Last year I attended a Creative writing class, and it got me back into writing. I decided to write a set of stories based on one I was writing as a kid, but I modernized it, changing the characters and general feeling around to fit the kind of stories I like nowadays as an adult.
This first one is called "Eternal Legion".
[quote] It smelled like fish. Dead fish. Really old dead fish, specifically. The stench was complimented with the scent of rusted, wet metal, salt water, creaking aged steel, and the sounds of heavy waves striking the hull and of a thousand flies buzzing about the cargo hold of the good ship Alexandra. My eyes blinked the last remaining sleep from my eyes as my senses were accosted by the overload of smells and sounds, not to mention the eternal swaying of the barely sea-worthy vessel separating me from miles of dark water below and around it. I will never get used to those sensations, not in all the four years I'd been trapped in this dark, dank floating hole.
I pulled my body up from the cold metal floor, bits of sea slime dripping off as I tried to rub the stinging sensation of salt in the air out of my eyes. I didn't have a mirror in this poor excuse for a room, and didn't need one to tell that my eyes were bloodshot as hell. My heart was hammering so hard in my head it was probably leaving an impression on the underside of my brain.
As my blurred vision adjusted, a dark cell came into view. Bits of white paint defiantley clinging to cold bars on one side, with walls covered in more rust then paint. I was entirely enveloped in unfeeling, heartless fabricated metal.
The pain from my ankle runs up my leg, jump-starting my brain. I look down. The cuff was probably as old as the ship and just as beat up. Despite everything it was still more then enough to keep me from escaping this place. The chain clinked, echoing in the tiny room as I shifted my body up.
Saying my legs felt weak was an understatement. The damn things shook like some newborn animal as I struggled to get myself upright. My cold, damp hands, covered in dark stains from the filth around me came up to the unkempt bush of a beard I'd grown and scratched. I could only hope that the rats hadn't been gnawing on it.
The sound of groaning steel called my attention to outside my cell. The short hallway was in much the same state as the cell, with a flight of mesh stairs leading up and out to the right. Everything was lit by a single flickering, dim light with a bulb that hadn't been replaced in months. The red light was met by the first daylight I'd seen in days as a latched door at the top of the stairs opened. I could hear the armed guards on the floor above shifting their automatic weapons and greeting someone as I blinked from the sudden change of lighting.
The door closed as someone stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs, followed by a loud thud that shook the walls. The metal latch slid into place as I heard the person who entered descend. The person's footsteps were different from the boots of the soldiers outside. What were those, heels? I could only hope so, last time I saw a woman was probably a year ago. I think she'd been one of the folks in charge of the place.
As the woman came down to the last steps I could finally see her. Tall, slender. Blonde. Thin metal rimmed glasses. Hair tied tightly back into a long flowing ponytail. Mesmerizing, bright eyes. Perfectly triangular jawline. Probably in her late twenties. She was wearing a lightly colored business suit, probably custom tailored as it hugged the curves of her body closely. Her short skirt showed she had legs for days shrouded in tight hose. A scent I hadn't smelled in years graced my nostrils. Perfume. Her whole getup was probably expensive as hell. In one hand she carried a briefcase. Clean, polished steel, with some kind of high-tech lock in it with a thumbprint scanner on it.
"Mr. Takarada." she said, her accent unmistakably Australian, words drawn out and bemused as she stepped closer to the bars, a smile creeping across her face and her free hand firmly on her hip. "You're a hard man to find."
It took me a moment to clear the salt from my throat; last time I'd spoken was almost a month ago to yell at a guard for throwing my food through the bars instead of passing it through normally.
"I...uh...I don't know who's been telling you that, but that's not my name. My name is..."
"Sam O'Riley, that's the name you've been telling everyone, yes," the woman tilted her head as she lightly chuckled, "but your real identity is Ryuji Takarada, isn't it?"
That gave me reason to pause. She knew my real name. The woman pulled a smartphone from inside her suit pocket, tapped the screen a few times, and began reading something on it.
"Let's see. You're Half-Japanese, Half Brit, was born in London to a military family. Your Brit half must be where you got those nice blue eyes of yours, eh? Your brother Ivan was born shortly after you while you spent the latter half of your childhood in a small flat on the East End. Your family relocated to Hawaii during most of your teen years, which I imagine is where you got your tan from. You returned to Britain at age 19 and enlisted in the military, with your brother as tech support. Served a tour in the Middle East. Your C.O. said you were a model soldier, fought well and even saved some of your buddies in the middle of a rather nasty firefight in Kabul."
It was starting to come back to me. Everything that had led up to now. Everything except the reason why I was at the bottom of this ship, which I knew she was going to read next.
"...And then came the incident in the Mediterranean. Your team was attempting to recover an experimental new weapon codenamed 'Darwin-Lance' that had been stolen and was on a ship floating halfway between Egypt and Greece. I believe what happened next made international headlines; the organization that had stolen the weapon, the 'Black Rose Society' was what they called themselves, correct? They detonated the weapon."
Oh, boy. Here it comes.
"Ah, and here comes the fun part. You somehow managed to survive the blast. They found you clinging to a life preserver floating off the coast of Tabarka. They brought you home and during yoru debriefing, you made the claim that you had seen...something out there. Whatever it was, it was apparently reason enough to have you placed under military arrest. But you...you're a slippery one. You managed to escape, and were on the run for about a month before they found you in Santorini holed up in the back of a hookah den, under the name Sam O'Riley."
"Well," I responded at last, "you've certainly done your homework. Yeah, they found me and brought me to this...floating hellhole. I know what this place is, though. It passes itself off as a fishing vessel, but its real purpose is as a floating gulag for Interpol. It's a prison that doesn’t officially exist; Somewhere they send people that folks in charge of running the world need shut up for reasons of international safety."
"Mr. Takarada, what you saw out there spooked someone in the higher-ups. Way high up. The thing you described, well, that's what I'm most interested in, because no matter how deep my people have dug, that part is missing from the reports. It's all redacted. My people have got some epic resources behind us and even we can't find out what it is."
"That's why you're here, then. You want to know about that thing I saw."
The woman put away her phone and leaned in closer, placing her hand on the bars separating me from her. Her face was even more gorgeous up close.
"Mr. Takarada," she spoke, drawing out her words again with a smile that could charm the scales off a snake, "I would be greatly pleased if you would tell me exactly what it is you saw. I can make it worth your while."
She spoke quieter now, in a hushed, warm tone that tickled and teased at parts of me I'd convinced myself would never get used properly again. I stopped myself for a moment and thought about what was going on. This beautiful stranger suddenly shows up out of nowhere and tells me my life story like it was a memorized portion of a textbook. She obviously knew things that I didn't know about; like the real reason of how I'd ended up here. Was this real? Was she offering me a way out for information? Maybe she'd just take what I'd have to tell her and just leave me here to rot. In the end, though, what else could these people do to me that they hadn't done already? It might be worth it to say it one more time. What was the worst that could happen?
"Okay...uh...after the bomb went off...the ocean was churning like...like boiling water. The sky was clear and yet the waves were enormous. And uh...then I saw this...thing come out of the water."
Her eyes lit up. Her expression suddenly became serious and attentive, as if mesmerized by my words.
"Go on, Mr. Takarada. What came out of the water?"
"A tower. Some kind of building just...rose out of the ocean. It was made of some kind of...greenish-blue metal, almost crystal-like. After that...I blacked out."
The woman looked downward, deeply inhaling. Her eyes began darting around. Wheels in her head were turning furiously, I could tell.
"You know what that thing was...don't you?" I asked.
She looked up. Her breathtaking smile returned, only this time it was devious, like a kid who'd learned some kind of naughty secret. I began worrying if I'd done the right thing by telling her.
"Oh, Mr. Takarada...I do believe you've told me exactly what I needed to hear."
She turned and moved away from the bars. She fetched her phone from her suit pocket again and began dialing a number. For a moment a tinge of fear crossed my mind, perhaps she was simply going to take what I'd told her and leave me behind in this cell. The woman walked over to the far corner of the hall, her heels clicking on the steel floor.
"Hey," I said, reaching for her, "uh...where are you...?"
"Is the line secure?" The woman spoke into her phone. She paused for a moment, listening to someone on the other side of the line. "Good. You were right; he's seen it. The description he gave me matches. He's been chosen. We're ready to begin."
Ending the call and placing her smartphone back into her inner suit pocket, the beautiful stranger turned and walked back towards my cell bars.
"Soooo," I said, stretching. "Any chance you can tell me what's going on?"
The woman winked at me and looked down to check her watch.
"Do yourself a favor, Mr. Takarada," she said, placing her briefcase down, "you might want to keep low to the floor."
"Why's that?"
The sound of movement on the deck above my cell distracted me. I could hear hurried footsteps moving around, one of the guards yelling.
"Because, Mr, Takarada," said the woman, pressing her thumb against the fingerprint scanner on her briefcase, "We wouldn't want you getting shot. Not when we're so close to the greatest find in human history."
"I'm sorry, what now?"
More commotion from above. More yelling. Automatic weapons being loaded and primed. The woman in front of me opened her metal briefcase and picked up something from inside. My heart started pounding when I saw it was the parts of a MP7 sub-machine gun.
"Okay," I yelled, gripping at the bars of my cell, "I deserve an explanation, what the hell is going on?"
"What's going on in an extraction, hot stuff," she said in hushed, excited tone, assembling the parts of her weapon together, "because as of this moment, you are the most important person on the whole damn planet, and we can't have you here in the hands of the enemy. Here, start cutting yourself free."
She then pulled a pair of bolt cutters from the case and passed it through the bars. Holy crap, this was really happening. I grabbed the bolt cutter and began working it on the chain attached to the cuff on my foot.
"The enemy?" I said, snapping the tool shut, cutting half of a link in the rusty old chain apart, "They're Interpol, how could they be..."
I was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of gunfire. The guards above deck were in a firefight with someone outside.
"Your brother, Ivan...he saw this coming, you know," said the woman as she began loading her gun.
"Ivan? He's...he's a conspiracy buff. He thinks everything is some elaborate plot. You're not seriously telling me..."
"Ivan was right, Mr. Takarada. The lost city is rising, and the pompous asses running the world are shitting on their thrones at the thought. The true origins of humanity lie directly below where we are right now."
"This isn't happening. There's no way that-"
BAM. The hull of the Alexandra shook violently as the ancient ship lurched to the side, knocking me off my feet. I landed face down on the floor as sea water began seeping in from the wall behind me.
"Sorry, Mr. Takarada," said the woman as she grabbed a crowbar from the corner and ran up the stairwell, "you might want to stay on the floor. Things are about to get dicey."
I crawled to the bars and looked up to see the stranger forcing the crowbar into the door, keeping it shut. She ran down with surprising speed for someone in heels, extended her MP7's stock, held it against her hip, and aimed it at the door, just as the sound of fists pounding the door began ringing out.
"Miss Lasade!" I heard a guard yelling, muffled through the steel door, " We need to evacuate now!"
The back wall of my cell was beginning to buckle noticeably outward. The sound of something giant and metallic grinding against it was making everything shake horrendously. The rusted weathered steel groaned like some unfathomable dying beast out of The Book of Revelations. The whole time the strange woman's eyes never left the door, her finger firmly placed on the trigger. The whole time the gunfight above was growing more frantic, I could hear the shells and spent cartridges of the soldier's guns falling and a whole lot more orders being called out.
Suddenly the entire back wall of my cell was ripped out like an old bandage, allowing me my first look at sunlight in a very long time. As the light poured in, my eyes were blinded. I covered them with my hands as the fresh salty sea spray hit me. As I lowered my arms and my eyes began to adjust, I could see outside the gaping hole that had once been the cell wall. The sky was bright and cloudless, crowned with the warm, welcome sight of the bright burning sun above. Small, quadcopter military drones were hovering next to the ship, trading fire with the crew above deck.
Below that, in the sea right next to the Alexandra, was an old Los Angeles-class Nuclear submarine. The hull was a dark navy blue and bore no markings to indicate what country it belonged to, save for an white infinity sign on the conning tower. Rapidly sinking next to it was the piece of the Alexandra's hull that had been ripped out by some kind of grappling cables coming out of ports on the side of the sub. Whatever organization this woman was working for had some serious toys to work with.
"Mr. Takarada!" The woman who I now knew as Lasade yelled over the sound of the roaring ocean. "Are you free yet?"
Dammit, I'd been so distracted that I'd forgot to finish cutting the chain.
"Working on it!" I yelled back as I went to work on the other half of the severed link.
Behind me I heard a clanging sound. The crowbar had fallen out.
"Work faster, Takarada, I'll hold 'em off!"
I pulled the bolt cutters shut over the metal link and it finally fell apart. A moment of relief that I could finally move around without that thing on me lingered briefly in my mind before another wave crashed into the side of the ship, spraying me with frothy, salty water.
"Now what?!" I yelled.
"Now, jump!"
"What?!"
"Jump! The others will be waiting for you underwater, just jump!"
The metal door at the top of the steps finally gave way, and the stranger open fired with a heavy DUDUDUDUDU. The soldiers at the top wildly dodged her hail of bullets.
"What about you?!" I screamed.
Lasade turned and sprayed the lock of the cell with lead, it fell apart, clattering to the floor.
"I'll follow you! Just go!" She turned and resumed her cover fire through the doorway.
I stood at the edge of what had once been a wall, barely able to stand from the swaying of the ship. The deep blue churned 9 meters below, waiting for me with open arms.
"What are you waiting for?!" Yelled Lasade over the sound of gunfire. "The Annunaki aren't gonna discover themselves, you know!"
It was time. I took in one big gulp of fresh sea air, and dove to freedom.
[/quote]
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/210147/1d923ebf-a331-49a7-913c-a27bd84d1e15/index.jpg
But have you considered pastebin for formatting reasons
I actually don't know how to use pastebin, would you mind showing me how?
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