Doc_Heaven

Health Update

Howdy. I'm still alive, as you might've guessed.

Long story short, a mosquito got cute and dengue fucked me up.

I didn't have to go to the hospital more than two times, but it left me with little stamina and slight health complications.

I'm working on the next chapter, and I'll try to update before May at the very latest, before April at the very earliest, but there's a chance my health will take a downturn.

I'm writing as we speak, but please be patient with ...

100YoP Chapter Twenty-Nine "What a mistake. What a joy."

Farah had been kind enough to drop me off at my apartment building.

After two days of constant driving, I was beyond exhausted. Some of my bruises from the heist had yet to finish healing, and I could swear my bones creaked when I moved. I tried to put on a brave face when I nodded to my neighbors, who expressed joy at my health and a hope that this wouldn’t happen again.

I assured them it wouldn’t then shoved past them.

As the elevator slowly struggled upwards, I glared...

100YoP Chapter Twenty-Eight "I turned up the music and looked away."

“AAAAAAALL BYYYYY MYYYY-SEEEEEELF!” I sang, as loudly and as off-tune as possible, along with the radio which I’d just turned to max volume.

Farah, who’d been sleeping on the seat next to me, startled awake with a snort. She looked around, spotted the empty food wrapper on her lap, then saw me singing my heart out like I was trying to win a contest.

She glared at me for a while as I crooned,...

Wired Bone: Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

Michael sighed with relief.

Now that they had left arid sands behind in favor of dry dirt, the air was turning cooler. Soon, they would be surrounded and shadowed by flora. In his mind, it was worth the threat of fauna.

He’d missed seeing green in the horizon; the little trees that interrupted Third York’s sidewalks weren’t enough by a long shot. The area around El Paso had still been recovering from the new dust bowl when he’d left it...

Wired Bone: Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

After a while, John, Chris and Moss got bored of playing futbol and came over to fetch Luke and retry their attempts at making him feel better.

They found him sitting next to Sawyer, eagerly talking her ear off about an article he’d read about genetically-modified pets becoming more common in lower-income households, now that they’d become passéwith rich people. Sawyer seemed a bit lost, but was smiling a bit while Luke talked. He woul...

Wired Bone: Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

It was about three hours later when the Council meeting ended.

The matter of adopting Kingston Hill’s research was revisited and argued multiple times during the meeting, once a topic was exhausted, but they always ended coming back to the same result.

Houses Sanguine, Aurum and Asclepius could not be dissuaded from their path, and neither could their supporters. They were determined to break the code and participate in Dark Science.

Zero...

Wired Bone: Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

The Head Councilman’s office was in the borough of Gilgamesh, as the previous Head Councilman — the original Head Councilman — had decreed. The main Council Chambers were there as well, but on the other side of it, closer to the coast and what used to be New York, now known as the haunted district of Gilgamesh.

This let Zero looked out of the window and wonder at the sight of the city below. As a test subject of only fourteen months of ...

Wired Bone: Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

Consciousness arrived with no merciful transition. One moment there was the darkness of peaceful, dreamless slumber, and the next moment Lucas was awake with the sticky feeling of dry blood on his face and a certainty that he was going to go to hell when he died.

He was Catholic, so that last part was nothing unusual.

“Ugh.”

“Shuddup,” John muttered from beside him, still half-asleep.

They were both lying side-by-side on Joh...

Wired Bone notice

Did some restructuring of the story, nothing major, but updates should happen more often now that I'm not making 8k words per chapter on average.

Wired Bone: Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

There was an abomination against good sense standing outside the window.

Quadruped with wings, it had the head and wings of a pigeon, but the body and grubby paws of a possum, all tied together in grey fur and feathers that reflected the light in greens and purples, with bits of black fur-feathers around its beady black eyes. It was framed by the early morning sun, and would have looked majestic if one ignored the fact that it was filthy disease-carr...

Wired Bone: Chapter Six

Chapter Six

“Well,” said Crane. “Shit.”

That summarized the situation pretty well, in Luke's opinion.

Devonte Crane was a man in his forties. Black-skinned, bald and clean shaven at all times. He was tall and lithe, though the few occasions that Lucas had seen him shirtless had shown a rather impressive musculature that came from years of exercise.

At that moment, he’d been wearing a loose shirt under a jean jacket with its sleeves rolled up,...

Wired Bone: Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Three minutes and forty seconds later, Doctor Phan and Zero went their separate ways. The good doctor had to report his progress to his superiors, meaning Zero had the rest of the day to go about his business.

The Academy was large.

Large enough that the building and its surrounding campus occupied 12% of Third York borough of Odysseus. Granted, this district was mostly natural, consisting of little but farmland, the Academy’s campus and vast ...

Wired Bone: Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Gibson Heights, to the unprepared, was a nightmare that bordered on the Escher-esque.

The DeRose apartment was the only actual living space in their building’s thirty-fourth floor. Everything else had fallen apart or been turned into a business. Just outside Lucas’ door was a ramen shop, opposite to a thrift shop and next to a tattoo and piercing parlor. Everything else was uninhabitable like a foreign planet.

Lucas moved out and towards the...

Wired Bone: Chapter Three

Chapter Three

The world had been made untamed, left wild and scarred.

The road the caravan crossed was unstable and shattered, a line of concrete put together from what had remained after the tungsten rain had ended. The terrain surrounding it was nothing but sand and craters, silica bent into odd glass formations that bent out and reached up like the fossilized fingers of the Devil.

As Michael looked out, one hand on top of the steering wheel and the other ...

Wired Bone: Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The light, filtered through the fluids inside the glass tubes that ran throughout the room, dyed the room in a deep red glow. They ran across the walls and just under the ceiling, barely leaving room for the lamp lights.

Though at first glance the positioning of them appeared random, Zero’s experienced eyes tracked the way they all connected to the Thought Alternator, a block of mental at the end of the room.

Hundreds of wires expanded from it....

Wired Bone: Chapter One

Chapter One

24 Hours Earlier:

Twelve-year-old Lucas DeRose woke up to the ringing of his alarm clock.

With trained motions, he immediately slammed his hand down on the device before he fully woke up, then laid completely still in bed, avoiding any motions that might cause creaking from the old springs under him.

His sleep-addled mind barely managed to process what his ears provided, but he scrounged up enough working neurons to deduct ...

Wired Bone: Prologue

The bodies were cold, and they had been for quite a while.

The crowds of onlookers, originally just a smattering of children watching from across the street — eyes wide, expressions blank and knees drawn up to the chest — had evolved into most of the neighborhood finally approaching the three corpses that had been there since around twenty past midnight.

Several police officers were already standing around, keeping order past the yellow line some industrious soul had already p...

Scraps of Flesh: Chapter 1

24 Hours Earlier:

My alarm clock woke me up at eight thirty in the morning, half an hour before my mother woke up.

As was my routine, I immediately turned off the alarm and waited with an ear open in case I heard the creaking of mom getting out of bed. Once I was satisfied that I wasn’t going to hear anything, I got outta bed.

As quietly as I could, I went under my bed and removed a shoebox that was hiding a hole in the wall. Reaching inside, I pulled out ...

Scraps of Flesh: Prologue

The bodies were cold, and they had been for quite a while.

What had previously been a collection of school kids watching from across the street — eyes wide, expressions blank and knees drawn up to the chest — had evolved into most of the neighborhood finally approaching the corpse that had been there since around twenty past midnight.

Several officers were standing outside the yellow lines someone had already produced, facing away from the body and keeping an eye on the popula...

100YoP Chapter Twenty-Seven "I can do loud."

When Billy, Farah and Yua all burst into Alice’s clinic, they found her sewing up a gash that cut diagonally across my chest, having just finished with Steph. Cass was already there, sitting in the corner, fuming and doing her best to not distract Alice as she paced around, frowning deeply and crossing her arms.

The clinic I’d bought and funded for Alice was spacious, well-staffed and supplied, and very quite hidden. Which was only natural, since it was a back-alley clinic for gangs...

100YoP Chapter Twenty-six "Well... Shit."

The windows were fogged up, the driver’s seat was inclined all the way back, a song was playing through the speaker, and the lights of the city could be seen through the windshield, as the car was parked just outside of Gotham, overlooking it from a popular spot for couples.

All of these factors were ignored by Cass and I in favor of each other’s company.

Hands roaming under clothes, mouths pressed tight...

100YoP Chapter Twenty-five "Young Billy"

They were six when they met.

But the firs

100YoP Chapter Twenty-four "I feel alright."

It wasn’t a long wait. I’d barely had to struggle for a minute that felt like an hour before Batman, flanked by Nightwing and Robin, showed up in front of me again.

I was leaning my full weight against the wall, using my Stick ‘Em powers to stay more or less upright while I waited. The surprise from them using their grappling hooks to show up again so soon made me slide down a bit, but I stopped myself and corrected in time for them to walk up to me.

“Re— 2022-09-17 15:56:15 +0000 UTC View Post