Tag Archive | kaijune

Kaijune: How Cuute

Jul19

The worst thing you can say about an enemy is “Aw, how cute.”

Not because you risk offending them – we’re talking someone who is already an enemy, for one, and in this particular case, we’re talking about things that would have to go through a whole translation process to sort that out, because they definitely don’t speak English.

No, because the moment you say cute, you’ve stopped thinking of the thing as an enemy and have started thinking of it as something to hug, to protect, to coddle.

This was a big enough problem when the things the news insisted on calling the Lilliputians invaded.  Well, visited.  They weren’t as small as the ones Swift visited in his Tales, but they came up to about an average adult knee and they were what my daughter called “chibi”: their features looked exaggerated and childlike.

But that was them.  When the rabbits appeared, well, then we had really big problems.

Really, really big problems.

Have you ever seen a grown adult soldier arguing with their officers that they can’t shoot the bunny?  Have you ever seen a tank sat on by a bunny big enough to start nibbling on the flag hanging off the twenty-seventh floor?  Have you ever seen the hairball from a hare that size?

Okay, so back up a bit.

It hadn’t even started with the Lilliputians.  It had started with some sort of humanoid-like grey people with giant eyes, and it turned out they ran an intergalactic tourist agency – I have been told, time after time and in painstaking detail, that they are not tourists, that tourists is a provincial back-water Earth concept, but people who are not scientists travelling to new places to see how they live sounds a lot like tourism to me.  Anyway, the problem with tourism (or splet!clogk, or irri♫arren↓) , as I’m sure anyone who lives in a picturesque place could already tell you, is getting the damn tourists to leave.

So may be the Lilliputians weren’t invaders, and they did go home when we convinced them that their visas had expired, but the rabbits…

Look, nobody even knows if they’re sentient.  They don’t talk to me, they don’t talk to the consul, the Grey Folks aren’t even sure how they got here. But they might be cute and they might be fluffy and now nobody wants to shoot them, sure. But the amount of shit a building-sized rabbit leaves is pretty impressive, and let me tell you, that ain’t cute.

“splet!clogk” and “irri♫arren↓” aren’t necessarily meant to be pronounced by a human mouth but I was thinking that the ! in splet!clogk is a tongue click and the gk makes sort of a choking noise; the ♫ is a whistle and the ↓ is for a drop in pitch. 

Kaijune: Catch ‘Em

Jul3

“Rashi, what did you do?”

The interns at the laboratory known only as The Lab did their level best to be close enough to hear the argument while far enough away to avoid any fallout.  Just three weeks ago, a new intern had taken umbrage at being shouted at and, while the Boss was fine – the boss was always fine – three nearby interns had lost parts or all of their limbs to a parasitic vine.  With the memory still clear – with Yando still sitting in his mechanized chair, working the controls with what were only sort of fingers (and sort of vines) everyone was very cautious this time. Continue reading →

Kaijune: Little Monsters

Jun21

Written in the setting/time of my 101 Apoc Nights story.

They had been passing bathtub hooch for hours and the fire had burned down to coals, on which they were roasting whatever they still have to roast.  And then one old woman, her hair white and her skin a maze of wrinkles, set down her jar with a thump.

“I tell you,” she told them, “the monsters are scary and the places where time goes backwards, yeah, those are pretty scary.  But the worst thing I ever found – and I am not joking about that – was a lizard not quite as long as my arm.”

Now, she continued, I could tell you horror stories about this area I was in.  It had been a city and then it had been a ruin and now it was four little cities around a whole bunch of ruin that only the bravest went into.

Because – and this was the kicker – because some asshole had released a series of giant poisonous lizards into the city back in the end times.  Someone had, the Lord only knows why, let some asshole would-be god watch Godzilla, I guess.

So that thing had been killed.  But the problem is – the problem was the great-dane-and-a-chihuahua problem, I suppose, but the end result was baby lizards.

And those baby lizards had been wiped out too, but… well you get the idea.  It turns out that, in the center of this down, one lizard in ten has a chance of having flaming acid breath.

And I don’t mean just a little puff like a thing that small ought to give.  No.  No, I mean, these things could spit out a cloud of acid fire like their great-grandmama had.

And that, my friends, is why that one city split into four is the scariest I’ve ever been into.

She leaned back and gulped her whisky.  “’Cause let me tell you, you pick up a baby lizard just like seven others and this one happens to put a hole in the nearest wall… you stop thinking oh cute and start running really damn fast.  And those things could show up anywhere.  No crashing, no roaring, nothing.  Just a little squeak and a belch.”

She rubbed where her eyebrows had been.  “But I didn’t lose anything I couldn’t stand to lose.  What about you, my friends?”

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Kaijune

Jun11

Gentlefolk: It is Kaijune!

I invite you to leave me prompts (image, word, concept, all three) about kaiju!

I last did this as a Patreon theme back in June 2017, so it seems fitting to revisit it now.

Anyone can prompt!  Stories will generally be 250-500 words and can always be continued for a tip.

(Tips, at the moment, are going in the “finish the bathroom and the attic” fund, as our bathroom is still missing walls).