Damn I Am Pretty Art Laboratories

Previous CANIS "C'mon!  Get moving, man!" The screaming voice startled me.  I looked up and turned red.  I hurried to the other side of the crosswalk.  I felt blush from my distraction. I had stopped in the middle of the road.  I just stood there, in my imagination, going over the last night's session.  Over and over.  Every single moment of awesome. "You need to pay attention," I admonished myself.  "Someone will run you over if you just get stuck in your head all the time.  Besides it wasn't that good." That was a lie.  My head still strode in the table RPG session, my domain as Game Master.  Storyteller. I had woven a complex game. A harrowing urban adventure.  The players took on the role of occult investigators in a fictional version of Portland.  I'd sprung the big twist on the players.  It took us until midnight to unravel it. "But every moment mattered,"  I told myself as I reached my bus sto...

REDSTAR Marie found the girl in the ruins of a wagon.  She had expected a demon on this hunt.  Not this. She and her mule had crested the prairie hill.  Marie had smelled the smoke.  Her hand rested on her satchel. "I'm not using you yet." The item inside the satchel seemed to ache at her.  Irritated she ignored those whispers.  She guided the mule down the hill toward the smoking wagon.  It must've been on fire earlier in the day.  Marie didn't hurry. Her hunt for demons had taught her to be careful.  She didn't hurry.  Her mother's people knew to keep an eye on the shadows, to not give demons the chance sneak up upon her with them.  Her father's ways, though, knew the names of the White Demons and how to turn their cunning against them. Something had struck the wagon down.  The wood had been shattered in places.  Marie could see marks where something had charged into the wagon, breaking the wheels.  Cha...

The eerie continent of Vault appeared after the Night of Fire.  Its sudden appearance is just one of its mysteries.  That the Vault floats in midair, roughly eighty handspans from the surface of the Ocean is another mystery.  For millennia, the Prince had cloaked it from all vision.  Prior to 1786 AO, most of the world had been unawares of the Floating Frontier. The Old Prince had restricted access to Vault so tightly that no one had suspicions of it.  The adamantine and other mysterious ores the Prince smuggled into Crux were thought to be just another part of the greater mysteries that surrounded him.  His successor has taken no interest in Vault.   He gave up most claims to it, save for the massive Castle on Vault that over looks the Secret Sound.  The new Tinkerer has announced plans to construct a bridge linking Vault to the mainland of Crux.  Once completed, Crux will no longer connect just two continents, but three. Vault is un...

There once was a girl who kept her heart in a box.  A wooden box with glass inlaid in it.  It glowed along with her heart's beat. That's where she kept it.  In a box. And never once did she want to put it back in her chest. She would open the lid and listen to her heart sing its song.  The heart song would keep her dry in rain and cool in summer heat. In dead of winter, her heart's song would make plants grow and move as if painted with brushstrokes. She never wanted anything wicked to happen to her heart, so the box was always clean. But she would never put it in her chest.  Never.  Ever. Worse would be those who suggested she give it away.  How could she be without its song to keep her? Without her heart, where would she be? Besides, she would say, no one could keep her heart like she. The girl who kept her heart in a box, kept it hidden from all others.  Sometimes handsome boys and wonderful girls would ask ...