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Sjan Evardsson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019

Stories (272)

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304 Followers

9 Following

272 Stories

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Don't Mind Me

If there was a Venn diagram of invisible jobs, real jobs that sound fake, and jobs that keep diplomacy running, Kina’s job would fall dead center, in the overlap of all three circles. As a Security Threatcaster and Wargamer, it was her job to first, know and understand the physical, political, and socioeconomic climate and circumstances at play. Then, using that knowledge, game out every likely scenario to a given confidence level, and plan contingencies for each.Kina usually planned for explicit scenarios that were within a fifty percent or...

4 likes

Signal Box

One thing about human progress that hasn’t changed in thousands of years is that things are only impossible until someone does it the first time. So many things thought impossible have been overcome by ingenuity and perseverance that the remaining impossibilities should, perhaps, be re-classified as impossible for now.Humans have been to the bottom of the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the Mariana Trench and the lowest point on earth. In the same spirit, humans have been atop Everest, above the clouds, outside the atmosphere entirely, ...

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De-escalation

“Once again, the unknown masked man known only as ‘The De-escalator’ has defused a tense situation in front of the federal courthouse this afternoon. After an intense, seven-minute speech, both the protesters and the police relaxed their stance, keeping the protest and the response peaceful.“The mayor’s office has expressed an interest in finding him and working with him. At the same time, a vocal group of supporters have been calling for him to run for office.“We turn now to Krista with the weather.”“Thanks, Chet. Not all heroes wear capes,...

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Teamwork

Taylor McAllister rubbed the sleep from her eyes. She’d been chasing leads down dead-end rabbit holes for days. If this tip turned sour, she’d have to go back in defeat and let her boss know that the summons couldn’t be served.For the moment, however, she was standing at a private launch field in the pre-dawn chill, waiting for someone to come for the little sport shuttle parked there. She was considering calling it a bust when she heard the gate clanging open.From her hiding spot by the hangar, she watched a small truck trundle through the ...

3 likes

Pick a Side

From a UN Peacekeepers force commander to “Champion” — whatever that was supposed to mean — was not a career trajectory retired Major Panit Ziegler expected. She’d planned a more realistic path of retiring young and starting a second career as a social worker.It was a warm April, and Panit was close to the end of her stint in the Bundeswehr, forgoing the proffered promotion to Oberstleutnant. The UN was processing the paperwork to release her back to the Bundeswehr, and she was training her replacement from France, Commandant Pierre Cole of ...

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Emergency Services

Lucla ran the scan again. The explorer ship drifted at one eighty-fourth of light speed. Compared to normal operation, the drift was so slow as to be equivalent to not moving at all. There were no signals closer than seventy or eighty light years.With only the radio working, even if she sent a message to them, the earliest response would be long after the ship had finished its slow drift into the rogue gas giant she’d been investigating. Sure, she’d fall into an orbit first, but orbit 12,307 would see the ship skim the upper atmosphere. Assu...

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You've Been Served

Taylor wanted to sprint. Every fiber of her being urged her to pump her legs and run full speed, but the half gravity of the small moon made that impossible. Instead, she fought against instinct to maintain a loping stride that covered ground faster than her pursuers could hope to keep up for any length of time … as long as she stayed under the canopy of the thin, alien trees.The slow descent on each stride gave her time to react to any irregularities in the ground. She wondered if it was how the world felt to cats. The thought of her cat ba...

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Anemoia

What defines a person as human? Perhaps better, what defines a human as a person? How are human persons different from those around her? Grag thought about those questions often, and when she did, she felt a longing for a life she never had.By DNA, she was human through and through. By culture, upbringing, and language, though, she was an ortian. By family, she had none, really. No blood relatives, and even the “adoptive” family in which she was raised treated her more as an experiment than a family member. Except for the youngest.“What are ...

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A Day at the Zoo

Jade wanted to sleep in, but the twin toddlers jumping on her bed, and sometimes her, made it impossible. “You two are up awful early,” she said.“Aunt Jade! Zoo! Zoo!” the little boy in lion pajamas called.“You promised,” the little girl in penguin pajamas said, the pleading clear in her voice.“Yes, I promised, Tracey. And we are going to the zoo today, Kasey, but you need to eat breakfast and get dressed first.” Jade sat up and spread her arms. “Come here, you little monkeys.”After cuddles, tickles, and giggles, Jade got up and began the da...

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Publicly Secret

They were always there, watching, waiting for the moment they needed to step in and fulfill their vow to keep The Secret. Alec hadn’t expected it to come so soon, though.He’d been introduced to them a year prior, after what he’d learned was three years of research and vetting of him as a candidate. Professor Miriam Dragostine had made the invite. After three years of an increasingly weird university experience, he was ready to peek behind the curtain.Less than a month after induction, Alec was called to an emergency meeting, not by the profe...

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A Problem for Later Me

7/4/4 KC (21st Day, 4th Moon, 4th Year of King Creshal)It’s still weird to write the date as KC. I keep wanting to write 1094 QE. Queen Elspeth ruled 1090 years; longer than anyone before. Old as she was, and stuck in her fashion sense, we still loved her.HRH Creshal is her opposite in a lot of ways. He dresses in current fashion, but he’s just a sort of stick-in-the-mud personality-wise. That’s enough of bashing the royals for this entry. On to the good stuff.I finally got my approval to visit Aramantia. Well, approval from here in Gell, bu...

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Prototype

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. It was what I was expected to say after all, and I’ve never handled that kind of pressure well.“This is an immense honor, and I’m grateful that the selection committee chose me for this mission. I’m ready to go.” My voice cracked a little, which the news reporters wrote off as emotion. My friends, though, know my tells.While I sat in my prep room in the pre-launch lounge, a conference vidcall to me flashed on the screen. I answered to see my closest friends from all over the world on...

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Patience

Patience. That’s one thing I’ve never been accused of possessing in any quantity. Makes my choice of career a little odd, but helping people solve their problems makes me feel better. Maybe it’s just a way to ignore my own.After starting from the bottom as a junior assistant in the Ambassador’s office, I’d made it all the way to the Ambassador’s right hand woman, Senior Chief Aide. From there, it was a small step to go to work for myself.These days, I’m known as a troubleshooter, broker, agent or, if they’re being blunt, a fixer. The name fi...

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No Middle

People like Yulia and me, we’re below justice; people like Mercy Botha, they’re above it. There is no middle, there is no justice.When Yulia was arrested, it was “mistaken identity.” Before anyone else was even aware she’d been arrested, she was transferred to the prison factory due to a “paperwork error.” An “industrial accident” left her dead on the second day.I found her body in the morgue at the Special Work Prison, six-hundred kilometers away from the prison factory where they said she’d died. The SWP was, in all but name, a brothel for...

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Found in Translation

“Greg, come up right away. Oh, and tell the analysts to drop anything they’re working on right now, this takes priority.” She returned the handset to the cradle. The hard-line communication system was older than anything else in the building. In fact, it was older than anything on the moon that wasn’t in a museum or itself a tourist attraction. It was secure, though, and that mattered most.The swarthy, mustachioed man burst into her office with a harried air and unkempt hair. “What is it, Grace? Did the signal office pick something up?”Grace...

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