dreamszilla

Colin Waverly tells the epic story of his father's shifty investment scheme, and what became of the capital. Image generated with OpenAI If word of it had ever spread, Father's tontine would most certainly have become the most famous in history. But it had been held the darkest of secrets until I learned of it just this past week. Outside of its participants, I may be the only one to know of its provenance. And its stunning conclusion. My name is Colin Waverly. My Father - God love him, he was a good one, but I hardly knew him - Richard Townshend Waverly, Dickie to his friends and colleagues, was the instigator of the Waverly Tontine. Thus its eponymous name. Tontine? I presumed you understood. It's, well, a cross between a wager and a life insurance policy, but isn't a life insurance policy, after all, nothing more than a wager? One by which you deign to be the sole beneficiary. What informed me of the Waverly Tontine was a wax-sealed, hand-written le...

A prison officer plans for Valentine's Day with his wife and daughter, but first must get through a challenging day at work. Image generated with OpenAI Ten years ago, Bob McClean killed his four-year old stepson Dakota for the insurance money, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He's been here ever since. We have other offenders who've killed a child, their own mostly. The baby wouldn't stop crying or the wife had it coming and the kid got in his way. Bob wasn't impulsive. When he bought the policy, he didn't tell Dakota's mom. He was running a scam involving churches at the time, had no fixed address. On the night Dakota died, he said, Dakota's mother had gone shopping, and he and Dakota were in their motel room, sitting up in bed, watching TV. Cars , Dakota's favorite show, was on. Bob fell asleep. When he woke Dakota was gone. Oh, he was frantic, he said, went running down the motel steps into the dark, crying. The EMTs ...

Novitiate Sym'An investigates an object descending from the sky that threatens to shatter the ideologies his world is built upon. Image generated with OpenAI Sym'An the Novice could not believe his eye. High in the Motherless orange sky, a strange object hung on lines from a floating overturned bowl. The lines looked a bit like spinners' ropes but even more delicate. The bowl appeared to be made of a membrane. Slowly descending, the object dropped behind a low ridge, trailing that membranous cup. Sym'An scuttled out of his small hermitage hovel, cut into the side of a dune, and made for the landing site as fast as his ten legs could carry him. It was the 100th day of Sym'An's wilderness fast among endless dunes and strewn rocks of an ancient seabed. How he wished the seabed was wet with life water. The fast had been long, and Sym'An was very thirsty. The sky was Motherless as the Holy Mother was not visible on this side of the world. There wa...