Three-Legged Improv

[nixie]

On a cold dark winter evening,the little guitar player was trying to sell her songs knowing the only other option was the workhouse. The little green man watched from the shadows mesmerized by the music, he wished he could capture the moment for ever.The following morning the shopkeeper was rather disgruntled to find a statue blocking his door.
---------------
Punishment, challenge setter, speculative fiction.

 

[Droflet]

(Who said you couldn't write Dickens in three sentences. Nicely done, you little pixie.)

"He who makes the challenge must be the first to take it," said the magistrate.
Albert drew in a deep breath, difficult on a planet with such a thin atmosphere, and took off at a jog.
Twelve hours later he returned from the mountain top, but such were the trials he endured he wasn't quite human anymore.

Mass murder, misery, horror romance.

 

[sinister42]

The cultists reveled at the destruction they saw, for the stars were right once more, and Cthulhu's great city of R'lyeh rose above the waves, carrying with it the doom of humanity.
"Ia...Ia...it's so beautiful..." Daniel whispered to Kristine. The two cultists held hands, watching the destruction unfold.

(An obvious choice, perhaps, but it works).

A virus that turns people inside out, a potato, old-school pulp science fiction (think Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers).

 

[Duttster]

The pile of inside out corpses lying in their twisted, mutilated forms ever portrayed the agony of their departed souls. Stepping forwards, Arcturus the Deceiver stepped over the dead without remorse, his eyes set on the potato grasped in the hands of one of the fallen. Pulling it from the stiff fingers, he crushed it and began laughing, his biorespirator whirring and clanking as he wandered on towards the fog.

A box of tissues, bounty hunter, crime drama

 

[nixie]

"Bloody hay fever, every year it is the same, stinging eyes, runny nose, nightmare it is". Grumbles the bounty hunter as he reaches for the box of tissues. Suddenly he lets out a large sneeze alerting his quarry, the notorious forger known as the money maker of his hidden presence.

Coronet, babysitter, slapstick

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Lady Gwendolyn Pfinstergrove, nanny to Her Royal Highness Alberta Maria, carefully placed the tiny silver crown on the head of the infant princess. She lay in her ebony cradle sound asleep. Everything seemed to be going right for a change, until Bracefeather, the Royal Fool, ran into the room and stumbled, supposedly by accident, directly into the cradle, tossing the baby into the air screaming.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Microscope, shopkeeper, fantasy

 

[Ihe]

Ren looked down into the microscope on the low shelf, but the shopkeeper, a small deformed elf, swatted her away as if she were a fly.
"If you want to study micromagiks, you better have the coin to buy the equipment," he said as he kicked her out of the shop.
"Well, I got what I came for," Ren said with a smile, holding up a struggling, brand new lab rat, "and this time I will have my own giant pet."
-------------------------------
youtube, the most boring man on the planet, irony (any genre)

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

"This video is better than Andy Warhol's Empire," Tyler said. She smirked at her boyfriend, popped the top off another bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, and watched him squirm. "Just another six hours of watching this guy sleep and I'll loosen your straps."

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fence, trucker, action/adventure

 

[Ihe]

Dale stepped on the gas and the truck made quick work of the anti-matter fence. The alien guards stopped in their tracks, baffled at this feat by a lesser creature.
"Nothing's impossible with a dash of human ingenuity and a multi-quantum state shield generator taped to a diesel engine," Dale shouted at his pursuers as he sped off.
----------------------------------------
Echo, Fae, Urban Fantasy

 

[Charles Parkes]

Andy Curran wondered how many times - and in how many different worlds - the world underneath London had been reimagined as an urban magical fantasy. Probably by enough authors to constitute an echo, he expects.

He saw no badly labelled train platforms or secret fae markets down here. Only a very large, and very angry soot elemental.

"The problem here is that you don't understand the mayor intends to make a better life for all the inhabitants of London - magical, imaginary, or otherwise. . ." It's a tough job being the London mayor's PR man when all you have are your wits and a fairly irrelevant service revolver.

"The Congestion Charge may alleviate childhood asthma, but we're not doing you out of a job. Those taxes will be rolled back into soot-generating industries! Think of the Congestion Charge as simply moving the pollution elsewhere. You aren't the first magical being that's going to have to think about a commute. My journey in on the train to London Paddington takes me almost an hour . . ."

"Train !!!?" screams the soot elemental, hellish smog pouring from its mouth.

----------------------------
Asthma, unemployment, detective

 

[Droflet]

Ah, Charles, you're supposed to write your story in three sentences. See Ihe's example above.

 

[Charles Parkes]

Darn, sorry everybody. . .

----------------------------

Curran wondered if the soot elemental realised that it had become an echo of bygone London. It's a tough job being the mayor's PR man, spending his time persuading these kinds of dangerous magical beings that environmental legislation really does belong in todays capital more than angry, smog-spewing fae still do. "Think of the Congestion Charge as simply moving the pollution elsewhere," he attempts to reason with it, "you aren't the first magical being that's going to have to think about a commute."

----------------------------
Asthma, unemployment, detective

 

[Droflet]

I'm a gumshoe, a PI. Well, at least I used to be. Then my asthma got so bad that I couldn't work anymore and now I'm living on government hand-outs.

Clown, dwarf, murder mystery.

 

[Alex The G and T]

How could the dwarf have been stabbed to death from outside a second floor window. There was no way for a murderer to reach so high above the street.
Until the detective realized that the clown with the knife was walking on stilts.

-----

Fisherman, Stormy weather, Fantasy

 

[J Riff]

Old Gribwalde the crabber caught crabs at the beach every day. He sang, mostly show tunes like Stormy Weather, and he read fantasy novels because crab-fishing was such a repetetive, dreary, dull and mind-numbing task that he needed to escape, in his mind, to a better place, a place with beautiful space-vixens, and no crabs or other nasty biting critters.

Coffee, robot, romance

 

[Cat's Cradle]

The smell of coffee wafted throughout the office, signaling to one and all that morning break had finally arrived. The men and women of the office staff clustered in the kitchenette, standing in line for a cup of joe, and passing the sleek, Parisian electric coffee kettle back and forth - caressing its stylish handle, and slushing it about to gauge the amount of coffee left. “Get your filthy, perverted hands off of her -” the delivery 'bot yelled at them, “that’s my fiancée you’re manhandling there!”
###

windmill, jockey, noir detective

 

[Droflet]

It was going on midnight at the Windmill Bar and Grill when I walked to the bar and ordered a scotch. I'd just finished a case and was meeting a guy who had another problem for me to fix. The guy arrived and said, "You Malone," to which I nodded and took note of his jockey sized bodyguard.

Spaceship, humor, horror. (BTW, CC, that's hilarious.)

 

[Cat's Cradle]

(Thx, Drof!)

 

[J Riff]

The spaceship Dorflet cruised into the Frambulon sector and billions of creatures on multiple planets perked up their ears and waggled their tentacles. The Earth Joke-Ship had arrived, with the finest comedians in known space onboard, and the fun was just about to start. Nobody knew that a deadly Franglizibdjibblarinarianian Neutron-worm was lurking in the hold, and that the entire solar system would shortly be reduced to glowing radioactive waste, right in the middle of the biggest laugh they'd had in years.

Guitars, leprosy, YA detective

 

[Droflet]

Guitars were strumming and a hot redhead humming as I walked into the seedy late night bar. I'm a cop, young for the job but ready to bust this case wide open. I saw the man scratching at his hand, the marks unmistakably made by a rare form of leprosy and knew I had my man.

Flying pigs, war, sci fi.