[ Kinship ] Vanilla Pudding to Go

Entering Jelly's Cafe, Five saw Tom Solven sitting at the counter eating vanilla pudding.  Jelly's had the best vanilla pudding, except for the time it came to life, and grew to gigantic proportions, and then went on a rampage.  Well, it was still good, but no one can eat that much vanilla pudding, not even Matt.  The town stunk of vanilla pudding for weeks.  The Sheriff requested that Cook not use that recipe again.  Not that it mattered much, people were put off pudding for a long time after that incident.

Sitting next to the diminutive man, he opened his notebook, and smiled as he saw Tom look over at him.

"Exactly why do you do this Five?  Asking everyone who will answer you so many questions?  You fancy yourself the town historian?"  Tom popped his neck, and squinted at his pudding.  "I still don't trust this stuff..."

Five gently probed Tom's mind, but meet with resistance.  A deep growl came from Tom.

"That makes my brain itch.  Stop.  I'll answer your questions."  He pushed the bowl of pudding away.  "I swear this stuff still grows.  I never seem to empty a bowl.  No wonder it's all you can eat."

Looking over his list of questions, a feeling of unease crept into Five's very being.  Shuddering he put down his pen.  Something was wrong.

"So Five you going to the movies tonight?  I hear it's supposed to be a new movie...  Wait what's wrong?"

Five noticed that Tom was sniffing the air, moving his head side to side.

"Zombies... lot's and lot's zombies..."  Jumping off the stool, Tom's transformation was incredibly fast.  One second he was a normal looking midget, the next he was midget werewolf.

Standing up, Five looked through the large front windows of Jelly's Cafe.  Main Street was filled with zombies, more than he had ever seen before.  This was bad.

"Five, I'll go out first, you follow me.  We need to make it to the Sheriff's office.  Something's wrong.  This many zombies shouldn't have made it into town without the alarm going off."  Turning to the rest of the cafe's customers, he noticed most weren't a part of the defense force.  "Everyone else should stay here, unless you're a member of the defense force, and armed.  You will be safe in here."

Tom turned back to Five.  "Try to stay near, I'll clear a path.  Let's go!"

Pulling out his Bowie knife, Five took a deep breathe, and a chill ran down his spine.  He never liked combat, but when he had to fight, he could fight.  Zombies were the worst.  He couldn't read them at all.  Their minds were blank.

With a howl and a leap, Tom, or Snarl, as many of the people called him, was out the door, and in seconds had already beheaded four zombies with a mere slash of his long claws.

Pausing before exiting the cafe, Five sent a mental message to his Clan.  The town was going to need help.  Then he was out the door, slashing out with the knife as the first zombie lurched towards him.  Somewhere down Main Street there was an explosion.  Everything seemed to rumble.  Then he was on the ground, momentarily stunned.  Shaking his head, his ears ringing, he saw the zombie looming over him, a black ooze dripping from a half rotted nostril, and staining what was once a very nice Superman t-shirt.  Five was wishing he had ordered some of the pudding when he had the chance.

Suddenly the zombie was headless, as Snarl came to his rescue.  "COME ON!"  Getting to his feet, Five saw something large and black swooping out of the darkening sky, and straight towards Snarl...

Zombies Don't Make Good Pets...

It's also a pain when they make it into your safe-house.  Poor Private Gronch, one of my three characters in Urban Dead is now a zombie.  I think I'm going to have him wander around, and hopefully find one of those Necro-Tech dudes to revive him.  As a zombie he can't use his stuff, but I think it's hilarious that he's got a flak jacket on.  That was a lucky find.

I created the graphic above after playing around with CorkboardMe.  Yes, I did a screen capture for the graphics, and did the rest with Paint.Net.  It's hard to make realistic looking blood splatters!  I thought I had a splatter plug-in, but I couldn't find it.

I hope to have some fiction posted sometime tomorrow, or maybe some sandbox ideas...

the Urban Dead

I was researching something yesterday, when I stumbled upon this browser game.  I was intrigued, so I created a character.  Gronch is his name, and he's a private.  I chose that as his class, because you get to start with a pistol, and some ammo of course.  It seems fairly popular and active, but I'm not that impressed with the game yet.

You have 50 Action Points to accomplish things.  Action Points are regenerated at the rate of one per half-hour.  This makes for a slow game.  One of the first things that's recommended you do is find a safe house.  You don't want to be caught outside once you run out of Action Points.  Zombies may eat you...

Private Gronch chose Club Greswell as his safehouse for the night.  Today I changed to a different location, because I realized during my explorations I was going to run out of APs before I made it back.  Once of the things, well one of the few things you can do is search.  Today I found a crowbar, and a can of spray paint.  I was excited about that for about 30 seconds...

In Urban Dead you can play more than one character so yesterday after using all my APs for Private Gronch, who I guess is AWOL, and trying to survive the zombie apocalypse; I made a zombie character.  I named him, Little Henry, and described him as a bald midget.  Little Henry didn't do much his first day, but he did attack a portable generator.  In fact he struck at it, and eventually tried to bite it.  Nothing much came of that, except for the lights flickering for a bit.  Heh... Other than that, all he did was wander around making zombie noises when he found a living person. "Mrh!"

Today when I logged on to Little Henry I discovered he'd been attacked twice, and some heinous scientist extracted some of his DNA!  Later Little Henry did what zombies do best.  He managed to kill someone.  Granted they were already down to 38 Hit Points ( everyone starts with 50 Hit Points ), but for 1st level I guess I did okay.  Unfortunately after the person was dead I didn't get to eat his brains, so I fled the area.  I earned 44 xp!  It takes 100 XP to learn a new skill.  Now I don't know what sort of skills a zombie can learn, but that should be interesting.  Maybe there's a brain eating skill?

I don't know how long I will remain interested in this browser game, but for now it's a good way to kill a few minutes.  There's probably a lot more to this game than I know about, but I just haven't felt like doing the research.  Man, I will be glad when I can finally play Skyrim...

Are You Ready?

A spoof cover of a government preparedness booklet.  The photograph ( if you didn't already know ) is from Night of the Living Dead, a movie that is in the public domain.  Government manuals are also not copyrighted material.

I should write the whole booklet from the perspective of how to prepare for the coming zombie apocalypse.  Might be fun...

[ Kinship ] A Zombie Ate My Homework... AGAIN!

Miss Leela, was taking attendance, which didn't take long.  Not many kids attended the Kinship Public School.  Today they were meeting at the Kinship Public Library.  Most of the kids hated having school at the library, because they say it feels "haunty".  However, after there was an "incident" in the school science lab, which led to the sheriff having to declare the building off limits, they didn't have many choices.

Only one of her students wasn't at school.  This always worried her.  So many things could happen here in Kinship.  She tried her best to warn, and prepare her students, but some things you can't prepare for.  She pondered calling the sheriff, but then she saw the student walk in.

Jeff, walking in breathless and sweating profusely, was carrying a sawed-off shotgun in his right hand, and his lunchbox in his left.  He set the shotgun and lunchbox on the nearest table, and took off his backpack.  Then he sat down in a chair, wiping the sweat from his brow.

None of the other children who attended school gave him much notice.  Miss Leela walked over and picked up the shotgun, opening it at the breech.  It was unloaded.

"Now Jeff you know we have a ZERO TOLERANCE POLICY here at school."

Shrugging, Jeff pulled out some paper out of his pocket.  It was damp, stained, and somewhat shredded.  He started to try and smooth it out.

"Jeff?  What's the policy about weapons?"  Crossing her arms, and raising her eyebrows, she waited.

"I didn't have time!  I didn't want to be late again!  I know the policy!"

"Okay, just load it.  So what happened?"  Miss Leela had a good idea what happened.  Poor Jeff's bad luck again.

"Well, I was walking down down FM 666, and then all of a sudden a zombie lurched out of a corn field.  So I stopped, and pulled my shotgun out of my pack.  It snagged my homework, and the wind blew it towards the zombie.  Well, the zombie caught it and shoved it in his mouth...chewing and slobbering...stupid zombie..."

"So you're telling me a zombie ate your homework again?"  Miss Leela, trying hard not to laugh, put her hand on Jeff's shoulder.

"Yes, a stupid zombie ate my homework... AGAIN!  But I got it!  I gave it both barrels. KAPLOW!  Blew it's head right off.  Then I got what was left of my homework...THAT was icky..."

"Okaaaaaay, well I'm glad you're okay.  So there was only one zombie?"

Still working on smoothing out his homework, Jeff replied,  "Yeah, only one, otherwise I would have runned away.  F... A... S... T... FAST! So do I get extra credit?"

"For what?"  Shaking her head,  Miss Leela walked back to the front of the class.  Sometimes that boy didn't seem right in the head.  Then again everyone who lived in Kinship seemed a little odd at times.

"For ZOMBIE DISSECTION!  I took pictures to!  With my digital camera!"  Grinning, Jeff held up his homework,  "Hhhmm... not too bad... UH are we going to have SHOW and TELL this week?"

"Well, write a report tonight, and uh... show and tell?" Miss Leela's jaw drops.

Everyone in the room jumped when Jeff's lunchbox, a much coveted A-Team lunchbox, started rattling...