SPOOKTOBER DAY 17 – LIMINAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  HITCHHIKER, TRUCKS & TRUCKERS, LOST & FORGOTTEN
TAROT INFLUENCE:  TEMPERANCE, INVERTED

TITLE:  THE RIVER LETHE

Premise:  A hitchhiker (HITCHHIKER) has nobody in his past that would notice he was gone or care what happened to him (LOST & FORGOTTEN).  He gets a ride from a young African truck driver (TRUCKS & TRUCKERS) to just, wherever.  They drive night and day through desolate places with automated services, scarcely a human in sight (LIMINAL).

The Villain:  Death itself, wrong prompt lol…  The African fella marched himself out of a war zone, terrible things behind him on that path.  As a refugee in America he learned the ropes, got a CDL, but never got to know anyone personally.  It’s like the family that died was still waiting for him to reach them, and he couldn’t disappoint by living life too vividly.  This isn’t abstract.  Death really is trying to pull him back in.  He was never meant to escape.

Horror Element:  The more they get to know each other the more remote the real world becomes.  By the time the hitchhiker and the trucker truly care about each other, they are seemingly lost to the world, in some unknowable void of concrete and brush and utter isolation.  Will the hitchhiker let himself go for a ride to somebody else’s afterlife?

They try to get drunk (TEMPERANCE, INVERTED) and drive off a cliff but idk something happens, the end.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  There was minimal hokeypokey here, didn’t need to photopea nothin’, which I appreciate.

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 18 – BIG CITY
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  PAGEANT & PARADE, AFTER HOURS, MASKED
TAROT INFLUENCE:  ACE OF PENTACLES, UPRIGHT

TITLE:  ONE DIRECTION IN THE PURGE WINNER TAKES ALL

Premise:  Like the fantasy NYC of The Warriors, this big city (BIG CITY) is parceled up into protectorates by gangsters with themed costumes (PAGEANT & PARADE), all in an uneasy alliance under the Shot Caller.  Unfortunately apocalypses keep happening, such as the events of my previous spooktobers Laserboyz and Rose Gold.  But hey, this is the pax cyberpunkica, and nothing will ever upset these good times again.

Something upsetted these good times again.  The corporate overlords who rule the city by day are too greedy (ACE OF PENTACLES) to let it be run by anybody else by night (AFTER HOURS), and decide to take over the gangs – or if they can’t take them over, destroy them.

The Villain:  There are multiple villains. Not like their victims are exactly the good guys either.  Dynex – the corp that controls the police – is the first to move, planting their own (MASKED) stooge in one of the gangs, so he can work his way up to becoming the new shot caller.  The contingency plan is to get Shot Caller’s rolodex to locate all the gangsters and have them converted into labor cyborgs for the prison industrial complex.  Two other corporations get wind of that via espionage, and come up with knock-off plans.  Exodyne takes over a different gang, maneuvering their own wannabe ganglord, with the backup plan to assassinate all the gangsters with drones, and Dexyne puts up their own candidate, with the backup plan to convert all the gangsters into laboratory meat.

Horror Element:  Unless all the corporations lose so hard they can’t implement their backup plans, everybody loses.  But the gangs are just a bunch of creepy antisocial high school dropouts, the fuck can they do?  Their days are numbered.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  I had a vision for this and this ain’t even close, but if you wanna just keep truckin’ in life, sometimes you take what you can get.  At least I didn’t have to do any photopea.

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