Honestly, when I read this prompt, I’m taking it to mean something along the lines of acting out of the norm in your day-to-day life. Like, you made a choice to do or say something that doesn’t make sense for who you really are.
That being said, I don’t recall any times like that!
I do recall, however, several times where I’ve had to act “out of character” because I was playing a game involving improv. Specifically, Dungeons & Dragons, because for some reason I decided to play a goblin artificer character and one of my buddy’s ended up playing my goblin brother. I’m not shy or averse to doing voices, and I think I do a rather okay imitation of a goblin from the game Warcraft 3, so the two of us did our best goblin voices anytime we felt the need to act IN character which itself was something that felt out of character for me!
So, I didn’t do the goblin voice acting often, and sadly that particular campaign made it maybe two or three sessions before the DM decided they had other priorities and gave up (and this was the third time they had done this to us, so we stopped letting them run campaigns, which further led to us never speaking to him again, but for several reasons beyond just the game).
Acting is a tough gig, and voice acting is nothing to sneeze at, either.
The sound of the Admiral’s boots clicking against the steel floor of the hallway were receding as the lights of the teleporter platform dimmed back to normal levels, and Calvin was still collecting his thoughts.
We spent all that time and effort collecting strange golden mice, that I was told was a rare delicacy, for cats… Calvin sank to his knees, reliving the previous 48 hours trapping an exotic animal on a backwater planet and his hands began to twitch, a psychosomatic after affect of having his hands regrown over a dozen times by the ship’s doctor. The snap of a pen against a clipboard made him flinch and grab his hands as if he had just failed to properly set another trap to try and catch thousands of Mirage Mice in a strange alien jungle. Therese cleared her throat to get his attention. “Calvin,” she tried to speak up and give him his next assignment, but being brought back out of the horrified trance, back to the present, made Calvin leap up and chase after Admiral Slodpolk.
It only took a few seconds for Calvin to run through the hallway, his heavy footfalls on steel echoing along, before he caught up to the Admiral. “You said they were an exotic delicacy, the likes of which, when provided to the RIGHT buyer, would yield something EXCELLENT for the SHIP!” Calvin was fuming.
The Admiral stopped and looked the young man up and down, assessing his intern. “Why yes, my boy, and as I recall, you were all to eager to volunteer!”
“I was EAGER to volunteer because after my first month of interning, of negotiating with various angry factions, that we would have a simpler job!”
“And it was a rather simple job, was it not? Besides, you did fine work, and the job went well enough that we may have made a solid friendship with the Void Cats. As I stated before, they developed a special technique for dry-cleaning, and it’s especially useful for old military hats like mine!” He said, brimming with excitement over the retrieval of the hat now adorning his head and what he thought it might symbolize.
Calvin’s eyes slowly drifted up from the old man’s face to look at the hat before snapping back to lock eyes again. “YOUR HAT?! I LOST MY HANDS FOR YOUR HAT?!”
“Well, of course. My hat is special. Do you see the golden braids around it? The Sol Interstellar Military had discovered years ago that Mirage Mice fur was an exquisite material for clothing, but at the time they couldn’t produce enough to make anything more meaningful in size. Their fur offers a special quality that I’m technically not at liberty to discuss as it is classified, which is part of why we had such a short window to collect. The Milky Way Trade Regime took that classified status as a means to deem the planet ‘off-limits’ to protect the Mirage Mice, and the Void Cats needed to get their paws on a large quantity to try domesticating them as a food source.” The Admiral puffed up a bit and beamed with pride. “The black market smuggling industry is very fast paced, so I’m glad we were able to assist them in time. Fingers crossed they call on us again soon, as my coat is looking about due for a cleaning.” He said before spinning on his heels to keep strutting towards his office, leaving Calvin to stand like an angry, vibrating statue in the middle of the long gray corridor.
The reflection of the hallways artificial lighting, normally cast upon the pristine finished steel flooring and walls leading to the Admiral’s office, was eerily disrupted by the black cat that Calvin was following to the teleporter room nearby. It padded along silently, a bizarre sheen flitting across its fur every time they passed a light, combined with the near void-like coloring, made it seem like he was following a shimmering hole in space with a tail casually whipping back and forth. Only moments before, Calvin had asked Admiral Slodpolk what the assignment was, but all the crazy old man said was “Follow the cat and bring back it’s goods.”
They arrived in front of the teleporter room, and the cat, now facing Calvin, looked up at him expectantly with brilliant emerald eyes that almost seemed to float in nothingness. Calvin sighed but opened the door. He followed the cat into the room and instructed the computer to beam them down to the planet’s surface. The cat leaped up on Calvin’s shoulder and let out an aggressive, but not angry, meow that caused Calvin to jump back from the console. The void-like cat, now perched on his shoulder, dug in it’s claws to help maintain balance, and then meowed again, this time a little more politely, and the computer lit up with new coordinates that appeared to be a mile below the planets surface. Calvin was wincing in pain for a second before his jaw dropped. The cat gave a slight purr and gently bumped the side of Calvin’s head before jumping off his shoulder to pad over to the teleporter platform. Calvin instinctively rubbed his shoulder where the claws no doubt left some marks in his skin beneath his uniform, all while staring at the computer console.
Another meow caught his attention and caused Calvin to sputter a moment as he realized the computer was waiting for a second entity to join the cat on the platform. He walked over but stopped short of stepping on the platform, looking down at the cat that was watching him. He could have sworn it was smiling at him for some reason. It meowed aggressively again, and Calvin took that as indication he should probably stop hesitating and just get on with it.
The platform lit up as Calvin got in position. He opened his mouth and was about to address the teleporter console when, in a sort of pleasant chirping sound, the cat apparently issued the command to begin transmission. In an instant they were in a dimly lit cave deep beneath the planets surface. Calvin blinked his eyes several times, trying to adjust to flicker torches that lined the walls, and stifled a coughing fit from the dust he was waving out of his face. This cat is sophisticated enough to somehow communicate with our technology, and yet they’re using fire to light up a cave? Calvin thought to himself.
The cat nuzzled against his leg to get his attention before it walked over to a spot in a nearby wall between two torches. Calvin followed along, still confused as to the circumstance he was in by following this cat that almost blended into the very shadows of the cave. It scratched a few times at the wall, and then waited. Calvin picked at his collar, the heat of the cave now apparent to him in his stifling pseudo-military uniform that the Admiral made all crew members wear aboard his ship, was starting to make him sweat. He started fidgeting and looking around at the shifting shadows caused by the torches and realized they were in a very long tunnel. A few moments passed, and an almost child-like voice spoke up from somewhere near his feet. “Don’t worry, I’ll have you back to your ship and it’s precious climate control in a few minutes.” Calvin stumbled back and looked around for where the voice came from. “Holy shit! Who’s there?!”
“Calm down, calm down, it’s just me.” The void-like cat had started speaking, and Calvin started to fan himself in the heat.
“I must be hallucinating. This is probably another of the Admiral’s prank like tests.” Calvin thought he was losing it.
“No you dummy, I’m just forbidden to speak in other languages when off-planet. Our kind have a reputation to uphold.” The cat spoke again, and then before Calvin could ask it anything the cave wall began to shake and slide back. A seemingly normal light source, relative to Calvin’s usual situation aboard The Last Opportunity, issued from a slit in the wall. As the wall continued to slide open with a grinding sound, the cat slid through as soon as there was room. A rush of cooler air escaped and washed over Calvin, his shoulders sagged a little with the relief it brought. He hurried to get himself inside, determined to be in a more comfortable and air-conditioned area. As soon as Calvin was in, the opening began to close behind him, and he realized he was in a much more sophisticated space that was all white. The cat would have stood out in this space but was nowhere to be seen, and Calvin slowly walked through, looking around at tables, chairs, desks, and large, clear plastic cases. It dawned on him that he was in a lab of some sort. The cat leaped up on a desk at the far end of the lab-like space, Calvin finally seeing the hundreds of stations lined up from one end to the other. It took him a minute to cross, but he could hear the cat scratching at something on the desk, the sound of its claws scraping across the surface echoing through the lab.
When Calvin finally stood over the cat on the desk it stopped clawing at a small case and looked up at him. “Here.” is all it said. A button was blinking on the case while a strange cross-hatched pattern faded on a pad next to it. Calvin, more than a little perplexed, slowly reached out to press the button. The cat jumped off the desk and casually padded off to somewhere else in the lab, calling back to Calvin as it went “Tell your Admiral thank you for the food.” The case opened with a pressurized hiss, and some sort of white smoke wafted out with a fresh scent. Calvin waved it away and reached inside to pull out the Admiral’s hat. “Hey wait a second….” was the last thing Calvin got out before he was unceremoniously beamed back up to the ship, where the Admiral was waiting for him in the teleporter room. The Admiral snatched the hat out of Calvin’s hands and popped it onto his hands. “Ah, much better! Those cats are great at dry-cleaning hats.”
Calvin sputtered, still standing on the teleporter platform, and watched as the Admiral strutted out of the room. “You mean we smuggled all that food for cats?”
Recently, I hit the one year mark of writing every day here on the blog, and I was using the daily writing prompts provided through the WordPress dashboard. Unfortunately, I’ve now come full circle and been getting the same prompts. Because of this, I’ve been struggling with trying to find things to write about when I feel like I can’t reuse the prompt of the day.
So, starting today, I’m going to try and expand into creative writing instead of just my usual ramblings.
If I see the daily prompt is something I don’t think is worth answering again (because I can’t add on to what I shared the last time) I’ll instead be looking up different creative prompts and trying to throw them at my good buddy Calvin aboard The Last Opportunity. If you don’t know who Calvin is, he is the protagonist from my NYC Midnight short story challenge entry called “The Smugglers Intern“. (I’ve shared the original, unedited entry here, so feel free to read it and possibly provide thoughts or critiques!)
Before I dive into Calvin’s misadventures as an intern aboard a decommissioned military space vessel, I’d like to make sure you know that I don’t plan on these creative writing posts intentionally maintaining any kind of cohesion with each other. There may be some that continue off of others, but it is not guaranteed, as I will be writing entirely off the cuff for the day. At least, that is the plan at this time. Finally, they may be any length I choose. They could be a simple paragraph, or they could be another multi-page short story.
Without further ado, here is today’s prompt for Calvin!
None of it seemed real, but after several months of helping Admiral Slodpolk negotiate market contracts across the galaxy, Calvin was getting used to his new normal. Except for today. The smell, although cloyingly sweet and nauseating, wasn’t the problem. It was the sight and sound of Yugarth VII’s Root Beer Pigeon’s falling out of the sky like a plague of Terran Locust’s. Thousands of creamy brown and white birds slamming against the ground, against windows and sides of buildings, while Calvin and the Admiral took shelter beneath an awning. Everywhere Calvin looked, they splashed with unsettling squawks like muted fireworks. Cascading rivulets on glass that would then reform into the strange birds, cooing on the sills. Dripping off the corner of the awning, creating tiny versions of them to strut around with the terrier-sized ones that congealed out of large puddles. A few seconds after their “rebirth” they would explode into vapor that hissed almost like carbonation escaping a freshly opened can of soda. None of these things, individually, would have bothered Calvin to such a stomach turning degree, but the assault on his senses was overwhelming. He wouldn’t be able to drink root beer for a while, and the strange rain of exploding carbonated pigeons would likely haunt his dreams for a couple days.
The Dragon's Grove 