dreamszilla

A coroner joins a group of cops who have been led by an unrepentant murderer to the site of his victim, and decides to stand up to the town's corrupt sheriff. Image generated with OpenAI When the snow had melted, they found him. By the second week in March the weather had grown unseasonably warm and the snow and ice had flowed down from the mountains and drained into pits in the valley, exposing the ravaged grave to the searchers. The man had been missing four months and his remains were found on the slope of a mountain just five miles outside the town where he had lived all his life. From the head of the grave a person could watch the new Wal-Mart's parking lot as it filled up. It was a warm Sunday morning when they found him. What was left of him - what the bullets, fire and coyotes hadn't already taken as their own - they found between two aging pine trees on an incline a few hundred feet above the mountain's base. The earth was tan where the killer's spade hadn...

The Korlqar Empire's invasion of planet Earth does not go as planned when they make first contact with the world-weary manager of a fast food joint. Image generated with OpenAI The arrival of the Korlqar Empire's armed emissary went utterly unnoticed at McDuncan's, partly because it was three in the morning, partly because the staff were all quite used to weirdos, eccentrics, performance artists, influencers, aspiring comedians, and other dregs of society. Truth be told, the tall, bald, gray-skinned, male-presenting individual wearing a cloak and making a scene in the lobby didn't even stand out. "Take me to your leader!" he roared in an odd but not unusual accent, waving what looked to be a Dollar Store toy blaster - all streamlined and bright-red. "Yeah, sure, sir, whatever," sighed Latitia, the intrepid cashier and survivor of seven armed robberies. She spared one glance to the visitor's strange - not car, exactly, but some sort of flat vehic...

Kaede feels estranged from humanity, but considers whether she could attract a mate. Image generated with OpenAI According to the internet, there are two genera of sloths: those with three digits on each forelimb, called three-toed or three-fingered sloths; and those with only two digits on each forelimb, called two-toed or two-fingered sloths. Why toes and fingers are considered interchangeable, Kaede has no idea. A toe is not a finger. She cannot type with her toes. She has, however, seen videos of a very talented artist who, after losing her arms, became very adept at using her toes to hold a paintbrush. Kaede could spend the rest of her life studying art, with the full use of her hands, and still never create anything of worth. Something else about sloths: When a female sloth enters heat, rather than searching for a mate herself, she simply sits in a tree and screams until a male finds her. This scream is not dramatic. It is not hysterical. It is straight to the point, as if to say...