Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title.

---

Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story (so forget about any editing), with the band name as a title.

Beth walked into the lecture hall, thankful it was still mostly empty. She was nervous about this talk, which was odd for her, she knew. Of course, most of her talks didn’t have the personal element this one did, so, okay, she’s cut herself some slack today. Some. Probably not as much as she should, though.

Behind Beth, Mike lumbered carrying the large flat boxes with the posters that she had finished last week. Jeff was carrying the easels behind him. Beth looked around the room, and back over her shoulder, suddenly completely convinced that her posters were inadequate for the enormous space.

“Did they have to put me in the biggest room?” she asked back to Mike.

“They did, yes,”

Beth stopped walking. She turned around to Mike, who had stopped just as suddenly, but jerked forward as Jeff ran into him from behind. “Oh. Sorry,” Jeff muttered, as he gathered the easel back into his arms.

“What do you mean, yes?” Beth asked Mike.

“Pretty much everyone is interested in your talk, according to the pre-conference survey. This was the only room that comes close to fitting everyone.” He paused to look around. “Not that everyone will fit. Might be tight. Standing room maybe.”

Beth stared at Mike.

Mike shrugged.

“Can I put these down?” Jeff asked?

“Uh, yeah,” Beth said and stepped aside.

Mike and Jeff continued to the front of the room and began setting up the posters. Beth followed, a little more big eyed, and a bit frustrated at her response to the large room. This was exactly the venue she needed to present her work. Her work was solid, though the results were completely bizarre. That she had managed to time her work as well as she had, that she had been in the right place at the right time, that was a bit of luck that happened only once in a lifetime. She was happy it happened to her, even if the end result wasn’t as happy as she’d liked.

A year ago, Beth had been volunteering at the free clinic on the other side of town, when her laboratory focus changed. She had wanted a place away from the academics in their ivory tower, and away from the privileged college kids who didn’t understand hard work, or how many doors opened for them just because they were at the college. She wanted to help people who needed the help most, and the clinic satisfied that want.

Moesha was the first inconsolable kid who came into the clinic crying of horses; her mother unable to figure out why, but more concerned about the fever and chills the child had been having for a couple days. Beth ruled out bacterial infections, diagnosed a viral infection, and gave Moesha’s mom tips on helping making Moesha as comfortable as possible.

When another child had come into the clinic with the same symptoms, including crying for a horse, Beth was amused. It was the first time she had heard a small boy wanting a pony. “A horse,” the crying child corrected her. “I want a horse, not a pony!” before dissolving into uncontrollable sobs.

It had taken Beth months to find isolated cases outside of her district. She had eventually tracked down one case where the child had died of a Takotsubo cardiomyopathy while crying out for a horse. That was when Beth knew she wanted to track this virus: it was something new, another virus influencing behaviour, much as Toxoplasma gondii had been show to do so years ago. This one, though, was very specific and very consistent.

The consistency in the pleas for horses had intrigued Beth. That she could trace this virus’ outbreak by searching for Facebook posts about kids asking for horses, and following up with the parents, had caused her colleagues to hold her in derision hadn’t deterred her from her research. It was a tool none of them could use in their research, but Beth could, and did.

And here she was.

Here, setting up to present her paper on the effects of Toxoplasma Equinus on human behavior.

To the largest audience in her career.

Beth had just managed to calm herself while reviewing her slides for the hundredth time today, when a noise from the back of the auditorium caught her attention. She looked up to see press cameras.

“Oh,” she thought, “Horses.”

Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title.

---

“Can not!” Nicky yelled.

“Can, too!” Danny yelled back.

The two boys were locked in a screaming match that had been going on for a while now, neither one wanting to concede.

“Can not!”

“Can too!”

“Can not! Can not! Can not!”

“Can too! Can too! Can too!”

“Can not!”

“Can too!”

The arguments hadn’t changed very much, if at all, and, well, there was only so much a dad could take before he had to do something to stop two young boys from going hoarse at the age of eight. Craig pushed himself up from his desk, and went to rap on the window.

“Hey! You two!”

The boys were too busy screaming at each other to notice Craig. After failing to catch their attention, he stepped away from the window and walked to the back door. After pulling on his coat and boots, he opened the door and walked outside. A stiff breeze blew up, tousled his hair and caught his breath in the cold of it. Shivering slightly, Craig pulled his jacket closed, and stomped down the stairs and around the side of the house.

Calls of “Can not!” and “Can too!” greeted him.

“HEY!” Craig yelled.

The boys finally stopped.

“What are you two arguing about?”

Speaking over each other, Craig couldn’t figure out what was going on, so held up a hand. “Wait,” both boys stopped talking. “One at a time. Danny?” Quietly, he muttered to himself, “Yeah, that was diplomatic, let the neighbor’s kid go first.”

“Nicky doesn’t think snowmen can fly.”

“Because they can’t!” Nicky cried out.

“Can, too!” Danny responded.

“Can not!”

“BOYS!” Craig boomed. They fell silent again, looking up at him. “Why don’t you find out?” The boys continued to be quiet, continued to look at him, but now with puzzled expressions on their faces.

“You could build a snowman, then see if you can help it to fly.”

The two boys looked at each other, then turned almost as one, and went to build a snowman. They had built enough snowmen for Craig to know that, well, they knew how to build snowmen. “That should keep them busy for a while,” he said, turning to go back into the house.

An hour later, he heard cries of “DaaaaaaAAAAAAAaaaaaAAAaad!” and went to look out the window. Nicky was waving his hands, gesturing for Craig to come outside. Bundled up better than he had the previous time, Craig wandered out into the cold and over to the side yard. To his surprise, a giant snowman sat on the end of a long board, which was tilted over a log one of the boys must have dragged from the woods behind the house.

“A seesaw, boys?”

“Yes,” Nicky said.

“We want you to jump on the other end,” Danny said, pointing to the end of the board up in the air.

Craig looked at what they had and realized immediately what the boys were trying to do. “The board will break if I jump on it.”

“We already tried jumping on it,” Danny said.

“He didn’t move,” Nicky said.

“What else have you tried?” Craig asked.

“Just that,” Danny said.

The three of them stood out there for a bit before Craig suggested, “How about you both come inside? I’ll make hot chocolate and we can figure out if we can get the snowman to fly or if snowmen can’t fly.”

Both boys agreed, and the three of them went into the house.

Craig turned into the kitchen to start the hot chocolate, and heard the boys turn into the mud room, then head up the back stairs a few minutes later. The “FWUMP!” from outside didn’t disturb his conentration as he stirred the heating milk on the stove, the back door opening did.

Nicky and Danny walked into the house, still fully dressed in their winter coats, hats, gloves and scarves. Craig looked at the boys, a bit puzzled.

“Weren’t you just upstairs?”

“Yes,” they answered in unison, and turned to go into the mud room, then up the back stairs. Realizing they hadn’t removed their boots before heading upstairs, Craig turned off the stove and was about to go to the stairs when dropping shadow caught his attention outside the window. He heard the second “FWUMP!”

When he looked out the window, he saw a giant snowman heading straight for the window.

He ducked.

The house echoed with a “BOOM!” then was quiet.

“SEE?” Craig heard Danny cry out from outside. “Snowmen can fly.”

“Yeah,” Nicky said, sitting with Danny in the snow next to the now empty board lying by the log, “into the house.”

Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title.

---

Zeb leaned to the right as moved the stick to the right while concentrating on the screen in front of him. His eyes were flicking almost wildly as he caught movement on the screen and maneuvered the ship to avoid the spots. Both feet were moving to adjust the flight, and his left hand rested gently on a lever to his left. Zeb’s relaxed pose was at odds with the intense look on his face. “Yippee ki yay,” he said softly, almost whispering the words.

Zach, sitting next to Zeb, doubted Zeb even knew he said it. Zeb had a number of small quirks that made Zach smile, his yippee-ki-yays being only one of the more recent ones he’d noticed.

Once Zeb had the ship moved into place next to the large asteroid, matching veloicity and spin, he turned on the auto-pilot and released the tension even Zach couldn’t tell was there until it was gone.

“Impressive,” Zach said.

“At how amazing I am in the middle of an asteroid field?” Zeb asked, turning to Zach with a dazzing smile across his face.

“No, at how much like recruiting you sound like when you’re concentrating.”

“Huh?”

“Yippee ki yay!” Zach called out, mimicking the video that all kids saw during their Saturday morning video watches, the one that inspired hordes of young men and women to try for the Space Corps once they hit puberty. Few wanted secondary school when the opportunity for space travel called to them.

Except the recruiting video never talked about the months being stuck in a tin can, having only a screen telling you what the outside might look like. Recruiting never told you about not seeing your family for years, never told you about the bone loss from weightlessness, or the discipline required to learn how to walk on land again. They never mentioned that it didn’t take many years for the pull of Earth’s gravity to be too much to earn back, and the whole planet was lost to you forever.

No, they just gave you “Yippee ki yay!” and a dazzling smile, much like the man across from him, Zach thought, a smile forming on his face, too.

“Indeed. Just like they taught us.”

“Yep.”

The two of them traded activities for the next four hours as the automated sensors took stock of the asteroid next to their ship. Zach enjoyed watching the data stream into the systems, watch the images form as the data reassembled outside what they couldn’t see from the inside. Zeb floated into the back half of the ship took care of his necessities, pulling out a nutrient gel pack and a bag of water on his way back.

After the last of the data came back and was processed, the large screen splashed their asteroid beautifully rendered, and the small screen in Zach’s hand went green. Zach looked up at Zeb floating over him, and pushed a few more buttons without looking at his hands to finish the data transfer to the microdrones and launch them away.

“All set then?”

“I think so,” Zach commented. “XR-43-2 appears from first scan to have the correct elemental make-up, but it has too many cavity echoes to be certain of its profitability. We should probably head around to the other side and see if there’s an opening.”

“Again?”

“Pretty sure that’s why we were assigned this rock.”

“Sucks to be the best,” Zeb commented as he twisted back into his reclined V and started strapping himself back in.

“Nah. It’s great to be the best. It’s the second best that sucks. I just get to watch you.”

“Sucker,” Zeb teased back.

“Yep,” Zach responded with the ease of the decade long friendship. He and Zeb had been on too many runs to count, and always the hard ones. The two of them had met in line on the first day of their Space Corps training, standing in the back of the line together, bonding over both having having two Zs as their initials.

Zach strapped back in. Zeb pulled the stick back, adjusted his feet to begin the side movement and began to move the ship along the face of the asteroid.

They hadn’t gone very far before the they heard the first ping.

“There’s the other thing they don’t tell you about in the recruiting video,” Zeb commented, as another small ping echoed through the small ship.

“Those shouldn’t be getting through, though,” Zach commented.

He hated when rocks made way through the perimeter and hit the ship’s hull. Death by tiny debris and a million holes was more common than any other space-related death. And each ping meant some dent on the hull, possibly a hole. No, no one ever talked about that at recruiting.

It was a risk they took with every job they ran in the asteroid belt, Zeb knew. He also knew that today wasn’t the day their luck ran out. “We’re fine,” he said. “Start the search engine.”

Zach looked back to Zeb with nothing but relief. Yeah, they’d be fine on this run. “What’s the over under on the cavity count before I fire it up?”

“Twelve.”

Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title.

---

“No, I don’t think this is a good idea,” Debby commented.

“It’s not a bad idea, and it’ll help Finn,” Scott responded, as he continued to clean up the toys in Finn’s bedroom. Finn had made quite the mess in his rant earlier, before falling asleep not too long ago. Scott felt sad for Finn. He felt sad for himself.

“And how much do you really think it’ll help?” Debby asked, her frustration with Scott starting to show. “You don’t think that it’s all just way too creepy?”

“Somewhat, sure, but Jeff suggested it, and I’d like to honor his request.”

Debby didn’t say anything else as she finished putting the stuffed animals into the toy chest. She walked over to Finn’s bed where he lay completely exhausted and in a deep sleep. She knelt down beside his bed, put her face close to his, and started rubbing his head. The boy didn’t move; the cadence of his breathing didn’t change.

Scott wanted to comfort Debby, but knew that she would shrug off any of his immediate attempts, so he walked out of the bedroom instead. He walked into the kitchen, where a large number of dirty plates were strewn. His sister was covering the half-eaten dishes, putting them in the refrigerator. Some dishes she emptied into the trash, and placed in the sink.

“Is he going to be okay?” Lydia asked.

“As okay as any of us, I think,” Scott replied.

“How about Debby?”

“Yeah.”

Lydia waited a little longer before asking about what was on both their minds. “So, you going to build it?”

“I think so.”

“Jeff would have liked that.”

“Clearly.”

“It is weird, though.”

“Clearly,” Scott responded, looking up at Lydia and smiling a small bit. Jeff was fond of making toys and the word “clearly.” He would have approved of both. Lydia smiled back.

Scott went over to the papers on the counter and looked them over. “It’s an easy enough toy to make,” he commented.

Lydia stopped with the dishes and came over to look at Jeff’s designs. “Well, sure, how hard is making a jack-in-the-box anyway? They’ve been around for hundreds of years, right?”

“Eight hundred or so,” Scott responded absently, fingers tracing the lines of the drawings.

“Yeah, well, make a Jeff-in-the-box then.”

“Yeah.”

“Just don’t use Jeff’s ashes when you do it,” Debby said from the doorway as she walked into the kitchen. “That’s all I’m asking.”

“But that’s kinda the point,” Lydia commented.

“Exactly the point,” Scott continued, looking up at his wife, his eyes shiny.

Debby looked at Scott. Lydia wondered if she knew how much Scott needed to make Jeff’s toy, how much help it would be to Scott in accepting Jeff’s death by making the last toy Jeff had designed. She held her breath and hoped Debby would understand.

“Okay,” Debby nodded, and moved into Scott’s arms.

Wherein I take a band name from Scalzi’s Next Band Name list, and spend no more than 20 minutes writing the story with the band name as a title.

---

Moore looked down at the small bone he had just uncovered and wondered for the briefest of moments if he was still in Mexico. The small bone didn’t look quite right based on the other ones around it, and was certainly not one he was expecting to find.

He had been reprimanded for that last “flaw” in his personality: that he expected to find certain remains and was often very frustrated when he didn’t find them. Nothing like having poor expectations when you were excavating skeletons, Moore thought, as he wrinkled his nose and squished his face into a childlike whine.

He brushed a bit more off the bone and realized it was somehow connected to another part still buried. Okay, fine, he’d uncover that, too.

Working meticulously, because, hey, that wasn’t one of his character flaws, Moore began to uncover a set of bones all connected in an odd way. The bones weren’t aligned in a characteriscally flat way that most burial bones were. They formed a three dimensional shape.

Puzzled, Moore called for Swanson to come over and view what he had uncovered.

Swanson was normally quite bored on these excavations. Not because he wasn’t working, but rather because he wasn’t very interested in recovering human remains and inanimate artifacts. Odd for an archaeologist, Swanson was always excited about uncovering animal remains.

Moore was pretty sure this one would do it for Swanson.

He was right.

Swanson was down on all fours, nose so close to the uncovered bones his eyes were crossed. Moore wondered if Swanson’s eyes were going to be stuck like that, and was still smiling when Swanson sat up and turned to him.

Ferret, Swanson said.

Moore asked for more information, since he was pretty sure the bones he had just uncovered were not ferret. Swanson went on to describe how the skull of the skeleton was a ferret skull, how it differed from the small mammals of the area, and had just started in on other aspects of the shoulders when Moore politely, watch that other character flaw, interrupted him to point out that the remains he had uncovered yesterday were of the Pre-Classic period so where at least 1800 years old, probably more like 3000 years old, but the ferret was a European animal. Worse, domesticated less than 2500 years before. How had a polecat ended up buried here?

Swanson tipped his head up, looked down his nose, and let Moore know that yes, it was a ferret, no he didn’t know how it arrived here, that wasn’t his area, Moore would have to figure that out himself, and walked away.

Moore was only a bit exasperated when Swanson left.

His exasperation turned to amusement many hours later when he had uncovered the rest of the skeleton and all its pieces. Moore was humoured to note the assembled feret skeleton he had finally uncovered was connected to a Mayan headdress. The skeleton wasn’t put together correctly, with the leg bones swapped and the tail bones definitely out of order, though the jawbone at the end of the tail did provide some good symmetry.

Apparently the Mayan priests didn’t know what to make of a ferret either.