\n So, a piece of Flash-Fiction here.  "But Fae!" some watchers might cry (cause really, who's gonna notice a clean upload but them?  Heh heh), "What about Fae's Christmas Music-Themed Special 2011?  You promised five, and delivered four!"

\n Firstly, I can count!  Really high, too!  Like... up to ten!  B... uh, secondly, I was making an editing pass of The Special Two (the missing 2011 Christmas story) just prior to upload when I suffered a power surge.  It shut my computer down, but I was saving at the time, and the file was completely corrupted.  Don't scream at me about backups; I don't backup my furry pr0n until I've uploaded it.  This is a system I will be changing.

\n So I lost the last story, and I have to rewrite it.  I've been taking a break (busy dragon has been way too busy!) and frustration feeds procrastination.  So instead, here!  Have yourselves some flash fiction goodness!  The Special Two will come in time, I promise!

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\n  - Fae

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\n  

\n Reality

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\n  Rain pounded against the window.  Thunder rolled through the hills.  Lightning split the blackened sky.  Wind howled.  Trees groaned.  Beneath the forces of nature, small figures scurried for cover, for safety, for security.

\n Except they didn’t.  But they did.

\n A lone otter sat at his desk.  He stared at the page before him.  There was no state to his dress; sun shone over every inch of him through the window at his side.  Artifical, computer-generated light lit his tired face as he stared at the open document before him.  Storm scene.  Nature’s wrath.  Pitiful little creatures as they fought to protect themselves.  They weren’t real.  They were just figments of a writer’s mind.  They didn’t scurry anywhere, because they didn’t truly exist.

\n Not until they did.

\n The otter’s paws shifted over the keyboard.  Letters arrayed themselves in pleasing patterns, born in flickers of digital luminescence.  They created.  They shaped.  They were magic and science and the divine.  The otter was God of his own little world.  Everything came into being in his own image. 

\n Except it didn’t.

\n A million voices screamed in his head.  Millions of stories to be told.  Millions of contradictions twisted his image of the world this way and that as the sun drew long across the real sky.  Was it the real sky?  What was real?  To the otter, time itself became as an abstraction.  His fingers danced and the digital lights before him wove creation before his eyes.  Blue skies grew brighter.  Then darker.  Violet.  Pinkish.  Navy blue.  Black.  Stars.  Still, he wrote.

\n Except he didn’t.

\n Writing was a tangible thing.  It was a physical thing.  What played out for the otter was neither tangible nor physical.  It was compulsive and emotional, indescribable and impossible.  Some people wrote.  He simply spilled his mind completely across the page.  He opened himself through his fingertips, and the innermost depths of his mental self took control of the keyboard.  All the infinite majesty and all the deepest terror spread before his eyes in perfectly ordered chaos.

\n Until it stopped.

\n Reality failed him.  Growling stomach.  Dry tongue.  Drooping eyelids.  Lack of caffeine.  Lack of alcohol.  Probable absence of personal hygiene.  How long had he been at that desk?  Was it the whole day, as his eyes saw?  Or was it the years that played out in his mind, alongside the little figures whose lives were tugged this way and that by his whims?  Was it a period of a dozen hours or so?  Or was it an era of turmoil that threatened to ruin civilization as he knew it?

\n Coffee.  Clarity.  Focus.

\n The otter returned to the desk and frowned at his words.  He folded his arms as he studied them closely.  Each character was scrutinized by the harshest glare.  Each sentence was mercilessly scanned.  Declarations of insufficiency and inadequacy flitted through the otter’s mind.  Tracts of land vanished.  Lives ended.  Reality bent and broke.

\n Ctrl-A.  Del.  Sigh.