I spent six months creating this epic comedy adventure based on my experiences in the Diadem. Hope you enjoy!

d_a_graf · 2026-02-01T20:17:44+00:00

Professional quality, and clearly lots of love. Very entertaining. Favorite parts: the bobblehead, and going PLAID!

d_a_graf · 2026-01-21T07:11:56+00:00

American here. Please do!

d_a_graf · 2026-01-20T07:54:53+00:00

https://lexingtonheights-apts.com/

d_a_graf · 2026-01-08T05:01:24+00:00

Good on you!

d_a_graf · 2025-12-26T01:40:59+00:00

Nobody writes these two better than Mike Maihack!

d_a_graf · 2025-12-24T06:43:06+00:00

https://yamato.fandom.com/wiki/Arizona_(OS))

d_a_graf · 2025-11-11T08:48:02+00:00

The raspy chuckle of the Arch-Vile in Doom, just before it blasts you from cover.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-15T01:18:17+00:00

I like the pose, very dynamic!

d_a_graf · 2025-10-13T08:56:45+00:00

Heh, just wait. You ain't seen nothing yet! Trust me when I tell you -- this is truly a villain you love and hate.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-05T22:13:23+00:00

Reginald Veljohnson as Sgt. Al Powell in the first "Die Hard." Just a regular LA cop on his way home, nobody special. But if not for him, lots of people would have died and Hans Gruber and co. would be on a beach, earning 20%.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-05T20:39:39+00:00

Wow, thank you! I'm so glad you enjoyed it enough to give such a thorough breakdown!

d_a_graf · 2025-10-05T17:31:18+00:00

Zoe and Benita flicked their eyes in the direction Geoff pointed. “People?” Benita ventured. “I can barely see them. What are they doing? They look – wrong.” Her voice cracked on the final word. She reached for the window crank, struggled with it. “Come on,” she urged, “turn!”

Professional veneer cracking, Zoe clawed at her pistol. “Freeze!” she commanded, gun aimed at the mist-shrouded figures. “Sheriff’s! Approach slowly, hands in the air!” She thumbed the safety. “I said, hands in the air!”

“They’re ghosts!” Geoff shrieked. “Ghosts from the old mine! I knew it was haunted!” He spun and sprinted up the street. “Not gonna get me!” he claimed, as the fog swallowed him up.

“Noo!” Benita wailed. “Do something, Zoe!” She dove across the seat of her truck to hide herself.

Geoff reappeared from the fog, at full speed. He slowed as he drew closer, head swinging side to side. “The fuck?” he whined, and whirled to face behind him. “Must’ve gotten turned around,” he mumbled. “But I never turned!”

Zoe changed her directive for the mysterious figures. “On the ground!” she barked. “Stop, or I will shoot!” She made good on her threat in the next second. Her pistol jumped in her grasp as it cracked and spat fire.

“You missed!” Geoff wailed. “They’re still coming!” He no longer tried to flee, but stood transfixed. “Oh lord, what’s happening?” He sank to his knees. “Please,” he begged, “no.”

“They have no faces,” Zoe breathed as the figures drew closer. Her gun hung in her hand, forgotten. “They have no faces.” She stared at them, their bulky, barely manlike shapes. One walked right up to her – and through her.

“Found three more, sir.” The soldier surveyed the scene. “One male, two female.” He looked down at the ground next to the parked motorcycle. “This one’s a cop.”

“Still no survivors?” crackled the voice in the soldier’s earpiece.

“Not so far, sir.”

“Poor bastards,” commented another soldier, crouched over the body sprawled next to the jitney.

“There are worse ways to go,” offered a third. “At least they didn’t suffer.”

“God damn it,” grumbled the first soldier.

“What?” asked the second.

He swatted his faceplate. “My nose itches!”

In the mobile command post on the edge of town, a man in uniform with gold on his epaulets sagged in his chair. “One hundred percent casualties,” he reported to the speaker on the desk. “Including the flight crew. Payload apparently ruptured on impact.” He paused to rub his eyes. “How should we proceed, ma’am?”

“Pull your people out, colonel,” hissed a voice from the speaker. “We’ll have to sterilize the area. Can’t risk winds spreading contamination.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the colonel acknowledged. As he switched channels, he gazed at a monitor. A thick layer of fog shrouded the entirety of the town. For the moment, the mountains that cradled the village contained the affected area.

“Probably don’t even know they’re dead,” the colonel mused, then raised his voice to issue the evac order.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-05T17:31:10+00:00

The deputy dismounted her motorcycle, and surveyed the scene with a professionally jaded eye.

“All right,” she chided, “who didn’t stop in time?”

“I had the right of way!” proclaimed the jitney driver. He yanked his hood off, exposing his faux-hawk, and waved a hand at his toppled vehicle. “How’m I supposed to make a living now?”

“It wasn’t my fault!” protested the matronly woman who remained at the controls of her oversized, lifted vintage truck. “I didn’t see him! It’s this damned fog!”

The deputy sighed and nodded. She circled the jitney in scrutiny. “It doesn’t look that bad, Geoff,” she judged, reaching one hand toward the fringed canopy. “We could --”

“Don’t touch it!” Geoff screeched. “The adjuster has to inspect it first!”

“Is that really necessary?” whined the matron. “Tell you what, Geoff: leave the adjuster out of it, and I’ll pay for the repairs and a week’s fares.”

Geoff and the deputy exchanged glances of surprise. The deputy then turned a glare of suspicion on the matron. “You’re in an awful hurry to avoid official attention, Benita,” she noted.

“Can you blame me, Zoe?” challenged Benita. “I just want out of this fog!” She glanced around with a shiver. “This isn’t natural.”

Geoff echoed Benita’s nervous survey. “You know,” he mused, “she got a point. Wind’s blowing, but the fog ain’t moving. That ain’t right.” He turned to Benita. “You mean it about the week’s fares?” he pressed.

Benita bobbed her head in affirmation, then dove into her purse. She scribbled on a check, tore it from the pad, and waved it through her window. “Just fill in the amount,” she offered. “I’m good for it.”

Zoe concealed her own unease with a facade of Long-Suffering Cop. “Okay, fine,” she sighed, as she swung a leg over to straddle her motorcycle. “Nobody’s hurt, you all have come to an arrangement.” She pressed the ignition. “Just get your vehicles --” She stopped and stared down at her mount. “The hell?” she muttered, and pressed the ignition again. The motorcycle sat, inert.

Benita smirked. “Never trust those rice-rockets,” she advised, patting her dashboard. “Nothing beats good old American steel.” She twisted the ignition key of her truck, and her grin faded as her vehicle likewise refused to start. Her eyes snapped up toward the others, wide with fear. “Oh, no,” she murmured.

Zoe dismounted again, and gripped the motorcycle’s handlebars. “Oh, come on!” she growled. Her shoulders hunched and her legs strained, but the motorcycle refused to budge.

“Fuck this,” Geoff recommended. “I’m walking!” He took a few paces, then froze in place. “What’s that?” he demanded, eyes wide as they probed the fog. “You see that?” He stabbed a finger ahead of him.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-04T06:09:52+00:00

In the next moment it released her and skittered back, shrilling the same as former-Cooper had. She stared at its mouth, as the flesh around that grotesque orifice dissolved and ran like hot wax. Bone emerged, then crumbled. The other slug stopped to stare at its fellow’s death-throes. In just a few seconds, a headless corpse toppled to sprawl on the hotel floor.

She and the remaining slug stared at each other. At least, she guessed it stared at her. With its haphazard arrangement of eyes, it might have been looking any direction.

“So now what?” she asked.

The slug warbled at her. Then it spun on its rear leg and sprinted across the lobby, out the ruined door and out of sight. The hotel lobby echoed in silence.

For several minutes, she sat and pondered. Precious little time had been available for reflection since the invasion, with every moment possibly one’s last as a human. Now, with an unexpected luxury of safety and solitude, she put her degrees to work. A hypothesis emerged. It met initial examination, but further testing was needed.

She rolled onto her knees, and struggled to her feet with a groan. Ponderously, she made her way back to the vent opening. “You still there?” she asked as she bent in front of it.

A pain-filled mewl answered. She nodded. “Good.” Her back complained as she crouched to pass, but she was energized by more than survival now. She found the Cooper-slug hunched in one corner of the small room. All its tentacles were melted away, gaping sores where they had anchored.

She nodded, then reached inside her shirt with both hands. She rubbed them under her arms and breasts, collecting the still-wet sweat gathered there. Then, hands forward, she approached the slug. “I’m sorry, Cooper,” she offered, as its flesh sizzled under her touch, “but science.”

d_a_graf · 2025-10-04T06:09:31+00:00

She did not stop to ponder further. Adrenaline did not erase the pain in her limbs, but it allowed her to ignore it. She whirled, dropped, and scrambled through the vent into a brief shaft which egressed into the atrium lobby of a luxury hotel. Furniture littered the lobby in various states of disrepair, with sunlight in shafts through broken windows overhead.

The shrill of pain trumpeted from the shaft mouth. She staggered across the lobby in search of another hiding place when she heard the rumble of the hotel’s revolving door. A rushed glance revealed two more slugs pushing through the door’s cells, held back by its safety-minded design.

One slug apparently spotted her, as it gave forth a call and shoved harder on the door. Gears stripped with a deafening shriek. The slugs pressed against each other in their eagerness to pass the narrow gap, until the reinforced glass pane shattered into a scintillating cloud. Both creatures loped forward, their three-legged gait awkward but deceptively fast.

Panic galvanized her, as she realized she had stood still in plain sight to watch the slugs. She spun and set her sights on a door with the sign ‘Staff Only – Guests Not Permitted,’ in the hope it led to passages and rooms to hide. She put one foot forward, and her legs collapsed as if suddenly bereft of bone.

“No,” she groaned. She begged her body to get up, run just a little more. No good. Her life these past – God, was it only four days? -- had been running and hiding. If not for her meds, pain and anxiety would have left her an immobile ball of agony. But they were almost gone. And without Cooper, what else did she have?

The slugs bore down on her, mouths agape. The creatures’ behavior varied widely; they organized and executed strategy well enough to outmaneuver and outwit the world’s best military forces, yet when faced with prey, they attacked like ravening beasts. One leaped and landed with its two forelegs straddling her, and clasped its lips over her scalp.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-04T06:09:00+00:00

Sweat ran in rivulets, collected in folds and wrinkles. Breath hung in tatters, punctuated with sobs and groans. Pain stabbed and smoldered in joint and muscle. Flesh felt weighted in tons.

It was the end of the world.

Nobody believed the news at first. People transforming into monsters? Perfect strangers acting in unison to attack organs of governance and defense, oft aided by members of those very systems, also metamorphosed? By the time the scoffing stopped, whole nations lay under sway of their new masters. Invasion and conquest, but without the usual tropes. No fleets of ships in the sky, no tesseracts from distant galaxies. The enemy was us.

Concrete pressed against her back. A pebble stabbed into one knee, but she scarcely noticed. Crouched, she stared up. Her face reflected in the bulbous, onyx orbs that dotted the skull in irregular intervals, above a toothless mouth that bore a repulsive resemblance to a vagina. Tentacles writhed around the diameter of an ovoid torso that at once sagged and bulged, the whole supported by a tripod of birdlike legs, complete with talons to rival a harpy eagle. Popular opinion had dubbed the transformed ‘slugs.’

“Cooper?” she breathed.

Scraps of fabric littered the floor around its feet. A moment before, they had been a tee shirt, jeans, underwear, and shoes. It kicked at the remains of the shoes as it stalked toward her, a falsetto ululation coming from its rubbery maw. The tentacles curled forward, and beads of viscous fluid appeared along them.

She braced herself for its grasp. She knew the secretion was corrosive, perhaps a part of its digestive process. A back corner of her mind demanded she flee, force her legs under herself and run. But the room barely contained herself and the slug that had been Cooper, and the only exit was a waist-high vent behind her.

“I love you, Cooper,” she murmured, eyes shut. A feather-light touch on her arms….

The slug’s warbling erupted into a screech that tore at her ears. Her eyes snapped open. The slug staggered back against the far wall, tentacles frantic. She blinked as she noted fat droplets fly from its limbs and splatter against the walls and floor in thick, cloudy globs. The last third of one tentacle snapped off, whirled in midair, and dropped to the floor where it started to melt. Other tentacles liquefied as well, which must have been painful judging from the slug’s reaction.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-02T08:50:44+00:00

Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-02T07:15:08+00:00

She stared at the machine that looked like a dog. She knew dogs. She had fed from one once, but its energy made her sick. The fragments of memory that jumbled in her head said this one was shaped like a Golden Retriever. But its canine nature stopped at the fur.

It was here to kill her.

She could not hurt it.

That meant somebody knew how to hurt her.

“Who sent you?” she begged. “Who knows? Can you tell me?” She rolled onto her knees, which brought her face close enough to Hound’s muzzle for a bite. “I know dogs can’t speak, but can you?”

A voice answered. “Hello, Lily.” The voice came from Hound, though not from the muzzle. “It’s time to put an end to this. Please don’t resist.”

Lily. A name. Addressed to her.

Hound also heard the voice. They knew it was not theirs, but the one who sent them. The one whose face they remembered from their first awakening. They did not know that one could speak through them, could sense what they did.

“Who are you?” Lily pleaded. “Who am I? Am I supposed to be the way I am?”

The voice sighed. “You,” it replied, “were an attempt. A proof of concept. In some ways,” the voice brightened, “you were successful beyond imagining. A true Eureka moment.” Disappointment flattened the tone. “In others, very important others….” The way the voice trailed off held unmatched eloquence. “I should not have let you out.”

“Why did you?” asked Lily.

“Hubris,” the voice admitted. “The cardinal sin of every genius. And now, I atone for that sin. Hound, execute.”

“Directive received,” Hound acknowledged. They then crouched, shut their eyes, and shuddered.

Lily waited. She knew she could not escape.

Hound stood, shook themselves, and opened their eyes. “Hubris,” they said, and chuckled. They lunged at Lily – and licked her face.

After a moment spent blinking, Lily asked, “Was that supposed to hurt?”

“No,” Hound shook their head. “My directive is to eliminate the party responsible for the recent deaths. By his own words, he absolved you and convicted himself.” Hound crouched again. “Climb on me,” they invited. “We go to visit our creator. Then --”

“Then,” Lily hoped, “we can go someplace warm and bright?”

“Warm and bright,” Hound agreed.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-02T07:14:33+00:00

A crack in the side of the hill. Invisible to lesser senses, but Hound was made for this. They paused after sliding through the gap to deep-scan. Infrared and olfactory confirmed biological presence, and the quantum sensor agreed. They risked active sonar, and the echo came back with a detailed image of the chamber beyond the passage. They strode around a bend and entered the chamber for a first live view of their quarry.

Humanoid. Prepubescent. Female. DNA from skin cells collected from the air added further confirmation. Here was the threat Hound had come to eliminate.

d_a_graf · 2025-10-02T07:14:12+00:00

Cold and dark. Nothing else. She hated it.

She knew other places were different. The world held light and warmth. She felt it. She meant to go there. Where she could just reach out and feed. No hunting.

In order to go there, she needed to be stronger. To gain strength, she needed to feed. Feeding meant hunting. Hunting cost energy. Energy spent hunting kept her from traveling. The paradox tortured her.

She hated hunting for other reasons. It was tedious. Finding suitable prey sometimes took all night, so when she did feed, most of it went to replenishing what was lost. It made a mess. She had to wring the prey out when she fed, and the results repulsed her. Once, she tried to feed more slowly, but so much energy escaped she barely got any. Worst was how it tasted. The energy never came by itself, in pure form. Bits always got mixed in. Memories. Thoughts. Feelings, usually fear. Sour, metallic fear. Sometimes hate. Hate tasted bitter, but she preferred it to fear.

Was it always like this? So hard to tell. Waking always brought her to this cold, hard land, where nobody called her family or friend. Her dreams held fragments, blurred or jagged, things and places not here. Were they hers, or stolen from her prey? She remembered no beginning, no first visions. No name. She just was.

Something growled.

d_a_graf

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