Love Is in the Air: a Valentine’s Day series by Jennifer Weigel
This is the fifth and final installment in a Valentine’s Day series of shorts by Jennifer Weigel in which unsuspecting lovers succumb to deadly gases. You can read the other 4 installments here:
Joe and Dianne
Episode 5, the Final Chapter:
LOVE struck once again with its noxious fog of poisonous deadly gases. Why did it appear in such a deadly form? Why did it drift in and out of being between those who expressed the deepest truest feelings for one another? Something was horribly wrong; this wasn’t how love was supposed to manifest at all. Where were the happy endings? And why was everything always so stinky?
Back at the laboratory, Doctor Gruesome smiled with glee after unleashing his creation upon the unsuspecting world. The mad scientist had been rejected by his beloved creation Galatea, an Android in the shape of his perfect woman. But Galatea was not interested in being a sexpot, she had set her sights on eliminating inefficiencies in the quest for perfection in both form and function of being, and courting her creator simply didn’t fit within her agenda.
The robot’s icy withdrawal and subsequent disappearance had spawned the doctor’s vengeful wrath. He had wrought the deadly vapor in response. If he couldn’t have love, then neither could anyone else. He had made sure the resulting invisible cloud of LOVE (Latent Odiforous Virulent Energy) would be as putrid as possible, because nothing ruined the mood and sowed confusion like a good bout of flatulence, or Bromhidrosis, or any other unexpected foul-smelling odor for that matter… It’d serve them right, the lot of the lovers and dreamers and so on, to die by the most fetid of fumes, the mad scientist thought as he cackled.
The invisible cloud of LOVE appeared wherever love blossomed, manifesting out of the spiritual conductivity created between those who exhibited the emotion at its peak sensation. Unbeknownst to anyone else, it lay waste to those who spawned its generation and then disappeared as quickly as it had come, leaving no trace.
Meanwhile, Galatea was already busy working on her own pet project, developing and streamlining plans to create a race of perfect beings by reworking her subjects to her design. Her human counterparts were horribly wasteful of their own energies and abilities but, with some slight modifications, vast improvements could be made. It was easy to lure victims to her lair where she could experiment upon them to determine the best course of action towards her better and brighter tomorrow, for she was wholly femme fatale after all.
Galatea returned to the laboratory from whence she had been fashioned in order to procure more materials for her work and to exploit the mad scientist’s feelings for her to entice him to her lair to further her research. When Doctor Gruesome laid eyes upon the Android he was instantly infatuated yet again, and followed ever-hopefully. Galatea knew he would be an amazing addition to her research, for his brilliant mind could be put to the most incredible of uses. She began to become attached to the idea of having him around, to pick his brain both literally and figuratively so to speak.
As the robot performed the lobotomy and prepared to supplant Doctor Gruesome’s outstanding brain into the well-oiled mechanical body that would better serve him in their imminent partnership, a noxious cloud settled into the room. Unbeknownst to both Galatea and the doctor-brain, neither of whom possessed the ability to smell, LOVE had returned. They succumbed to the poisonous gases together, bound forever by their mutually sealed fate.
You can find more of Jennifer Weigel’s writing by visiting her website here at Jennifer Weigel Words.
Continuing our AI journey from last time exploring Little Red Riding Hood herself as the Big Bad Wolf… All of these are based upon the AI generated art and prompts using NightCafe and then created as posters in Canva.
How very… Phantom of the Opera predatory… this is definitely not what I had in mind. Maybe something more cutesy?
Ugh. Maybe not.
Wow, that seems like such a cop out, cropping off the head so you don’t have to depict it. And I don’t want to lose the Little Red Riding Hood reference completely.
So no surprise there, I knew that was too many references to work.
And we continued to devolve, join us again next week for the final installment to see how this ended… And again, if you want to catch the last AI art journey, you can find it on Haunted MTL here. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
And as promised in Big Bad Poetry, we shall embark on our next AI journey, this time looking at Little Red Riding Hood. I had wanted to depict her as the Big Bad Wolf one and the same, although maybe not so big nor bad. But it just wasn’t happening quite as planned. All of these are based upon the AI generated art and prompts using NightCafe and then created as posters in Canva.
So I actually like this even better than my original vision, it is playful and even a bit serene (especially given the Sinister style). The wolf is just being a wolf. It’s quite lovely, really. But it wasn’t what I had in mind, so I revisited the idea later to see if I could get that result…
Well, that’s not quite right…
Yeah more of the same…
And as you can see this is starting to devolve quickly. Join us again next week to see how this continued to develop… And if you want to catch the last AI art journey, you can find it on Haunted MTL here. To see more such devolutions into AI generated art, check out the Will the Real Jennifer Weigel Please Stand Up? blog.
So we’re going out on a limb here in this segment of Nightmarish Nature and exploring one of the most terrifying, most dangerous, most impactful species to walk this planet. I’m talking about us of course. Sure, as humans, we may not seem all that horrific to ourselves, but to many other creatures we have been a force of nightmares.
Why are we terrifying?
Humans are among those species that engage in massive modifications to our environment to serve our needs, like beavers who dam rivers, elephants who eat all of the new growth scrub to keep the savannahs tree-free, and so on. Yeah, all creatures have some impact on their surroundings, but some take it up a notch, and we do so at an order of magnitude higher still. And we have gotten so good at it that we have managed to exist and thrive in places that would otherwise be inhospitable. We are outwardly adaptive and opportunistic to the point of being exploitative. We are the apex predators now.
We have forced many creatures into extinction, intentionally and not, and have sped up these effects enormously. The National Audobon Society chose the egret as its symbol after it made a comeback from being hunted to near extinction, and it was one of the lucky ones. Many weren’t so lucky, especially if they came in direct conflict with humans, such as wolves and the big cats who were in direct competition, or those who were really specialized in really specific niche circumstances that we pushed out of the way. And this is in only a very very limited scope of our earth’s history, and has since been even more ramped up with industrialization.
But humans aren’t all bad are we?
Depends on who you ask… We have created all sorts of incredible opportunities for some species too. Take mice for example. And coyotes. And kudzu. And a whole host of animals whom we’ve domesticated, some of whom wouldn’t have continued to exist otherwise or certainly wouldn’t exist in anything resembling their current forms. And the most massive extinctions occurred long before our arrival, when the earth was still forming and underwent rapid catastrophic changes and swings, decimating critters as they were trying to get a foothold. Nothing is constant except for change; that has always been true.
So it isn’t my goal to get all eco-conscious and environmentalist here. Just that I feel if we are going to explore some of the more terrifying aspects of nature, we need to look in the mirror. Because if a consensus were taken right here, right now of all living beings globally as to what is among the most terrifying creatures among us, I’m sure we’d appear on that list.
If you enjoyed this closer-than-kissing-cousins segment of Nightmarish Nature on Horrifying Humans, please check out past segments:
