Wednesday November 1st, 2017

The exercise:

Welcome to November, the 2017 edition.

Trying something new today which I hope shall become a reoccurring feature: the scenario prompt. Essentially I will be giving you a starting scenario to work with and then each of you can take it where your inspiration leads you to go.

So here's today's scenario:

On the evening of October 31st, 2017, Arthur Dylan Diaz fell asleep in his bed, tucked snugly beneath warm, familiar blankets. On the morning of November 1st, 2017, he woke up somewhere else entirely.

2 comments:

Greg said...

Don't you need a hyphen if you write re-occurring instead of recurring? Or is that another English/Canadian subtle difference? Though it did at least clue me into where you'd put the steganography, and you're getting devious: it took nearly three hours to crack the code! All I'm going to say there is I think it would be a bad idea to use that much water, and I definitely wouldn't do it on a Friday.
The scenario idea is intriguing, so let's see where it takes us... :)

Scenario 1
Arthur stirred sleepily, his brain slowly noticing that something was wrong. The sheets seemed too heavy... and scratchy... and they were breathing. As that sank in his eyes flicked open and he tried to move, and got exactly nowhere. Lying on top of him as though it were the most natural thing in the world was a dog, and as his panicked brain looked around and assimilated what he was seeing, he realised that there were three of them and it was actually quite hard to breathe.
The dog closest to his head leaned in and licked him, a rough, warm tongue starting at his chin and finishing above his eyes. He spluttered.
"Fylbraest, you can get off him now." The voice speaking sounded amused. The dog looked at him with intelligent brown eyes for a moment, and then stood up and walked off him. The other dogs followed suit and Arthur oofed as the transfer of their weight to their paws, and so to much smallers areas of his body, knocked the air out of him. Finally he managed to stand up.
"Where am I?" he said, looking around. The walls were made of huge stone slabs mortared together and were bare of furnishing or decoration. There was a huge fireplace that he thought he could stand up inside at the end of the room, and the ceiling was way out of reach. The floor was covered with sawdust, he thought: it was yellow and soft and seemed to be sticking to him. As he brushed it off his calves he realised he was naked.
"Where's my jimjams?" he said.
The owner of the voice who'd told the dogs to get off him looked over at him and his hands moved for modesty. The owner -- they looked like they'd been starving for years and it was impossible for Arthur to tell if they were male or female -- smiled. Skin as thin as paper stretched over well-defined bones, eyes sank deeper into what was more a skull than a head, and a full set of yellowing teeth were revealed by pale lips.
"You're here," they said. "I call it home, but you're a guest so I don't think it would be quite right for you to call it that. I don't know what jimjams are."
"I was wearing clothes when I went to bed," said Arthur. "I remember it! I always wear them. And... where's my bed? Where am I?"
"Who let's you wear clothes?"
"What?" Arthur looked around the room for anything, maybe a towel or a t-shirt, that he could use to feel less naked. "No-one let's me wear clothes. I just do."
"Naughty," said the owner of the voice. "I can see you've not been well trained at all."
"Well-trained?"
"Well, you can talk I suppose," said the owner of the voice. "And you've learned some tricks. But getting into the clothes and wearing them... that's not what food does now, is it?"
The cold chill that ran down Arthur's back had nothing to do with his nakedness.

Marc said...

Greg - eh, I'm not great with hyphens, generally speaking. So it's probably just me making a mistake.

Well that's certainly an unfortunate location to wake up in. Great descriptions and atmosphere really bring all the awkwardness and unpleasantness to life.