Lost Key Found
Monica had been working at city hall for six years, and in all that time she had never once needed to go into the basement storage room at…
Playful and teasing sci-fi & fantasy stories
Stories in Sci-Fi & Fantasy tagged playful and teasing, ranked by how many readers finish them. Reads run 21 to 27 minutes. Writers to know: Glass Ritual, Keeper of Clover and Edition of Amber. Readers usually start with “Lost Key Found” and “Neptune's Second Sunrise”. Some are free to read in full; the rest open with a free preview.
Playful and teasing sci-fi & fantasy stories, ranked by readers
01 02 Neptune's Second Sunrise
The shuttle doors opened and Triton Station hit me all at once.
03 Tide and Time
The meeting hall of the Saltside Clock Tower filled up the way it always did before a vote, which was to say slowly and with a lot of…
04 Tides of Terminus
The shuttle ramp hissed down and the gravity hit me wrong before my boots even touched the deck.
05 The Eclipse Shift
Ella was thirty-four years old and she had been divorced for two years, and she had learned that the best way to get through the weeks was…
06 The Venus Return
I was wiping the same glass for the third time when the docking tube coughed open and let the new arrivals in.
07 Dust Runner's Bet
"You're really going to race that heap of scrap?"
08 Sixty and Screwed
The shift ended at 6:40 in the morning.
09 The Dawn Rep
Olwen woke with the sun striping the bed in yellow bars and no spell left in her skin.
10 Last Pour at the Refuge
Piper Benton was forty-three years old and she was wiping the same glass for the second time, which was a habit she'd picked up in the bad…
11 Gravity Well
The argument started the way most of their arguments started, over a schedule nobody had agreed to.
12 The Glass Wall Interview
The turbines were the first thing you noticed about New Meridian, even before you got inside the mountain proper, because the whole…
13 Gale Lessons
The thing you need to know about me is I don't lose.
14 The Resonance of Last Light
I've been a memory archivist on Cerule Station for six years now.
15 Ask the Vet
I had both arms up to the shoulder inside a heifer when the clinic door banged open.
16 Debt of Light
I was fifty-two years old, thirty years in the Helios Fleet behind me, and I was floating in an airlock outside a temple, waiting for my…
17 Cinnamon & Copper
Shae Hartford was twenty-three years old and she had a problem, and the problem was not the dough sticking to her knuckles.