#writever is a Twitter writing prompt initiative with monthly lists of words. The suggestion is to write, based on these words, science-fiction, fantasy, fantastique stories. It can be a single story in thirty-odd tweets, or thirty-odd one-tweet micro-fictions, written any time one wants. My personal approach is to program one tweet in french, and one in english, for the morning of the day for each word, in the genre that comes to me that day. I post them on Twitter as suggested, and on Mastodon as well.

Here are my writevers for August 2022:

1 – Meet

He’s a virtual hustler with a different identity on every planet within the Federation and then some.

She’s an indie space trucker, roaming across the galaxy, hauling containers the content of which she doesn’t want to know about.

Of course they’ll meet.

2 – Consent

“We vampires are actually unable to do anything against the consent of involved parties. Neither crossing thresholds, nor biting, nor even frightening, nor… the rest. This explains, I suspect, that we are not the dominant species in this world.”

3 – Friendship

“Volta and I met during the Earth-Mars war. I flew an ambulance, he flew a fighter. I would rescue the wounded, he would shoot at me — made sense then, we were on different sides. When the war ended, we stopped shooting each other, and we became mates.”

4 – Complicity

Sometimes the knight would vanish under the blinding flame of the dragon, who would leave with the gold.

Sometimes, the dragon would crash, an arrow in its heart, beyond a far hill, and the knight would take the reward.

Always, they split the gains 50/50.

5 – Spark

“Well… The two Plasms attending this cocktail evening have caught each other’s sight. Look at them slowly spiraling toward one another! Imagine that if they were of opposite polarities, then the slightest spark would EVERYBODY DOWN!

6 – Trust

“You are a werewolf. You, a vampire. Reason dictates that there cannot be trust, ” the golem said.

“Trust is not about reason,” the vampire countered, “it is about, ah, heart.”

“Or guts,” grunted the werewolf. “Anyway we don’t trust all humans, only this one.”

7 – Smile

“I cannot believe it! All your predecessors had to flee, chased by the enraged poltergeist! Yet here it is, peaceful, all smiles even! How in Hell did you manage that?”

“I took the lead: when it materialized, I smiled at him first.”

8 – Link

A sorcerer has a link with the Mana that provides him with power. A witch has a link with Mana too… and then a link with every other witch. Cut a sorcerer from his Mana, and he’s as good as dead; cut a witch from her Mana, and *you* are as good as dead.

9 – Look

They gaze at themselves, in love beyond remedy, embraced, in the mirror which allows me to watch her even though she’s a Gorgon, and which prevents me from seeing him since he is a vampire. Beauty is, indeed, in the eye of the beholder.

10 – Declaration

“Statistics establish with a high degree of confidence that for equal durations, interactions with you produce more positive outcome than with any other human.”

“My goodness, R42… Is this a declaration?”

“Yes. A formal one.”

11 – Polyamory

“The séance was a success: her spirit manifested itself well.”

“I was sure that the love between her husband and her would provide.”

“Oh! No, it was far from sufficient. But love between her and every person present at the table turned out strong enough.”

 

12 – Date

“I am trying to be understanding, but to be fully honest, I must tell you I would not have agreed to this date if I had known that I would have to provide alone for over three long hours of conversation,” said the princess.

“Ribbit”, commented the frog prince.

13 – Passion

Examine a passionate human brain: none of its neurons carries any passion, only chemical currents. Therefore, a robot can act with passion even though none of its circuits carries anything else than electrical current.

14 – Seduction

“Yeah well, he’s into demon invocation but in hardcore mode.”

“What?”

“He invokes succubi but he does everything he can to seduce them. And then when they split up, he has to ensure that he does not come out of it gutted. Literally.”

15 – Attentions

When they eat out, she spares him silver sets, and he spares her restaurant with mirrors. In contrast, he puts up with the one she keeps on the ceiling above her bed, and she tolerates his taste for sheer nightgowns. Love is made of these little attentions.

16 – Letter

“What did you tell R42 earlier today?”

“It asked me what love letters were for. I told it they were for laying out to the loved one what makes you love them. Why?”

“Because since then it has printed out fifteen hundred pages and counting.”

17 – Laughter

She’s a siren, so her songs should intoxicate him, but apparently becoming a zombie took his musical ear, if he ever had one. However, his gait makes her laugh, and her laughs enrapture him — almost as much as the prospect of fresh brains.

18 – Sweetness

“… Your robot ?”

“Yes. Its embrace always has the perfect pressure, its moves are always deliciously delicate, its skin is always marvelously smooth, and it always has ideal temperature and vibration levels… Do you need a glass of water?”

19 – Surprise

Defeating the dragon had been a mere training exercise devoid of any difficulty.

Marrying the princess, a formality without the slightest of hurdles.

The surprise came when he realized how horribly complex managing a kingdom was, and it lasted his whole life.

20 – Flame

“All I’m saying, Azzie, is you and I are well placed to know that demons have a big leaning toward literal interpretation. So you should have learned to be careful long ago. Yet what you did just now, this whole fanning the flames of love? Waaaay too literal.

21 – Pleasure

“My pleasure,” said the prince, “is to achieve legendary feats of arms!”

“My pleasure,” said the dragon, “is to hoard fabulous treasures!”

“My pleasure,’ said the princess, “would be that you stop involving me against my will in obtaining *your* pleasures.”

22 – Potion

“A love potion?” said the witch. “For your own consumption? This is… unusual. Why this strange request, knight?”

“I cannot cause her any harm, therefore I want to ensure that I am undyingly in love with her,” said R42.

23 – Fall

“Fallen”, corrected Lucifer, “But not from Heaven. In love. With Lilith. Whom I chose to follow when she was cast out of Eden as she dared claim herself equal to Adam. And as low as I’m said to have fallen, I am still above those who will not call her a victim.”

24 – Heart

“I demanded of you the dragon’s heart,” said the witch.

“I did not have the heart to deprive him of it,” said the knight. “Nor he the heart to let me endure your ire alone.”

“Rrr”, approved the dragon.

“Punish you for doing as I hoped? I am not that heartless.”

25 – Impetus

“The worst case is two telepaths. As soon as they sense each other, if they like it, each one’s arousal boosts the other’s, and before you know it, they’re going at it like rabbits. Oh, and also it’s highly contagious on a radius of a hundred feet at least.”

26 – Disaffection

He loves action, she is fond of her bed. He is adventurous, she prefers home. Between Prince and Beauty, disaffection was a foregone conclusion. Plus, there is the age gap: he is in his early twenties, she is getting close to one hundred and twenty.

27 – Fusion

“When we create a new being, halves of two distinct DNAs fuse together”, said the engineer. “We robots,” replied R42, “call this “file corruption through concurrent writes”. Did *you* find a way to fix this kind of damage?”

28 – Thunderbolt

We vampires withstand things which destroy your own, human. Centuries of fidelity. STDs. Social convention shifts, inversions even. Centuries of infidelity. But we cannot stand being thunderstruck. The type of light it gives off is too sunny.

29 – Throb

“I can hear your heart beating,” she said, her ear against his torso, and soon she fell asleep. R42 gently got up, then proceeded down to the workshop to readjust his oil pump in order to remove the imbalance which would have ended up in a failure.

30 – Chemistry

“What do you know”, said the prince, “of the chemistry of love?”

“Not much”, conceded the dragon, “except the part about exothermic reactions”.

“… You mean that your flame is in fact–“

“Yes.”

“… Wait, but then, when you aim at me–“

“Yes.”

“… Ah.”

31 – Love

The prince bent over the Sleeping Beauty.

“You should stop,” said a voice.

“It’s alright, I have her express permission!” said the prince, and exhibited a scroll.

“… Ok,” said the voice, “but do you really want to catch your true love’s strong mononucleosis?”