Anyone is welcome to contribute. All you have to do is create a character with a unique power, and then that character is yours and you drop in when you feel like and write chapters from their point of view. We'll all be telling separate stories at first, to let the characters grow and discover their powers, but eventually we can start moving toward the characters meeting each other. Other than that, there is no plan. Just have fun with it! Oh, and no murdering someone else's character unless they agree to it.

I'll kick us off...
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The speck in the sky became a smudge, and then a chunk, and then a genuine cause for concern. Tom stood watching with a foot up on the bench, one hand on the mast and the other over his brow, looking like a painting of a sixteenth century explorer ready to discover strange new worlds.
It was definitely coming toward him. Of course it was. First time he takes the sloop out in over a month, and crap from the sky falls on him.
Quickly, he adjusted the tiller so as to move out of the object's path. The wind swept the vessel along at a hearty speed. He reached for the life jackets.
They weren't there.
Tom cursed and punched the air. A good sailor checks that sort of thing before casting off. Right now, however, he was at a point in his life where he wasn't a good anything. It had been a long month.
He checked the sky again and almost jumped. The spot was as big as a quarter now, and still coming at him. Tiny crumbs of rock flaked off in its trajectory. He thought it might be a meteorite.
Scoping the horizon in all directions proved fruitless; he was too far out to make it to land in time. The boat moved along, but no matter how much distance it covered, the meteorite always seemed like it was pointed directly at him. All Tom could do was wait.

In the brief time that he was able to see it up close before the impact, he judged the meteorite to be about the size of an average car. It took out the entire stern with a deafening crunch. The force sent the rest of the vessel spinning and tilting, throwing Tom into the water.
It felt like minutes before he surfaced, but when he was up and gasping for air he surveyed the scene frantically. He could do okay in the water, but he was no swim team champion. Certainly he could never swim all the way back to shore on his own. He needed a life preserver. The hull was going down, so that was no good. Most of the debris was too small to cling to.
"HELP!" he screamed. It was stupid, he knew, but somehow it made him feel better.
Something came floating up next to him from under the water. He seized it. A life preserver ring! Well, not quite, he saw. There was a protrusion coming out of it that distorted the roundness of it. But it floated. Some other debris rose to the surface as well. He kicked past it and headed for the beach.

A woman ran out to meet him as he approached a water level that was shallow enough to walk in.
"Oh my god! Was that your boat out there? Are you okay?"
A little white dog was wading in behind her, its leash trailing forgotten in the water.
"Yeah," Tom said. He saw the word materialize behind the woman and come down hard on the back of her head, knocking her out cold.
No, seriously, that's what happened.
He gawked, dumbfounded. The four letters were scattered around her like disassembled lego bricks. The E lay over her hair like a hat.
The dog barked. Tom looked down at his life preserver. Now he recognized why it was such an odd shape.
It was the letter P.

Oooo, interesting start Marvin!

I'll have the first part of my story posted in the next couple of days.

How licentious are we allowed to be? G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17?

We still have to go by the forum rules, so probably somewhere between PG-13 and R.

I don't know if anyone else ever intends to contribute, but in order to keep the thread somewhat alive, here's another chapter from me...
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The YEAH letters were too heavy for Tom to carry all of them, so he dug a quick hole in the sand and buried them along with the P preserver.
"Don't you go digging these up," he whispered to the dog, which was busy licking its master's toes.
Suddenly, it started hailing. Or at least it felt like hail pelting his head and shoulders. Tom clutched his scalp, but it was already over. He plucked one from the sand: a letter G, about the size of a marble.
Of course.
An inhalation of air came from the unconscious woman. Tom stole a look over at her - her eyes were still closed - and frantically started scooping the little letters into a pile. The dog rushed over and licked her face.
Tom stuffed the letters into a faster, smaller hole than the previous one and clumped a handful of sand over it.
"Unh," the woman said.
It would have to do. He sprang to his feet and ran.

Still wet and with sand clinging to his clothes like Fun Dip, Tom had to take a couple of long bus rides back to the marina to get his car. He would have liked to have called a friend for a ride, but it looked like phones were going to be out unless he could find a way to make a call without his conversation physically squashing him to death inside a phonebooth.
But waiting in transit gave him plenty of time to ponder what had happened. He'd narrowly escaped death by meteorite, forged words out of thin air, incapacitated a stranger, then fled the scene. How could any of that have happened to him at all, let alone in the span of an hour? It was too ridiculous. He almost wished he'd kept one of those miniature letters, just to prove he wasn't crazy. Probably he could make more, but not in public; he didn't want anyone to know about this yet. Or maybe at all.
What he couldn't understand, apart from the letters appearing in the first place, was why they had been different each time. The first time, in the water, they were light and buoyant; the ones that knocked out the woman were solid, heavy, like bricks; and then they'd gotten tiny when he spoke to the dog. He thought he might have to experiment with this, but not today. It would be almost dark by the time he got home.

There was one message on his answering machine. Tom listened to it at the table while he gobbled a bowl of microwaved stew.
"*Beep* Hey, it's me. You're probably out on the boat. That's okay. Listen, I just wanted to... I need to talk to you...about...something. I'm so glad you're not home, I don't want to do this over the phone. Can we do lunch tomorrow? Or dinner? Or ice cream on a park bench, I don't care. I feel really bad about the way things ended. I'm kind of freaking out, actually. Sorry. Please call me back. *Beep*"
He sat frozen as he processed this, the steam escaping his stew the only motion in the entire room.
"Crap," he said, and the resulting mushy, odorous letters descended into his bowl of stew with a wet slap.

STORY

PART I

It was late. Too late, too late. There was no time. Too late to be here, too late to be there, too late for everything, too late for life.

The wind picked up and the trees swayed this way and that, their shadows dancing in the rampant river. Somewhere in the distant a dog was howling. Without pause.

The chill invaded his bones, moving from his gloveless stubby fingers, all the way up to his taut neck and large ears. He opened his mouth; his yellow teeth were barely visible through the dark viscous blood. He spat; and winced.

It was too late, too late to be alive, to be alive in the cold--in the freezing cold; it was too late, too late.

The river flowed, scraping the rocks and pummeling the base of the dark wooden bridge. The water was dim except for the spots close to the land where fluorescent lights glared and flickered.

The wind continued to wail as it changed directions, now whipping his long hair back and away from his face. Other than the wind and the water rushing under the bridge, the only sound he could hear was that of his own shallow breaths.

Not even the dog was howling anymore, not even that damned dog...

Suddenly his legs gave way and he dropped down to the ground; his fingers were still clenching the icy railings. Tears started flowing. He felt weak. All these emotions....damn! He was panting. He spat and cursed. He recalled how he had promised to stop using that language, that--what was that saying--"street language"? What was it he had promised Father Andrews? Oh, that's right, "improper language."

He looked around a bit, then tightened his grip, trying to stand up by proping himself on his right knee, but he felt too weak. He cursed again--under his breath.

He was breathing faster now and trembling too. He slowly relaxed his right grip, bringing his hand up to his head, and with the torn sleeve of his hand-stitched Italian suit, wiped the sweat off his brow. He looked down at the river through the railings. He took a deep breath. Pushing himself on his left knee, he tried once again, to stand up, cursing under his breath.

***

In the morning a young girl called the police, reporting "something shiny", "maybe a big guy or a big bear", in the river.

They found his body floating in place, in the river, stuck between the base of the bridge and a large rock.

Interesting, Juicy!

Much more subtle than mine, and I also feel like your prose is more human, while mine is kind of vanilla.

Thank you. But in my view it's the exact opposite!

Generally speaking, I am a bad writer: I often have trouble with forming coherent sentences, and my spelling is atrocious. Here, we're looking at writing stories and specifically the fantasy genre but mine reads like...well, anything but. You took a positive look at it and called it "human."

I am also stalling quite a bit, nothing really taking place at all (maybe a reflection of my own procrastination before writing this) while yours is much more action-oriented, reads better, uses more specific and apt words, and overall quite more interesting.

I needed to start with a sort of an inward journey because that's all I really know. I needed to introduce a character's internal world before any major action takes place.

But I do keep reminding myself that this is just a fun little exercise, and no pressure, and just write what comes to me. I don't want to criticize myself further because it'll kill whatever little motivation I got going. But your nice compliment does make me feel better.

Yes that's what I meant by human, you had some internal character stuff going on and I always feel like that's what my writing is missing. What you refer to as "action-oriented" is what professionals might call "fast-paced", because I'm not spending the time I should on character thoughts and feelings. But it's interesting that we seem to write with two different approaches in that sense.

STORY

PART II

The police were puzzled, as the body found was that of an emaciated man with long hair, dressed in an expensive Italian suit. It certainly did not resemble a bear nor "something shiny."

In the hospital, it was determined that the man had numerous broken bones in his arms and legs, a broken jaw, and multiple internal injuries. He is not going to make it, the attending physician had told the detective working on the case. Unless there is a miracle, he had added, raising his voice suddenly and gesturing vaguely towards the large window through which the orange sun shone as it sank behind the mountains.

Night had arrived and the police station was nearly empty and dark, except for one well-lit office. "And what was she doing there, so late?" Asked a young man as he flipped through pages of a small file, threw it on his desk, and leaned back in his chair. "Well?" he asked again. The middle-aged detective rubbed his face and glanced at the clock. "I don't know," he said, shifting from one foot to another. "I listened to the conversation again. All we know is that her name is Emily Brown, likely the daughter of Destiny and Ethan Brown of Alabama, who passed away in that car crash--"

"Look, I'm not the press, get to it already," said the young man, tapping his fingers on the desk. "Right, yes sergeant, uhhh...I also think she must have been driven there by someone, to the park...over there. There were some bicycle tire tracks but they disappear close to the parking lot--" The sergeant made a circular motion with his index finger as he stood up. "John, John, I know all this. You're wasting time. What was she doing that late? Is she a suspect?"

The detective froze for a moment then drew his brows together and said in a low voice: "That little girl? I mean we talked about possibility of his suicide but the if you saying the little--" "Yes, yes, the little...girl." The sergeant said with a big smile, adding, "and are you sure it was really...a girl? I've listened to the tape too and she sounds...well, something is off. Her voice is a little deep, little fake. So she's a 14-year-old, originally from Alabama but raised in New York and yet with almost no accent I might add, and she happens to have seen something shiny, a big bear, which is nowhere to be found by the way, exactly where we found the body?" He paused and drew his brows together and walked towards the detective, who continued to glance at the clock and swinging his briefcase back and forth. He stopped and brought his face to within a few inches of the detective's and whispered, "John, why are you so distracted? You've been like this all day."

The detective dropped his briefcase and stepped towards the window as he made a grand gesture. "Oh, you don't know the half of it! I told you Janet is divorcing me but I didn't tell you that bitch is gonna suck me dry. That fucking bitch is taking the house, the kids, I'm getting fucked..." He stopped mid-sentence as he looked back at the sergeant suddenly as if he had been hit hard with an object and he was looking to find the perpetrator. He remained frozen for a few seconds, then his face relaxed, he looked down, and sighed. "I'm sorry, I don't know what came over me."

The sergeant continued to stare at the detective, then went back to his desk and sat down, picked up a report then dropped it, shaking his head. "This is affecting your performance now. There is no excuse. We all have problems. Why don't you leave for the day. Forget about the overtime. Do you have an appointment again?"

"Not with the lawyer this time," the detective mumbled as he bent down and clutched his briefcase handle. "I have to pick up the kids at nine. They're with their...uhhh," he sighed, "mother now."

The sergeant continued to read a report on his desk. The detective looked at the sergeant, then the clock, and the sergeant again. "It's too late, I need to go now...it's too late already." The sergeant did not say anything nor did he look up as the detective walked out of the office and shuffled down the dark hallway. His briefcase swung back and forth, bumping into desks and empty chairs along the way.

Tom didn't sleep that night. Not because he couldn't; he just didn't. He sat on the basement floor staring at the drywall, trying to dare himself to speak again but knowing what would happen if he did.
He had thought about bringing a notepad or a marker board to his lunch date, but that was just too weird. He didn't have a plausible excuse for not being able to speak, and even if he did, she knew him too well to believe it.
Then he thought about recording some phrases here, at home, where no one would see the letters come out, but that would be even weirder to sit there in front of her and play a tape of him speaking; not to mention it would greatly limit the conversation.
Okay, dammit. It was time to experiment. There had to be some way he could control this stupid thing.
First he tried holding his shirt over his mouth while saying the word "raspberry." It came out sounding something like "affbwwy." The letters looked like clay sculptures made by kindergarteners. He supposed that might be useful, in a way; if they didn't look like letters, they couldn't be traced back to him saying them. But not what he was looking for.
He tried singing a few lines from an old Springsteen song, and the letters floated and bobbed through the air like balloons in a breeze.
He screamed "You can't handle the truth!" in his best Jack Nicholson voice, and they clanged to the floor in large, flat metal sheets.
He whispered "I think there's someone in the house," and that's when he learned something significant: the letters were pebble sized, just like when he whispered to the dog at the beach. He tried the same sentence again, this time as quietly as he possibly could.
Crumbs sprinkled down before him. He wouldn't even have noticed had he not been watching for them. Almost good, but it still wasn't practical to go around with your mouth in everyone's ear all the time.
Tom looked at the discarded letters on the floor, and the song letters trying to escape through the little rectangular window near the ceiling. He would have to keep cleaning this crap up so that it didn't get crowded.
"What the hell am I supposed to do?" he whispered to himself, tilting his head back against the wall. As he said this, some of the letter pebbles dropped into his mouth and straight to his throat. He sat up in alarm and coughed it up.
Ugh. As if he didn't hate these things enough.
Through the tears in his eyes, the room looked empty again. He blinked and wiped them. It was empty. No letters on the floor or at the window.
He stood up and took a few steps toward the center of the room, spinning to make sure he hadn't missed something. No, they were all gone.
"Raspberry," he said.
The letters popped up at eye level and began falling to the ground. He coughed just before they hit.
The word disappeared.
"Beauty," Tom said, and coughed.