Each week, our Writing Promp Guru, Comicfan, brings to you two (or more) prompts in the Writing Prompt forum, a subforum in the Writing Workshops forum.

Writing Prompts are exercises for your writing muscles. They can help you get through writers block (creative prompts) or train specific muscles (technical prompts). They can even focus your writing muscles into new thought patterns (challenge prompts).

Here are a few things to keep in mind to keep everyone safe, sane, and successful.

This week the prompts are:

#104 -- Life never has been easy on you. You thought nothing else could possibly upset you until you walked into the store and met your double. What sort of life do they lead?

 

#105 – (first line) "And just what the hell am I supposed to do with this?

Last week, one of the prompts #98 received an interesting response:

The prompt --

Here is the situation - Five years ago your life was falling apart around your ears. With no real direction left you sign on to take part in a government experiment which will place you and 9 other people into lock up with no communication with the rest of the world until the time is up. Tomorrow the doors will automatically unlock allowing all of you out. What has it been like? Who are the others? What is the project you have been working on?

The post, submitted by Cia --

They'd lied to us.

We weren't working on an experiment. We were the experiment.

I was shivering in my bed, the measly blanket that covered me not nearly enough to keep me warm. The effects of what they had done had changed others more than me but the sadistic bastards enjoyed torturing me more for some reason. Maybe it was because I'd killed one of them. I'd fought so hard for the first year.

I didn't have much fight left in me.

I had lost my savings and my family. With only days left on the lease of my cardboard box of an apartment in the slums, I'd desperately scanned the ads. I'd seen one for scientific service that seemed promising.

They had said we'd be locked in the dome for five years. It was supposed to be an ecological study to see if humans could adapt to a new planetary environment. There had been a new planet discovered just outside of populated space and there were apparently creatures on 'MC-214-XXV' that were slaughtering the human troops they sent against them. We were supposed to be alone, no outside contact.

That was just another lie.

They wanted the planet. On my world what they wanted, they got. The nameless faces had stood behind thick clearplaz watching the experiments they performed on me. Four of the others had died immediately. Two had gone insane and damaged themselves so severely the doctors had put them down.

Not before they dissected them though. They made the four of us still living watch while they did it. That was when I attacked, biting and clawing at the guard who had twisted my arm behind my back and faced me forward with a punishing grip on my neck. He'd died in convulsions, blood leaking out of his ears, nose, and eyes.

I'd never killed anyone before.

I was fiercely glad he was dead but they made me pay for it. I don't know how I survived the things they did to me. Somehow, I still felt sane but I wasn't sure if I really was. The other three had disappeared and I tried to listen, to find out what happened to them. I wanted to help them, even when I couldn't help myself. It was all for nothing though. I wasn't going to be alive much longer.

I had discovered that if I held my hand against the metal door of my six by eight cell that I could feel the vibrations of anyone speaking in the corridor. Somehow I could understand what the vibrations were; could translate them into human words. The most interesting I'd heard before yesterday was whispered talk of an original specimen.

One of the aliens that so confounded them was here.

The five years the other nine desperate souls and I originally agreed to were up. But they had never planned to let us go. Not on Earth at least.

I'd learned we were on a ship heading for MC-214-XXV. It had taken five years to get here. I was going to be sent down the planet. The experiments they'd done on me were an attempt to alter my DNA to mimic the aliens, to change me into someone that could survive and spy for them.

Now that I knew what was going to happen I pulled out the one secret I'd managed to keep. I palmed a small sharp point I'd made from a screw that I had dug out of my bed, slipping it under the waistband of my pants. It wasn't much, but I'd rubbed the three inch bolt into what could be a lethal weapon.

I had a feeling I'd need it.

However, I didn't expect the dart that came through the small slot in my door. I slumped to the bed, unable to move. They hadn't darted me in a very long time. They had liked to see me struggle before I'd lost the will to do so.

"You're about to go on a little adventure," the head doctor said. His smirk made me sick to my stomach.

I tried to struggle when they stripped me but my limps were completely numb. One guard held up my screw and the doctor laughed. "What do you think you were going to do with that, hmm? Kill yourself? Don't worry... the odds are that the inhabitants of MC-214-XXV will be more than willing to oblige." He drew up a silvery blue liquid into a huge syringe and then injected it into my neck.

The pain was overwhelming. It felt like acid eating into my body; the pain and pressure in my eyes and head felt like they were going to explode.

I whimpered. "Why?" I forced out, panting at the effort that speaking took.

"Science requires sacrifice," the doctor winked at me, "and you're the sacrifice."

I tried to struggle as the guards carried me out of my cell and through the freezing corridors that made up the bowels of the ship. A secondary reaction to the liquid injected in me seemed to make me jerk spastically. I was dumped onto a metal slab and webbing came down over me. My head slumped to the side.

I gasped. It was like looking at a man straight out of a vampire novel. He was pale white and his skin was covered in blue marks that traced all over his body, possibly designs or his veins, I didn't know. But...

He looked like me!

Or I looked like him. I wasn't sure which.

His eyes were dark, almost solid black as he stared back at me. His mouth dropped open and I could see that he had fangs just like I did.

The doctor leaned over me. "Don't worry, he can't kill you. His life depends on yours. The nanos we put in you are the antidote to a poison we injected him with. Without your saliva he'll die. You should live long enough to gather some interesting intelligence that we can use to eradicate the disgusting creatures.

"Remember, science is sacrifice. You will die for the greater good of mankind."

I wanted to smash his smug, sanctimonious face.

I was naked, weaponless, and locked on a small shuttle with an alien. We were about to be sent down to the alien's planet; a place where no human had ever lived more than a single hour.

I was so dead. Maybe that would be a good thing. Dead meant no more pain, right?

The trip down to the planet was rough. My head slammed against the metal slab and after that it was all a blur.

The web around me retracted when we hit the ground and I slid off the slab to lie in a boneless heap on the floor.

The alien was on me in seconds. A humming sound reached my ears but whatever changes they had made to my DNA allowed me to translate sound vibrations in the air converted his words as well.

"What are you?"

"I'm a man," I said.

"You don't smell like a man. You don't look like a man." The disgust was palpable in his tone. Claws on his hands dug into my shoulders as he stared down at me. "You understand me. You have my isitziu." One claw traced the blue lines that covered my chest.

I didn't have claws. "They did it to me."

"The men in the machine in the sky?"

I nodded. I didn't struggle. "Are you going to kill me now?"

"No. I am not stupid. I understood that nelho's words. If I kill you, I die too. If I die, my people would suffer. So... we will keep you alive I think."

"We?"

The question was unnecessary after just a moment. Hot, humid air swirled around our naked bodies, warming my chilled flesh. I heard the sound of the inner capsule door being opened and men swarmed inside. The small space was soon packed.

"Seral, you are alive!" I heard one cry. His hum was so high pitched it was almost painful.

The babble was too much for me to translate after that. Seral, if that was his name, did not get off me. Blue blood began to seep from the wounds in my shoulders. Between that injury, the near starvation I'd been kept in, and the effects of the fluid they'd injected into me, I was done.

I was beginning to fade but not before I managed to hear Seral order the men to bind me and carry me with them to their city.

"We shall study this creature."

I wasn't going to die. I was going to be locked back up in another cage.

Despair filled me.

I was going to become another experiment, for the aliens this time. What would they do to me?

“Kill me now," I whimpered, "please just kill me."

"Oh no, little tziu, I won't do that." His fingers traced the marks on my skin again. "I will discover everything that is in you and then we will see just who you are to me. The nelho have given us a gift that has great worth, one they can't even begin to imagine."

 

As you can see... this can be a great way to write some really fun short fiction. So, get to the prompts and maybe we will see you up here next week!