Oh, hello! Please come in, handsome, and don’t mind the cats. But make sure you don’t step on any of them, hard as that may be considering the number currently in my “collection: you don’t want to end up like the last unfortunate fellow to darken my crooked doorway!

Whenever Greg had a day like the one he had had today, he liked to pick up a new video game. Old, new, any genre, any console (for he owned them all) - none of that mattered. Just that he had some new story, some new world, to immerse himself in, to enable him to substitute this disappointing reality for a new iteration, where the goals were clear and defined, and all effort was duly rewarded. A neat, hand-crafted universe, all contained on a disc, cartridge, or as compressed digital memory on a hard drive.

Commission for anonymous

Sequel to:

https://www.deviantart.com/smokeysis/art/CMSN-The-Stepford-W...

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Fucking brute.

That was the only thing Jim could think as his Dad pontificated on all matters of life and love while he drove them both in his beaten-up white van to the job site.

His dad cleaned septic tanks for a living, and Jim was home on summer break for college, so he had been roped (read: forced) into accompanying him to today’s job, while his Dad’s regular guy, Simon, was out sick with a stomach bug, the product of some bad beef empanadas he had had for dinner the night before.

First, he shrank. Not dramatically so – this wasn’t like Honey I Shrunk the Kids or Alice in Wonderland or anything. He was very far from Dwarf height, either. At most, he lost a foot and change in stature, enough so that his eye line was now below the picture mounted on the wall in front of him, whereas just moments before he could look directly at it without having to crane his neck back.

Oh, do I have a tale to tell you….

The final day of my life, at least as I had known it up until that point, was a Sunday, which now
seems appropriate, if not a bit ironic.

Molly walked leisurely down the paved path that snaked through the woods. It was almost dusk, and she enjoyed taking these early evening strolls after particularly hard days at work, which it certainly had been.

The flames flickered in Sid’s dull eyes, as he listened to the harsh, dying screams of the stray cat. This alley never wanted for them, fortunately, and he had plied the old tomcat with a can of old tuna he had found in a nearby dumpster, his usual method. Then he threw it in a rusted metal garbage can, doused it with gasoline, and set it alight with one of his matches.

Diego and Pablo were grateful to have finally made it to the hot springs. Too used to the warmer climate of their tropical home country, their bodies were ill-suited to the average temperatures of a place this far north. In fact, neither had felt properly warm all vacation long, not since they first got off the plane a week ago, only adding insult to injury after such a long flight. Not even cranking the heat in their shared hotel room seemed to fully eliminate the chill that had seemed to settle into their bones.

Note: this a written continuation of a comic I commissioned.

Page 1: https://www.deviantart.com/thet0wer/art/thet0wer-Comic-01-92...
Page 2: https://www.deviantart.com/thet0wer/art/thet0wer-Comic-02-92...
Page 3: https://www.deviantart.com/thet0wer/art/thet0wer-Comic-03-2-...