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Myths Illogical

A 184-post collection

Challenge #01608-D147: Repent Now...

[Name] sighed and turned back to their paperwork. In the scant few minutes they’d been talking with the other person, the paper seemed to have multiplied. It was breeding. There was a giant paperwork orgy going on right on their desk, and it was all they could do to fill out forms faster than they were produced. -- RecklessPrudence

They say paperwork is hell. They don't have the half of it. Imagine the largest offices in the world. Floor after floor of endless, uniform, windowless cubicles. Floor after floor of grey monotony. Floor after floor of filling out and shuffling paperwork from an inbox into the relevant outbox. And no potty or coffee breaks.

They have no time to look up from their work. They dare not take even a second from one paper to the other. They dare not stretch. There is no time to sigh. Their only hope is to fill in the paperwork before the next page enters their inbox. If they do not, the paper in their inbox doubles.

There is a clever device that takes the page from the bottom of the heap and juts it out to where it can be seized so that the worker can fill it out. It is not that clever, and often jams. Those in the cubicles hit the red button and grab a page from the top. They cannot afford to wait. They cannot afford to stop. They barely have time to suckle from the coffee dribbler or nibble a bite from the treats dispenser. They sit, bare-bottomed, on a hybrid of a toilet and an office chair. There is no rest.

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Challenge #01541-D080: Soured Gift

Wings are the symbol of mages, a manifestation of their powers. But magic isn't something easily accepted. People will do anything to be normal. -- YizukiKhons

They appear with the first use of magic, which can happen at any time following the day that a child first recognises that their own actions have consequences beyond themselves. Some say that their size indicates the mage's power. They are made of light, and it is not their size, which is illusory, but the luminosity

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Challenge #01538-D077: A Stay in a Haunted House

Just because something is supernatural doesn't mean it won't follow a learnable set of rules. It just means the "why" of those rules isn't bound to make logical sense. -- RecklessPrudence

It was an old house. Of course it came with a ghost. It had been a farm in the ancient days of yore, before urbanisation subdivided the land again and yet again, and it became the last house along a new street that had once been its driveway, and, simultaneously, the

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Challenge #01536-D075: Dire Times at the Dog and Duck

It was one of those places that people went to, to drink as much as possible in the shortest time. There were tiles well above head height, the floor was tiled and covered in sawdust, at shift change staff hosed it out and put down fresh sawdust. -- Anon Guest

There wasn't a menu. There weren't interesting bottles on the back shelf. There was barely a back shelf, which held a bottle of suspicious pickled eggs, which also held a pickled vermin

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Challenge #01534-D073: Wyrd Customs

"How normal is this occurrence that there's automated vocal procedures to talk about the demonic presence?" -- RecklessPrudence

This lot of magicians had graduated through technology and out the other side, never once stopping in at Global Pollution Station for a long debate about how dangerous pollution was, when you really got down to it. Shayde was impressed. Not many worlds actually noticed the long-term effects of certain technologies and decided to look at other ways to do things while the water

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Challenge #01532-D071: Unseen Flaws

"What? What is it?" "Give me a minute. I've been an idiot and I'm trying to compensate." -- RecklessPrudence

"No, no, no, no, no!" Paper snowed from its fountaining upwards. Judging by the look of things, inspiration had been going in entirely in the wrong direction. "It's all shit! It's nonsense! Rubbish! Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish..." And then Maester Kadfel fell to sobbing at her desk.

Thaldrik fielded as many pages as he could catch, and laboriously rounded up the others. Months of

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Challenge #01528-D067: World-threatening

What do they eat, anyway?

::snort:: Anything. They don't care. They're roaming, poisonous, armoured, Dark Magic-spawned garbage disposals. -- RecklessPrudence

"Dark Magic is extinct. It's been extinct for thousands of years," objected Thaldrik.

"And they've been around that long," said Maester Kadfel. "Possibly longer. It was their creation that lead to the uprising against Dark Magic and its subsequent elimination." She tapped the illustration. "For now, they seem content to remain in the calderas of Mount Seethe, and eat... whatever they find

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Challenge #01515-D054: A Good Host's Reward

Pick a second! -- Gallifreya

There's one advantage to being an early riser. Usually, it's watching some kick-ass dawns as they happen. Today, it was meeting Brutus. He's what most people call a gargoyle. I'd go into the difference between the real gargoyles, which are decorative stone waterspouts, and what people call 'gargoyles' but are actually called grotesques. Those are decorative stone building features with no inherent function.

But I wouldn't call Brutus 'grotesque'. He's kind'a pretty. Even with his stone skin

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Challenge #01514-D053: One Miserable Evening in a Dragon's Lair

http://toxixpumpkin.tumblr.com/post/100767877989

Pick one! -- Gallifreya

Of all the experiences in the multiverse, there's nothing like sprawling across the head of a friendly dragon. Alas, since this dragon was fighting a bout of the 'flu, it meant that Sam was doing the sprawling in a budgie-smuggler, and kept one hand on the fire extinguisher.

Dragons sneeze fire. And even though Bloodflight was comfy in his cave, there was still the risk of setting a few things on fire.

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Challenge #01511-D050: This House is Not Haunted

http://goddammitstacey.tumblr.com/post/155552788003 "I just turned to my housemate and said, “y’know, we’d never know if we were haunted” because we have four cats between us, so every clunk, bump, and crash gets entirely ignored and now I want a movie about a ghost becoming increasingly desperate to haunt a family but they have cats and so the poor dear goes completely ignored" -- Gallifreya

I was, once.

Nothing more than that. Simply that I was, once.

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Challenge #01508-D047: The Nature of Hell

http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/156684722295

"Due to a loophole in the system, people can escape hell and get to heaven after death. You go to hell and all you see is Satan, just sitting there playing the harmonica. Everyone left him and now he’s all alone." -- Gallifreya

Jean Paul Sartre said that hell is other people. He could not be more wrong. Though other people have their disadvantages, the true hell is loneliness. Hell was made to be vast,

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Challenge #01501-D040: Dis-possessed

"There is no room for demons, when you're already self-possessed" - Carrie Fisher -- RecklessPrudence

The demon Az'bar'bijol, once summoned, launched itself at the luckless human who was foolish enough to read its incantation out loud. And almost got the spiritual equivalent of a concussion when it was repelled by a possessing force already in residence, so to speak.

"Nice try," said the human. "But you can't do that with me. And... soon as I whip up a binding spell, you won't

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Challenge #01497-D036: Incautious Wishing

They go about their daily lives, unnoticed, but without them, things would soon fall apart. -- Anon Guest

He'd got his wish. Those Types were gone from his country. They may even be gone from the world, but he didn't really care about anything beyond the borders that didn't make him money. This encapsulated quite an amount of uncaring for the world, had he cared about that, either.

He had exactly forty-eight hours to enjoy his newly-made paradise. No man remaining in

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Challenge #01496-D035: Signal of Doom

http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/156012408168/you-live-in-a-world-of-superheroes-and "You live in a world of superheroes and supervillains. Each person gets three marks, one on their right hand to indicate their future arch nemesis, one on their left hand to indicate their side kick/partner, and one on their chest to indicate their powers and insignia. Today your marks show up and they’re… Shocking, to say the least." (same prompt but this time, all the symbols are identical. If you did that the

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Challenge #01495-D034: Super Signals

http://writing-prompt-s.tumblr.com/post/156012408168/you-live-in-a-world-of-superheroes-and "You live in a world of superheroes and supervillains. Each person gets three marks, one on their right hand to indicate their future arch nemesis, one on their left hand to indicate their side kick/partner, and one on their chest to indicate their powers and insignia. Today your marks show up and they’re… Shocking, to say the least." -- Gallifreya

Everyone gets their Wakening at a different time. The symbol on the chest

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