On stranger winds, currents guide us through most facets of life life. We can push against these invisible currents, fighting and struggling to chart our own course. We can bend to their will, letting Fate take us where she may. Or we might learn to embrace their fickle nature, but never accepting their rule as absolute. Tonight, Eva and Joe take us out where the wildest winds blow. Strange though they may be.
Tonight! Live! From two different places in the United States!
We are proud to present #GenresNotIncluded, the Best Typewriter Improv on the Planet!
Join me and our lead author, the classically trained @EvaNewcastle, as we begin another spellbinding tale! Take it away, Eva!
— Joe Nelson, August 16, 2024
Strange, sometimes crazy, ideas had a way of blowing in on certain winds. Childhood memories swept in on the first crisp autumn breeze. Treachery arrived on a harsh gust. The omens arrived, mystical agents, when the front winds died and the skies turned green.
But the others?
Kindness? It was a soft southern brush of air across Micah’s cheek.
And anger? Anger came with the coldest of the north winds as she stood at the prow of her clipper, the lights of her childhood home in the far distance.
The cutlass at her waist was an anchor to that emotion.
She stared long and hard at the second story of the house where her childhood bedroom was. The wind that day rained down from the sky, but the air was too dry. No rain fell.
The sky turned a color she’d never seen.
Kindness came from a passing stranger. “Get down!” he called.
He had pushed her away. In her memory, she could still feel his hands upon her shoulders, firm, unyielding.
The sky should not have been that shade of red.
The fire that engulfed the clocktower came from no cannon, but it lay waste to her home nonetheless.
Fifteen years ago.
The red came without warning, as did the sudden gust. And then another. Explosions lit the horizon. The change in circumstance came too fast. The next thing Micah remembered was waking up in a car on the floor. Groggy. Scared.
“Where are you taking me?” she asked the stranger.
“To safety,” he said, uncertainty making the words a lie.
There were so many winds that could blow across the grandest nation in the land. Never had she imagined the wind of despair. A sickly wind that stank of death.
Fifteen years.
Tonight, she came home, on a new wind.
“The winds of despair,” she repeated to herself.
How did he know? He never said. That was the mystery that haunted her for over a decade. She considered the winds of change and laughed, for the first time in fifteen years at the cliché.
The winds of war. The winds of Artury.
Technology shut down overnight. Electrical systems overloading. Despair.
Death.
The winds of hardship were like sandpaper on bare skin, but they toughened Micah.
She learned of the Harbingers. She trained herself.
She trained herself for the night she would come home.
The Harbringers rebuilt the town in their own image, devoid of humanity. Artury had been her sanctuary until she awoke to find the stranger had left her, trained but alone.
Micah inhaled the change in the air, a purposeful breath, a wire cutter concealed in her hand. One step.
“Let’s go!” she called to the crew. Her voice did not waver. It was not the voice of the scared girl, fifteen years past.
Tonight, with sword and wire cutters and determination, Micah would begin to take back what they stole from her.
The winds of justice would be a bitch.
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