Week 24

Well, another week, and another story!

This week's story was prompted by my entry in the Five Minute Fiction contest. The prompt was "report" and a rather amazing story came out of it. Talk about inspiration! I wrote over 300 words in five minutes! I liked the story so much, I fleshed it out some and made it this week's story. I thought, though, as an added bonus, I'd post the original 300 word story here, so you can compare and enjoy. So, here it is, the original, short, Report.

The Report

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” Gerald said.

He’d been walking this beat for fifteen years now, had worked his way up from a foot cop to a detective, and still mostly kept to the same beat. In all that time, though, he had never seen anything like this.

“What do we have here, Officer?” he said to the duty officer.

“Looks like a dragon attack, sir,” he said.

Gerald had already figured that part out. There were red dragon scales all over the place, and the building they were looking at had been burned on one side. It had to be a dragon. But that didn’t explain the dead troll, the dead scientist and the fact that the place was just crawling with brownies. Gerald hated the fae, and brownies the most. The little suckers trashed his car last week. ‘We just want to clean your windshield,’ they had said. Right.

“I got that much,” he sighed, “I mean what do you have for information on the reason behind the attack.”

“Not much, sir,” said the duty officer. “Just this.”

He handed Gerald a manila folder with a plastic tab on it. A little bit of paper in the tab had some writing on it, but all it said was ‘Report.’ No number, no idea of what the report was on, nothing. Gerald opened the report and gave it a brief scan. Mystical drawings and arcain formula were side by side with scientific formula, and it looked like two different hand writings for both sets of notes. More disturbing, it looked like they were trying to find a way to combine the two styles of controlling the world.

Gerald looked over at the troll again, and saw the telltale tattoo that marked him as a wizard. Whatever was going on here, the death of these two were just the beginning of things.

“Sergeant,” he said to the duty officer, “get me some coffee. This is going to be a long night.”

The End