Jump to content

The Spiderweb Art Movement, Round 2!

nikki.

By nikki.
in General

 Share

Recommended Posts

nikki.
Magnificent Ornk

nikki.

Posted
Posted

We haven't done this for a while, so here's a reminder for those who were here the first time (and an introduction for those of you who weren't).

 

Basically, this thread is here for you to post your creative works - be it painting, photography, poetry, prose, or anything else that doesn't begin with "p". In the past we had sketches, musical compositions, poetry and short stories, so anything goes (as long as it abides by the CoC of the boards).

 

Once something has been posted, everybody else can offer constructive and helpful criticism (unless the artist asks not to, I guess). To start us off, I'll post an old piece of poetry of mine.

 

Click to reveal..
Two plus the world.

 

The night slinks slow over the wood-chipped walls

creating a valley of shadows,

an intrigue never to be explored.

 

With a testing push against creaking windows

they send the wind to envelop,

but our foundations withstand

 

the onslaught of rain comes slowly, at first,

but shattering glass as shards of ice

clatter-splatter-smash against the panes.

 

Inside the spider’s web, the light flickers,

and the house of cards before us wavers.

Gentle hands stop it falling down,

 

until the door is opened, and the outside lamps

burn away the shadows and intrigue,

as echoing voices bring down the walls.

 

And with that, have at it!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dikiyoba
Magnificent Ornk

Dikiyoba

Posted
Posted

If it's not insanely long, you can post it in this thread directly with spoiler tags. Otherwise, create a free webpage with Freewebs or some other site, post your story there, and provide a link to it.

 

Originally Posted By: Arancaytar
Which story is the spoon quote from? I couldn't find it among the Sudden Fiction...

Fifth section, second story.

 

Dikiyoba.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dakkanor
Chittering Clawbug

Dakkanor

Posted
Posted

okay ive got it all down

 

i had to copy id off of drafts that i kept and i've tried to keep it to what i had submitted in that class but there were some points that were too clumsy to my four year older eyes

 

 

Click to reveal..
WITHOUT ETHICS

 

"you experiments are without ethics. You are Hereby Expelled From the science

community!" Those words both destroyed and recreated him and haunted him in his

sleep. as always he woke up in a cold sweat cursing a twenty year old memory.

Before he left his small bed he realized - it was his birthday.

How old was he? Ah, yes 67 ... and what was the year?... 2025 that was it.

 

He ate and then checked his breakthrough - for that was what she was:smarter,

stronger, faster and better developed. She was a Queen. As he entered his laboratory he marveled at the fully developed experiment. Once he checked

on the experiment he Knew - his Queen and the five males would hatch soon. He scurried to the giant refrigerator filled with meat and opened it to let it warm up. they would be famished and if he was lucky they would be fully functional and he hoped they would see him as a parent. then he did what he was itching to do for the last three months -the time it took his ... children ... yes that's what they were - to grow out of embryos. He entered the code and heard the the computer 'warning One hour before Birthing commences. warning one hour till Birthing commences.'"Ah" he exclaimed in a thin reedy voice "My life's work is coming to this" and with this he

left out of necessity.

 

So he used his toilet and washed his hands, then got himself another snack - it would be awhile before he got another chance to eat. A sudden thumping on the front door nearly gave him a heart attack. Then he realized a pattern. He smiled, his 'Sponsor' were here to see the hatching from a closed room made especially for them. if he succeeded - and didn't expire from joy - they would pay him for his design plan, notes and experience. he opened the door

"hello good sir" he said happily, "Are you ready for the Birthing? it will happen soon" he said with a Demented grin.

"it is?" said a man with a a baritone called Joe. "Well that's good as I was here to ask ... so how soon?" he

was worried he might have to stay

"oh about forty-five minutes" he said elated.

"I'd Better call my superiors" said Joe unsure.

"I should get some refreshments then" he said "What would you like?"

 

She awoke, trapped.She thrashed until she realized she would be let out soon enough - so she succumbed to sleep after she informed the males of what was soon to happen

 

With fifteen minutes to go he sensed them and then informed his sponsor that at least half would hatch. this made him very pleased especially since one of the ability's was already working.

 

"Now how often will they mate?" His Sponsor said

"Ah... about four times a year with half a dozen in each clutch!"he replied to a question that had been asked dozens of times, already he knew the next

"And how soon till they mate?"the sponsor asked

"six months for the female, three for the males" was his often repeated reply

 

She woke again and knew what was imminent so she communicated it to the males

 

Joe never knew what happened to the man to make him look so much like a lizard. in fact when Joe first saw him a forked tongue was expected when the man talked. now Joe understood - it was a failed experiment! "Why Lizards?" Joe wondered aloud

"Because they're versatile and can live in extreme heat." Joe's employer had heard and answered "And now they can live in extreme cold" these words shook joe as he finally realized what would happen. These creatures would end humanity and it was all too late to stop it.

 

She knew it was time so she waited for the liquid to empty From the tube she was in. she saw her creator and acknowledged that creature that once was human. the males recognized him as well - only because he looked kin to them how inferior were they. then she saw what he had prepared for them - cold yes but still good - red meat. enough to kick start their growth. in her anticipation she made what was as close as a smile as she could. she was already seven feet high oh how magnificent she would be!

 

"She's awake!" he cried " and in a minute she shall feed!" He was in hes own version of heaven at that time and for the first time since that experiment all those years ago failed and got him kicked out of the scientific world leaving him alone and mutated beyond recognition he was truly happy. the five large tubes that grew and held the males ascended and they stalked into the refrigerator to eat their fill. they were already five feet high and all together they weighed half a tonne.their tubes were five feet in diameter, the queens was six. once the males had finished they went to the nests made for them and the laid their raptor-like body's to rest. as they passed him each one dipped its sleek head in acknowledgment of their father and he nodded back with a grin that covered his entire face.

 

Finally, he raised the largest tube and out she stalked and quickly finished off the meat in the refrigerator. Then she faced the viewing room where the sponsor were cocked her head to the side for a moment as if she were listening then spat there, he paled knowing that heaven though she was unable to use her fiery breath until she was mature, he also knew that her saliva was highly acidic mainly to help with food. After a moment he slowly shook his head and asked "Why did you do that my dear?" 'they wanted to kill you and steal us' she replied in a sibilant whisper audible only in his mind. and to that he smiled a deep, meaningful smile "so my daughter we have work to do"

 

 

there when this was written i was fifteen and just gotten into spiderweb software and this story is heavily inspired by geneforge the critters i imagined when writing this were ... can you guess it? fyoras

 

the original ending was horrible so i rewrote it just today despite my promise to myself to submit this as it was

 

i would like to point out that before now the only people who have read this were my teacher at the time and my immediate family none of which would understand the full story or see it as i did but i think most people here might

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 2 weeks later...
Hypnotic
Rotghroth Rhapsody

Hypnotic

Posted
Posted

This has poor grammar, no plot and its done entirely with words beginning with "T". I was bored at school so I decided to make an alliteration story. Enjoy.

 

Click to reveal..
Talkative Trevor taught tackling to two terrible Tuataras, then trampled three tired Totara trees travelling to terrific Taupo, talking to Taihape Tourists taking the terrifying triple turbo train, that transfers train takers to towns.

 

Not sure if it classifies as art.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
JadeWolf
Ineffable Wingbolt

JadeWolf

Posted
Posted

A prologue I wrote for a to-be book a couple years ago. Of course, I never got the plot out right and moved on to other stuff.

A bit long though ^^, but the text paste site doesn't work for me. (Max 34 lines??)

 

Click to reveal..
Stars burned diamond silver against the velvet background of the night. In front of the myriad glowing scatter of the cosmos lay a shadow, another veil of night, massive, looming, enlarging. A disc-shaped inky blot, now covering half the sky, as black as the pits of sorrow and as huge as a thousand suns. The Sphere.

 

 

We were coming closer, shifting from the transfer orbit that had brought us arcing into the system into another that would send us spinning around the great black sphere. It grew in the cockpit windows, steadily eclipsing more and more of the painted starfield behind it, eating up suns; spreading across the face of the galaxy. We sat strapped in, the autopilot guiding our long slow fall down the abyss of its gravity, and watched in silence as we plunged towards its huge dark maw.

 

 

The Sphere was one hundred million miles in radius, two hundred million in diameter; from its centre to its wall spanned the distance from a sun to a normal, comfortably inhabited planet. Indeed, it was hollow, this cavern wrought by gods, and at its centre lay a star, lost in the vastness of its interior. We could tell from the radiation emissions flowing piping hot off the Sphere’s exterior that it was a perfectly normal small yellow sun, like any of a hundred million others; and we could tell from gravity readings and analysis of the orbits of the other planets in the system- three gas giants, small and far out- that the walls of the Sphere were seventy miles thick. All this had been known for millennia, since the first tentative expeditions of man swept across these far reaches of the galaxy in times forgotten; all this recorded many times in books of history, forgotten, rediscovered, erased by the tides of war and the fall of dying empires. Nothing more we knew. No one had ever penetrated those mighty walls. No man knew what lay inside that cavern. We were to be the first.

 

 

Who could know who built the Sphere? Men, perhaps, under the guidance of a civilisation long fallen, with the aid of technologies and machines whose principles had been lost, whose designs destroyed by time and war. Something else, perhaps, strange creatures toiling in darkness and vacuum for hundreds of thousands of years before vanishing traceless into the depths of space- or perhaps sealing themselves forever inside the impenetrable fastness of the Sphere. There was no telling from its walls; its outer surface was simply a featureless plain of iron and steel and metal mined from asteroids and from the corpses of gutted planets. Whence had the material come, to build such a structure? How many thousands of worlds must have died to complete it? The Sphere glowed darkly red with the transmitted heat of the star inside, and gave up no clues. No one had ever pierced those walls. There had been attempts, expeditions to drill through the mountain walls or to blow holes in them with nuclear fire or antimatter. But none had returned. Their fates were lost in twisted legend, and for centuries this part of the galaxy had been stricken by conflict, riven by total war. It was as if the Sphere was cursed; surely a mere seventy miles of steel could not defeat the creatures who had torn planets from their orbits, killed suns, thrown themselves in an instant across light years in glowing ships of plastic and metal? Yet that barrier, cratered and scarred on the outside with the impacts of millennia of meteorites, had yet to be crossed.

 

 

We did not mean to cross by force, but by cunning. We had no drilling equipment or thermal lances the size of cities. We came, the four of us, with nothing but a map.

 

 

It was ancient, and confused by many translations, and it had been harder to find than a rook in a flock of a million ravens in the dark, but we had reason to believe that it was genuine. It gave us the key to the Sphere, the way in: a gate, a few hundred metres wide, located in a certain place on the surface, well hidden, leading via a maze of twisted tunnels carved out of the heart of the steel to the inside surface. Anyone could have found it, had they been prepared to look, to fly at close range over the countless quadrillion square miles of the outside surface and go over it with the fine toothed comb of a mass detector. No one had had the time or the inclination. The Universe contained far greater wonders, and far greater rewards.

 

 

Our map was a program, written in the obsolete machine code of an ancient computer. We had spent years finding it, following obscure rumours and dead trails to cities long forsaken on worlds devoid of life. We had searched in a hundred museums to find an machine capable of running it. The Sphere was spinning, a slow dance of years and inches per second, and the program knew how, and it could tell us where the Gate was now, in relation to the system’s own North, the perpendicular line to the orbital plane of the gas giants. It remained to be seen if its predictions were correct, and if what it predicted existed in the first place...

 

 

We fell into orbit just above the Sphere, flying a few miles above its pockmarked surface, coasting past it at a thousand miles an hour. So huge; at this speed it would take us the better part of a year just to circumnavigate it. Blackness filled half the sky, a great featureless plain scattered with craters and rough impact circles lit by the light of a hundred thousand stars. Our shadow, etched in starshine, flew with us. The Sphere was glowing, radiating the heat of the star inside it in the far infrared, but we could not see it; to our eyes, it was as black as the grave.

It intimidated us, this work of gods. Bigger than anything else in the universe save the massive ruby-glowing red giants, dying stars preparing to blow themselves into oblivion on the winds of infinity. Move it into our home system and it would contain our sun, our homeworld, and the four planets inwards from ours. It dwarfed its contents like a beachball encapsulating a small marble, like a cosmic cathedral made of black aged iron with an apple at its centre. It contained more space than all the structures and all the ships constructed by Man in all the thousands of years since he had built mud huts by the side of some river long dried up on a world long blown to hell. It was unimaginably, inconcievably huge, as difficult to imagine as a whole as it is to picture a billion grains of sand the way you can picture three. From our tiny ship it looked like a plain, the horizon immeasurably far away; a plain exetnding to infinity, with only stars beyond.

 

 

We coasted, flying towards the coordinates supplied by the map, and waited, and readied out equipment and tightened our straps and wrote solemn entries in our log, while the excitement and the fear built in our hearts.

 

 

Our ship was small, a five-berth light ex-military runabout such as might be found anywhere doing scouting or small cargo runs or paramilitary escort duty. She could make planetfall and loft on her own and was fitted with a slow, cheap and ancient stardrive that groaned when we pushed more than a light year out of it and took hours to recharge afterwards. But she was called Rose, and we were quite attatched to her.

 

 

For this trip, the culmination to all the years we had spent roaming around these distant backwaters of the galaxy, spending weeks on messy primitive war-torn planets following up the few leads we had, Rose’s spare berth and her cargo space was filled with equipment we had bought on credit from one of the few ports that would lend us money. We weren’t pirates; we weren’t even wanted by the law. We just had a local reputation for borrowing cash, wasting it on pointless expeditions and taking far too long to pay it back. There was me, the pilot; Ace, the engineer; Jane, our historian turned detective; and Rod, doer of the jobs he couldn’t find an excuse not to undertake, or general systems engineer. Our partnership had begun many years ago, when Jane, fresh out of a research faculty at the richer end of the locality, had approached me with a lead, a dream and a bit of cash. It took her a year and a lot of determination to convince me to pay any attention to her crackpot scheme, until she jumped me with the evidence- and then it took the two of us as long to find anyone gullible enough to tag along with us, in the shape of Ace and Rod. All those who had scorned us, both at the port bars and in the halls of academia, would have to prick up their ears and listen when we returned this time.

 

 

Against the night the braking motors fired like unfolding flowers, sending waterfalls of incandescent gas blooming over the steel plain of the Sphere. It would take half an hour to brake our sufficiently to allow us to land on that black cratered plain; we had ample time to wonder what awaited us.

 

 

The ship’s forward radars drilled deep into the Sphere’s wall, sweeping over the area below and ahead of us, seeking any variation in the featureless gulf of metal that extended to the starry horizon on every side. They could not penetrate deeper than half a mile, and down to that depth they found nothing whatsoever; not a structural beam, not a hollow, not a single imperfection in the miles-thick armour of the Sphere. We flew over an ocean of steel.

 

 

Fifteen minutes into the deceleration burn the nav computer beeped. Ace brought up the radar cross-section. We had it.

 

 

A few dozen miles in front of us, the Sphere’s wall suddenly narrowed from heaven knew how thick to a mere two hundred metres from inside to outside. The thin area of the wall was a disc a hundred metres in diameter, and beyond that was emptiness- as if a tunnel wide enough for a battleship had been bored through from the inside of the Sphere and stopped just short of breaching the outer wall. The Gate was here, in the exact position described by the map, give or take a few miles. We screamed with joy, our doubts scoured away, our dreams another step closer to the light of truth.

 

 

The circular area where the wall was thinned, inexplicably, was completely free from meteorite impacts. It was just as well, for anything larger than a small hill would have blown right through it and into the tunnel beneath. It was also very strange, since every square metre of the Sphere was pockmarked with at least one inch-wide impact crater- yet there was not one blemish on the flawless disc of the Gate. Yet there were no guns, shields or any sort of hardware capable of warding off such missiles.

 

 

Well, whatever. We added it to our long lists of mysteries and decelerated so that we hung in space a mile out from the surface. We dropped five twenty-megaton nuclear warheads with sixty-minute timers and magnetic clamps, retreated to a safe distance, switched off all the non-mil-spec gear and stowed it in the nukeproof lockers, and huddled together in the shielded cockpit. An instantaneous incandescent phoenix flower shone for an instant behind us in perfect silence, faded, and died.

 

 

We turned around and thrusted back. A ragged fifty-metre hole had been blown in the centre of the Gate, amply large enough for Rose to fit through. It opened on the gaping abyss of a tunnel that descended into darkness like the opening of some legendary mineshaft. It was cylindrical, and its walls were flat and totally featureless.

 

 

We cranked the radar, the seachlights, the laser radar, the forward cameras and the passive EM lenses to full amplification, rotated the ship to nosedive into that midnight canyon, and lit up the main drive.

 

 

The tunnel followed a strange path. It dove straight down for a mile or so, then twisted in a complex three-dimensional assembly of S and V shapes, continued sideways along the inside of the Wall for five and a half miles, contorted again like a piece of tangled string, and turned straight “down” again towards the inside of the Sphere. Weightless, for the Wall’s mass was not sufficient to exert anything more than a tiny gravitational pull upon the ship, we navigated that gut of iron. Until, when we were five miles away from the inner surface of the Wall-five miles away from discovering whatever lay on the inside of the Sphere- we had a shock. We had just turned a sharp corner when we began to feel our weight returning.

 

 

Ace cut all the thrusters, and the ship began drifting slowly backwards the way she had come. When she had gone ten metres, she stopped- and we were weightless again.

 

 

Ace throttled up,we moved forwards, something tried to push us back. She applied more power. We made headway. She looked at her instruments. We had entered a gravitational field of a strength comparable to an average planet’s field, oriented away from the Sphere’s centre- and it was evidently purely artificial. There was no concentration of mass in the area capable of causing it. It was there, we surmised, to hold whatever lay on the inside of the Sphere to the inside surface; to turn the Sphere’s inside into a mock-up of a planetary surface.

 

 

One with an area five billion times greater than any habitable planet the Galaxy had ever known.

 

 

As to what generated the field, we had no idea. In the region of the Galaxy we called home such technology was a myth, a half-fictional legend that belonged to long-lost high civilisations or other, far-away, more sophisticated parts of the great starry Milky Way. No one could say for certain whether it existed, or had done in the past, or was a mere fairy tale. Certainly no one knew how to construct such a device, any more than they knew how to go about building a Sphere. The extent of local technological knowledge- “local” referring to the region of space one could travel across in a lifetime- went no higher than the simple hyperdrive, and even that was a hit-and-miss art whose technological and theoretical foundations were no better understood than the dreams of a flower or the memories of a ray of sunlight.

 

 

We came to the end of the tunnel. There was air here, held somehow in check against the artificial gravity by some mysterious field which we traversed without a whisper. We reached a sheer steel wall fifty metres thick, devoid of a gate or a hatch or a breach of any kind. We clamped the ship to it, feeling as if we were clinging on to the inside of the roof of a massive hollow tower, and got out the drilling equipment.

 

 

We never could have known.

 

 

EDIT: Bump! Has anyone even read this laugh ?

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Alenxa
Fledgling Fyora

Alenxa

Posted
Posted

Hello all.

 

Something my brain did, more or less with my permission: "Almarian Wine," to the tune of "Mexican Wine" by Fountains of Wayne.

 

Click to reveal..
We've been killed by a Vahnatai bomb explosion

Lost all our food on a moldy ocean

Walked into combat without our potions

Another commotion

With every promotion

 

But we still trek on where the sun don't shine

Grab all the loot that we can find

Hit reload for the hundredth time

And just have another glass of Almarian wine

 

We started a fight with the talking spiders

Enemy priests went and charmed our fighters

We know what the cause of the mushroom Blight is

And six-legged dogs are amazing biters

 

But we still trek on where the sun don't shine

Though chitrach hunting makes us whine

Hit reload for the hundredth time

And just have another glass of Almarian wine

 

We've been dissected by Rentar-Ihrno

After we called her a crazy weirdo

We found out how far sliths can make a spear go

I just looked up and my health's at zero…

 

But we still trek on where the sun don't shine

Pushing crates and committing crimes

Hit reload for the hundredth time

And just have another glass of Almarian wine

 

Because we still trek on where the sun don't shine

Cast Restore and we'll be fine

Hit reload just one more time

And we'll have another glass of Almarian wine

Think we'll have another glass of Almarian wine

Won't you have another glass of Almarian wine...

Link to comment
Share on other sites
JadeWolf
Ineffable Wingbolt

JadeWolf

Posted
Posted

Welcome to Spiderweb! Please deposit your sanity with the fluffy turtles !

 

(do we still do this? - traditions may have changed during my absence)

 

 

I like those rhymes wink Apart from the fact that's a song I quite like in the original, I personally find your description of avernum is perfectly accurate. I like the six legged dogs bit.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Kill Frenzy
Tenderfoot Thahd

Kill Frenzy

Posted
Posted

Ah, was planning to add a Nephil and another human character but... These are exile characters I've created; Hector the archer, Atani the ranger, Cormac the fighter and Felix the apprentice mage.

 

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o83/Kill_to_thrill/Exile-Hector.jpg

 

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o83/Kill_to_thrill/exile-Atani.jpg

 

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o83/Kill_to_thrill/Exile-Cormac.jpg

 

http://i118.photobucket.com/albums/o83/Kill_to_thrill/Exile-Felix.jpg

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Enraged Slith
Easygoing Eyebeast

Enraged Slith

Posted
Posted

I love how your adventurers looks like a terrifying group of vagrants. I think you've captured the essence of the standard party of Exilers(?)/Avernumites.

 

I'm also fascinated by their garb, which seems to be drawn from numerous cultural influences. I don't know if it was intentional, but it's pretty interesting.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Kill Frenzy
Tenderfoot Thahd

Kill Frenzy

Posted
Posted

Yea I was envisioning that the characters in the first picture were rookies, the ones in the second maybe around level 5 or 8.

 

One thing I love about Exile is that it's adventurers aren't glamorous heroes running around in shining full plate mail with an abundance of well crafted weaponry and magic items. They are raggedy, under fed, poorly equipped people with real personalities and flaws, whom rely heavily on their skills just to survive.

 

I mean really that pretty much applied to Exiles/Avernites as a people. Honestly is my most favorite fantasy concept ever.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
The Mystic
Easygoing Eyebeast

The Mystic

Posted
Posted
Originally Posted By: JadeWolf
So he's our new guy with wierd powers.
Who are you calling weird? tongue

Originally Posted By: Tuberous Villainy!
At higher levels, they look more vicious, more battered, and have a more motley assortment of impressive but highly mismatched gear.

—Alorael, who thinks they already show an appropriate callous disregard for fashion in pursuit of more bonuses. Those are real adventurers!
I can see it now: You have a mage in your party who happens to be wearing the following:
  • A polka dot shirt that gives a bonus to Intelligence
  • A pair of vertical-striped pants that gives a bonus armor
  • A plaid robe that gives a bonus to Mage Spells
  • A glowing pair of boots that give a bonus to Gymnastics
  • A pair of blue & orange gauntlets that give a bonus to Dexterity
  • A cowboy hat that gives a bonus to Arcane Lore and Nature Lore
  • A pair of glasses that are made from one-way mirrors and give a bonus to Rune Reading
Eyes watering yet? tongue
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Dantius
Easygoing Eyebeast

Dantius

Posted
Posted

This is why I must wear matching sets of armor in all my games: initially, I go for the basic outfit (everything worth 0 coins), then I go for the Shaped outfit, then the Puresteel ensemble, and finally the artifacts. No cheating- I I don't have all the requisite gear, then no switching! It makes for an interesting challenge.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Lilith
Hatchling Cockatrice

Lilith

Posted
Posted
Originally Posted By: The Mystic
Oops, I meant two-way mirror. It's basically a special pane of glass; one face acts as a mirror, and the other acts as a window.


those don't actually exist by the way -- or rather, there's nothing special about the face that "acts as a mirror" in itself

the way you make a one-way mirror is to have a slightly reflective glass surface and light up one side of it much more brightly than the other side

you can see this effect yourself with your house's windows at night: if the inside of the house is lit up and the outside isn't, you'll be able to see into the house but people inside will only see their own reflections when looking out
Link to comment
Share on other sites
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing
×
×
  • Create New...