Thursday December 20th, 2012

The exercise:

Took Max for his final midwife appointment this afternoon. Little monster is nearly ten and a half pounds now!

The countdown to presents and what not continues with: Gremlins.

Yeah, I guess we've got a theme now. Well, a theme within a theme: a week's worth of Christmas movie title prompts, all of which feature some sort of connection to the darker side of the holidays. Because, you know, 'tis the season and all that. 

It's a mega theme week!

Either way, it continues... now.

Mine:

Our target was a mysterious factory, deep in enemy territory, whose towering chimneys belched black smoke into an otherwise unoccupied valley. A scout team had been watching the operations for several weeks by that time and security appeared to be understaffed and undertrained.

Whether that was because there was nothing worth guarding or because it was a clever coverup of something integral to their war efforts was unknown. In recent days, however, suspicion had been increasing exponentially. Some of the leading minds back at HQ were convinced this was what we'd been searching so desperately for.

So they sent us in to make sure they were right.

We were a small team, built for stealth and speed. Years spent together in the heat of battle had melted us down into what seemed like a single cohesive mass. One brain ruled our bodies, one heart pumped blood through our veins.

If that factory truly was the source of the gremlins that had been invading the engines of our flyboy's machines, then we were the men to put a stop to it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Max sounds like he's doing well!
Heh, I like the reference back to the origin of gremlins in your piece today, for all it stops me using the same thing :-P It's very atmospheric too, with the black smoke belching and the little details about the stealth teams and the security staff. I enjoyed reading it :)

Gremlins
"I confess, I'm quite lost," said Miss Diffy. She adjusted her flying goggle, stroked her hair (sprayed so heavily that even the strong winds at this altitude weren't moving it), and pouted. Mr. Swansea, holding his top hat on his head with whitened fingers and a death-grip, widened his grey eyes.
"How?" he said, the wind nearly ripping his words away. "We're in a hot-air balloon, Diffy darling. You only have to look over the side to see where we are!"
"Oh I know that, silly! I'm lost because I don't see how gremlins can have infested something so low-tech."
"What do you mean?" Mr. Swansea's face had gone a slighly ashy-grey.
"Look, you can see one sitting on the sand-bag." Miss Diffy pointed and giggled. "It's much cuter than I thought they would be!"
"It's eating the rope holding the sand-bag on!" Mr. Swansea lunged at it, tripped over a second, previously unseen gremlin, and plummeted from the basket.
"Oh golly!" said Miss Diffy as the hot air balloon rose.

morganna said...

Little and green
Lean mean fighting machines
We are here to take your queen!

Marc said...

Greg - when I checked to see what other definitions might be attached to 'gremlins' I knew that I had to use that one! Also, I was pretty sure you would've gone that route and I wanted to see what else you could come up with :D

And, unsurprisingly, I'm glad that I did!

Morganna - yeah, I wouldn't want to mess with those little buggers...