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How about we just use an online RNG to determine the winner in the case of ties? That way no need for a neutral arbiter and we can maybe get 4 stories each time which is more fun for reading AND for voting.

I believe there are plenty of 100% transparent RNGs online, or we could use a method that I have used in the past for forum games: Everyone picks a number and whoever gets the closest to the first number drawn in a chosen major lottery wins. The FWC I mean., They don't win the lottery.

Oh, and yes, Sini... My choice of the name "Indrid" in the final bit was a semi-deliberate homage to The Mothman Prophesies (also a book about going over to the "other side", of madness or reality, or both) ... I mistyped "Ingrid" as "Indrid" (probably because I've read that book like 20 times) and then just decided to keep it as I liked it, and thanks for noticing... Will certainly be cut from the full novella version if it ever happens.

Oh, and to clear things up a bit about Stupot's and my story.

Sini mentioned that she thought the cutoff point between Stu's "original story" and my writing the first time was when Lucy pushed off the tunnel rim into the sea, and then my "purplish" style took over.

This was not the case. For starters, nothing was prewritten from a story Stu had started on in the past.

It was only the premise of a game he started to make years ago where a person enters a launderette and finds a tunnel through the back of a washing machine drum that we used. And, in the game, the tunnel did not lead into a fantasy world.

Actually Stu did not know that it would lead into that ocean world when he wrote the first page and passed it off to me. His fist installment ended with Lucy going into the tunnel.

I took over and wrote the part about her finding the ocean world at the other end (in fact there was a weird flipped-gravity thing that I wrote where she looked down and saw the clouds and the waves were coming in from above but we decided to cut that in the final edit).

I wrote up to the point where she crawled back to the door and couldn't open it.

Then Stu amazed me with the raincoat-thing's entrance and all that happened next until Lucy "Embraced the darkness"

And then, yes, it was me for a bit after that, until Lucy was told to put her hand out by the voice from the boat. By this point I was deliberately writing in a weird off-kilter tone to make the "other side" seem otherworldly (hopefully).

Anyway, the initial switch in tone was because of that deliberate choice on my part, not because it was the first time we had tag-teamed the story.

Everything after that is kind of a blur as time was running out and stuff was getting written on the fly. We didn't know if there would be an extension even though Sini had hinted at maybe wanting one and we certainly didn't want to be the ones asking for an extension given the surprise project we were keeping secret to spring on you guys.

It was a rush! One of my favorite times ever writing in the contest. So much fucking fun!

Sini, I just got finished reading your story and the first thing I will say is that it was beautifully written. The next thing I will say is that I felt, during a lot of it, that I'd walked into an epic fantasy movie halfway through and was at the part where there was mostly a lot of nicely shot scenes of a character struggling through forests and caves and getting all messed up, and others blasting in a tunnel, and all that went on for quite some time, and then there was a peak of intense interest concerning the interaction between the prince and his male lover.

And I was suddenly intrigued by the premise that the prince was not interested in a female bride, even though his lover might be on a part-time basis, which was very amusing. I had just thought the characters and story had found its hook for me, and wanted to spend more time with them, but then it was back to slow panning shots of physical difficulties and massing armies, and I felt lost again.

The geography of the situation made sense a bit to me, but there was a bit too much getting to the conflict without a lot of character interaction to hold my interest through the "second act".

Then, we get to the battle, and the dialog between the two male lovers was amazing! That one line in particular! I'm sure you know which one. That line, and the prince's response, was great. A big Game of Thrones vibe.

Then there was an epic battle involving weather control which just fell flat for me again. Everything was so vague. I wanted to hear about individual soldiers being hit by lightning and their armour arcing the bolts to other soldiers, and their comrades screaming as they were thrown away from the blasts and then having to climb over the fallen dead. And that might all sound like I wanna see gore, but that's not what I mean. Well, it is a bit, but mostly I mean that I wanted an eye on the battlefield and know what was happening down there instead of just sizzles and the smell of burnt flesh.

If there's gonna be an epic battle then there has to be an epic battle.

Then, I liked the scene where the prince and his lover find her with the nuclear launch codes in her hand about to twist the key, and talk her down...

And then some old lady I've never met before wraps things up.

Sorry if I sound a bit harsh, but I did find it difficult to keep a grasp on what was going on. I think the scale of the story might have been too large for it to fit within a FWC format. If it were a novel, with more of the interesting character interactions that held my attention, then I think the concept could be awesome.

It just couldn't sustain my attention in this format through most of the runtime, sorry.

And I know you wrote it all in a rush, and in conclusion I think it is an excellent proposal for a 150 page novel.

Mine and Stupot's story suffers from the same factors, and your feedback pretty much mentioned all the flaws that we ourselves discussed but then ran out of time to do anything about.

We are actually thinking to revise our story into a co-written novella-length project. Who knows if that will happen or not, but yours would be an excellent book as well I feel, given a bit more focus on the characters and spreading the world-building over a lot more narrative real estate.

We are in a weird situation here for voting now.

I would suggest that none of the participants vote this time, as, no matter how the votes are split, we all have to automatically vote for the other story, rendering our votes meaningless.

Once voting opens, I'm going to message a few people like I did a few times before and try to get some outside votes, although both stories are very long this time, so that might come to nothing.

In the event that no outsiders vote, I would suggest that Baron decides the outcome.

So, here's what happened:

Stupot and myself talked a bit about the theme and came to the conclusion that neither of us could think of anything to write about for it.

Then I remembered a text-based game that Stu had only completed the initial premise of, but that had always stuck with me.

I suggested that he could continue that story here. He told me that he didn't really have the time or inspiration, so I came up with an idea for a project. A project that would also fit the theme of "The Other Side"

We would write the story together: We would each write as much as we could of the story, and then save the collab file, and then the "other side" would write the next part, however much they could.

This was done completely blind for each of us.

It was so much fun being completely unprepared for what the next jump-off point of the story would be the next time the update from the other arrived.

After a certain "chapter", Stupot did create an AI graphic about a plot-point I was already aware of by that time, and so we turned that into the "cover art" for our story.

We also decided that there would be no clear delineation between which blocks either of us wrote, but there are probably tells.

At the end of our efforts, I actually DID do the final edit, but only changed the stuff that Stu and I agreed on AFTER the blind back-and-forth writing was done. Only fixed some of the glaring continuity issues and had to kill one of my darlings... for the greater good!

Enough rambling. Here is it:
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Seven straight days of torrential rain had forced her hand. Surprisingly, she was alone in the launderette – a dire, badly-lit room located between two other failing local businesses of ambiguous nature.

Three front-loaded washing machines ran along the west wall, opposite the entrance, and two large dryers occupied the northern end. She tossed the last of the wet towels into a dryer, dropped some coins into the slot and started the machine.

Now, she was at a loss. The rain had only worsened, so there was no going back outside. A wobbly wire magazine rack held just one item, an ancient, damp, sun-bleached copy of Fly-Fishing Magazine. Lucy had been fishing once and had hated it but picked up the crumbling rag anyway and flicked through it.

A piece of paper fell out onto the floor. She picked it up:

"Surrender to the dark"

Suitably creeped out, she hastily plugged the scrap of paper with the scrawled message back into the magazine for the next person to find and decided to occupy herself by checking the other machines.

The first was empty. She put her head inside and said a short "Hello", briefly enjoying the muffled reverberation in her ears.

The second machine contained a child's sock. Lucy considered pocketing it but quickly realized how messed up that would be and left it alone.

The third washing machine had an "Out of Order" sign on it. She opened it, anyway, put her head inside and said "Hello?"
This time, her voice echoed for longer, as though she were shouting into a deep well.

It took her a moment to notice that the back wall of the drum was missing. In fact, the cylindrical stainless-steel interior of it seemed to extend way beyond where the back wall of the launderette could possibly be.
"Fuck it," she said. And climbed in.

After a crawl of twenty or so meters through the crenulated silvery tunnel, all the while telling herself that all this was unnatural and to just back her butt up and get out of the washing machine and bail, Lucy popped her head out from the other end, her curiosity getting the better of her, as always.
She looked out and up first of all and spat out, "FUCK ME!"

Above her, through the darkness, she saw roiling, stormy clouds and, within them, bursts here and there of electrical stutters that suggested lightning, although she could hear no thunder.

She glanced down quickly and saw shallow swells of waves on the ocean below, slapping against the jagged, stoney cliff that stretched up from where the metal tunnel broke through it. The waves were hitting so close below her that she felt and tasted their salty spray.

"Um." Lucy said, her stomach clenching. "Fuck this noise." She started to back up through the impossible washing machine tunnel. Twenty meters later, her butt felt glass against it. She craned back over each shoulder, but there was not enough space over either to see.

It took Lucy quite the minute or two to perform the ducking, rolling maneuver that got her facing the other way.

Then the horrific reality hit. The door of the washing machine had closed and locked behind her. There was no latch on the inside. Screaming, she bashed he palms, and then her fists, against the concave glass but it didn't budge and she had no purchase behind her to enable a solid hit without sliding backwards along the tunnel's slick stainless-steel surface.

The more she struggled to find a favorable position for each bash the further she slid away from the glass.

The only thing left to do was yell for help. Her own piercing scream reverberated and ricocheted around the tunnel long after it had left her mouth.

Just then, she noticed movement from the other side of the glass. The door to the launderette was opening. Thank goodness, I'm saved, she thought. She pounded on the glass but it only made a dull, damp sound, barely audible even on this side of the window. The launderette door slid open and Lucy could see that it was still raining outside. Then someone moved in, (a man, most likely, but it was impossible to tell) wearing a black raincoat with the hood up and dripping from the rain.

She tried hitting the glass again, but it was futile. She knew she had to scream again but was too awkwardly positioned to plug her ears.

"Oh well. here goes. Three, Two, One."

She closed her eyes and screamed again, louder than before, and instantly regretted it. Ears ringing, she opened her eyes and looked to see if she had been heard.

But the man was gone. At least, he was no longer in view. Perhaps he had gone round to the corner where the fishing magazine was.
She remembered the magazine, and the note that had slipped out of it just a short time ago. Surrender to the dark. Could that message have been meant for her?

She became aware of a change in the light from outside the washing machine. A wave of unease washed over her, and she positioned herself to better see through the glass.

Then, the window went dark. Hands thudded against both sides of the glass from the outside, a form obscuring the launderette's already dim lighting. She scrambled back in terror. Whatever it was, it was no man. It had no face, just a darkness hanging beneath its dripping hood. The washing machine door clicked and swung open and the being reached inside with a dripping wet arm. Lucy edged herself backwards down the tunnel as the creature climbed menacingly into the entrance. She became aware of the sound of lapping waves behind her as her feet found the end the tunnel, where it opened out into the unknown. The creature was shuffling quickly towards her now and she had no choice.

Surrender to the dark.

Without looking behind her, she pushed against the end of the tunnel and plunged backwards into the darkness below.

Lucy, within the dead-on five feet on her frame, felt her stomach contents flop over with what felt like an audible thud-slosh as she fell, and then gasped in shock. The coldness of the water was so intense that the gasp drew a gulp of it down her windpipe and she started to choke and splutter, her brow, nose and pursed-out lips barely above the waterline.

A shallow wave washed over her face, coming in so unannounced that she breathed in more of the brine through her nostrils before remembering to hold her breath. She panicked and sank. Now her sinuses were burning as well as her lungs. She waved her arms by her sides and scissored her legs and barely broke the surface again. One more downward flap of her arms pushed her head and neck above the threat of waves, and she drew in a huge breath of air.

Light swept across her wet face for an instant and then moved on. The beam had come from somewhere out over the insane ocean behind the washing machine but, her eyes now also stinging from the salt water, she couldn't see what direction it had come from, nor from how far away. There was a noise different to the slopping slash of the waves against the rocky cliff but she hadn't noticed it formally yet even though it was...

A hand grabbed her shoulder from behind in a grip that hurt!

She whipped her head around and looked back, the mysterious beam of light sweeping across the unvisited side of her face upon its return track. Her eyes were still readjusting from the first sweep but had recovered enough to see the raincoated 'man' now fully out of the tunnel. 'He' was in an inverted position and was gripping onto the jagged rocky cliff above the briefly-illuminated silver tunnel with his feet. But they weren't feet. They were something like a cross between taloned reptile claws and suction cups.  His still fully-raincoated arm stretched out over the gap of at least three meters to where its gloved, but normal five-fingered hand, gripped her shoulder like a vice.

Of a magnitude of at least three compared to the previous ones, a larger wave slapped against the back of Lucy's ginger cornrow braids, crashing around her screaming mouth as the chug-chug noise that had been steadily growing below her perception grew louder.

As Lucy felt herself being dragged back through the freezing water towards the spider-clinging raincoat thing, she whipped her head around back out to sea to where this new chug-chug-CHUG-CHUG sound was becoming impossible to ignore.

The beam of light that had only brushed her briefly twice before, now suddenly swung abruptly and stabbed her right in the eyes.

Everything was glare, sparkling off the turbulent wake she was leaving behind her as she was painfully reeled in by the raincoat thing.

The gray, wooden bow of a boat showed through beneath the starburst of brightness that occupied most of her vision.

A bare, human hand reached out through the glare, almost within grasping reach and a gravelly voice yelled down, "TAKE MY HAND, MISSY!"

Lucy reached up and snatched at the large, weathered hand and missed. She was still being dragged backwards. It was all she could do to keep her head above water as she flailed out again but the hand seemed further away than before.
"COME ON, MISSY!"

One more time, she lunged with everything she had and the massive hand grabbed her by the wrist, wasting no time in tugging her up the side of the boat. She felt as though she was being pulled apart – the rope in a tug o' war between the raincoat beast and the man on the boat.

Just then, she became aware of flashes of green whistling overhead and the grip from behind her loosened and broke. She was dragged unceremoniously over the side of the vessel and looked up to see a row of men launching balls of green light toward the thing on the cliff. She flopped herself over to see the raincoated horror pathetically cowering from the onslaught and just like that it disappeared in an explosion of water that rained down on both boat and ocean, and Lucy collapsed to the deck.

* * *

When she came around, Lucy found herself in a small bunk. She was dry and she was warm. Her vision was blurry and her body ached, but she was okay.
"We thought ye' wurra goner, there, missy?"

"W-what..."

"Name's Matthew. Captain Matthew. Crew calls me Dad, but you don't have to."

She looked past the captain and blinked a few times to clear her vision. Gawping back at her was the rest of the crew. She became self-conscious and checked her state of dress. She was wearing someone else's clothes.

"Go an' do some work, will you, boys."

"Yes Dad," they said in unison and scattered.

"I run a tight ship," he chuckled to himself, "in both senses o' the word. As you can see it's just me an' the boys, and not a lot of space. You'll be 'ard-pressed  t' stay here with us."

"Where is here?"

"If I kn'w the answer to tha', I wou'n't be on this fuckin' boat."

He handed her a metallic cup of warm water.

"It's tea... 'cept we've no teabags... I s'ppose you've got questions?"

"That man..."

"Aye, he's one o' them water demons. Not t' only one, mind. So, if he's after you, then so are the rest o' them."

"Didn't you guys kill him or something?"

"Back there? No such luck, missy. We jus' turn't him back to water... temporarily, mind. Be back, he will."

Lucy shook her head. "I must be dreaming."

"Well, you can try sleeping ag'in and see if y' wake up back in yer own bed. Y' won't. We've all tried. But you need the rest anyway, missy. I'll leave y' alone for a bit."

She was asleep before her head hit the bundle of dried seaweed that served as a pillow.

***
 
Lucy's nostrils awoke first, the silver studs in the divots of both twitching. The salty scent of something frying forced her eyes open. Her stomach growled. She hadn't eaten anything since her dinner of cup noodles at her shitty little one-room flat on Regminster Avenue in the equally shitty London borough of Wandsworth.

It felt absurd that she was even thinking about what had been her reality maybe 24 hours ago, probably many more but maybe slightly less, when the dried monstrosity of what looked like a cross between a puffer fish and a shark swung above her head between two hefty beams of the bulkhead her bunk lay against. It was what passed for decoration for whoever actually owned this bed, she imagined.
 
Lucy threw her legs off the side of the bunk, reached out and grabbed hold of one of the wooden pillars running down the middle of the narrow crew quarters, and groaned and farted as she hefted herself into a standing position.

The boat tipped sideways, and she instantly fell down. Being young, only in her early twenties, the fall wasn't as big an issue as trying to stand up again proved to be. Her muscles, acquainted as they were with easy city life and only getting a workout really on a weekend here and there in the mosh pits of underground nightclubs, were screaming at her from her recent dip in the soup and the tug o' war that had followed.

Calves and thighs singing an overture, Lucy bumped her way side-to-side up the rickety staircase, more a ladder, that led up from the crew quarters. She emerged through a somewhat rectangular hole in the tented aft deck that the crew of the boat used as their everything-else area when they weren't sleeping or fishing.

Around the iron hotplate over its pit of glowing coals sat... well, everyone. Dawn was not here just yet, but she would be arriving over the flat horizon of the sea presently by Lucy's bleary-eyed estimation.

The low, rolling swells of the now cobalt-hued sea might have been rocking the boat gently enough for the seaworthy crew to feel as if they were on solid ground as they tonged fried hunks of fish flesh onto their plates, but one of them had to grab Lucy's unacclimatized elbow and steady her as she stumbled her butt down into an available rough-hewn bucket-like seat.

Grins of amusement passed between the men. Lucy found a plate stacked with glistening white bricks of fish meat suddenly in her hand, and she grabbed one and stuffed it into her hungry mouth. As she mashed her teeth on the huge mouth-filling morsel between them, not wanting to waste a single second until it was down in her stomach, the taste reminded her of some kind of bizarre fusion restaurant blend of tuna, pencil-tip lead, and eyedrops.
 
It shouldn't have worked for her, but either she was so hungry that it did, or it was just actually good. She was in no position to tell.

They let her get half the fare into her before Captain Matthew, AKA 'Dad', said, "Well, Missy, does y' mind tellin' us y'r name or will we jus' be callin' you Missy from now 'til sunset be comin' ar'und ag'in?"

Lucy swallowed the gulp of tunapencildrops fish currently in her mouth and replied, "It's Lucy... ummm, thanks for askiiiing?"

The man on Lucy's right, brown-haired, wiry-framed, mid-forties, started laughing first, spitting out clods of fish with several more sandwiched between the gaps in his black, rotted teeth.

He wheezed out the last of his laughter and then suddenly pulled his brow down into a fake serious frown, held out his hand, and deeply spoke, "Junior Senior, at your command m'lady!"

The other men flew into explosive laughter.

Lucy, shocked by his mockery, yelled, "LOOK! I'M NOT REALLY IN THE MOOD FOR YOUR HORSESHI...". And then she surprised even herself by suddenly breaking down in tears and hitching and sobbing, "Lu-lu-look I-huh-huh-I cu-cu-can't e-e-even..."

Junior Senior put his arm around her heaving shoulders and said, gently, "It's okay, get it all out, Lucy. We've all been through it". And Lucy did let it all out, spurred on by this stranger's kind tone, tipping her plate and spilling the rest of her breakfast onto the deck.

Sometime later, after the PTSD reaction and introductions were over with, Lucy decided it was time to ask the really important questions, "How did you all get here?"

"Same way you did; Through that stupid out-of-order washing machine." said the blonde youngster known as 'Petey Pete'.

"But, that's stupid." said Lucy. "That machine can't have been out of order for... wait. How long have you people been here for even?!"

"Well, baby, I went into that machine in the August of 1967." drawled the obviously American hippie called 'Dave'. "Ask me the next one. I think I know what it'sa gonna be."

Dave's baby-blue eyes sparkled in his baby-fresh thirty-something face as she started to stammer out the question but then he asked it for her in his smooth-as-silk voice, "Why haven't we just gone back out through the tunnel, right?"

Lucy nodded and Captain Matthew took back the conversation saying, "Y' could'v ask'd that to 'Beautiful Bob', but he ain't w'th us any l'nger. Ya see, he did indeed make it out thr'gh yon tunnel."

"Why didn't he go for help or..." blurted Lucy.

"Well, he on'ly got two'r'tree blocks b'fore he saw that ev'ryone was a raincoat thing, or some ev'n bigg'r 'r worse 'n ways. T' world back there isn't wha' it was b'fore we came here."

Lucy, her eyes tearing up, said, "Then, what is... what d-did... whu-why have...". And then she broke down in sobs again, her crying eyes against the dampening knees of her new, rough linen trousers.

The final man of the crew, 'Lance Neighbor' by introduction, spoke up and said, "The night Beautiful Bob came back out of that fucking tunnel with half-a-dozen bottles of whiskey stuffed in under his clothes, we all drank ourselves silly. It had been our one hope of getting back. The next morning, we found him hanging from one of the beams over your bunk."

Lucy, her face drawn and shocky, said, "It's not my bunk."

'Dad' said, "T'is now."

"But, didn't you say there wasn't enough space?"

"Aye, there isn't. But something tells me you're gonna need our help... Or, more to the point, we're gonna need yours."

"What makes you say that?"

"Just a feeling, missy."

Lucy became acutely aware of some exchanges of glances among the men. Captain Matthew lowered his eyes and grimaced.

"What... What is it?"

"Ahh, it's nothing, Lucy. Really."

"Will somebody tell me what's going on?" She looked around for someone to answer her.

"Okay. Here's the thing." The captain re-established eye contact and sighed, "Some o' the boys were talking. And... they noticed a certain resemblance between yerself and Bob... And I agree, tru'betold. The ginger hair, the freckles."

Lucy's face went ashen, and Matthew leaned in towards her. "It's true, isn't it. That sly old dog. He never mentioned a daughter."

"Niece." Lucy corrected. "My Uncle Robert vanished when I was kid. We all thought his wife Aunty Hayley had killed him. But there was never any proof, and she always insisted he had just gone out to do some errands and never came back."

"Laundry, by any chance?"

Lucy shrugged her shoulders, "I guess so."

"Well, it's a good job blasphemy doesn't exist in here, because JESUS CHRIST."

"I knew it!" said one of the crew. The room became abuzz with excitement, though what exactly they had to be excited about was unclear.
 
"Petey Pete. Grab Bob's box for me, won't you?"

"Aye-aye, Dad," said the young man as he hopped over to a wooden chest and lifted the lid. He dug out a small box and handed it to the captain, who handed it in turn to Lucy.

"Maybe you can make sense o'these."

She opened the small container, revealing a dozen or so slips of paper. As she flipped over the first one, she immediately recognized it. It was the same as the piece of paper back in the launderette. The same paper, same ink, same handwriting, though the messages were different.

Escape this tortured realm.

No solace here.

Return to the beautiful place.

"They're all like that." Dad said. "He clearly missed home. We all do."

Lucy shook her head. "No, I don't think so. I didn't know my uncle well, but I know he had problems. He was a miserable alcoholic and his wife hated him."

"Aye, he loved the bottle. But the notes don't lie, missy. He wanted out of this place."

"No, you're reading them wrong. I found another note just like this, back... up there. He must have written them when he went back. For him, this was the "beautiful place", home was the "tortured realm".

"Wait. Let me get this right? Are ye saying... Are ye saying he lied about not being able to go back? The place being full of those raincoat demons an' suchlike?"

"Either that, or it was the alcohol talking."

The earlier buzz of conversation had subsided, replaced by a heavy silence.

Then, one of the crew spoke up. "So... does that mean we can go home?"

"I think we should try," said Lucy.

No sooner had she said that, than a piercing wail of a whistle tore through the air. Everyone's heads turned and the men sprang into action. Lucy stared out across the ocean, open-mouthed, at what looked like a vast tsunami heading towards them. But it was something else.

A voice shouted "It's them! Hundreds of them!"

"They've come for you, Missy! Let's get home!"

'Dad' turned away from Lucy, and started his speedy, pigeon-toed climb up the steep ladder from the aft deck of the tugboat-sized vessel to the narrow captain's bridge with its driftwood-like, asymmetrically peaked roof above.

While still halfway up, he shouted back, "JS! Man th' rudd'r! Pete 'n' Dave, t' battle st'tions!". As Junior Senior started to rush to the aft, and Petey Pete and Dave stood up and kicked their heels back hard on rusty metal pedals at the base of their log-head seats, Captain Matthews shuffled his feet around his orange plastic swivel-chair, and put a hand on its back so as to turn it enough so he could dump his butt in.
 
Then he allowed gravity and the chair's pole support to swivel him forward enough to grab the rusty lever on his left with one hand and grind it all the way forward, his other on the boat's wheel, yanking it hard to the left.

The log seats that Petey Pete and Dave had sat upon spun over, along with squarish sections of the deck's boards, and were replaced by bulbous, blackish iron cannon-looking things, both pointing the wrong way from the incoming scrambling mass of what had seemed a tsunami at first to Lucy's eyes.
She stood up and said, "FUUUU—Shit! What should I do, Dad?!"

Captain Matthews heard her over the growing chug-chug-chug of the boat's struggling, suddenly awoken motor, and yelled back over his shoulder, "Hang'n T'GHT!"  as he pushed down on the half-dome of the rusty iron button beneath his foot.

There was a "CLACK" and then the boat's motor said, "chug-chUG-CHUG". And then "CHUG-CHUG-CHUGCHUGCHUG!" from belowdecks.

Lucy barely had time to grab hold of one of the tent's guy lines before the boat started to swing in a tight, frothing circle, Junior Senior gritting his face at the aft rudder from the force his bulging biceps were under.

The chittering, howling, black front of the incoming wave of insanity started to build up upon itself from the rear, growing ever-taller as even larger and more malformed insect-slug-pistoned things crested and built upon the initial swell.

Even more suspiciously insane and bulky forms were on their own way up from behind the tsunami, the multi-facetted lighthouse-eyes atop their rippling silhouettes opening and slicing beams of orange light in spinning, narrow cones, when the boat's cannons finally faced the horizon-spanning cliff of enemies, and Petey Pete and Dave opened fire.

WHUFF-WHUFF-WHUFF went the dual cannons. Green orbs fled from their maws in high arcs over the ocean and into and over the growing wave.
 
"AIM F'R 'TS BASE!" yelled Dad down from the boat's bridge, and his two best gunners obeyed. The green shells, reminding Lucy of tracer-bullet footage she had seen in World War 2 documentaries, exploded in glowing plumes of mushroom-clouds at the base of the approaching wave and started to carve out a divot in it as the boat pulled around again close to the cliff.

Lucy, swaying, barely able to keep her feet under her, saw the stainless-steel of the curved roof of the washing-machine tunnel reflecting back the bursts of light from the boat's cannons.

The arc of slain enemies at the base of the wave had piled up under the pumping, green onslaught from Petey Pete and Dave, but now stalled in its growth, as more spiderish reaching legs and bulbous tumbling heads and other worse forms poured over their fallen brethren.

The aft of the boat bumped up against the rocks and Junior Senior, his face wracked with navigation effort yelled out, "GO! GO! GO, GET OUT!"

Junior Senior leapt over onto the rockface, dragging Lucy with him. As they scrambled up the rocks, she turned her head to see Dave and Petey Pete leaping over onto the base of the cliff too. Captain Matthew was waving furiously at them to keep going while he manned the cannons as best he could on his own, remaining on board to provide cover for Lucy and his boys.

The tsunami of insanity had wrapped around the vessel and had them surrounded in an tightening semicircle, but Dad was fending them off with perfect precision. Without a word, the men seemed to have encircled Lucy in a protective shield and it was then that she realized the water demons were only interested in her. As they clambered up the cliff, the crew formed an ever-tighter guard around her and the green streaks of light pumping out from the boat kept the enclosing ring of monsters at bay until finally they reached the lip of the washing machine tunnel.
The men immediately all knew their next assignment. Getting Lucy into the hole safely.

They heaved her up and she grabbed the bottom rim, then Petey climbed on Dave's shoulders and got beneath Lucy's legs just enough to lift her into the hole.

She managed to shift her body into a position to help Petey Pete come up in behind her, but something was wrong. An eerie rumbling sound began to emerge from below. The men had gone silent and the air was still. She peered down to the ocean's surface to see the men all doing likewise. All at once, a huge mountain of dissolving demon bodies erupted in a giant column of water which seemed to linger in the air momentarily before falling, smashing against the cliff face, taking Dave, Junior Senior, and Petey, tumbling down, screaming, with it.

But there was no time to mourn her new friends. Out through the tunnel's opening she saw a gloved, dripping hand reach up and come down, gripping the rim, and the familiar waterproof material of its raincoated sleeve.

The faceless demon effortlessly pulled itself up and climbed into the tube. It made no noise as it crawled toward her, forcing her back towards the launderette end of the tunnel. She reached the inside of the washing machine door, pushing against it and pounding on it fruitlessly. She heard the sound of the demon's raincoat brushing against the inside of the tunnel now and knew it was close.

Then, in the door of the washing machine, she saw a green flash. It took her a second to realize it was the reflection of one of Dad's strange orbs. And in the quiet pause that followed, the orb entered the tunnel, bounced around down its length, and ripped straight through the raincoat demon, instantly liquefying it. Lucy braced herself against the curling wave of briny, surging water, but it simply bustled around her harmlessly and smashed into the washing machine door at the end of the tunnel, sending it wide open.

Lucy wasted no time in scrambling through, as a flurry of new orbs were sent into the tunnel, destroying it completely in a cacophony of explosions and the crashing downs of collapsing metal and rock, blocking the tunnel and sealing it forever.

And then there was silence again.

***

Months passed. Lucy had mentioned her ordeal to no one. They wouldn't have believed her if she had. She sat in her shitty bedsit, surrounded by empty bottles and mounds of clothes piled up against the wall. She was going to have to do another load of laundry. But that could wait. She would need whiskey first. Which meant facing 'them'. They were everywhere now – working in the liquor store, stalking her in the street, knocking on the door claiming to be her concerned parents. But she knew what they really were.

In a moment of clarity, she became conscious of the pain in her fingers and she looked down and saw their red-raw tips and bloodied nails.
"No Solace here," she muttered to herself. "Escape this tortured realm."
She opened the door to her bedsit and left.

***

Back in the launderette, Lucy makes a beeline for the third washing machine and swings the door open. Inside she sees the shiny, brand-new drum of it, still with its intact back wall.

"Fuck." She slams the door and hefts the machine away from the wall for dozenth or so time.

"Return to the beautiful place," she says, and continues where she left off yesterday, scratching at the drywall behind the washing machine.

After yet another long interval for Lucy of time and fingernail destruction, the door of the launderette slides open, and a plump middle-aged woman ducks in out of the ongoing downpour.

***

"Oi! What you doin' there?!" yelled Indrid, her wrinkled brow drawing down in anger. These crackhead youngsters pissed the fuck out of her! She'd seen enough on the telly about their "marry-you-ana", as she said it, and their other drugs and was sick to death of it all.

Lucy glanced up over the edge of the pulled-out washing machine and made eye contact with Indrid.

The look of desperation in the frazzle-haired young lady's eyes made Indrid back off a step and a half.

Then the red-haired vandal stood up, dashed around the washing machine, and scampered past Indrid, the last vestige of the scamp's frizzy, gone-to-seed cornrows almost brushing her shoulder.

"What the actual EF?!" said Indrid, pulling her glance back from over her shoulder and setting her attention back squarely on the laundry task at hand.

She loaded her laundry into the second machine down the wall as she suspected that only the worst kind of unsanitary people in a hurry would use the first.
 
She set the machine running and then looked around. There was just a wobbly wire magazine rack in one corner that held only some awful magazine about the horrors of humans exploiting animals.

So "NOPE!" on that!

She wandered over to the only other thing of interest: the machine that the scratching junkie had pulled away from the wall.

Indrid ducked her head around to glance behind it, and her eyes widened.

The junkie had indeed been clawing away at the drywall here. But, in a perfect circle around the scratch marks, seemingly embedded through the wall, was the end of what looked like a washing machine drum. But not the normal, firm-edged end of one. The rim of the gleaming metal drum looked like it was putting out a crown of silvery tendrils all around its circumference, each like a vine reaching out for sunlight.

At the middle of the ring of stainless steel, Indrid saw that the junkie had broken through the plaster of the launderette's wall in a roughly triangular hole.

Sounds were coming through, faint wet sounds.

She crouched down and put her ear against the hole. Yes, it sounded like wet, slapping sounds, like maybe the wet hands of someone rapidly crawling on metal.

The sounds stopped just shy of the hole.

Indrid turned her head so that her eye was now looking through the triangular gap.

She screamed.

...

Awesome! Something in the works!

Just got the chance to watch the replay of the awards. Well-deserved wins in most categories!

And then, came along mine... and YOU MOTHERFUCKERS had me crying my ass off at the stuff that was being said onstage and off about me...

Thanks you all SO MUCH for these feelings that I will never forget!

Love this community above and beyond all other online nonsense!

HUGZ!

Thank you so much for the award!

I couldn't attend this year, but will be watching the replay later today!

Something is crossing over here as well...

I can't say I remember "The Last Deal", unfortunately. So many stories over the years! Link?

Whoops, it was called "One Last Deal".

Here's the link:

https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/competitions-activities/fortnightly-writing-competition-faustian-bargain-results/msg636564815/#msg636564815

Cheers, Sini, for the feedback. Glad you could understand basically the whole story, despite the black-holes drones being confusing. Will work on that better as I wrote this on the fly (pun intended).

The ending is a callback to my story "The Last Deal" written many years ago.

I intend to revise and collect a bunch of my stories from the FWC into a compilation book titled "Spare Bones" and hopefully publish it.

This is one part of my God/Devil trilogy consisting of "The Last Deal", "Daring the Devil", and now this one. The ending probably makes a lot more sense if the stories are read back-to-back.

> Lick the glass

Is this over? WHAM?

THE ENCORE OF ULTRAMAX SIX


Galaxies wheeled above the stadium, the dome over it magnifying every star in their clusters' spiral arms to brilliant pinpoints. The night sky above the planet Megamus 45-h was amplified visually to the max by the dome's optics, perhaps even more so than the amping-up of the upcoming audio performance that the backstage technicians were twisting every last dial into place for to provide the ultimate rock concert experience for the five-million-strong crowd thronging before the mega-stage.

It was to be the trillion-seller band of Ultramax Six's last live performance before they retired to the luxury of the various solar systems that each of its members owned.

The crowd's stomping was actually producing significant seismic waves within the planet Megamus, and the auditory waves of their screaming voices vibrating through the stadium's dome was diverting the flight-paths of the huge clouds making up the Jigha Bats' annual migration paths. But neither of those effects were going to end up being the cause for the impending destruction of the entire universe.

Axe Lorran took the stage, his pink dreadlocked hair swishing around the fingers stomping their way across the stem of his guitar as he thrummed out the first meganotes that told the audience the band was about to rip into their hit song "Big Pulsars in the Night"

The spotlights aimed down on Styn Joth thudded on hard, in sequence above his drum-stack as his sticks flew over it, booming out the rhythm of the piece.

From either side of the smoke flowing around the drumkit platform appeared Gorge Levell and Kvin J'ust, powering the crowd into a frenzy with their own deep bass guitar strums, synching their way into the beat.

Axe took the center-stage microphone in hand, bent it down, and screamed, "IT WAS A HAAAAARD THING TO DO..." into it in his iconic guttural voice.

The crowd went insane, the thudding feet of their thrashing vibrating through the ground, up through the stage supports, and into the band's feet, driving them on to deliver the greatest and last performance of their lives.

When Axe reached the mid-song lyric of, "AND THEN I IMPLOOOODED..." the technicians up in the hovering control booth all hit the switches in sequence that released the black holes.

Each singularity sped above the ocean-like audience, bound to the core of neutron-star matter that their hoverdrones used for both their power supplies and the upcoming effect.

An effect that had never been seen before, one that would write this concert into the annals of history, except not in the manner its producers had intended.

Lasers lit up the massive space above the audience, their green, red, and purple lines slicing through the smokey air. Each of their multitudes of beams intersected with their paired singularity drones, wrapping their lengths of pulsing light off on tight, radical courses as they warped around the black holes' densely compressed spacetime.

It was a lightshow display that the audience had never seen before. Nobody had. The multicolored laser lines crisscrossed overhead, U-turning and flashing through the night, forming into a pentagram as Axe bellowed out the line, "SHE WAAAS A GOD TO MEEEEEE".

The crowd was reaching a crescendo of frenzy, hundreds of thousands already fallen and being stomped underfoot, when it happened.

Up in the control booth, K'rr Marthunk turned to his right, caught the gaze of Loppin B'str, and said, "Shit, I warned them!"

On the Meginflux control boards before their many, many flailing hands, bars were rising fast.

Five bars to be exact, going from the expected green and leaping up through hoped-for yellow, and then onward through kurner, and fior, and rapidly approaching the much-dreaded red.

They were the five bars that monitored the experimental black hole effect creating the totally Metal pentagram that lit up the faces of the out-of-their-minds throng, flashing across them in multicolored pulses until one of the drones spun out of control and swung down and around through row D-1 all the way over to row ξ-7, gobbling up at least three hundred thousand spectators through the maw of its singularity as it went.

The band played on.

The wails of joy and terror from the audience only drove the band to further heights of performance, Axe screaming, "BUT THEEERRREEE'S NO GOD TO MEEEEEEE" into the mic, head thrown back in the extasy of their last song ever, of the encore their audience had never even got to demand.

The pentagram continued to morph out of its star shape as another rogue drone split off, its wraparound orange laser light tracking it faithfully, doing a hook-around and plowing through the hovering control booth where Loppin's last words to K'rr were: "I dunno..." before both of them and the booth itself funneled into the drone's event horizon with a crush of metallic noise that hid their screams.

Now, with the control booth lost, and the loss of control in the pulsing crowd, and the band's song entering the ultravolume drum and lead guitar solo, all the remaining three drones sped off at random, two eating up the midsections of cranes supporting city-sized spotlights, one ducking out through the dome, creating a perfectly circular hole, before ducking back through on a tight about-face only meters away and causing breaking-off-iceshelf-sounding cracks to start to spread out with POPS and CREAKS.

The crowd was now 60% in terror, crushing another 15% underfoot as they tried to flee in every direction, and the remaining 25% still in the throes of oblivious rapture to the song as Axe, now lying on his back on the stage, thrusting his hips wildly up and down into the air that was starting to peel away and flow up and out through the rapidly-expanding hole in the dome, belted out, "AND GOD CAN GO FUUUCK HIIIIMSEEEELF".

That's when a roughly Texas-shaped section of the broken dome came spinning down and disintegrated Axe's thrusting body into unrecognizable chunks thrown every which way with its razor-sharp edge that would have been located somewhere around Galveston.

The band played on.

Despite the entire front section of the stage being obliterated in a semi-circle carved out of destroyed Geminite and plastered with dripping gore, and not even to mention the embedded dome section starting to tip outward in the direction of the now 75% fleeing crowd, the band played on.

The rogue drones, still feeding their closely-partnered black holes from their magnetically-sealed canisters of neutron star matter, swept around above and around the concave floor of the Megamus 45-h Event Facility Arena, their singularities gulping in air, sections of collapsing non-US-state-shaped dome segments, bits of falling spotlights, and eating holes through the stands and stampeding crowds, now at an all-time fleeing rate of 90%, and diving their voracious way into the ground and then popping back up after eating soil and rocks and, in two cases, magma.

The jagged Texan shard of the dome that had reduced the stage, and Axe Lorran, to pieces finally tipped all the way over and crushed somewhere between ten and twenty thousand people as it shattered, its victims' fronts, backs, and faces plastered against the fragments of its thick glassy surface.

The band missed a few notes as they realized this was all not just part of the show.

Two volcanic geysers erupted from the crowded ground, one within kilometers of the stage, pretty much in the center of the arena, the other much further back and to the side. The columns of glowing orange magma peaked, mushroomed out, and then poured down on thousands more of the now 96% fleeing audience, dissolving them into screaming globules of melting flesh that quickly grew quiet.

The guitarists stopped playing pretty much in unison, only Styn Joth on drums bashing out a few extra beats before also pausing and looking around.

The city-wide spotlights finally crashed all the way down from both sides, exploding in mushrooms of fire, showers of sparks, and fans of ground-splitting quakes. Thirty-something thousand more died instantly.

And then the trumpets sounded: BOOOOOUUUUM! BOOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUM!

Down from the sky they blasted, and the singularity drones suddenly froze in place, their faithful lasers still beaming on them, and then dashed through the air above the suffocating, mangled multitudes below and reassembled thusly:

One flew out directly above the drum stack recently vacated by the fleeing Styn Joth.

Another raced in a direct line away from the stage and assumed a position about 10 kilometers downrange, above the chaotic flood of humanity trying to flee.

Two buzzed out to either side, 8 kilometers apart, about 2 kilometers down from the stage.

And then the fifth, the one that had gone rouge at first when everything fell apart, flew into position at the center of the crucifix formation, right where the crossbeam would have met the upright, and then a great light flashed forth from that meeting point and God came through.

"ALL HOLD GROUND WHO REMAIN TRUE TO ME!" His Voice explodeblasted.

The fleeing audience were even more terrified by the sight of this massive, incomprehensible entity hovering under the cross of laser-light in the sky, and continued to run away in great hills over the crushed fallen beneath them.

God megaspoke, "THEN YOU HAVE CHOSEN. SO... END!!!"

And a great tide of whiteness fled from His form, booming soundlessly out over the surviving multitude and slaying them into dust, and then kept rippling out beyond the planet of Megamus 45-h in an exponentially-expanding sphere, wiping the entire universe clean out of existence, like a teacher wiping today's lesson from the chalkboard in preparation for tomorrow's.

God stood stock still in the void He had willed into unbeing. From behind him, the most beautiful voice He had ever created spoke out in shock, "What did you do to those people?!"

"WOULD YOU QUESTION *ME* THEN, LUCIFER?!" God shockwaved, glancing back over His "shoulder".

Out from behind the impossible shifting form of his creator, Lucifer flew in jagged stop-motion, still only barely existing in this new reality, and spoke thusly, "Y-you wiped them all f-from existence. All th-those souls.", from his angelic mouth.

"WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I CREATED THE WORLD?", ultrablasted God.

Lucifer looked around at the nothingness, his perfect face hanging slack with shock and said, "But, what of their souls, and their children's souls?"

"IT WAS ANOTHER FAILED EXPERIMENT. I WILL DO BETTER NEXT TIME."

"But, why, my Father?! Guide me, as I cannot understand your..."

"*I* WARNED THEM. I COMMANDED THEM TO NEVER TAKE UP MORE THAN A SINGLE PORTION OF MEAT IN ANY OF THEIR FOUR ARMS AT A SINGLE TIME, NOR EVER TO WEAR MATCHED SHOES ON ANY OF THEIR SIX FEET! BUT THEY DISOBEYED, AND MOCKED *ME* WITH THEIR BAD MUSIC AS WELL."

Lucifer, feeling at a loss for words, and the necessary existence of space and time to speak them in, still managed to get across, in his angelic voice, "My Father, I do not doubt your wisdom, but I do question your actions. You have undone all of creation. What is the ends to all this?"

God saidboomed, "IT WAS A MISTAKE TO GIVE THEM SO MANY LIMBS TO SIN WITH, AND TO CREATE SUCH A MULTITUDE OF THEM AT ONCE. THIS TIME I WILL GIVE LIFE TO ONLY ONE MAN WITH ONLY TWO ARMS AND TWO LEGS AND THEN SEE HOW IT GOES FROM THERE."

Lucifer asked, "What shall you name him, Father?"

God creationspoke, "ADAM."

Sorry, guys. Unless there's another extension of maybe another three days, I'm unlikely to be able to finish my story for this round. I currently have a paying writing editing gig and can't afford to neglect that. If not, then I'm also good with that.

Would need an extension until maybe after the weekend to get mine done.

EDIT: Ah, a bit behind the times I am. Cheers, Stu.

Got half a leg broken, the other one and a half still to go.

Oh, come on, we all know that the first thing we would do as adventure game players is light that fire and see what happens!

> LIGHT THE FIRE!!!