Two sisters traverse oceans of plasma and vapor on a nearby gas giant, seeking treasure, so they can get the perfect solstice gift for their dad.
Music: “Among the Stars (looped)” by Andrew Sitkov
Video description
Video Description: “A Gift From the Gas Giant” Trailer. Duration, 40 seconds. “Among the Stars (looped)” by Andrew Sitkov. Digital painting. Seen against a background of outer space, the head of a giant whale-like creature emerges from a glowing gaseous surface at bottom left. The head, seen in right profile, is angled diagonally across the whole image. The creature has a large glowing round eyed with spirals within, and two rows of thorny appendages along the bottom. The creature’s mouth is open and between is a small space vessel with two active thrusters flanking a glowing net. Clusters of stars appear along the right edge. Title card with the words “Short Story” and “Genre: Science Fiction,” is displayed at center. Tagline is displayed at bottom. It reads: “Two sisters traverse oceans of plasma and vapor on a nearby gas giant, seeking treasure, so they can get the perfect solstice gift for their dad.” Title card and tagline fade. A watermark of the word “storyfeather” appears over the image. Lines from the story appear in sequence: “A loud metallic boom rattled the ship. Verena let out a scream. The ship began to sink, fast. ‘What’s happening!’ Verena cried. ‘We’re leaking anti-ballast on the port side,’ Mona said. ‘I’m trying to keep the ship level.’ The stars vanished. The steam vanished. They sunk through and into thick streams of grit-filled orange gas and dense clouds of electrified plasma.” Site URL appears at bottom center throughout and fades at end. As the last line disappears, the image blurs and darkens, the story title appears at center, and a text card appears at top that reads “Available to Read Now storyfeather.com.”
Welcome to Year 10 of Storyfeather
Every year’s short stories (mostly) follow a theme. For Year Ten, every month’s stories share a genre or theme, some anchor point that the reader can rely on. But within that, there are strange concoctions brewing. The genre’s merge, archetypes collide, mythologies mash…welcome to the Year of Fusion.
November’s Base Elements:
SPACE-VEMBER 🚀MEETS LOVEMBER 💙
FUSION RECIPE.
Base elements for November: Space and Love.
For the fusion element, I turned to my reliable Story Cubes again. This time the pack that’s themed “Actions.” I rolled three cubes (hmm, it occurs to me now that maybe I should include pictures of these cubes in future). The results? A person holding a wrapped gift box up their ear. A person with a bat poised to hit a ball that’s coming toward them. A person hanging from a bar (this particular element flew of the reactor—aka my mind—without my noticing and wasn’t part of the story). There’s also an intriguing potential element from the attempted brainstorm I did at the beginning of the month: A wristwatch that doesn’t work.
So, what if, a father whose wrist-clock doesn’t work properly misses the deadline to get tickets to the big Holiday Hitball Tournament for his daughter? Or no, what if he doesn’t miss it and he gets that gift-to-top-all-gifts. And his daughter decides she needs to get him something just as incredible…
Genre: Science Fiction
Tags: Dad, Gas Giant, Gift, Hauler, Holiday, Rahini, Sister, Solstice, Tide-whale, Trawler, Verena, Whale
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