Yippie dang doo! 55th place!

Those not in the mood for a story (and it is a LONG one), scroll to the bottom of the page.

"My God."

A simple phrase, uttered by a simple man. Of course, he would argue with that classification, but the fact stands nonetheless. I snorted. Stupid kid. In this line of work, you had to be stoic. You couldn't afford to let anything take you by surprise, especially what you were supposed to be investigating. It didn't do good for your street cred if you got scared at the sight of a little.. a little...

...blood...

"Holy sh- I mean, uh, *cough*." I've seen some vile things in my time, let me tell you. Men gutted like fish, people I knew vivisected and left to rot, kids with pulped limbs, you name it. But this, this was something else entirely. The room was a war zone. Furniture was thrown upside-down against the left wall, the rug was shredded, like it had been chewed up by an overzealous lawnmower, and, for good measure, the victim's massive television was shattered and had been shoved through a window, shards of glass coating the floor beneath. Strangely, the closet was untouched. But the destruction alone was not enough to make me uneasy. That was the job of an inexplicable green substance that seemed to coat everything in the room. I rubbed a bit of it in between my fingers. It had the consistency of mucus. Lovely. I wiped the stuff on my trench coat. "Whatta ya got, kid?" I barked at Billy, the intern unfortunate enough to get the job with yours truly. He was gonna be a "forensic scientist" when he grew up. Hah, yeah right, the kid got queasy at the sight of a paper cut.

"W-W-Well, Mr. Danger, sir, just from looking at it I can tell that this substance is most certainly organic in nature, you wouldn't get this s-s-sort of consistency from industrial waste or a human-manufactured polycarbonite, however, the c-c-color and the scent, coupled with several other f-f-factors, makes me-"

"Cut the crap and just tell me straight, kid, do you have a clue about what this stuff is or not?" I spat. "I don't have the time or the patience for your forensic mumbo-jumbo."

"S-S-Strictly speaking, no, sir, I d-d-don't have a clue." he stammered.

Of course. Nearly ten years of fancy college degrees and awards and when you got in the field, they all turned to mush. That's why I never went to college. Private eyes don't need degrees, and neither do I. "Remind me again why I hired you, kid?"

"W-W-Well, Mr. Danger, sir, you weren't actually t-t-the one that hired me, that was the police c-c-commissioner, you were just a-a-assigned to me because you-"

"Yeah, yeah, I know, I know." I sighed. Look at me, Dirk Danger, a private eye if there ever was one, and here I was doing investigative work for the West Hartford police. What a sap I was, eh? But I needed the money, and no private eye was gonna make more than a few bucks in this sham of a city. I had turned my attention back to the crime scene when I heard footsteps behind me. I whirled around.

"Stop right there, maggot! I oughtta- Oh, Mr. Collins, I didn't recognize you!" Of course it was him, who else has hand lotion strong enough to overpower the scent of festering rot? Chester B. Collins has got to be the greasiest, most slippery stiff I've ever encountered on this job. You can't ask the guy a question without him trying to sell you some made-in-China crap that's supposed to cure arthritis, or shine your hair, or clip your toenails, or whatever.

"Hello, Officer. You're looking mighty fine today," he hissed, "I just wanted to thank you for coming out here today, I take great concern in the welfare of my tenants, you know, and I can rest easy knowing that their safety rests in your very capable hands. Speaking of those hands..." -Oh, God, here it comes, I thought- "you look like you could use some of this wonderful creme manufactured by the Liánjià company! Guaranteed to remove corns in two weeks or less!"

I shot a look at the kid. He was carefully inspecting the closet on the exact opposite side of the room. Some help he was.

"Uh, thanks anyway Mr. Collins, but I have a job to do right now, and my boss would kill me if he found out I was buyin' cremes on the job." I said as I died a little inside.

"Suit yourself!" Collins sniffed, and exited the room. I trotted over to the kid, thankful for something to take my mind off my not-private-eye-ness. Find anything interestin' over here, kid?" I demanded.

"Y-y-yes, sir, actually. I-I-I found this piece of... stuff here, s-s-sir. M-m-my instruments indicate that it is o-o-organic in nature, though the chemical m-m-makeup does not match any known compounds in my d-d-database," he said, wiping his nose.

"Gimme that!" I snatched the thing out of his hands. The texture reminded me a bit of Winky, the hairless kitten that I most certainly do not own. "It's skin, kid," I announced, "no buts about it."

"B-b-but sir, it doesn't match any DNA s-s-sequence in my database!" he cried, lifting the screen of his laptop so I could see it. Pfft. A real detective doesn't need any damn techno-compu-crap.

'I said no buts, boy. This is definitely skin. From who, or what, I don't know," I looked at him, "You're the college brat here, what does it look like to you?"

He shrugged hopelessly. 'I-i-it seems like it may have come from a m-m-mammal, sir, but it shares traits c-c-consistent with amphibians as well.'

"Well that's just peachy. The room trashed like a tornado hit and the only evidence we have of the culprit is a piece of a creature that doesn't exist," I sighed. "The best we can do right now is set up some cameras and hope the thing returns to the scene of the crime. Get on it, kid!"

Billy reached into the duffel bag by his side and retrieved three motion-sensitive cameras, setting them up around the room. After this was done, we left for the police station and the sweet, sweet whine of the coffee machine.

Continued here

Poor Slurrp. All he wanted was a place to live, one where those strange, tall things wouldn't scream and yell and throw things at his head whenever he walked by. He finally thought he'd found one too. It was nice, small and dark, had lots of cushy cloth things to make a bed, and there were all these little crawling things that tickled Slurrp's toes. He liked the crawling things. They didn't try to hurt him when he talked to them. He never wanted to leave. But he got hungry, so he went outside. That was a mistake. Suddenly, instead of dark and quiet, there was lights and screaming and things flying at him, one of those tall things coming at him with a large head of hair on a stick. He was forced to defend himself. It wasn't his fault if the outside place got wrecked, all he was doing was trying to drive the tall thing away from his new home. After the thing left, he went back inside of the nice, dark place with the little friends who didn't try to kill him. But then he got hungry again, only this time, instead of the tall thing, there were these large metal eyes looking at everything. He made them go away. And then that creature with the huge brown, baggy skin and the smoking nose tried to take him away from his home! Poor Slurrp, he thought, poor poor Slurrp...

Based on this doodle of mine: