going to tell you that! You might be a pervert.” This thought was practical---it was the situation that was bizarre---so Marcy lowered ten inches, and there was a sudden square opening in the clouds.

“Hey, clouds don’t do that!” Marcy thought, and shot straight up into the cloud.

Once inside, Marcy immediately realized that the structure that contained her was probably not either a cloud or a giant Swiss cheese. In fact, it resembled something from an old TV show she’d seen once, although she couldn’t remember the name, something with a lot of blinking lights and miniskirts and this guy with the worst bangs she’d ever seen. Her thoughts propelled her neither upwards nor downwards, and Marcy cried out, “Hey!”

“Oh, we’ve turned it off,” said the tinny voice, which now clearly came from a strange but impressively skinny being with huge eyes and no hair.

“Turned what off?” Marcy asked, and then added, “Who are you?”

“Turned off MOPS the Mind Operated Propulsion System—the way you’ve been traveling. For now.” The being stepped back and took a bow, “My name is Glinx, of the planet Oritruba, and we have been circling your planet looking for someone to replace our lost pilot. You’re the most talented MOPerator we’ve ever seen---your thoughts leap from pragmatic to ditzy in nanoseconds!”

“What’s a MOPerator?” Marcy asked, not sure whether to be insulted.

Glinx seemed to smile.” A MOPerator is what keeps this vessel in the air. We move just the way you have been, although our method is more refined. Six months ago, our last MOPerator died, and we’ve been unable to find a replacement to get us back home. We recorded the old MOPerator’s last thought to keep us elevated, but we haven’t been able to go anywhere, until Glidget had the bright idea to look for an earthling MOPerator. We wish to offer the job to you.”

Marcy was shocked. Who did he think she was---some little nobody with nothing better to do than fly around in a space ship with a bunch of aliens she didn’t even know? Although she had always wanted to be a stewardess, if she could do it without the screaming babies and puke? Maybe flying a space ship was like that?

“I know you will be reluctant to leave your home and job,” Glinx said.

“No, my job sucks,” said Marcy.

“We have many amenities here,” Glinx continued. “Including an exercise room and all the synthetic food you desire. Plus our planet’s gravitational pull is much weaker than yours; you’d only weigh about 13 pounds.”

Now THAT was something Marcy could really get behind. “You guys don’t have any screaming babies or puke, do you?” she asked.

“Our young are completely mute until they pass puberty.”

Well, who wouldn’t want that? This MOPerator thing was looking more and more intriguing.

“Plus, you know, we subscribe to Cosmo.”

And Marcy was sold.

Annah sighed as she stared out the window into the seemingly endless expanse of desert. Even with the air conditioner on full blast, the heat in the car was unbearable. Storm clouds were building near the mountains in the distance, but they would not be there for hours and even then it probably wouldn't rain. There would probably be a nice lightning show, however.

Sounds of her siblings squabbling in the back seat brought Annah out of her quiet musings. Frustrated, she grabbed a pillow that was laying on the seat and threw it in the back. It hit her brothers in the face and stunned them into silence.
“Annah,” her father called out warningly, watching her in the rear view mirror.

“Well, you weren't going to do anything about it,” Annah retorted. “Besides, it didn't hurt them. It just made them shut up.”
“Don't do it again, or I'll turn this car around and go right back home.”

Annah snorted and returned to staring out the window. ”I couldn't do it again,” she thought to herself. ”I only had one pillow.”
It wasn't long before her brothers started to fight again. “James! Micheal!” she called out desperately, about to yell at them for being so loud. As she saw her mother beginning to turn around in the front seat, however, she changed her tactics. “Did you know that this place wasn't always a desert?”
The two boys stopped bickering and stared up at Annah, their eyes wide. “It wasn't?” the older boy asked.

“No,” Annah answered. “It used to be a sea, or a huge lake or something. Archeologists know this because they find shells and stuff when they dig. I bet that a long time ago when the dinosaurs were still alive, a big giant water dinosaur was swimming along this very path. Like, a giant plesiosaur or something. That would be neat, wouldn't it?”
Annah smiled as the boys began chattering about things like the sea and what sort of dinosaur they would have been in it. They were still little and didn't quite understand that most dinosaurs were limited to land, so Micheal decided that he would be a giant sea T-Rex and James wanted to be a sea Triceratops.

Listening to the boys talk, Annah focused her attention once more at the window outside. The storm clouds in the distance were large now, and most had shapes of their own. To Annah's surprise, one little stray cloud had taken on a shape reminiscent of that sea long ago – one that reminded her very much of a picture she had once seen of a creature believed to be a plesiosaur, Nessie the Loch Ness Monster.