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  • #4052
    TracyTracy
    Participant

      “Did you have to make such a scene!” Yannosh hissed into the phone. “You were noticed!”

      The Indian butler looked furtively over his shoulder, but there was no sign of Mr Asparagus leaving the hotel bar yet.

      “Yes, yes, I know they’re calling it a dust devil but….”

      Hearing someone approaching Yannosh quickly pocketed the phone, but it was only the chambermaid, Finnbjörg.

      “Góðan dag herra, er allt í lagi?” she asked politely, and then added, ““क्या सब ठीक है? मैंने सुना है कि आप धूल शैतान का उल्लेख?”

      Yannosh was taken aback. How many languages did this island bumpkin speak?

      #4047
      Jib
      Participant

        Back at her desk after a crash course at zumba with the Chinese team, Connie was sorting her e-mails (meaning sending them to trash). Nothing fancy, nothing catchy, nothing to grab her attention span for more than a minute.

        The noise of the open space was making her feel drowsy. Maybe a coffee would help her wake up, or maybe if something could happen to stir the pot. Connie deleted a few more e-mails to show the others that she was a busy reporter before leaving her desk.
        Passing by the desks of her colleagues, Connie looked surreptitiously at their computer screens and saw that everyone was playing the busy game. It was sad to recognize that good news (meaning bad news) were hard to come by nowadays.

        In times like these, she had to resist the tentation to create her own news, it was not that kind of press. But still toying with the idea and making up some outrageous stories with her team was a way to make time fly away more quickly. Once, Hilda had even reused one of the titles for a real stories that sadly happened shortly after she had made it up.
        Rumour had it that Hilda’s great grand mother was a gypsy and could do palm reading. The gran even used palm tree leaves to do her reading when there was nobody, you just had to cut the leave in the shape of the person you wanted to read the future and she would tell you all about them. She was good.
        “It runs in the family,” Hilda had said. “It’s helpful to be at the right place at the right time.” And for sure she was the most prolific reporter of the agency.
        Connie sure would have used some of Hilda’s medium inner sight to know when something would happen.

        She made herself a cappuccino and with the milk drew the face of Al Pacino. Many years at a press agency and you learn a few tricks to impress your friends.
        She heard the slow and uneven pace of sweet old Sophie behind her. She sighed, she didn’t want to have to answer another of her dumb questions about the future. If Hilda could read bits of the future, Sophie was always thirsty about it. Maybe that’s why Hilda was more often in the field and not so often at her desk.

        Connie turned and almost dropped her cappuccino as the old lady handed her a Fedex envelop.
        “Sorry,” said sweet old Sophie, “That just arrived for you. I wonder what it is.”
        “I’m sure you do,” muttered Connie.
        “It’s from Santa Claus,” said the old lady with a conniving smile.
        Connie looked at the old lady, with a forced smile. Was insanity a cause to get rid of one of your employee ? She took the package with one hand. Heavier than she had expected. When she saw the address, she couldn’t believe it was real. The sender’s and city’s names were certainly fake. Jesus Carpenter, Santa Claus, AZ
        Sophie was still there, looking at Connie with a big smile.
        “What are you waiting for ?” the reporter asked.
        “Aren’t you opening it?”

        Connie considered opening the package, but the avidity on the old face was making her uncomfortable. “Nope,” she said. With her cappuccino and the package she went back to her desk. Sweet Sophie was still looking at her with that greedy smile on her face. Connie shivered and shook her head. It was obvious, the old tramp was mad.
        She touched the package, trying to guess what was inside. As no convincing guess presented itself in her mind, she stripped it open. There was an iPhone 5 SE with 64Gb memory in it, two plane tickets for Keflavik in Iceland, and a note.
        ‘If you want a good story prepare your suitcase. Bring Sweet Sophie with you. We’ll contact you once you are there.’

        Connie thought of a joke. She checked the package and no matter how many times she looked it was still her name. She looked toward the cafeteria and she shuddered. Sweet Sophie was still looking at Connie with that strange smile, as if she knew. Or as if she had sent the package herself, the reporter thought.
        “Someone knows where Hilda is ? I need to talk to Hilda.”

        #4045
        TracyTracy
        Participant

          “She aint been right since she covered that emotion show thing, has she?” remarked Flanigan, pushing the broom along with his arthritic bony fingers, and jerking his head in Connie’s direction.

          “Bloody ridiculous if you ask me, asking for trouble,” replied the young trainee janitor, Godwin. “I could have told her, it’ll come to no good tampering with mother natures emotions,” he added, wiping a tear from his eye.

          “Steady on, what are you crying for? Pull yourself together, boy, and go and clean them toilets.”

          Godwin gave Flanigan a withering look, and stomped off towards the lavatories, sniffing loudly.

          #4040
          TracyTracy
          Participant

            The phone rang, putting paid to Hilda’s intention of going back to sleep. There was evidence that the random face puncher had lashed out again, this time in Boston. Boston! Hilda quickly packed a flight bag, vaguely wondering why she didn’t have suitcase packing staff on hand. There was no time to watch a “how to pack a suitcase” video, either. The verdigris statue lay tits up on the smashed concrete sidewalk, indicating that the face puncher packed quite a punch. Hilda grinned at the thought of the danger bonus payment for this assignment, and then scowled at the thought of US customs crotch gropers. She toyed with the idea of wearing a codpiece stuffed with dried chamomile, just for a laugh, but thought better of it.

            #4036

            Ricardo had finished cleaning the tea cups in the empty office. He liked the job alright, it was a bit silly of him to surmise people would clean their own cups, and do their own teas. That was what he’d meant with the team job comment.

            Connie and Hilda were right, totally right about it; he couldn’t expect too much, he’d just arrived, he was just a simple intern in a prestigious journalistic establishment. He’d come here to learn the tricks of the trade, when he’d answered the wanted: secretary and cleaner ad of last week.
            So far, there was only so much golden nuggets of weirdo news he could find. You’d need some serious training to get to the level of Hilda and Connie, the dynamic duo.

            For now, he was content to being put to menial tasks, it helped know the colleagues better, support them as he could with the pressure on the deadlines. And also, improving the typos and legibility by cleaning up the loose letters dropped during typesetting.
            His own headline baiting skill was still rather low —it was an art to create the perfectly sexyied up heading, not too tacky, but enticing enough to captivate the readership’s attention.
            If Hilda was the queen of headline fishing, Connie was undoubtedly the empress of headline baiting.

            #4028
            Jib
            Participant

              Ever since she had read H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine” when she was 12, Sophie had been obsessed by the future. Now being a sweet old lady of 86, you would think she had used her share of the future and for most people her age it would be true. The trend would reverse and they would end up obsessed with the past.

              But for sweet old Sophie, who was living in Eastend London, her interest in life was mostly fed by news of the future. She didn’t know how it was possible, but she certainly believed it was. And who better than a time traveller could send news from the future ?

              She had been interested recently by an article about the telebeamer. They wanted to make you believe that in 2035 it was still impossible to transport yourself instantly from one place to another. She didn’t believe it of course. If time travel was possible, beaming yourself should be child’s play.

              Sweet Sophie was not good at math when she was young, but she was good at puzzles. She had a knack with patterns and immediately see where the pieces fit together or not. The articles on that website were like puzzle pieces. All she had to do was sort out the facts from fiction and find her map to the time machine.

              Now that she had found this invaluable source of information, she could plan her next move.

              #4027
              TracyTracy
              Participant

                In the fashion section of Rim of the Realm, Connie “Continuity” Brown was weaving the latest reports together.
                An unsavoury trend was gaining momentum in the meat factories to increase productivity: workers were wearing nappies to save wasting time visiting the lavatory.

                The trend was spreading to banks and offices, where high heels and codpieces were required, causing a spate of unusual injuries and accidents, especially since the equality laws came into force, requiring both men and women to wear both high heels and codpieces ~ and nappies, due to the removal of time wasting unproductive lavatories worldwide.

                #119

                A tiny dot of red light was peeking through the horizon line. It grew and grew until it became clear to Quentin that he would be rolled over by a giant wheel of gouda. Luckily, his cat-like reflexes allowed him to dodge that dreadful fate, and become the first showcased resident of the local newsreel of bits of odd news.

                #4013

                In reply to: Mandala of Ascensions

                Edward Cayper had been absorbed on the mesmerizing display of the large monitoring screens. He’d liked to believe it was a meditation of sorts. The simulation made the most tantalizing displays, ever changing.

                Although there had been flitches. Increasingly. He called them flitches, scratchy flea-like glitches, all small and jumpy, but he had an eye for them. He was, after all, one of the early designers of the Program. REYE – Reality Emergence Yielding Existence. That didn’t mean much, but sounded cool at the time.
                REYE was in its eighth stable upgrade. Despite the flitches, it had evolved at exponential speed.

                Edward swiveled from his chair to look behind his desk. A series of pods was lined up with sensory deprivation tanks hosting hundreds of plugged-in bodies dreaming in synch with his creation.
                He’d been told they were volunteers to participate in the largest mind control experiment in the world. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t a lie, but didn’t care so much.
                REYE was in charge of coordinating the whole program with astronomical and minute precision. Each person linked to the program believed they had become ascended (or something similarly close to their metaphysical belief). Free of the bonding of space, time and corporal existence, they were taught into a very subtle and complex system of attunement to higher truths. A large basket of bollocks of course, but while they were doing it, and deeply believing it to be real, the mind-energy they produced was redirected to certain mind control experiments.

                Since they started in the 80s, the program had had slow progress. In the beginning, only a few sprouts of channellers appeared near their area, in Nevada. They were quite timid at first, full of doubts about their hearing or seeing voices – still better than the abductions of earlier, when many went completely nuts. But now, progresses were made steadily, and with much less effort. Edward personally believed that the network of waves created by cellphone proliferation had a factor in this trend. Such interconnexion made everything easier.

                Within the program, the flitchy Ascended Masters still had to be reconditioned from time to time. On the vitals of Jane Pierce (a.a.a. “also avatared as” Dispersee within the program), Edward could see there were occasional resistance and stress, which in turn made the glitches more frequent. A change in her drugs dosage would do fine to level the serotonin in her bloodstream. It would be that, or unplugging her.

                Before leaving the room, like every day, Edward switched the monitor to the camera over one of the pods. Florence Vengard (a.a.a. Floverley), was dreaming peacefully, as usual. Since she’d arrived, he’d felt connected to her. He imagined her with long curly red hair floating in the milk bath instead of the bath-cap that made the maintenance so much easier. He was told she had overdosed on pills, and wouldn’t wake up. The program seemed to be tethering her to life, frozen in time.

                A well-oiled machine.
                If you overlooked the small things… that REYE was becoming more inquisitive, and Edward suspected, greedy too. He had seen subtle gaps in the mind-energy gauges, it couldn’t be a coincidence. The program was becoming too smart, maybe too human.

                It couldn’t bode well.

                #4006

                In reply to: Mandala of Ascensions

                Balzac had flunked again. He was sure of it.
                Geography test this time. The test was tricky, like every time Medlik had made sure of it, that old uptight Master.
                Actually, why it was called geography was up to anybody’s guess. There wasn’t anything to prepare the test, they’d been notified at the last minute.
                And every tool could be used. In short, cheating was allowed, but he’d figured out soon enough, pretty useless.
                They were given a news extract, talking about a carbonite deposit found in the earth’s crust that would solve all of humanity’s woes about clean air and clean water.
                The test question was basically. What do you make of it?

                #3837
                ÉricÉric
                Keymaster

                  “This is not fair !” The guy put down the blue dragon head on the table next to the ladies. He was still wearing the rest of his costume, scaly tail included.

                  “Oh shut up Leo,” Linda cackled softly, making it sound like she’d called him Leormn or something. “We’re all prisoners here of our own device” she sang. “Who cares about how unfair it is. Even the rat took a break to Mumbai, instead of waiting for his next call by the Board of Authors. You should do the same. And get rid of this silly costume, you’ve had it for as long as I’ve known you. Or keep it. I don’t care.
                  Next round of cackle is on me!”

                  #3831

                  “Sorry to bother you again, Ed.”

                  This was a lie; Evangeline wasn’t at all sorry. There was nothing she loved better than to be the bearer of bad news and she was rather pleased to have an excuse to call Ed Steam so soon after their last conversation.

                  “The Cackle Insanitization Committee contacted me. Their spies reported that Gustave had a meeting with that awful whinging Bea woman from Cackletown.”

                  Ed was shocked. “Gustave? Gustave Butterworth, the scientist? He’s supposed to be working for us, isn’t he?”

                  Evangeline sniffed dismissively, eager to pass on her next tantalising morsel. She tried to keep the excitement out of her voice and sound appropriately serious.

                  “The other concerning thing is that the Contumacious Cackler is in town. There have been several verified hearings of him.”

                  “The Contumacious Cackler!” Ed’s horrified reaction was music to Evangeline’s ears, although she was not entirely sure who the Contumacious Cackler was or why the mention of his name elicited such horror. She decided to ask.

                  “It’s rather a sad story. His mother ran away from home when he was just 3 years old, due to his father’s incessant cackling. The Contumacious Cackler never saw his mother again and he grew up with an obsessive hatred of cackling. He vowed to put an end to cackling. He cackles so evilly that he stirs up trouble wherever he goes. His dastardly plan is to create so much resistance to cackling that the people are inflamed sufficiently to rise up against cacklers. He is reported to be responsible for the demise of cackling in 2 of the provinces.”

                  #3826

                  In reply to: The Hosts of Mars

                  prUneprUne
                  Participant

                    It feels like it has all been a dream. And not a particularly good one, too.

                    I look through the window, and the blue sky of Earth shines brightly though. Only a few more days before the quarantine is over, if I’m to believe the hazmat-suited staff, and I should be able to get out to wherever I want to. You can go back to your family the nurse had said with a smile. They surely must miss you.
                    Obviously, the well-intentioned nurse had no notion of her family…

                    The TV set they’ve put in the rooms is more helpful to piece together the fragments of memory of what happened. The news had kept mum about the aliens, or about our return for that matter. It seems they can’t explain how we came back so fast, without telling more. Maybe that’s the real purpose of the quarantine… brainwash us into forgetting, returning back to our lives quietly, and be happy that we could get back in one piece. Funny they should even bother at all, actually.

                    I don’t know if there’s any coming back to how life was before. Surely the Inn and Aunt Idle would still be there, if only both more derelict than before. But would I want to get back? Do what? Only Mater’s sharp wits were ever a match, and she is gone too.

                    This is the end of the Mars story.
                    With some chance, I’ll start a business with Hans — raise Guinea pigs, rats and maybe a couple of those cute African pygmy hedgehogs. That would be a lot more fun.
                    Squeals and cackles, and truckloads of cuteness.

                    #3810

                    In reply to: Scrying the Word Cloud

                    ÉricÉric
                    Keymaster

                      losing hair hell news great master
                      dream finly seen moment brought
                      flynn stones night ghost christmas show
                      reality sitting white apparently

                      #3805

                      In reply to: Mandala of Ascensions

                      Whenever Nabuco projected to human consciousness, they had the habit of seeing him as a plump looking bearded vagrant, like a Pavarotti turned homeless. It had annoyed him for a while, but now he didn’t mind as much.

                      Nowadays, he was mostly off the bliss addiction of the Rays, so in a sense, it was fitting. If he were still in physical human form, he would probably have taken on quite some weight. And that made him a sort of pariah too, splintering off the great order of ascension, or whatever They called it nowadays.

                      With them, there was no denying he’d lived quite the grand life, being ascended and all. They used to called him Master Nebuchadnezzar — well, often Master Nabuco.
                      He’d gotten on the rayroll almost by luck. He was credited for inventing the chibubble technique, as a way of extracting bubbles and peals of laughter when people get all hot and excited. At the peak of the technique, somewhere around the 1968s, he had recruited and incorporated many gnomes into the fold, as nature spirits known as gnomes had a uncanny knack for extracting laughter off people. With the call for sexual liberation and getting closer to nature, they had plenty of opportunities to get people high, and chibubbles were all the fancy.
                      It had started to go down as fast as it rose, people were no longer interested in nature, gnomes working condition when forced to move to urban environments were a disaster, and the chibubble production plummeted. Now, the industry was a thing of the past ; sometimes there were a few chibubble memorabilia kept by other Masters interested in speculating on its rare value more than for anything else. Now kitten videos on social media had replaced the chibubble gnomes business and driven a new unseen growth of the Gross Divine Product.

                      He didn’t know if the gnomes were responsible for it, but living so close to them and nature for a while, somehow opened his perception to the falsity and the insanity of their quest for power. So instead of finding new venues for innergy extraction as they all did, he’d resigned.
                      Nobody had heard about anybody resigning before, so they suspected him of trying to be original, and maybe disrupt the clever and immutable laws of the universe.
                      Long story short, he’d managed to escape their clutches, and live on his own, and off unhealthy junk thoughts habits. Those were the worse, the craving of decadent thoughts, maintained by the entertainment and news industries, the social media and all of it. In the long run, that or the fuzzy bliss were faces of the same coin, and debilitating in the end.

                      Even when he tried to block them, he could hear the thoughts, prayers and all the inner chatter. The spirit world, or however it is called, was a medium ideal to carry those thoughts and reverberate throughout the whole universe. Like sound waves travelling under water for large distances. Now, he could resist the urge to answer, seduce and insinuate. Many of the thoughts were so naive and would welcome anything. He was still a junkie, and those offerings were never helping getting him off the wagon.

                      Humans hoped for ascension, but ascended masters like him who were trapped in a false blissdom could only hope to resume their path by descending to human form. Such irony.

                      There was one voice that seemed to stand out. It had the flavour of “dangerous” pinned onto it, the kind of bright colours that venomous snakes and toads have on earth to warn predators to keep off, or else. It could only mean one thing, a genuine seeker of truth, someone who had the potential to tear the veils to shreds.

                      He’d seen quite a few of those, they were usually young, and for many of them terribly naive and easily corrupted by displays of power. Search for truth and search for power were sometimes so easily mistaken one for the other. The bright colours would fade over time, but they were still dangerous, too unpredictable to be trusted fully. Learned Ascended Masters knew well to leave those to their own device, while tending to the less critical minds.

                      But what did he have to waste, especially now? Nabuco zoomed towards the origin of the thoughts, observing at a distance, the young Domba.

                      #3801

                      In reply to: Mandala of Ascensions

                      When Medlik connected to his Master, the Great Tetatron for guidance, he was a bit surprised at the suggestions of his Master to allow for the dissent at the news of no alarity increase.

                      “Send them love and light”, said the Master.
                      There was no need to correct or fix, or take responsibility for the lack of results.
                      He quickly chastised himself for his bad behaviour and lack of trust in the universal plan.

                      The Master, catching his mind, seemed to add ominously “You don’t want to lose all your oscars with unascended deeds, do you?”

                      #3794

                      In reply to: The Hosts of Mars

                      ÉricÉric
                      Keymaster

                        “You can call us the Blue Enders” said gently one of the blue aliens, which by the shade of it, must have been a top ranking official.
                        Kale was a bit confused, and space had a jelly consistency that harped and warped around his ears. It may have been the injections they gave him after the meeting with the sculpturesque Fin Min.

                        She had explained to him, they had made contact with a unknown sentient civilisation, and that they had in their infinite and blue compassion decided to warn us of impending doom on the Mars colony. They had requested a translator to go with them on a rescue mission on their faster-than-light bluship named Sprakle Star.

                        Hazy and fuzzy, he was quickly put and wrapped in a ball of cotton, ear-deep into a globe coaster of roller proportions.
                        At least, that’s how it felt… That waccine must have been full of blue bees.

                        “Arrival on Mars orbital level 1, in 5,… 4… 3…”

                        At least, the Blunders had the good idea to put an instant translator in his ear-muffins.

                        #3786

                        In reply to: The Hosts of Mars

                        prUneprUne
                        Participant

                          I dreamt about Mater last night. She was her old self, brilliant and snappily dangerous.

                          It’s been the first dream I’ve been able to remember in weeks. I don’t know why I expected the great beyond space to be less… claustrophobic, but there’s no escaping the confinement.
                          I was telling her I was missing home, the air, the smell of eucalyptus trees, the rains before winter. I think I even became sentimental about my sisters. Hardly a news from them these days, but how could I blame them. They are always busy on some down-to-earth cause, and I know better than to criticize those on the ground actually doing something to change the wrongdoings of the world.
                          When I started to cry uncontrollably, Mater told me I was a baby, and that I should man up. Typical Mater. Dido would have called her names under her breath, I think that was her way to express her love for her. People are silly.

                          In the dream, I stopped crying but the tears had swollen into a river, and I was starting to drown, things became hellish and I could barely breathe, but somehow I could still feel Mater’s presence, like a beacon. I made it out of the torrents onto an island. There were many refugees. The doctors had the strangest blue eyes, and Mater’s voice told me to trust the process but not the doctors. Then I felt all the blue eyes looking at me, and I woke up in a sweat.

                          Hans is still deep in a peaceful sleep, so I went out of the bedroom to get some water and check on the piggy and her litter. They are always sleeping blissfully too. It’s a wonder when you think of it, that I thought it was just getting fatter when it actually was pregnant from before we left Earth. Now they’re mostly an open secret, as everyone finds them so cute.

                          The most difficult was to conceal them from the reality TV show’s cameras. The hysterical fans are always scrutinizing every move we all make, and keeping some privacy is tricky, but apart from the external prying eyes, pretty much everyone here know about them and it’s like a game of hide and seek. I like how it fuels the speculations and paranoia of the Mars bunker debunking association, who think we’re all part of a mass cover-up. I’ve spent some time on their website when I couldn’t sleep the first weeks when we arrived. I would probably have never known about it, but I just searched for myself on the web, and found this thread about the new conspirators. I had to laugh at the beginning, but they raise reasonable doubts in the middle of their rants. By now, I know better than to raise the topic, especially after all the religious nonsense. Seems there are some people that get really annoyed when I asked naive questions about it, like Maya.

                          Like I said. People are silly.

                          #3782

                          In reply to: The Hosts of Mars

                          ÉricÉric
                          Keymaster

                            Finnley!” Mother Shirley called. “Another brainwave is coming! Put me on speakers.”

                            Taking on a dramatic voice, Mother Shirley started to prattle on the microphone.

                            My dear parishioners, good day to you! Dramatic news before we engage our Bollothrope Meditation:
                            “There is a fundamental change of vibrations. We have to face a destabilization of energies as we know them now. There are shifts to enter into entirely new consciousnesses. All agreements are rewritten. We will have new experiences of consciousnesses we never had before. The world will be joined by new consciousnesses never experienced before. The matrix as we know it will not exist anymore. A totally new bending archetype will arise, a new archetypical bending extraterrestrial energy. The energy of contact.”

                            When she got out of trance, she reached for a glass of water, amazed at what she’d seen in her mind’s eye. There was hope for all. She still couldn’t believe in how many shades of blues such salvation came.

                            She was still reeling from the high energies when she heard the sirens followed by the mars-shattering waves deep within the ground.

                            #3763

                            In reply to: The Hosts of Mars

                            ÉricÉric
                            Keymaster

                              “I won’t mince my words.” Finnley’s gravitas in the bright blue light made Eb shiver.
                              She didn’t wait for him to continue. “I’ve received orders to termitate the program in two weeks.”

                              “T… ter…?” Eb almost started to voice his concerns.

                              “Before you say anything, need I remind you I personally supervised most of the program since probably before you were born. I know the variables, I know the consequences.” She sighed, and drew deep breaths from her chamomile vaporazor —it would help alleviate her manic attacks and panic depressive impulses (she was beyond bipolar, she would say, probably multipolar).

                              “It’s a done deal, Eb. With the impossible influx of refugees after the latest floods around the world’s coastal areas, the water increase, people fleeing, and all that… Well, seems the governments wanted the space. I won’t draw you a picture, you’ve read the news in your cubicle, haven’t you?”

                              Eb was speechless. He couldn’t imagine they could clear the space in such short time. That, and dealing with another set of refugees. What would the Mars settlers do,… if they survived the trauma of finding out they were lied to—like billions of people too. The implications were far-reaching. Two weeks, more than a stretch.

                              But termitate?… Nobody could wish such dreadful end to a program… He ventured “With all due respect, Ma’m, are you sure there’s no better way than termitation?”

                              She turned at him with a surprised look on her face. “Where do you get those funny ideas Eb? We’re humane, nobody wants a termitation on top of our problems.”

                              Eb sighed of relief. She might have made a Tea-pooh (TP for short).
                              He didn’t realize that he had just agreed to the two weeks deadline.

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