SPOOKTOBER DAY 19 – VAMPIRES
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  STRAY ANIMAL, REGRET, RAIN & STORMS
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KNIGHT OF STAVES, INVERTED

TITLE:  SAD AND WET

Premise:  Rain & Storms got me thinkin’ about the Hyades which I first learned about via The King in Yellow, thx bobby c!  Haven’t explicitly done anything with lesbians this month so it’s time for this carmillionaire to get caught writin’ girly.  Let’s see…

The carmilla species of vampires (VAMPIRES) takes the form of cats or shadows, and needs to sleep in a coffin full of blood to stay healthy.  That insufficiently sauced sickliness makes it natural for them to use pity to inveigle themselves into the graces of young ladies, who be subsequently consumed.  This is all well-documented historical fact, I’ll have you know.

A young lady named Madison is trying to work her way up from the trailer park, in school to be a nurse.  Normally, she’d be too busy for hijinks to unfold in her life, but she had to reduce her course load and work hours to help care for a sickly mom.  Wondering how this will ever work out (KNIGHT OF STAVES, INVERTED), when on a wet night (RAIN & STORMS) a sickly cat (STRAY ANIMAL) scratches at the door, crying for help.  She lets it in.

The Villain:  The cat’s health improves and mom’s gets worse.  Further, sometimes when the cat is out of sight, a weirdly familiar-acting trashy girl named Miracall is hanging around the trailer park, making sweetie-eyes at Madison.  Of course, Miracall is the cat.

Horror Element:  Miracall was totally going to seduce and devour the young lady, as is her clan’s remit, but sickly mom was so much easier of a target.  Madison discovers mom losing her last drop to the cat and is filled with remorse (REGRET) for her previous mercy.  While trying to kill the cat, it transforms into Miracall and preys upon her mercy in a much different way.

This leads Maddie to the clan’s lair, and HORROR.
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  The ai got some surprisingly good story details in this pic by chance.  The nurse looks mad, like she’s cradling baby girl because of a sense of obligation, not unreserved kindness.  I didn’t even ask for that.  Further, I just asked for wine to be splashed around, to get past violence filters, and it gave her bloody knuckles – an injury you only get from punching!  In my story, nurse was trying to kill the vampire before the pity set in.  Wotta coinkydink.

I can see the flaws, but even so, I like this one a lot.  If I ever wrote or published this cheese, I’d wanna include some version of it in there.  Maybe not the cover, maybe an insert.  Fix the goofs, maybe repaint the whole thing, tweak the font only a little.  It’s almost like I’m into toxic yuri.  Nonsense!

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SPOOKTOBER DAY 20 – MEDICAL
OPTIONAL CHALLENGES:  SURGERY, DARKNESS, THE UNKNOWN
TAROT INFLUENCE:  KING OF PENTACLES, INVERTED

TITLE:  SEE FOR ME

Premise:  …Then you gotta get sent to a slam, where they tell you you’ll never see daylight again.  You dig up a doctor, and you pay him 20 menthol kools to do a surgical shine job on your eyeballs…  Psych.  Man, that seemed so cool way back in tha double-M.  Anyway,

This is a sequel to Low Cost, which ended with the locusts of the apocalypse being release from a mine shaft that hit the abyss (THE UNKNOWN).  The quarried abyss-adjacent stone was used to build low income housing that mutated a bunch of poor people into sad bug creatures.  A kindly medical (MEDICAL) corporation has pledged to make them all able to lead normal lives, with various surgical experiments (SURGERY).

The Villain:  Sackleresque siblings.  Sis (KING OF PENTACLES, INVERTED) knows the abyss must be a source of great power, but it can’t be exploited if nobody who goes in is capable of coming back out.  Unmanned probes can’t pierce that dark (DARKNESS) with a hojillion lumens and the fanciest light receptors evar.  She has her mengelesque brother do experiments on the bug people not to heal them but to understand their abyss-spawn anatomies, that they may create superhuman scouts.

Horror Element:  Is it so much body horror for nothing?  What will the most fit specimen discover down there, if the experiments succeed?
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This year I’m using AI tools from goog and openai plus photopea to make my covers.  This is kinda shit, but it’s cool that it looks pretty different from most of the others.  Gemini wasn’t much help, had to photopea the composition before bringing it to openai, but once I got there, one try was good enough.

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