Hmm, prison. Is that what you're thinking of for the boys instead of school after only their first week? o_O
The prison The nearest land was only five hundred metres away. They all said it with a twisted smile on their lips, shaking their heads slightly as they turned and walked away. The nearest land, only five hundred metres. As though that somehow made escape a possibility.
The nearest land was indeed five hundred metres away, straight down and below a nearly equal depth of water. The prison ship Coulibert was sat only a little way from the Pacific pole of inaccessibility and would remain there indefinitely, or at least until all the prisoners on it were dead. The crew that had sailed the ship here had been taken away by another ship that had shadowed them the whole way, after destroying the navigation equipment and sabotaging the engines. They didn't seem to be broken exactly, but nothing the prisoners had tried so far had managed to get even a spark of life out of them. And, according to Sidharthey at least, there wasn't enough fuel on board to get very far even if they could turn them on.
Kraulik liked sitting on the sun-deck. After four months abandoned here the tinned food was monotonous, the desalinated water was brackish but tolerable, and the other prisoners had finished murdering each other and had settled into six or seven tribes that each controlled an area of the ship. The sun-deck was disputed territory, but also a kind of demilitarised zone, and short of the bridge the best place to see that no-one, absolutely no-one was coming for them, whether for rescue or to see if they'd died yet. Kraulik sat on a sun-lounger, one with fewer blood-stains than most of the others -- they'd had their own version of the Night of the Long Knives three times and the sun-loungers had been the staging ground twice -- and stared at the horizon. After a few minutes the thin line between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea became hard to see, and it felt a little like he was floating away into emptiness. He couldn't decide if he liked it, so he kept doing it and seeing what happened. He harboured a deep fantasy that one day, if he could only get it right, he actually would float away and could finally leave this god-forsaken place. As that thought crossed his mind, he shivered, and, his mind now alert again, looked around more carefully. He thought, though he had no easy way to check, that he was the only one who knew a certain fact about this area, and that knowledge answered a question that the other prisoners had all asked in a way that made unpleasant sense. The ship wasn't quite at the Pole of Inaccessibility, but a short distance away, and in fact much closer to a point that was predicted as a point of incursion for Elder Gods by Lovecraft.
He hummed to himself, trying not to think these thoughts, but they were strongly intrusive. Why, the prisoners all asked, would they be put here and given food and water and then abandoned? Why not just push them all overboard an hour out to sea? Why leave them food for a year? Why provide water purification and desalination? All became easy to answer if you thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this was the tasty-looking bait in a mousetrap rather than a bizarre and unusual prison.
Greg - no, no, no... that's what the school is thinking for them.
It's gone okay so far, actually. Still transitioning but getting there.
This is a fascinating setting. I would be pleased to read more about it... for however longer it may or may not exist without being consumed by something.
2 comments:
Hmm, prison. Is that what you're thinking of for the boys instead of school after only their first week? o_O
The prison
The nearest land was only five hundred metres away. They all said it with a twisted smile on their lips, shaking their heads slightly as they turned and walked away. The nearest land, only five hundred metres. As though that somehow made escape a possibility.
The nearest land was indeed five hundred metres away, straight down and below a nearly equal depth of water. The prison ship Coulibert was sat only a little way from the Pacific pole of inaccessibility and would remain there indefinitely, or at least until all the prisoners on it were dead. The crew that had sailed the ship here had been taken away by another ship that had shadowed them the whole way, after destroying the navigation equipment and sabotaging the engines. They didn't seem to be broken exactly, but nothing the prisoners had tried so far had managed to get even a spark of life out of them. And, according to Sidharthey at least, there wasn't enough fuel on board to get very far even if they could turn them on.
Kraulik liked sitting on the sun-deck. After four months abandoned here the tinned food was monotonous, the desalinated water was brackish but tolerable, and the other prisoners had finished murdering each other and had settled into six or seven tribes that each controlled an area of the ship. The sun-deck was disputed territory, but also a kind of demilitarised zone, and short of the bridge the best place to see that no-one, absolutely no-one was coming for them, whether for rescue or to see if they'd died yet.
Kraulik sat on a sun-lounger, one with fewer blood-stains than most of the others -- they'd had their own version of the Night of the Long Knives three times and the sun-loungers had been the staging ground twice -- and stared at the horizon. After a few minutes the thin line between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea became hard to see, and it felt a little like he was floating away into emptiness. He couldn't decide if he liked it, so he kept doing it and seeing what happened. He harboured a deep fantasy that one day, if he could only get it right, he actually would float away and could finally leave this god-forsaken place.
As that thought crossed his mind, he shivered, and, his mind now alert again, looked around more carefully. He thought, though he had no easy way to check, that he was the only one who knew a certain fact about this area, and that knowledge answered a question that the other prisoners had all asked in a way that made unpleasant sense. The ship wasn't quite at the Pole of Inaccessibility, but a short distance away, and in fact much closer to a point that was predicted as a point of incursion for Elder Gods by Lovecraft.
He hummed to himself, trying not to think these thoughts, but they were strongly intrusive. Why, the prisoners all asked, would they be put here and given food and water and then abandoned? Why not just push them all overboard an hour out to sea? Why leave them food for a year? Why provide water purification and desalination? All became easy to answer if you thought that perhaps, just perhaps, this was the tasty-looking bait in a mousetrap rather than a bizarre and unusual prison.
Greg - no, no, no... that's what the school is thinking for them.
It's gone okay so far, actually. Still transitioning but getting there.
This is a fascinating setting. I would be pleased to read more about it... for however longer it may or may not exist without being consumed by something.
Post a Comment