This blog's about writing, right?
OK, three easy rules:
1. Five sentences at a time, no more--no less.
2. No back-to-back posts--wait for someone to post a paragraph before you go again.
3. As much as it's possible, build upon what's been written. In other words, make this a coherent story--but one that takes unexpected twists and turns.
Anyone can participate. Here we go:
It was a dark and stormy night (ha!) that greeted Jane as she stepped off the intergalactic transport onto an empty landing platform. Turbid clouds of black and grey stalked across an emerald sky, obscuring the abandoned structures of Cirellus Iv's largest city.
What killed these people?
She grabbed her bag and took a step foreward, but her foot struck something. A black chest sat in the middle of the platform, a note pinned to its lid.
5 comments:
(oh, fun!)
Despite the protection of her eva suit, the solid metal sent a frisson of pain up her leg. The wind buffeted her, up in this exposed place, and sudden rain sheeted in acid gusts from the turbulent sky. Her suit registered its destructive composition, and Jane wondered how the population of Cirellus had allowed this to happen. She bent down and tugged the note from the chest lid.
Do not open this box
No, she didn't have a good feeling about this: the whole bloody mission was a cock-up. Jane hesitated over the box and then glanced at the nearest of the corpses lying on the platform, her feet leading her slowly there, as if the body had some sort of deep gravitational pull, like a black hole collapsing on itself.
The corpse was withered by heat, a twisted thing garbed in burnt skin that looked like little more than fluttering black tissue paper, and when she nudged it with her foot that skin tumbled into black ash and was whirled away by the wind. The corpses were all the same, flayed by impossible heat, and yet the buildings were all unmarked, untouched, as if they had just been built. Jane looked back at the black chest, and then at the note in her hand, and the whole time she was thinking Pandora... that bitch.
A piece of the puzzle fell into place. Pandora, scourge of the outer rim—Demon Queen of the nether reaches of space—had left her mark upon another system.
But who had sent out the call, the request for a quantum psychologist?
Jane's suit picked up an eerie moan—a ghostly whisper that came from everywhere…and nowhere.
"Jaaaaaaaane…"
"Cut it out, Markus, and get your ass out here," Jane said, glancing at her smirking partner as he stood in the door of the craft representing the entirety of her "Task Force": a single member of the military's Enforcer Battallion (his eva suit dripping weaponry)... and he was an annoying member at that, who seemingly couldn't take anything seriously.
"If I come out there the goddamn rain will eat right through my suit," Markus said, leaning against the door and holding his hand out to touch the hissing water.
"Your suit can walk through thermo-nuclear radiation... and there are bodies out here, so pardon me if I don't like standing around, all by my lonesome, in this fucking necropolis."
"I seen dead bodies before," Markus said, shrugging, his eyes incurious, as if the oddity were not the drifts of withered corpses but rather Jane's reaction to them.
"You haven't seen bodies like these," Jane said, her eyes skimming back acrpss the dead citizens, scattered like human leaves, and then... and then her eyes went back to the patient black box, sitting on the platform as if it were waiting.
Thank Heavens, this thing is dead.
I never liked this idea, and I don't even know why. Just icky to me.
Having said that, I gotta say, that if you cut it off at 'Pandora... that bitch' and smooth out a few of the 'foreshadowing' things that didn't come to pass, then this would stand as a wicked piece of flash.
As ever, I think I could sell it!
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