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Colour Contagion · Original Minific ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 400–750
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Confusion Fusion
It was just another day in the undisclosed underground location somewhere in the USA. Dante Pienaar sighed, staring at the cargo containers standing in front of him. He much preferred the old times when, after the regime change in his old country, he had to run abroad and launch a successful career as a mercenary.

This was no longer the case. After an unfortunate landmine accident back in Nigeria or Chad—Dante never bothered to learn more about countries he fought in—he ended up stuck in this magazine, feeling more like a bookkeeper that a member of the biggest organized crime organization on Earth. Shady businesses with governments, drug and arms trafficking, blackmail, murders – all of this existed somewhere far away from him. He knew about it only from the containers and what was inside of them .

Dante’s electric wheelchair moved closer to one of the containers that his assistants had just opened. There were several boxes inside, each of them bearing a differently-coloured sticker. Black ones – conventional weapons and munitions; blue – drugs; yellow – radioactive materials; red – organs harvested from victims of some conflict in a nameless third world country, so needed by the organization’s rich clients. And so on, and so forth, throughout all the branches of the syndicate.

Seeing how his life revolved around those boxes, Dante Pienaar often compared his current situation to working in FedEx – that is, if FedEx shipped to North Korea and bribed port officials everywhere in the world to let their containers pass without further inspection.

This time, however, something went wrong. Once the container was opened, Dante’s nostrils were attacked by some foul stench. He winced, immediately thinking of that one time when some overly ambitious boss of the Triads stuffed way too many prostitutes in a cargo container. By the time they arrived, most of them were rather definitely suffocated. Cleaning took all day and, as far as Dante knew, the mafioso was currently enjoying retirement at the bottom of the ocean.

Dante looked inside. Good news was, this time the container wasn’t full of dead bodies but rather ordinary boxes with green stickers. Dante furrowed his eyebrows – he was pretty sure money didn’t smell that way, unless someone took “money laundering” way too literally.

“Open it,” he said to one of his assistants. The tattooed young man took one of the boxes and opened the lid, immediately recoiling and retching. Dante shook his head at this and rode his wheelchair closer.

His frown deepened. Apparently someone decided that instead of putting kidneys in a red-marked fridge was not good enough and instead put it in an ordinary green box, with just a few bags of ice for protection. Which, of course, melted along the way.

Dante rolled his eyes and grabbed his cellphone. Making a call took a while; the conversation was encrypted and, for safety reasons, the signal would go all around the globe before reaching its target.

Finally someone answered the call. “Pienaar?” The guy with a strong, Eastern-European accent yawned. “What do you want? In Pristina it’s the middle of the night.”

“Shut up, Qendrin, and listen to me,” Dante muttered. “What’s up with those kidneys in green boxes? The whole place stinks and that annoying billionaire won’t shut up if I don’t get new kidneys for his grandma. You’d better have a good answer or I’ll send him your kidneys.”

“Ah, it’s this new guy,” Qendrin replied. “Funny thing, really. We knew he was an idiot, but it took us two days before we realized he was colourblind…”

“You hired a colourblind guy to mark the packages!?” Dante exclaimed. “Fucking naaier! What are we now? Equal opportunity employers?”

Qendrin sighed. “I know. He also can’t tell yellow from blue. Some guys in the Middle East were really surprised when they got a ton of cocaine instead of enriched uranium…”

“Oh really…” Dante muttered, eyeing the blue box standing in the back of the container. Regular yellow boxes were lead-lined, but the blue ones… “Crap.”

“What happened, boss?” the assistant asked. He’d thrown up and looked like he wasn’t going to get close to the container anytime soon.

“Get me a Geiger counter,” Dante replied. “I’ll have to explain to the boss how we got ourselves and the whole magazine irradiated.”

The assistant shrugged. Like many employees, he wasn’t very bright. “Is it like those dead whores?”

“Worse.” Dante shook his head. “But at least we’re not Qendrin…”
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#1 ·
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Alternate Title: Honey, We Gave Ourselves Radiation Sickness!

Okay, Mr. Comedy Man...

I like this on paper, if that even makes sense (nothing else does). Companies like FedEx and Amazon seem to have either robots or idiots for their packaging and shipping, and this is like a jab at that kind of stupidity, taken to its extreme.

The problem is I wish this was goofier, believe it or not. It's not a shitpost, or at least I don't think it is, and I say that because it's too lucidly written. There are a few other entries I've read so far that read like they were written by a crazy person (or maybe it was Majin Syeekoh) and that's partly what made them interesting, if not necessarily "good."

I probably won't remember this entry as much as those for that reason: stupidity aside, it's not particularly funny. Maybe it's not wacky enough? It's hard to tell, because you can only shove so much insanity into your minific before making it an outright shitpost, and there's a delicate line that must be straddled.

On the bright side this is pretty polished; I didn't notice any grammar oddities anyway. Although maybe it was polished too much, because in trying not to make this a shitpost the author might've overcompensated.

Far from terrible, though, and I don't see this being at the bottom of anyone's slate.

Unless you work for FedEx maybe.

Also, you'd think a color-blind person would tell their employer of such a thing, especially if their position involves knowing what color is what. That's some dumb shit.
#2 ·
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Yeah, I mean, I pretty agree with what was said above. It’s hardly funny. I mean, it’s not badly written, but the reveal is pretty much lame. Colorblindness is tested for in about all the jobs that deal with colors. Don’t try to be a train engineer if you’re colorblind, for example. No dice. I wonder if you can be a pilot, btw, irrespective of what your visual acuity/sharpness is.

I’m not sure what colorblindness you depict, btw, but blue/yellow conflation is pretty rare. Guy basically seem to see only one color (Achromatopsia) which is even rarer.

In any case, all the fic is built around the twist, but the twist itself is far from punchy, that’s why it comes across as wishy-washy.
#3 ·
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Bottom slate because I color coded my reviews and got them mixed up. Sorry.

It might be the late hour, but I am having trouble really formulating a critique for the story. Fundamentally, I think the problem is that it is enough enough. It is not silly enough to really push back against the really grim subject matter, and it isn't grim enough to allow for the punchline to be extra absurd. It is just sort of stuck in the middle. And I think that's what it needs to do: choose one of those extremes and make sure it fits in them.
#4 ·
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The joke about the cargo container filled with prostitutes is exactly the kind of dark, dry humor that the rest of the story needs to be. I mean, I think it was genius to describe it as "overly ambitious." But when it comes to most of the other jokes here, they just don't land for me.

The issue IMO is that you're trying to dip your toe into goofy stuff. For instance, the explanation about the colorblind sorter has a lot of the same beats as the hooker shipping container joke. But the former has no teeth, compared to the latter. The fact that it's both a ridiculous explanation while also being tonally mild (almost like a Looney Tunes gag, I feel) really robs a lot of the rest of the story of the edginess that would have made this great.

So it's not often I say to go edgier, but I really think this would benefit from amping up the "dark" part of "dark humor."