We have not just one, but two new story ideas hitting the runnings this week. As before, you’ll find the number of bonus votes that each story will receive at the closing of the poll in parentheses after the name of the story. The longer each story has spent up in the polls without getting written, the more bonus votes it will get, ensuring that it will eventually get around to being written.
B. Holodeck Whore (5) — Ensign Aaron Whelk feels like he might be a bit in over his head, signing up for a three year voyage into interstellar space aboard the CSS Virile. He has wanted to get on a starship since he was young, but now that he’s here, he doesn’t quite feel like he fits in. His degree in warp engineering and superluminal astrogation aside, he has no idea what to do half the time. It isn’t until he’s taught what he was brought on board for that he begins to accept that he really does have a place on the spacecraft.
C. Camp Sherwood (3) — Camp Sherwood is a small community of men and only men in rural United States. From the outside it may seem like a place for people who live an alternative lifestyle of strict hierarchy, where there are the men who make the decisions, and their partners who obey them. But investigative journalist Jethro Mason is sure that things aren’t as they seem, and that there is something more nefarious going on. Whatever it is, he’s sure it has something to do with Hierarch Industries and the mysterious Project Ophiucus that he’d managed to hear about.
D. Window Shopping (1) — The Artemisian Commonwealth is home to people of every stripe and creed, from the most mundane of everyday-men to the most spectacular of heroes. But this story isn’t about heroes. In the Quayside Quarter of Seaside City, there’s a little street tucked away from the view of the major thoroughfares, where one could go to slake every perverted little appetite. It’s Brian Hummer’s first time in Bacchus Boulevard, and he can’t take his eyes off the pretty slaves displayed in front of the shops. He’s sure that he wants one of them, but a particularly savvy businessman who has been watching him thinks he’d be better off being one.
E. Hierarch Hijinks — Summer is just around the corner, and Alpha Aaron Blessing is eyeing a week in the middle of July for vacation on a sunny beach in the hope of maybe finding his fated mate by the seaside, like he’d always fantasized. He thinks he deserves it. After all, he’s put in quite a bit of effort. But he won’t get his vacation without a fight because his rival Alpha Riley Cassock, is also hoping to take that week off. Enough alcohol to knock an elephant dead later, and the two Alphas have come up with the perfect way to settle their differences: a game of seduction. Whoever manages to get in the pants of adorable blond sitting at the other end of the bar gets the week off.
F. Recidivist’s Rehabilitation — In a world where changing bodies is as simple as flinging one’s consciousness across the cosmos in a stream of electrons and electromagnetic radiation, pathological kleptomaniac and playboy Lupin has gotten away with his fair share of crimes. Stealing the Pleiades collection should have been child’s play, but the thief finds that his luck has run out. Captured, Lupin is confident that he will get away from this, just like he always had, until he finds out that a new rehabilitation program has been put in place for repeat offenders like him.
