Create-A-Story Tag!!! – Mechanical Anime Edition

I think you all know that I am not a fictional blogger. I have one fictional post before and I am not sure how that came out. Maybe it was good, maybe it was ok, I don’t know. I do only that this was hard. I kept rewriting lines and thinking about how I wanted my small amount of characters to act. I hope everything worked out how I wanted it to.

The strange thing is that I used to write short stories all the time when I was a kid. I also wrote a long fictional story in my English class as an undergraduate and I have done the nanowrimo twice as well, though I doubt the quality of those stories too. When I was given this challenge, by Ospreyshire who has a book by the way, I had to accept it. I would like to thank him for getting me out of my blogging element by doing something different.

Here are the rules:

1. You pick your “word”, your setting and your story genre from the list below.

As individuals, your brand of creativity is unique to yours, so we want to highlight that by letting you choose from a bunch of words and creating something beautiful out of it. Yes, some people will choose the same combination as others but I guarantee you each story will be unique as per the individual. The options are really just there to cater to you specifically. You can challenge yourself, you can work with your strengths or you can take creative risks. It’s all up to you and how you express your creativity.

2. The short story will have a limit of 1000 words. You do not need to write a story with 1000 words exactly. It could be 300, or 500 as long as it doesn’t surpass a thousand.
3. YOU HAVE TWO WEEKS TO ANSWER THE TAG. This is honestly just another way to ensure none of you overthink this. It’s not supposed to be your magnum opus. It’s just a fun short story to share to people. If you cannot answer within two weeks, the tagger can tag other people.
4. Lastly, you must tag three people to participate. Keiko will collect all the short stories and compile them into one giant hub featuring all the stories.
5. Don’t forget to link back to Keiko(link back to this post)so she can collect all the stories. You can’t just link back to her wordpress, since she won’t be alerted of the pingback. You need to link back to a post or a page, because wordpress works like this. (Very important guys!)
6. Use the Create-A-Story picture in the post. I don’t really know why, but a lot of tags do this so might as well, right? But seriously, it’ll mostly help people recognize all the Create-A-Story tag posts.
7. Copy and paste the rules in your tag post as well, so others can be clued in to the Create-A-Story rules.

I am doing this using the words fire, school, and slice of life/romance

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A Short, Cold Break

Fire alarms, I think to myself. Why did a fire alarm go off now?

I do my best keep my head down and close to my body while wrapping my arm around my body to keep myself warm. My winter coat was still in my locker inside the science building. At least I know that I am not alone in suffering. These other classmates must have felt the same way as me.

On my left, I heard some light crumpling in the snow headed toward me.

“Hi Paul.” A female voice came out from a figure that I could barely see. “Tough final, huh?”

I look up for a second and notice that it was Cathy. We studied hard for this chemistry final until early morning. She looked just a cold as I was feeling.

“I was having a hard time remembering some electron configurations.” I give her a soft smile.

“Then it’s a good thing you have some extra time to think about it.” Cathy shivered somehow squeaking out a teasing smile. “It’s not like we went over those a million times this past week.”

“You know I don’t have the best memory.” My face was red from the cold, but I felt a blush appear on my cheeks anyway.

Cathy giggled. She has such an infectious laugh and smile combo. Can you see why I have a small crush on her?

“I think it’s too cold for my mind to function anyway.” I say shyly. Cathy nodded

“Let’s hope the fire department gets here soon.” She looked past the other students and into the street. “I don’t think being out in the cold for so long is good for any of us.”

We moved a little closer to each other to some warmth. It wasn’t working too well, but it was the thought that counts. I liked being closer to her anyway. She smelled nice.

“Maybe the building will burn down.” I smarted off.

“That would be good.” Cathy nodded with the largest grin on her face possible. “It would definitely keep us warm.”

I smiled too. “Plus, we could roast some marshmallows.”

“I do like smores.” She danced around a little bit. “Encase that doesn’t happen, I’ve got an idea.”

Cathy told me her idea. We are going gather our classmates together and form little study groups to review our material. Everyone’s notes were still in the classroom were our exam was supposed to take place, so testing memorization was the name of the game.

We both walked around to each of our cold classmate and told them about her idea. Some people didn’t want to, but there were enough interested students to form five groups of four. This was a good idea. We all get a little warmer through more people’s body heat while keeping our mind’s occupied.

I wasn’t in Cathy’s group, but that’s ok. I like a lot of my chemistry classmates. A few of them live on my floor and I’ve had nothing but positive interactions with each of them. Maybe I was a little jealous, but this activity only lasted five minutes.

The firemen finally arrived with their loud siren blaring over our winter wonder land. Nobody could hear anything, so I walked next to Cathy and waited for the firemen to go through our science building. She smiled at me and I returned it.

“I guess we won’t be roasting marshmallows today.” Cathy sighed.

“There are worst things.” I nodded. “How about after the exam?”

“Maybe later.” She rolled sleep out of her eyes. “I will definitely need a nap after this.”

My thoughts travel to how we almost pulled an all nighter for this exam.

“That actually sounds like a great idea.” I was exhausted too.

It only took maybe two minutes for them to discover that it was a false alarm. The firemen must have given our professor the ok, because she showed up out of nowhere and told us come back into the classroom.

“We wasted enough time.” Professor Neal exclaimed. “Please hurry up.”

As the class started walking into the building, I took a deep breath. Even if I did review some of the material that I was having difficulty with, the pressure of the exam still gets to me. It’s not like I am failing, but I am hardly the best student.

I felt a snow ball hit my face. It was Cathy. Of course, it was Cathy. She smiled and walked into the building. With a bit of renewed confidence, I walked into the science building after her. I’m going to take this chemistry exam down.

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I bet some of you thought that I was going to put mechs in this, didn’t you? Yeah, I thought I would try something that isn’t my usual thing. It’s always more fun to keep people off guard.

Anyway, time to tag people/Blogs!

1) Alex’s Anime Arena
2) Shoujo Thoughts
3) BlazTavern