An ever-growing page of random fun writing prompts I come up with.
Neanderthals
The year is 2030, labor shortage is plaguing the totality of First-World nations. Populist regimes and totalitarian neo-feudalism have taken over what used to be known as the “Free World”, with inequalities reaching never-before seen heights between the truly wealthy and the middle class, now clearly poor. In a last-ditch effort by privatised governments to forcefully keep market growth while the great replacement plan using AI is still being built, an elite task-force of brilliant genists and biologists have been tasked with reviving the long deceised Neanderthal; the reasoning being as follows:
- Although far-right ideologies have made it through the collective consciousness at this stage, it is still a tall order to convince your population that 70 hours work-week for little-to-no pay would be for their own good.
- The effort to embed xenophobia as well as the othering of anyone that does not look exactly like yourself has been a major success.
With those ideas in mind, raising a humanoid race of, for all intents and purposes, Aliens and enslaving them for the sake of market growth sounds like the perfect win-win scenario for billionaire shareholders across the globe.
Retired Yakuza
Yousuke is what you would call an average senior Japanese citizen living in a quiet village outside of Kyoto. For such a man, even the relative tranquility and safety of Kyoto was not enough; his true home where he would live his latter part of a rambunctious life would be no other than a fishing village away from the growing invasion of tourists throughout Japanese cities. On a hot Japanese summer day, as is part of his routine, Yousuke wrapped up the remainder of his daily chores: a rusty shovel balanced against a wall built by his father all those years ago, freshly ploughed Earth that exhumes a small all too familiar to farmers, and a hunched over old man, feeling the weight of decades upon decades of intense labor. The sun was at its zenith when Yousuke, feeling dehydration slowly kicking, decided to take a stroll down towards the village square, where a modest market took over the village every Sunday. Today was no such day however, with the Square showing little signs of Life aside from the village NandemoYa handiman, Shuntaro, fixing the few spotlights that encircle the round square, which were starting to show their age. As the intensity of the heat mixed with his hatred for bamboo hats took their toll, Yousuke barely managed a curt “konnichiwa” before wavering in his walk down the square, and ended up collapsing headfirst at the foot of the stairs leading up to the village shrine.