'Below you will find two sentences. Do not look at them until you have at least 5 minutes to sit and write. Here are your instructions:
1. You must use one or both sentences in your story, preferably as the FIRST sentence, but they can appear anywhere.

2. After looking at the sentences, write whatever comes into your head for 5 minutes, more if you feel like it.

3. Do NOT edit as you go. Forget spelling, grammar, etc., until after you finish your quick writing session. Then you can go back and tidy your story and post it if you want to.

4. Have fun! Be wild. Nothing you write is stupid!
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1. All I had left was despair, blind, empty and cold, like a whirling dervish of a blizzard in my soul.

2. I fell to my knees, unable to stand before him, pleading silently for forgiveness.'
 
 
 

I fell to my knees, unable to stand before him, pleading silently for forgiveness. After two hours in Tyr's closet, my legs had fallen terminally asleep.

"And what, may I ask, are you doing in my closet, Beka?"

"It was a dare!" I blurted, before I could remember my 'shipwide termite scan' cover story. Damn, Valentine, what is it about this guy that turns you into a teenage girl?

"A dare? Captain Valentine, dares are for the weak-minded!"

"Okay, more of a bet. A big one. Really Big. Like you wouldn't believe..." I blathered, my appeal to his greedy side dissolving like so much bubble bath foam. Stop that, Valentine!

"I see. And that, I suppose, would explain all the video gear?" He said icily, as if my cameras were a threat to his dream of Niet domination. Which, come to think of it, they might be. "And who, exactly, was to buy these tapes? Guderian? Cuchulain?"

"Oh these?" Out of reflex, I scrambled awkwardly backward to block his view, but he'd already seen enough. "Strictly for personal use - I swear!"

Red hot spikes were jabbing into my legs. For long minutes, he stood silent, appraising, as if deciding how best to dispose of my body. Finally, I could take no more. If he's gonna kill me, so be it, but at least I'd die comfortable. I massaged my thighs, slowly and langourously working the blood into them. Damn, if it didn't feel good!

Tyr's demeanor seemed to change. "Personal use, you say?" he asked, eyeing my leather command suit, now glistening with slickery-wet soapy water.

"Yeah, personal use," I admitted bitterly, trying not to notice the large raft of foam that broke free fron his rippling six pack, and was sliding off his groin.

"Well," he said cautiously, "compromising video is a tricky business. You could have these cameras set to transmit... autocopy to multiple files ... perhaps encrypted and concealed as astrometric data." His arm lashed out, relaxed, but cobra-fast, and snatched the camera from my hand. "I can think of only one way to neutralize their blackmail value."

"And what might that be?" I asked, knowing I wouldn't like the answer.

I was wrong. "I'd need some compromising video of my own." He swept one massive arm toward the decidedly un-Neitzschean oversized Louis XIV bathtub, overflowing with lavender-scented foam. "Care to join me, Captain Valentine?" He said, switching the camera back on.

"What? That's it?" I asked, amazed and relieved.

"Oh, no, my dear lady," he said ominously, "There will be much much more. I assure you."