text: I'm sorry if I'm doing this wrong - please correct me if so!Basically I saw this post on another sub and thought it would make a hilarious short story, so I used it as a writing prompt! I hope it's okay to post it here. My partner also drew a picture of it for me! Story: The shadow of a man was plastered against the office wall, illuminated by the bright white glow of a set of monitors. The screen on the left displayed a website regarding Cthulhu Mythos and theoretical summoning rituals. Other tabs along the browser displayed much of the same. On the right hand side, a text editor was open - the file was titled “Mythology Essay”, though the flashing cursor on a blank page indicated much more work had to be done. Jake sat hunched in his chair, a stick of chocolate pocky crumbling between his teeth, the dirty fingernails that held it chewed beyond repair. “Ugh, this assignment is stupid...” Jake sighed, using his freehand to run his pale fingers through the mess of dirt-brown hair that spiked out in various directions atop his skull. He clicked through a few more tabs and read a page about ancient human summoning rights and chuckled to himself. “Why would a ‘supreme being’ even bother responding?” He closed that tab and moved on to the next. Instinctively, Jake reached out for another stick of pocky, and found the box empty. He grunted, shrugged, and extended his bony appendage further out, towards a can of soda. There was no resistance, and Jake realised that it, too, was empty. Well, almost. Upon being disturbed, a singular black ant scurried out of the open soda can, using the tab as if it were a bridge to cross to the delicate stack of papers that waited beyond. “Ew, ants.” Jake grumbled, a scowl overtaking his previous bored expression. He pushed his chair out from the desk and across the tiles in a single dramatic sweep, then stood up to his full height. He was reasonably tall and uncomfortably lanky, and his movements made no sound across the marbled floor. As Jake made his way to the next room, the brightness made him wince. He was used to working in the dark in his office, and frequently forgot that he always left the kitchen light on. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the brightness, but he didn’t need to wait for it to do so. Jake had lived in the same apartment for the past three years, and was quite comfortable with the layout - he even knew to step over the pile of laundry he left by his bedroom door, and to kick aside the random box of cereal that he left in the lounge-room to snack on, ‘just in case’. By the time Jake’s eyes had adjusted to the light, he had already opened the pantry and was rifling through for something else to shove into his gaping maw. He kept telling his parents that he studied better when eating, but really he just liked the taste. It didn’t take long for Jake to decide on his snack, and he retreated from the pantry with a chocolate chip cookie in hand, and another in his mouth. For the first time since that morning, he actually looked at his kitchen - and noticed something unpleasant. A small hole had formed in the foundation of the windowsill, and a trail of ants had started to push their way through. “Well, I guess that’s where the nest is...” Jake groaned, a mouth full of biscuit, as his eyes followed the black dotted trail. The path of ants snaked across the kitchen bench, over the sink and down the refrigerator. They formed a small s-bend along the curve in the tiles but continued past, into the bathroom. Jake followed them then, curious about how deep their warren had gone in just a few short hours. He watched them struggle to tackle the navy bathmat, the thick spines of fluff more like mountain ranges for the tiny critters. The ants showed intense determination, and a great lack of intelligence. Jake chewed the final bit of his first cookie and stretched out one of his spindly legs, hooked his bare toes on the bathmat and flicked it aside. “Just go AROUND.” He groaned incredulously at the ants, who scattered briefly at the attack. They raced to the edges of the room, then curved back around on the next tile bend to resumed their previous path. Jake cocked an eyebrow and watched as each ant made its way to the very centre of the bathroom. There looked to be several hundred amassed in a large heap, crawling over each other as if fighting for air. Then Jake noticed something strange - from what he could tell, each ant carried the same thing - a small speck of... something? It was some sort of white crystal, maybe sugar or rock dust, he wasn’t sure. But as Jake looked more intently at the ants, they seemed to start to look back. The writhing mass had settled and each creature had found its own space on the floor, directly facing Jake. “That’s... odd...?” Jake straightened up and clenched his hand around his remaining treat, feeling a little intimidated by the hoard of insects before him. He took a step back, and it almost seemed as if the ants did too - but not quite. Instead, they had started to shift apart slowly, all of them at once, forming a large and vaguely circular shape around the entire bathroom floor. Jake’s eyes opened wide in shock and he glanced behind him, noticing that his path to retreat had also been filled in by the hoard of tiny bugs. “Is this how I die?” He whimpered melodramatically. But then the ants stopped - their wall complete. Jake took another look around and noticed that each ant was staring right at him, and had placed down its little white crystal, forming an unbroken line of sparkling powder - with Jake ‘trapped’ inside. He tensed and shook, crumbs falling from the biscuit in his hand. Several of the insects broke formation then, rushing inside the circle to gather the discarded biscuit crumbs before disappearing down the drainpipe. Jake froze, then slowly opened his hand. More ants moved - but not enough to break the formation completely. Each crumb had been collected and carried off without hesitation. “Oooookaaay?” Jake tilted his head and relaxed his composure a little. He shook his head, as if convinced he was dreaming, then took another look around the room. He definitely was standing in the centre of what looked like an ant’s summing circle, or some sort of ‘devil’s trap’. “I think I need to take a break from my essay...” he groaned and ran his free hand over one of his eyes, and then his stubble. “Okay, I’m crazy.” He said to no one in particular, probably the ants. “Cookie?” He bent down slowly and placed his remaining biscuit on the floor about a foot in front of him, and then straightened back up. Immediately the hoard of bugs descended, each ant discarding its crystal behind and rushing to tear apart the cookie and vanish into the drainpipe with it. Within a minute they were gone, crumbs and all. The only thing that remained of the crazy scene was the abnormally large amount of white dust strewn about the room. Jake rubbed both his eyes again and groaned, taking another look at the aftermath. Not a single ant was left behind. He shrugged and gave a slight chuckle as he headed back to his study. “I definitely need more sleep.