#mayfly mayscribe

[mayfly-maycry]

Usopp, halfway through the timeskip. He’s been steadily getting stronger, and it’s time to face some of the bosses of the Bowin Islands. But every time, he chickens out and Heracules has to save him. It’s fine if he’s not strong enough yet; he’ll be strong enough to beat them soon, but for now he doesn’t stand a chance.

Heracules sees that Usopp is using him as an out after a couple repeats, so this time he says that no matter how much Usopp begs him to save him, he’s on his own. Of course, Usopp freaks out; he can’t possibly beat this thing, Heracules took every exaggerated word about how much progress he’s made at face value, he’s not actually ready. But Heracules isn’t coming to save him, so he looks to the only other person he can: Sogeking.

He’s been using Sogeking to get out of the occasional rough spot, and as he did Sogeking grew and developed as a character. But this time when he puts on the mask, something is different. Sogeking gets him out of the immediate tight spot he’d been in, but as Usopp sniveled in relief in the back of his head, Sogeking called out.

“How long will you continue to believe the lies you tell yourself, Usopp-kun?! What good are your words, if even you cannot tell which are true and which are not? ‘I am weak, so I should be scared; I am weak, so I need to be saved; I am weak, so I cannot defeat the enemy in front of me. Sogeking is strong, but I am weak.’ You do not need to be scared; you do not need to be saved,” he points his slingshot at the creature. “And you can defeat the enemy in front of you.”

The creature is recovering now, preparing to charge. Sogeking plants himself directly in its path. “I may be a lie, but my skills are truth. Your strength is my strength, Usopp-kun.” The creature lunges. “You are strong.” Sogeking lifts the mask, and immediately Usopp’s legs begin to shake violently. He has to run, has to get out of here — but he feels as Sogeking guides his hands, pulling back his slingshot, taking a steadying breath. And as the creature comes close enough to touch, Usopp looses, blowing it into a fiery explosion of leaves.

[mayfly-maycry]

You watch the man from behind a tree, amused.

“What is he doing?!” your younger sister hisses from beside you, ears covered at the cacophony. You’re tempted to do the same, but have the experience to hold your dignity instead.

“He seems to be trying to attract one of us to whisk him away.”

“I thought humans were afraid of being spirited away!”

“Not this one. It happens, sometimes. Most humans believe their lives are better as they are, but sometimes one will see the truth. Or rather,” you smile coldly, “their lives are so miserable they believe whatever horrors our realm might hold would still be better than what they have now.”

Your sister gives a small “oh” of understanding, nodding as she continues to watch the human bang his pots. You, however, frown. Usually, those men were broken, found sitting quietly with their heads bowed, maybe even sobbing gently. Some fae like to make a game of it, see how long a human will sit before they decide their life isn’t so bad and walk away — only to be taken as soon as they change their mind.

But this one is different. Energetically banging his pots and yelling loud enough for half the forest to hear, he doesn’t seem broken. There’s a glint in his eye, like a child preparing to take their mother’s pie as it cools on the sill. But why else would a man willingly come to the fae? Maybe their reputation is finally improving among the humans. Regardless, you turn to go.

“Oh, thank goodness,” your sister says. “I thought you were going to make me try to take him.”

You snort. “With all that iron he’s banging around, why should we? I have no desire to reward that sort of behavior. Come, let’s go. He’ll likely be gone by sunset.”

Your sister scampers after you, hands still pressed against her ears, as the grating, piercing sound of iron clashing against iron slowly fades into the distance.

"OH BOY, IT WOULD SURE SUCK IF THE FAE TOOK ME!" cried the man banging pots and pans together in the middle of a mushroom circle.

[mayfly-maycry]

It was empty.

The hero, watching from high up in a nearby building, smirked as he aimed the rocket launcher at the confused villain, who was frantically trying to defend himself to the cameras.

“Surprise, motherfucker.”

He pulled the trigger.

"Now behold! Behold as I unmask your...beloved...hero...?" The villain's voice trailed off as he tore open said hero's crippled mech suit on live TV, only to reveal something quite...unexpected.

[mayfly-maycry]

You think poison has no place in cuisine? Ha! You couldn’t be further from the truth. With how easily we place wines alongside our food, you seem to have forgotten that alcohol is still a poison. I can summon the finest of drinks with a flick of my fingers: wines to rival the most expensive, beers to entice the most rowdy nights, and the most intoxicating of spirits without a hint of the bite of the alcohol itself. Or if you should wish, I can remove the poison from the drink to allow you to enjoy the flavor without fear of drunkenness. A far step above turning water to wine, is it not?

"Fire mages can make the perfect roast. Ice mages can create shaved ice from thin air. Even necromancers can make walking ham that will slice themselves for the guest. What can YOUR meagre magic do on the greatest arena of all: The dining table?"

[mayfly-maycry]

You knew what was happening as soon as they approached you. You weren’t stupid; you knew the stories. They didn’t even try, but you let them take your name. You didn’t want it anyways.

“Take— take it back… please…”

Watching the young fey writhe, you felt an overwhelming hatred well up in you. Why would they even try to take your name if they couldn’t handle it? Pathetic.

The fey’s thrashing subsided, leaving them quivering in the fetal position. You spit in their general direction and turned away, resuming your journey. What had you been doing before you met them? Oh, that’s right. You’d been looking for a suitably tall cliff to jump off of.

The thought sent a jolt of fear through your stomach that it hadn’t in years. You suddenly realized you felt lighter than you had in a long time, as if you had left all your problems behind with that fey. You chuckled to yourself; that was probably exactly what had happened. They had taken your name, your very self that you loathed so much.

Well, since you weren’t going to kill yourself, you may as well head home. You turned in the direction you came from, then stopped. The fey had your name; nobody there would recognize you anyways. You broke into a grin. That hellhole was the fey’s problem now. You were truly free now in a way you had never been before.

Your joyous laughter echoed through the woods to where the fey still lay on the ground, crushed by the weight of your world. They should have heeded the elders’ words: never take from those with dead eyes.

A young fey creature just tricked you into giving them your name. They are now writhing on the ground in agony begging you to take it back. You have no idea what’s going on.

[mayfly-maycry]

“Yeah, we tried that. It takes significantly more lasers to fill the same hallway, and we don’t have the money for that. With the number of lasers we have, we could only get a single layer of dense enough grid.” “Like a laser wall?” “Yes, exactly. Intruders — or rather, the for-hire ‘intruders’ we had test our system — would just break through the wall next to it then back in on the other side to go around. Either that or just break the lasers. You should never leave your laser sources where unwanted hands can reach them.” “Wait, we hire people to try to break in?” “Yeah, just like major companies will pay people to try to hack into their systems so they can find vulnerabilities. Where do you think they got the idea from? Anyways, back to the laser question. We did try filling the hall with as good of a grid as we could, but turns out it was actually easier for intruders to get through, since they’d get into a rhythm and had an easier time predicting where the lasers would be.” “Like hopscotch?” “Exactly like hopscotch.”

"Why do we make laser grids like these?" "What do you mean?" "I mean instead of a messy random arrangement of lasers that a nimble intruder might be able to jump through, why not a simple grid wall with no gaps large enough to allow a person to pass through?"

[mayfly-maycry]

The devil sighed. “Unfortunately for you, they are named as such because of my liking for them, not my ability to make them. Fortunately for you, I have just begun to crave one and I do know whose is the best.”

They then instructed you in how to make another summoning circle — rather similar to the one that had summoned them, but slightly different — and repeating the ritual with the new circle summoned another demon. Or at least, you assumed by circumstances it was another demon — he just looked like a French man.

Upon his summoning, the devil walked up behind you. “Yes, François, good of you to come. I need two of the usual, stat.”

The French demon gave a bow. “Right away, sir,” before striding out of the room. You and the devil followed him as he made his way to your kitchen, informed you that he would have to borrow it, and set to work. You sat on one of the stools at the counter and watched, fascinated, as he drew small sigils in the air to summon ingredients — top-tier if the fancy labels were anything to go off of — and mixed them in your banged-up metal mixing bowls. The devil sat beside you.

“You’ve never tasted devil food cake until you’ve tasted François’s. I believe the turn of phrase in English is ‘so good it should be a sin,’ but usually Heaven gets all the good bakers; lucky for me this one made his way down to my end of the afterlife.”

You had no idea how one was supposed to have a conversation with the devil, from the Bible, but you figured you could give it your best shot. “What exactly did he do to… ‘make his way down to your end of the afterlife,’ as you put it? Or is that rude to ask?”

The devil chuckled. “Hardly; the man grew up with a love of baking but none of the supplies, so he’d sneak into the bakery at night to borrow their ovens, plus their ingredients. Trespassing and theft. They did end up hiring him eventually, though, so it was all forgiven in the end.”

“Well, a sin is a sin I guess, even under such innocent circumstances...” The Christian afterlife was notoriously unfair in the old books, but you had held some kind of hope that it had maybe… caught up with the times.

“Oh, he also murdered his wife. I’m no judge, but I think that’s what pushed him down the stairs to my door.”

“Huh. You don’t say…” you said, reeling a bit. Yep, that would do it. Maybe there was still hope for the afterlife.

You and the devil continued your chatter, François joining you after the cakes went in the oven, speaking mostly in short responses to his lord’s jibes, but occasionally tossing out baking advice that had you itching for somewhere to write it down.

Eventually the oven timer went off. Except, it wasn’t your usual timer. As François opened the oven and pulled out the cakes, you noticed the oven wasn’t actually on; instead, two small portals floated near the top and bottom, presumably leading to the fires of Hell itself based on what you could see. You waited in anticipation as the cakes settled, the smell almost making you drool.

Finally, Françoise got out a knife and cut a single large slice out of one of the cakes, placed it on a single plate, and placed that in front of the devil with a single fork. The devil licked their lips with what, despite the cliche you could only call a devilish grin, and picked up the fork. They cut out a bite with a careful yet practiced motion, then placed it in their mouth. Th devil held the fork there for a moment, eyes closed, savoring the flavor before slowly chewing and finally allowing the moment to end when they swallowed.

The look of sheer bliss on their face was almost enough to actually make you drool. But as the devil continued to eat, François simply stood watching, making no move to get a second or even third plate. You looked almost desperately between the cakes on the stove and the piece on the devil’s plate. Just when you couldn’t take it anymore and were about to get up and serve yourself, the devil set down their fork and spoke.

“Ahh, that was delicious. The best one yet, I think. Did you change something in the recipe, François?”

“Hardly, sir. Perhaps it was the oven. Or maybe, as they say, good company makes the food taste better.”

The devil nodded. “Right you are, François. And I am a generous devil; this deserves a reward. The second cake is for our generous host. François, prepare it appropriately. And another slice for me as well.”

“Right away, sir,” François said with a smile, taking the devil’s plate and cutting a slice from each cake. He placed one in front of the devil and one in front of you. Finally. Finally you could taste it.

Reverently, you picked up your fork and took a bite. It was just as the devil had said: so good it should be a sin.

"What made you summon me, mortal?" "I want you to make me one of your cakes" "…you summoned the devil so he could make you chocolate cake?" "It's named after you, isn't it? Yours should be the best"

[mayfly-maycry]

“Hello, I��d like to make a withdrawal.”

“You’d like to… what?”

“Make a withdrawal. This is a bank, is it not? I placed my money here for safekeeping until I needed it, and I need some of it now, so I would like to take some back.”

“What?! You can’t do that! That’s not how a bank works! You get somebody else to watch your hoard so you can go off galavanting and doing whatever else you adventurers do. You don’t take it back! What would you even do with it, if not keep it in the safest place you can?”

“Oh boy. Let’s go get the local banker so they can explain currency and how banks actually make their money to this poor dragon.”

While “loans” and “investments” seemed to defeat the purpose of a hoard — to have and hold things — the dragon certainly noticed the steady influx of coins, as well as the return of customers as their faith in the Dragon Bank was restored.

A fantasy dragon realizes it can acquire more gold and treasures by operating the realm's first Dragon owned bank from its lair. Its been extraordinarily effective as adventurers trust a dragon to guard their riches over traditional banks.

[mayfly-maycry]

The manager of the experiment walks in, glances over your shoulder, and whistles. “Wow, that’s impressive! How much of that is new?”

“…only $43 dollars,” you tell her, puzzled.

“Ah. I see.” Is her only response before she leads you to the exit. It seems to be taking longer than it should — who knows, though; it took you forever to get through the paperwork on the way in, and it’s only been five minutes.

Finally, the elevator dings, opening onto the building’s lobby. “The exit’s right there, I’ll let you see yourself out,” the manager tells you, checking her watch. You do, and when you’re barely ten feet away from the doors, you hear what sounds suspiciously like the cocking of a gun.

You break into a run, but she’s too quick; exactly 6.192 minutes after pushing the button, you’re dead.

On the day of your 18th birthday, you pressed a button that gives you $10,000 for every day left in your life. You just checked your bank account: $1,000,000,043.

[mayfly-maycry]

For as long as you can remember, and much longer than that, you have been an executioner. How can you know, when you do not remember? You wrote it all down.

Your first century is contained in only a few volumes, as you started writing only when you began to forget. It was written rather haphazardly at first, one volume of what you could recall in your initial scramble to record your memories before they were gone, and several more volumes of addendums that came to you after. Since then, you have had to transcribe the older journals to a newer page, one that wasn’t so old it threatened to fall apart at a single touch, and took the opportunity to put things in order as best you could.

You may not remember your youth itself, but you have memorized every word of your journals, especially the older ones. Taking a life didn’t always mean stealing it; you thought it started sometime soon before you were born. It was when you were a child that people started to figure it out— that some people had stopped aging, and whispers made it to the streets that lives could be stolen. Murder began to run rampant as many sought eternal life; people became bolder as the benefits of killing those they quarreled with increased, and children started disappearing off the streets, kidnapped and either killed on the spot or sold to the wealthy for the same purpose. The government at the time was good, not yet corrupt as all governments eventually become, and intervened. They named an extended lifespan the curse of a killer, and punished those who sought to evade death with that which they ran from.

However, there was a problem: one who kills a killer is themself a killer, and would gain eternal life, making the position of executioner one that was coveted by all. Already wealthy families were calling for the implementation of the death penalty and jockeying to get their sons the position. And so they decreed that the guilty would be determined by a jury unrelated to the executioner, of which only one would exist for the nation. And to be that executioner, they took an average young man, a baker’s son, a youth who had never stolen a life, and appointed him the position.

You had been given a choice, of course. You had forgotten why you accepted by the time you recorded the event, but you had accepted nonetheless. You were forbidden contact with your family, and it was a year before you started your new profession. Ostensibly it was to “train” you, but they really did very little of that; your journal suggests the goal was to ensure you truly lacked connections and, more importantly, that you aged as you should.

The memory has since left you, but your first day of work was recorded in painstaking detail in your journal. The juries had been busy for the past year, and in that time had prosecuted enough to fill the jails twice over. It was a public affair; you were dressed in long robes of white, walked onto a stage in the courtyard, and handed an axe. They brought up the first person, a middle-aged man, and put him in the stocks. When you just stood there, staring at him and gripping your axe, they told you to do your thing, gesturing to the man’s neck. Your hands were shaking, but you lifted the axe and swung with all your might. The crowd cheered, and you opened your eyes to find his neck had become a fountain of red.

You had recorded the faces of the first six — exactly six — people you executed, but past that it became a blur. After about twenty, the crowd stopped cheering. After about forty, most left for lunchtime and never came back. Despite the lack of viewers, you were not allowed to stop. When your arms became weak, you stopped swinging and let gravity do the work. The axe became dull enough that it took two swings to take off their heads, but they didn’t hand you a newly sharpened one until it took three. A few spectators — the more bloodthirsty ones — stayed throughout the afternoon, with several popping in to see if you were still going and report back to their friends and families. Even those spectators disappeared as night fell, but your work didn’t stop.

You kept going through the night, and when the curious came to check at dawn, you were still going. A silent crowd gathered to watch as the sun rose. You were going much slower, as you were exhausted and starving, but you were still going. The crowd watched as you prepared to swing the axe on the next neck, but none came. You looked blearily around the stage for the next prisoner, but one of the officials was stepping to the front of the stage and addressing the crowd. It was over. As soon as you realized, your grip on the axe loosened, dropping it behind you, and you promptly followed, collapsing into a pile of your robes. They had been stained completely scarlet, not a speck of white left. It wasn’t until later that you realized the whole thing had been performative; the piling of years of sin onto a single pure soul. Neither you nor your journal had any idea how many you had executed that day; you had lost count after a baker’s dozen of baker’s dozens, which was as high as you had known how to count. You were likely still living off of that one day of execution, even all this time later.

If someone is killed, however many years they would have lived is added to the killer’s lifespan. For as long as you can remember, you have been an executioner.

[mayfly-maycry]

“It won’t turn out how you think,” you told them. Still, they continued to beg. All you had to do was touch them; they already had a sculptor ready to do the work. And they would pay you handsomely! As much as it took!

In the end, you relented; but you didn’t take their money. They gathered and posed with their arms and legs spread to give the sculptor room to work, and you touched them one by one. Once it was just the two of you in a room of statues, he got to work. You left him to it, spending the day working on your garden; you had just bought some hydrangeas that needed planting.

As the sun began to set, you checked in on the sculptor and his subjects. He had done a fine job; each figure had been chiseled down to stereotypical perfection, likely by their requests. It wasn’t to your taste, but you were impressed by the fine curves and symmetry that made it up nonetheless. You said as much to the sculptor, and he handed you his card, telling you to call him if you ever wanted to make use of his skills. For that matter, this was looking like this would make a profitable partnership; if you were willing to continue, of course. He just couldn’t fathom why you—

In that moment, the last ray of the sun slipped below the horizon, and the spell was broken. On every sculpture simultaneously, so the screaming was horrendous. An entire chorus of agony as every perfect statue surrounding you turned to a human with more exposed muscle than skin. It was a horrific sight; you must have blocked it out, from how little you remember. The sculptor startled at the sudden cacophony, his expression turning to horror as the blood began to pour from exposed arteries and veins; but you simply winced and swiftly got to work. Much as you had that morning, you touched every one of those poor souls as quickly as you could, turning them to stone fountains that stopped spewing their crimson liquid as soon as they were formed. You may have stopped the majority, but there was still a lot of blood that pooled around your feet. Ah well; that’s what the tarps on the floor were for, more than just the stone fragments that the sculptor had chiseled away.

“Wh-what the hell just happened?!”

“Exactly what I told you. You carved away the surface, leaving the flesh exposed. I warned you, but they still wanted it.” You shook your head.

“I-I never heard anything about this!” The sculptor took a step back, his attempts at indignation and self-righteousness doing a poor job of masking the fear on his face. “But you knew! You knew they’d all die if we did this! This is your fault!”

“Oh. They didn’t tell you? Poor thing; they probably knew you wouldn’t agree to it if they told you. But you’re wrong there, too.” You stepped towards the sculptor. “All I did was touch them; you’re the one who chipped away at their flesh, bit by bit, until they were almost entirely stripped of it. And what’s worse, you accepted money for it.” You stopped in front of the sculptor, and he leaned away from you as you leaned close, his eyes darting. “Sure, you knew nothing, but that’s still manslaughter; or, I suppose, assisted suicide, since they requested it themselves.”

“S-so what? You’re going to pin this on me, and walk away scot-free? The cops won’t take that story; you’ll be right there with me on trial.”

“Ideally, the law will hear nothing of this; the crazy sculptor will disappear into the woods, presumably with his equally crazy followers, never to be heard from again. But that doesn’t seem likely; so I’m sorry for this.”

You swiftly reached out your hand and touched him, freezing the sculptor forever in a moment of horror as he realized what you meant to do. Well, not forever, you thought as you pushed him over and watched him shatter on the floor. Pieces that small were hardly considered alive and would not return to flesh even when their time was up, in your experience.

You turned to the other victims. Aside from some of the deeper carvings that had reached their organs, causing them to spill out, most of the statues retained their thin beauty even after a moment as flesh, although it was marred by the agony carved into their faces. Poor things; even if they were allowed to return to life, it would only be a few minutes of agony. Much better to put them out of their misery. But first, something had to be done about the blood; it was getting out of hand, threatening to spread into the next room and past the tarp.

A ridiculous amount of bleach and mopping later, you brought your sledgehammer to visit. The sledgehammer was very useful for breaking large rocks you found in the yard into something that you could actually dig out of the ground. One by one, you took it to each statue, making sure to start by obliterating recognizable features, then ensuring the pieces were small enough to not leave you another bloody mess tomorrow night. By then it had gotten late, so you left the rest for the morning; you still needed to shatter the recognizably human features like fingers and noses, plus grind them all small enough to step on.

You went to bed satisfied: a major annoyance taken care of, and gravel for your garden path as compensation. Only your dreams whispered of the horrors that you had witnessed.

Everyone you touch turns into stone for a day. Recently a group of people beg you to touch them so they could be sculpted into the perfect body.

[mayfly-maycry]

“I just have a really good skin care routine! Alfred preps everything every night!”

“Sir, your father was a vampire. Did you really think your obsession with bats came from nowhere?”

‘Batman has no powers’ “Bruce you have aged 10 years in the last 84.”

[mayfly-maycry]

You’ve never really understood why everybody is so afraid of stubbing their toe. It’s just a toe. It’s so small. How bad could it possibly be?

You’re something of a klutz, but you don’t normally have to worry about hurting yourself, thanks to the invincibility. It would seem this time is the exception.

You stub your toe against your bed frame and drop like a rock, clutching at the worst — and, to be fair, only — pain you’ve felt in your life.

You get it now.

You were born with the greatest power of them all: invincibility. There is one catch, you are mortal for a single random minute each day. You just found out which minute it is.

[mayfly-maycry]

You close your eyes as the prosecutor presses the button. You have no idea where — or rather, when — you’ll end up, but you’d braced yourself for this from the moment the gavel had fallen on guilty. You hear the time machine whir to life around you, and when it fades to silence, you open your eyes — to find nothing has changed.

You and the prosecutor stare at each other for a moment, equally bewildered, before she shakes herself and pulls out a walkie-talkie.

“Tech support, what’s going on? Over.”

A voice crackles through the walkie-talkie. “Not sure, all readings show normal, give us a few minutes to investigate. Over.”

The prosecutor does not seem too happy to be stuck standing in a room with a convicted felon, and you can’t exactly blame her. You sit on the floor inside the time machine cross-legged, partly in an effort to put the prosecutor at ease, partly because it has become evident that you’ll be there for a while.

After about ten minutes, the prosecutor’s walkie-talkie crackles back to life. “We’ve found the problem. The time machine functioned perfectly fine, the randomly determined target just happened to be a few milliseconds after it was activated. It’s improbable enough to be almost impossible, but not quite. We’ll prep the machine to try again. Over.”

The prosecutor sighs, shaking her head. “Can’t they do anything right?” She goes and stands beside the button again, ready for when the techies give her the okay.

“Hey, wait just a minute,” you say. The prosecutor glances down at you; you hadn’t said anything since you entered the room, so it is her first time hearing you speak. “Isn’t this double jeopardy? I was sentenced to a trip in the time machine to a random point in time. I’ve already done that. You can’t just do it again because you don’t like what that point was.”

“The machine is ready when you are, prosecutor. Over,” her walkie-talkie says.

The prosecutor hesitates. You watch the gears turn in her head, and you know you’ve won when she turns to the door. “I need to discuss this with my colleagues. Don’t go anywhere,” she says as if you can leave the time machine; the only door opens into a different room, under guard to prevent you from doing just that.

Her heels click across the room and the door shuts behind her. She is gone for a while; you count a solid twenty five minutes on the digital clock you find in a built-in display on the inside of the time machine. When the prosecutor returns, she does not look happy. “Congratulations. By the laws of this country, you have served the sentence of your crimes and are free to go.”

In a future where time travel exists, criminals are punished by being sent to a random point in time. Having been convicted of a crime, you now face your punishment.

[mayfly-maycry]

Your parents were some real jokesters and named you John Doe. It haunted you and your sister, Jane Doe, throughout your lives, but 500 years later she’s the only one left you recognize from your time.

People’s souls vanish from the afterlife if their names stop being mentioned by those in the living world. You, an average person who hasn’t accomplished anything exceptional or abhorrent, have been here for 500 years and still haven’t vanished yet.

[mayfly-maycry]

“Ah, I see where the mistake was made. They attempted to offer things of value to them, not you. So tell me, great beast— what do you wish for that is worth my life to you?”

The beast hissed, its claws enveloping you, “Many humans have tried to bargain with me. Some offered gold for their life, others companionship…. even love. What useless thing will you try to offer me for yours?”