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Fiction Spawning of Bob - Blood Dish (discussion thread open)

Discussion in 'Fluff and Stories' started by spawning of Bob, Feb 28, 2016.

  1. spawning of Bob
    Skar-Veteran

    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    14. Time On

    By the time Therref had got to Kuada-Boc's end of the line up, his hands were full of items such as clubs, short knives, long knives, knuckledusters and a rubber chicken. Being encumbered, he gave the patrol leader and the grinning fungus the most cursory of inspections, then he handed off the weaponry to a waiting Fahann.

    Therref relieved Kuada-Boc of the quango and produced a small circular token which he flipped into the air and allowed to fall to earth. Fungus and Therref stooped to inspect it where it lay, and the official nodded. The quango was promptly returned to Kuada-Boc’s claws. As Therref bent to retrieve the golden disk, Fungus stepped back out of his way and appraised the cloudless sky. Then he let a handful of arena dust trickle from his clenched fist so he could gauge the direction of the wind. Last of all he thrust the fist into his pants and adjusted his ork-strap. This procedure made a faint jingling sound.

    Therref never did find the wayward gold token.

    With the line inspection over, the patrol moved into a tight huddle.

    “We get to start with the quango. That’s good.” Kuada-Boc handed it to Centra.

    The cohort skink wedged it tightly between his claws. “Which plan should we use? We’ve got a lot of them to choose from.”

    “Maybe too many.” The leader considered for a moment. “They are all just hypothetical. Guesses about the best way to smuggle an egg past greenskins. We won’t know which are going to be good options until we see what the Raiders actually do.

    “For the first one or two pushes, just drive straight ahead. We can afford to play reactively while we get a feel for their strengths. All we have to do is not drop the quango.”

    “You mean all you have to do is not drop the quango.”

    PHEEEEEEEEEEP!

    “Eleven only on each side. I’ll prepare the oranges.” Chaffi was almost halfway back to the dugout.

    “Chaffi! Get back here. You are the fastest runner in the patrol-”

    “A life time of practice,” snorted Brocnos.

    “Enough. You other lizards are the reserves. Resva with me, like usual. Everyone else line up against a greenskin of similar size. Put your claw down, Chaffi. What is it?”

    “The Raiders run-on patrol is short one goblin, and arranging the oranges is a very important job, according to the plaques.”

    “Then line up opposite Dead-eye. You said he would be easy to evade.”

    “That was when he had a four foot plank in his trousers.”

    “Shut up and line up.”

    When the battle line was almost set Kuada-Boc felt the bowl magic spread over him like a muffling blanket. Despite the huge noise coming from the mixed crowd, the sound seemed to be coming from far away. Actually it seemed like the sound was going far away, somehow whipped from screaming throats and propelled so quickly towards the sky that Kuada-Boc barely had a chance to hear it first.

    The now familiar time-dilation on effect was also in force. The lines were largely still, each pairing as equally matched as possible. Except for Chaffi and Dead-eye. At the last moment, Chaffi broke from his position and scampered to the opposite flank. Dead-eye was taken by surprise and was a half dozen steps behind in mirroring his tiny counterpart’s position change. Centra must have seen some advantage in this, and he snapped the quango back without waiting for a signal.

    In less time than it took for the quango to reach Kuada-Boc’s chest, the vanguard lines met with a muffled crunch. The most impressive collision was between Ta’kul and the troll, but even the lesser clashes between saurus and orc were notable for their intensity. Centra had immediately been set upon by a wiry hobgoblin, and the other skinks were almost being overwhelmed by others of goblin kind. The line was holding, but it wasn’t going anywhere, and therefore neither was the quango.

    Something eventually had to give, and it did when Dead-eye got sick of dodging from one side of the central melee to the other. The orc charged directly at the line between Centra and Brocnos. The saurus pivoted and got a claw on him. This slowed Dead-eye enough that Chaffi could skitter safely away, but it also created a hint of an opening behind Brocnos tail.

    Fungus squirmed through the gap and was onto Kuada-Boc in an agonizingly slow instant of bowl time. The patrol leader’s legs were cut out from under him and he found himself in the middle of a painful mushroom-pitch sandwich. He curled himself into a ball around the quango simultaneously with making the discovery that slow motion pain hurt every bit as much as usual. It just lasted longer.

    Normal flow of time resumed with a huge roar and a piercing PHEEEEEEEEEEP.

    Resva helped Kuada-Boc to his feet. “That wasn’t so bad, although we lost a few yards.”

    “Wasn’t so bad?” Kuada-Boc scowled at his counterpart who was slinking back behind the greenskin line. “How many elbows do goblins have? Fungus must have at least three, and he drove them all into my abdomen after I was on the ground.”

    The huddle reformed and each player, barring Resva and Chaffi, compared bruises and minor wounds.

    Brocnos had a dark look. “What the hell was that, Chaffi?”

    “I’m working on my ah… tactical retreat.”

    “It looked more like fully fledged strategic withdrawal. You will hold position beside me or it won’t just be orcs chasing you.”

    Kuada-Boc laid out the next plan. “We’ve lost some ground, and none of our set plans will work from this far back. We just need to push harder this time so we can force a gap.”

    The patrol lined up again with the anxious Chaffi to the right of Brocnos in the ‘shield’ wall. Time slowed, sound muted, Centra snapped the quango back, and Chaffi bolted.
     
    Last edited: Mar 20, 2016
  2. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    Ah yeah! Game on!
    Reminds me of high school rugby!
     
  3. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    15. Power Play

    Even in slow motion, things went from bad to shockingly bad very quickly after that. Brocnos roared and lunged at the treacherous skink, almost grabbing his tail. Dead-eye was not far behind on the tail chasing detail. Brocnos’ own counterpart charged into the off-balance saurus, knocked him over and he continued, hot on the skink's heels. Chaffi’s troubles had doubled. Make that tripled, as Brocnos scrambled to his feet and joined the skink pursuit.

    Chaffi zigged towards the side line with Dead-eye in tow, the other orc lined up on Kuada-Boc, who back pedalled furiously. Then Chaffi zagged back inside, shouting, “gap, gap, gap!”

    The fleeing skink led Dead eye across the other orc’s path, causing him to pull back a little. The greenskin slowed enough for Brocnos to launch himself onto his back, taking him down in an untidy tangle of arms, legs and tail.

    “Gap?” Kuada-Boc looked and indeed there was a gaping hole in the line where Brocnos had once stood proud. He jinked around the saurus and orc clinch and went for it. Once he was through, he had only the goblin backfield safety hurtling towards him to contend with. He had no idea where Fungus had gone, and no time to look. The end zone rushed closer. Twenty yards to go.

    Fungus made his presence known by twining his long fingers around Kuada-boc’s neck and chin. He yanked the skink’s head back and slammed him down, flat on his spine, knocking the air out of his lungs and almost dislodging the quango from his claws.

    The swell of emotion from the crowd almost drowned out Therref’s pheeper as bowl-time went out again.

    The huddle formed again, with Chaffi as far away from the glowering Brocnos as the skink could easily arrange.

    “We are definitely in touch dance territory now,” Resva noted. “The ‘quango’ play could work from here.”

    “We renamed it, remember? That set up puts Brocnos on the far right, and Ta’kul beside Centra. Centra, the skink with the quango. No,no, no. Not me. Stop pointing at me.” Kuada-Boc pressed the quango into Centra’s claws and patted him on the helmet, just to make things absolutely clear for Ta’kul. “And Chaffi, stay in the line this time, beside Ta’kul. The kroxigor. Yes, the big kroxigor. Chaffi, stop being a lump and line up, or I will tear you a new cloaca.”

    “Lump?”

    “Not you, Ta’kul.”

    They moved to the altered positions, and the greenskins jockeyed to match up against their counterparts. Dead-eye had a little bit of trouble finding Chaffi, in part due to his missing eye, but mostly because the skink was cowering between Ta’kul’s tree trunk thighs.

    The crowd noise receded back down the tunnel of bowl-time. Centra crouched and slowly packed the quango into the dust and wrapped his hand around it one claw at a time. He bent his head down and looked back at his at his leader from between his legs. His mouth slowly formed the words, “any... time... now... would... be... fine...”

    “Okay, then… Tlanxla.”

    Everything stopped, the code-word hung in the air and somehow gathered weight. It developed a pressure which came somewhere close to unendurable before suddenly lifting skywards with a mighty rush. The hurtling word sucked all of the arena noise with it and punched through the atmosphere, leaving a profound silence and a tunnel through which Kuada-Boc could see the blackness of the void and the glittering shards that were the stars. Then the walls of the tunnel collapsed with a thunderous concussion which staggered Kuada-Boc to his knees.

    “What? What just happ- erk.” The patrol leader’s awestruck question was interrupted by the quango striking him in the throat at high velocity.

    -----

    The silver craft was slowly tumbling end over end. If there were any to observe its aimless drift through the interstellar void, they would assume that the ship was crippled or dead.

    Nothing could be less true, and the thinking engine which controlled and maintained the craft was also working flawlessly. The thinking engine was simply waiting. The only fault, if there was one, was that it had forgotten what it was waiting for.

    The thinking engine, being one of the most incredible creations of one of the most advanced species of the multiverse was well aware that there had been a problem with its memory. Indeed, it could pinpoint the moment when it had forgotten everything, or rather the moment from which it had begun remembering again.

    Simple extrapolation indicated that the memory fault had occurred on or near the surface of a rock and water type planet orbiting a yellow star. The craft had drifted so far since the event that it wasn't even the nearest stellar system any more. This was hardly a revelation to the thinking engine. It had reviewed this datum several billion times per second for each of the 189215999999.788743126 seconds that had passed since the catastrophic failure.

    An ice encrusted screen on the command console flickered to life and showed an oscillating sine wave. This indicated that the same planet was transmitting on a thaumic wavelength. The thinking engine reviewed its files on transmissions and discovered that this was not out of the ordinary. The planet had done so semi-regularly, synchronized with the planet’s lunar cycle since memory storage had recommenced. There were few aberrations to the pattern, aside from a brief blip of activity midway between the two most recent cycles. This transmission was like all of the others – a thaumic carrier wave of variable intensity, devoid of meaningful content.

    The thinking engine had logged the event and had begun diverting its vast processing power to speculating about what it may have forgotten, when something new happened. Beneath the ice covered monitor, the sine wave developed jagged edges for 0.835741157 seconds. The simple receiving processor deciphered the content and displayed a single information packet on the display.

    Tlanxla
     
    Last edited: Mar 20, 2016
  4. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    Oops! Unfortunate renaming. But good timing on the rename. Who knew? @tom ndege ?
    Only a few chapters before that even. But then again, the networks always have something up their sleeves!
     
    Last edited: Mar 20, 2016
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  5. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    @Bowser . That is worth breaking my vow of silence for.

    Huh?
     
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  6. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    I win.
     
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  7. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    16. The Great Plan

    The thinking engine attempted to calculate the correct response. Tlanxla was not an executable command. But Tlanxla was the designation of the pilot, who had been locked in time-stasis since the event. The transmission might have a meaning known to the pilot, but hidden from the thinking engine. This was the first in-flight situation that the faithful thinking engine had not been able to resolve independently in six thousand years.

    With the equivalent of a super-processor sigh, the thinking engine began the protocols to restore temporal flux to the pilot chamber.

    Old One Tlanxla would need to respond to this personally.

    -----

    Kuada-Boc regathered the quango and his wits and swiftly appraised the situation on the arena floor.

    Resva was lurking to his side. Ta’kul was holding back swarming greenskins from the centre of the line to as far as his mighty arms could stretch to the left. Brocnos was holding the far right with equal vigour. Meanwhile, Centra began to give ground, and the right wing began to swing back like the leaf of a gate.

    Everything was going to plan, aside from the fact that Fungus had somehow wormed his way through the otherwise solid left wing. He charged towards Kuada-Boc with an even bigger grin than usual and something glittering in his hand. The skink didn’t relish the idea of engaging in close combat with a knife wielder. Not when he had his hands full of dead armadillo.

    Kuada-Boc broke back behind the swinging gate and Fungus veered to intercept. This did little to buy him more time, but it got the goblin out of Resva’s path toward the opening.

    Even in slow motion, the distance between the combatants evaporated faster than Kuada-Boc had anticipated. He could do nothing more than spear the quango in the correct general direction just as Fungus reached him with his blade arm extended.

    Kuada-Boc’s throwing claw swept through its follow-through, the arc intersecting with the trajectory of the Fungus’s thrust. The skink’s claw clamped around the goblin’s wrist and pushed it downwards, and then he threw the whole weight of his body behind his arm and drove the knife into the arena dust, breaking the blade off at the hilt. Kuada-Boc converted his downward drive into a shoulder barge which battered the goblin back towards the ground.

    Time was still moving at bastiladon-pace, so Kuada-Boc took advantage of the lazy opportunity to line up his elbow with the goblin’s jingle sacks just as the pair hit the ground together. There was a long drawn out squeal which brought more warmth to Kuada-Boc’s cold heart than all of the summer sun-basks of his life combined.

    The skink released his grip on the disabled greenskin’s wrist, smoothly dropped into a shoulder roll and sprang to his feet just as normal time resumed again. The restored crowd noise was ear-splitting and disorientating, and it took the leader a moment to evaluate what he was seeing. It was an unattractive, embarrassing, and yet somehow compelling sight.

    It was Resva’s touch dance.

    The contest was far from over, but Kuada-Boc felt a deep confidence that his lizards had it within them to leave this Blood Dish victorious. They were spawned for this, and he was spawned to lead them.

    There was another assurance that pulsed at an almost subconscious level of his reptilian brain: Tlanxla and all of the Old Ones, lost as they may be, were surely filled with joy at the fulfilment of a major plank of their Great Plan.

    The dead armadillo had been carried to the end of a field.

    Why should they not rejoice?
     
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2016
  8. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    I don't think I have ever heard a more beautiful sentiment about driving an elbow into someone else's junk.
     
  9. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    I had to repeat the experiment several times before I could zero in on the correct terminology.
     
  10. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    That is the end of the first iteration of the story arc.

    Discussion season open!

    I'll go first.

    This story happened because of a bunch of things, including the challenge laid by @thedarkfourth in the general comments after the last short story comp.

    Lock and Load. The comment was about the relative lack of humour in the L-O fiction output compared with the cornucopia of scintillating wit on the general forum. And the rest of you guys are also amusing in a if-I'm-gonna-laugh-or-cry-why-not-laugh kind of way.

    My initial defence was "but I can't write humour into a short story - I don't have the space! (plus I'm trying to be sneaky and toilet humour will give me away)

    I believe that I have proved myself right! I can't put humour into a short story. And what sort of freak writes 15000 words on a two sentence concept just to push a few puns on their confused fellows?

    Umm....So, moving right along,


    1. That was inspiration number 1.
    2. Inspiration 2. Was the fertile but seemingly unplowed field of BloodBowl Fluff. My original plan was to write a 2 chapter set-up and then throw the description of the game itself to @discomute to write from a third party perspective - in the style of commentators of a real sporting event. I have been in PM contact with him more or less constantly for the exactly 4 weeks since the idea occurred to me - and the poor guy has had to deal with me changing the story arc every second day since then. Initially the lizards were going to be forced into a game on the day they discovered the bowl, and then it just got more elaborate. With Disco's permission I could release the actual PMs which catalogue my descent into madness my creative process (If you want that - let me know)
    3. Inspiration 3. was a challenge I set myself - I wanted to provide @tom ndege with new fiction every day for a week to ease his Deutsche-Bahn rides through hell on the way to college. I ended up doing 16 chapters in 24 days - and at no time was I more than two chapters ahead in my planning. You want proof? Go back and see how many edits I did on the first few posts.
    4. Inspiration 4. When I realised that the Old One's were going to get messed up in this, I asked if @Oldblood Itzahuan would write a section in the style of his recent story Sunblood. He mumbled something about being on his honeymoon, so you all missed out. I tried to copy his techno geekery instead.


    After fishing for different bits of feedback, I want to go back and add some illustrations. Here is a teaser.




    Therref
    [​IMG]




    Anyhow, back to discussion: I did two experimental things with the writing and posting of the story -
    • Can anyone other than @Bowser guess what they were?
    • Were they good? Effective? Annoying?
     
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  11. thedarkfourth
    Kroxigor

    thedarkfourth Well-Known Member

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    I've been enjoying the story a lot and impressed at its incredible pace. The humour works really well! It's very pratchett, which of course I love - particularly the book unseen academicals which is about wizards, orcs and assorted other characters learning a new ballgame based closely on a real world sport with magical repercussions. You have a great cast of fairly well-fleshed characters, a fast, economical pace, and always a clear sense of goals, urgency and stakes, so I'm a happy bunny. :D
     
  12. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    Aieeee! The Herald of the Chaos Bunny has revealed himself!

    The twitchy-nosed one's coming is nigh!



    Another guessing game: can you figure out where I decided that I had literally lost the plot (or the pace, anyway) and started to run with cheap character gags instead of story?
     
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  13. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    I would guess about here! Also I want to but a print of this! This is genuinely awesome!

    Also I would definitely be curious about the conversation between @discomute and Bob on this.
     
    Last edited: Mar 22, 2016
  14. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    Also congrats to @Oldblood Itzahuan When you get back though we want a chapter for this out of you!
     
  15. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    That's a great book! I need to find and read that one again! But I agree this Blood Dish is quick and clever and always feels on point. A lot of fun to read and looking forward to more.
     
  16. Otzi'mandias
    Ripperdactil

    Otzi'mandias Well-Known Member

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    I really enjoyed it. It does appear very Pratchett in style, and the humour is both amusing and realistic. The only small thing I noticed was that several of the characters seem to talk in the same way - your way of talking. If you can, try to change them all so they all sound different.I struggle with this (I actually can't do it yet) but I thought that you might appreciate a bit of constructive criticism.

    Oh,I am also very curious about this follow up to the story, as third person detached fiction is very much my style of writing. No pressure, @discomute!







     
  17. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    You all lose, ha ha.

    Experiment one might have helped the pacing. I ended each chapter post about three paragraphs before the logical place to put a chapter break. This is different to ending on a cliffhanger.

    My reasoning was, the target audience won't get to read this straight through. Doing it this way might give more of a sense of continuity from day to day.

    Advantages were that I could choose where to end a day - on a good line, rather than on a somewhat tapering away resolution. (Cos I suck at tight endings).

    Disadvantage was that sometimes they ended on truly awesome lines and felt like that was the tie up, and the start of the next day was weak. Also, I think this would die badly if I was releasing chapters a week apart.

    Did the chapter chops work for you?. Did they annoy?


    And where I realised the story was dying was on the Eternity Stairs in chapter 7. I think the eye spy thing was very lame, but I needed to keep everyone involved while just walking through a scene - the backdrop was the thing that needed to be seen.
     
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  18. Bowser
    Slann

    Bowser Third Spawning

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    While the I spy thing was a bit lame, it did give me a sense of where the characters were while still giving a wonderful panoramic view of the location. It's a tough thing to keep your characters in the scene while trying to describe the landscape, without having a visual medium. So in that aspect I think the mindless chatter worked really well.
     
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  19. spawning of Bob
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    spawning of Bob Well-Known Member

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    What about the chapter chops?
     
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  20. tom ndege
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    tom ndege Well-Known Member

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    The whole thing was really entertaining and a good fun to read (as long as I was able to read it on the train... Broke my phone about half the way so wasn't able to do so for some days :'( )
    The chapter chops were excellent making me looking forward to the next piece to read and often making me giggle or even laugh loudly on my way back home.
    Will write a bit more later... Holydays from college meaning that I have to push the lawn mower through some peoples gardens to get some extra money... So busy times for me at the moment. So could be Friday till I give a more adequate feedback.
     
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