Disturbing Mass Suicide Worries Local Authorities

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – A spokesperson for the LADP revealed details of an apparent mass suicide that occurred in the early hours of the morning today in a small warehouse along the docks in LA Harbor.

“We have no information at this time about the identities of the deceased, ” a grim-looking Detective Rob Richardson said during a press conference, “all we know is the scene is horrific and we don’t know why all of these people decided to end their lives.”

Sources tell Reuters that the scene is indeed grisly; the participants apparently inflicted severe injuries on themselves in the process of ending their lives.

According to Detective Richardson, there are at least three hundred bodies in the warehouse.

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Jason the Physicist wasn’t surprised at all when Jason the Physicist walked through the door to his bar. Since that time travel incident back in college, he’d actually been expecting something like this to happen someday.  What really surprised him though, was when a third Jason walked through the door.  The arrival of the third Jason seemed to unnerve Jason #2 as well.  For a moment they all stared at each other.  The Original Jason broke the tense silence.

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Gerald Baily had enormous hands. Each one was as wide as his torso — if he held his hand as if showing the number five, they measured thirty-four and a half inches from the tip of his pinky to the end of his thumb. In all other respects, Gerald was normally proportioned.

His unusual hands were first noticed when Gerald was still in his mother’s womb. The doctors marveled at the size of the tiny infant’s hands — at that point they were bigger than the foetus’ head. Gerald had to be delivered by cesarean section as the risk to his mother was too great for a normal delivery.

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When Chris woke up, he realized he was stuck in a maze.

He was in a small chamber, with four exits, and in the dim light, he could see that corridors stretched off and made abrupt turns off into the distance.

He tried to remember how he had gotten here, but his hazy memory gave no answer. In fact, other than his name — Chris — he could remember little else. There were giant, gaping holes where his life should be. It was obvious that he had a past, that he was someone, but the specific details escaped him.

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Jeff was playing the most important game.

It was a game of chess, and the stakes were very high — the highest, in fact.

He was playing for his life.  His opponent:  none other than the Grim Reaper himself.

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Walter Wiggensbottom had a giant, shaggy, white beard.  He was extremely proud of it — “It’s taken me forty years to grow this thing!” he would tell his friends.  Walter also had a giant problem.  For the last five years, he had only been able to find work as Santa.  Walter hated playing Santa, but did it reluctantly in order to pay the bills until his retirement kicked in.  At 62 years old, he still had four more years until his social security kicked in, and Walter hadn’t been lucky.  He had worked for a small manufacturing company his entire working life but they had gone out of business six years ago and taken his pension with them.

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Jason the Physicist knew it was going to be an interesting evening when the alien walked into his bar.  Jason had dealt with his share of odd an interesting events (like the time he helped the folks at CERN save the world from a tiny black hole they’d accidentally created, or that wacky time-travel incident back in college), but he had never actually seen an extra-terrestrial.  The alien slapped a tentacle on the bar.

“Whiskey”, it said, sounding very much like Stephen Hawking.  Jason peered around for the source of the word, and finally settled on a small black box on the creature’s belt.  The box looked like it had been put together from parts obtained at Radio Shack.  In fact, upon closer examination, Jason saw the tellate cirle R logo in raised platic on the front of the box, next to a small speaker whose wires disappared into the innards of the box.

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On the day Tokyo was being destroyed by giant robots, Ichiro Ramone was 5,470 miles away enjoying a nice sandwich.

Ichiro’s mother was Anzu Watanabe, a Japanese supermodel and lead singer of the all-girl 80s punk rock cover band Bang Bang Go Go. His father was Ricardo Ramone, a multi-billionaire who oversaw an empire of Mexican factories churning out NAFTA-friendly merchandise, ranging from cars to casino chips. Ichiro never felt at home in either Tokyo or Mexico City, so when it came time for college, Ichiro chose Berkley and majored in math with a minor in art.  It turns out that Ichiro was a certified Einstien-level genius, which was quickly noticed by the spooks at the NSA. They recruited Ichiro upon his graduation and put him to work on a top-secret project that involved breaking complex coded communications.  These signals appeared to be between the Russians and a destination just outside the orbit of the planet formerly known as Pluto in a region of space known as the Kuiper belt.

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On the day Tokyo was being destroyed by giant robots, Ichiro Ramone was 5,470 miles away enjoying a nice sandwich.  Ichiro was born to Anzu Watanabe, a supermodel Japanese mother and Ricardo Ramone, a rich, industrialist Mexican father 22 years ago in Tokyo.  He was an outcast to both countries.  So naturally, as soon as possible, he left his family in Tokyo and moved to Los Angeles, where he now makes a living working in a ticket booth at a Hollywood Boulevard pornographic movie theater.  A job that had its share of obvious drawbacks, certainly, but it was not without certain perks.  The owner, Mr. Perkins, was an ex-scientologist who had hit it big working at a startup during the dot-com boom and left it all behind to buy the theater from its previous owners, a transvestite named Denise (formerly Dennis) and her wife Charlene, a retired porn star.  In addition to paying Ichiro a salary, Mr. Perkins allowed Ichiro to stay in a room just off of the projection booth, so Ichiro was spared the expense of an aparment in LA, which saved him a considerable amount of money.  Ichiro was saving all of his spare money so he could go to culinary school and one day open his own restaurant.  He needed to do this on his own, without his parent’s money, to prove to his father that he was a worthy son.  When he had last seen his parents, it had been a heated, angry exchange, and he had stormed out of their penthouse apartment and not seen or spoken to them since.  He eventually bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.

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This is more of a note to myself, on what I’m trying to accomplish with my experiments with Tiny Fiction, and may likely be very disjointed.  The creative process for these things often starts with the first line of the story, and proceeds from there.  Often, I’ll have no idea where the story is going to end up.  Sometimes, I’ll have an idea of the tone I want to set (in Spies Like Us, for example, I wanted the tone to be bleak, and show how tired and worn Dmitri was by the process of being a spy).  Also, in each of these little nuggets, I want the reader to hunger for more.  I try to do this by including little interesting bits of detail, things I might reference in passing and never explore.  I’m sure I’m breaking all kinds of rules, and if I had bothered to take any writing classes in college, I might learn the “right” way to do this stuff, but I’ve read a lot of books and short stories, and I know what I like and don’t like.

I also want to use these small pieces of fiction to explore character development, and dialog.  I haven’t really had much dialog in either of them, but I’m going to work on that. Dialog is hard to do in only 500 words or so (my self-imposed limit to these stories), but I think that makes it more challenging — each word has to mean *just* the right thing.

This whole process has been interesting so far — now, all the time, I’m thinking up new ideas for Tiny Fiction. As I type this, I’m looking at 6 drafts that I’ve started, all in various states of completion.  One of them only has a title “The Short and Tragic Life of Archibald Turner”.  I have no idea what that story is going to be about, I just liked the title so I started a draft to capture the idea.  I guess that’s one of the exciting parts for me, having a place to capture all of these ideas, and actually bring some of them to fruition.

I’m not doing so great on my goal of writing a “short story” once a month (i.e., something more substantial than Tiny Fiction).  I have two ideas that I’m toying with for my first short story, and maybe I’ll just start throwing stuff out there for both and see what sticks.  Both are perfect for serial fiction — they’re ripe with ideas and characters begging to get into a series of adventures and mishaps. Hopefully after next week things for me in my personal life will begin to “settle down” (ha!) a bit more into a pattern and I can figure out how to fit these activities into my life.

Ah well, enough blathering on. I’ll maybe work on a story now.

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