Bry's Arte
Feb 4, 2013 18:24:55 GMT -6
Post by Bry on Feb 4, 2013 18:24:55 GMT -6
Sooooooooooo. I didn't have an art thread to my name. I made one. Tadaaaaah! =D
Here is a story I wrote for school, that Zinny demanded to read. XD Please note that I didn't bother going over spelling yet, so. Just ignore the mistakes, if you would.
Otherwise, I would really adore some extremely honest critiques! I don't offend easily, so please. Don't sugarcoat if you find any weaknesses. C:
Also, if anyone has any name ideas.... Cause I don't. XD
Teh Story
The world is in disrepair.
We've killed nature, and what's left of nature is now killing us. Mutant animals run rampant, caught somewhere between evolution and sorcery-- Because how else can I describe what we've done to the planet? We've cursed it. Rivers are nearly nonexistent, and the ocean smells like tar. The trees are baren, flowers are but myth, and the farms have long since succumbed to uselessness. Our buildings crumbled along with the greatness that was once mother nature, and in the midst of it all, a survivor was born.
A virus. A deadly horrible virus.
It affects the nervous system first, eliminating all rhyme and reason from the brain along with any personality, twisting the host to it's will. Then it affects the muscles, bones, and organs, both strengthening and enlargening them until the host is a mindless machine of sorts. A cure has yet to be found and I'm not exactly hopeful; this virus has been around longer than I have, and I'll turn seventeen in a week.
Rest assured, though, the government came up with the solution.
Or so it likes to think.
The idea of these happy little communities (Called 'compounds' encouragingly enough) was a tough one for the good people of America the Zombified to accept and rightfully so. Recall where else in history people have been forced to live within a caged community. Now tell me how many times it's worked?
Precisely.
But humanity didn't really have a choice. It was either succumb to a lack of freedom, or succumb to a lack of life. The choice was obvious for most people, though there were the few that chose to remain behind and brave the new world. And so we moved, every one of us that still had a will to live (Please note that I use 'we' loosely. I was hardly a twinkle at the time this all happened. It was probably twenty years ago, back in 2289). We moved into these covered compounds, away from the mutant creatures, away from the virus-infected stragglers (Dubbed 'zombies,' because we're nothing if not a creative race), away from the sun and the now-noxious air and the messed up world itself.
I don't really know who's idea it was to fight fire with fire, but whoever it was should be slapped with a mallet. Some brilliant scientist (One among so many these days) came up with the idea to fight these monster creatures, these 'zombies,' with monster creatures. Fight figurative machine with literal machine. And so the experiments began.
Laws were written and bills were formed, and they all went to supporting and defending the scientists struggling to negate the Zombie Virus. They labored tirelessly over what the cure might be, and in the meantime they built mercenary soldiers to protect us. It was supposed to be humane and painless (Hence the laws that were written and the bills that were formed) but they fell away from being humane in epic fashion. Most of their soldiers now obey without question, having no idea of anything aside from the job assigned to them, which is to kill and kill well, but there are a few of us who still fight back against injustice. Wherever that injustice may be derived from.
.... Yup, I said 'us.'
My own parents happen to be two of the most elite scientists in our compound. They're hailed as heroes because they've managed to graft a fully-working robotic arm onto a living subject without defect. This robotic addition lends exaggerated strength to its host, like any robot, and a multitude of gadgets. It's cold and heavy and inhuman, but it gets the job done when set against the attacking zombies.
I should know. The arm is mine.
It's the reason I was conceived in the first place.
Sneaking across the compound provides me with no problems. I've always been stealthy (It was a huge part of my training) and now is no different. I sprint silently across the courtyard, which is the only part of the compound that even remotely resembles the great outdoors, and pay a glance upwards at the fortified glass dome that serves as our sky, making a face as I run. It's not that I'm not solidly grateful for the protection it affords us, keeping out the mutants and the virus alike. I am. But that glass has fogged over in the twenty years it's been up there, and now the only light comes from not stars or the moon but spotlights set up to emulate their heavenly models.
Just once, I'd like to see the stars. I've heard they're beautiful.
I make it to Hawlie's building in less than five minutes, taking care to make my way in at the ground floor with my hand pressed against the security plate. Hawlie lives in the main dormitory, where they keep the soldiers and subjects who don't have a 'proper home' like I do with my parents. I've been here so many times, the layout is pretty much ingrained in my memory. I could run it in the dark.
Which is exactly what I do after clipping the wires in the main breaker box in the basement. We should have at least thirty minutes of pure darkness; I take off running for the stairs.
Two days ago, I found Hawlie's name on the list of upcoming experiments, even though I'd erased it like nine times already. In the past, she's had multiple mechanical additions, like me and my arm, but hers went deeper than just physical power. Hawlie's left eye was replaced completely with a robotic replica, giving her a mass of new abilities. And because of it's proximity to her brain, she was an obvious choice for the newest tech. The scientists developed a new microchip, that, when activated, gives them control over the disobediant part of the personality that I'd lately been exhibiting. Hawlie would essentially be a braindead puppet.
And curse it all if I'm gonna let that happen. Not with everything else I've let happen.
After flying up two flights of steps, counting my footsteps as I go to avoid tripping in the dark, I arrive on Hawlie's floor. Two steps into the hallway, I hear a guard pounding the floor up ahead of me and I dive to the side, feeling for a doorway to disappear into as he passes me. My destination is halfway down the hall, which takes me no time to get to, but then I'm waiting, twitching anxiously, for Hawlie to open the door and join me.
She didn't always live in this dorm, instead used to live on the streets of the compound, scavaging from the rest of us and hiding in the shadows under the bridge. That's where I met her, ten years ago when I was a scared six year old with a funny-looking new gadget on my arm. She calmed me, even with her rough nature and raspy six-year-old voice, and she ended up saving my life, breaking me out of my blindly obediant ways. She hadn't been raised by her parents to think like the rest of us, simply because she hadn't been raised by her parents. That made her special, and different. That is the reason that even now, I cannot bring myself to abandon her to her fate.
I knock softly on her door, but it opens before my knuckles make contact, and I almost tap her in the face. She grins at me, and though I can't see much in the dark, I can see her brilliant smile.
"Let's go," she whispers in a rush, closing her door with a soft thump and grabbing my hand to tow me away down the hall. Abandoning stealth in my surprise, I trip after her.
Hawlie takes the lead for two reasons. The biggest one is that her artificial eye can see in the dark ten times better than my human ones, and can pick up on heat trails; she'll know long before I will when a guard is up ahead. The other reason, that I deny whole-heartedly, is this: though we've both got egos that could rule the world, Hawlie's smarter, plain and simple. And she's got major leadership skills.
And I trip when I get nervous.
"You know you'll get us caught if you don't stop stepping on your own feet," Hawlie hisses from up ahead and I scowl in the darkness. She's got a habit of pointing out the obvious, which is only ever irritating when she's right.
"You'll get us caught if you don't stop hounding me," I snap back, and though she doesn't say anything else, I can hear her snicker to herself.
We make it the rest of the way down the hall and descend the stairs with no problems; as I was hoping, most of the guards have left us alone to go running for the power outage. I do the mental math in my head. It's been perhaps five minutes since I knocked out the lights. They've found it by now, for sure, but to reattach the wires again, and in the dark.... I'm still hoping for at least twenty-five minutes more.
As we run, I go through the layout in my head. The entire compound is built much like an anthill. That is to say, made up of many rooms, many tunnels, and not much else. The courtyard resides in the middle of it, and is the only place that allows for an 'outdoor experience,' otherwise absolutely everything else is indoors and surrounded by a thick wall. The inner hallways wind around in every direction, most rooms look the same, save for what purposes they serve, and the entire place could aptly be called a maze. The only thing keeping us on track at all is the fact that my parents have maps, and I have a photographic memory.
"Turn right," I tell Hawlie, and she obeys with protest, proving that we make a great team. Further on we run, at times ducking into doorways, at times turning into unused hallways, all in the name of hiding from the guards. We make it out of the dormitory building in no time, and then it's into the labs, which is the hardest part if only for the memories haunting the hallways. Neither of us say much of anything, except my quiet directions, but that's not to say it's a soundless journey. Some of the rooms still have residents, and the muffled but obviously pained moaning and mumbling is enough to give me chills as we slip past.
It's hard, leaving them behind, but I can't be the hero here. I can't save them without sacrificing Hawlie, and that's something I'm unwilling to do. So instead, I grit my teeth, duck my head, and breath a sigh of relief as we exit the labratory hallways.
The wall lies before us.
Though called The Wall by pretty much everyone in the compound, truly it is more of a ring of rooms, heavily fortified, that house many of the weapons used against the zombies. It's easily got the highest security in the entire compound, as well as the most cameras and guards.
Which also makes it the most fun to get through.
And then the lights flicker on. Tracks of lights like luminescent snakes run along the floor up close to the wall. This means the guards will be on our trail within minutes; I blink at Hawlie in shock.
"Well done," she says dryly.
"You know what?" I grumble, my shock wearing off just as quickly as it came. I step forward a little more hurriedly now. "I had literally hours to plan this vacation. Pardon me if my prediction was a little off."
Pressing my hand against the security plate beside the door, I jump a little as it pricks me. Taking a blood sample? A DNA sample? Either way, that's new, and it's a little unnerving when my name comes up on the screen, especially considering I've never once been this close to The Wall before.
"Let's step up the speed," I mumble, as the door slides open, permitting entry. Footsteps begin sounding down one of the halls we've already been through, and both Hawlie and I snap our heads around to look. The sound is far off, but not by much. She looks at me, a flicker of 'What happens if we're caught?' in her pretty blue eye. Quick frankly, I can't answer her.
I've never been caught.
"I say again," I repeat, this time grabbing her hand myself and dragging her along behind me. "Let's hurry up."
We race as well as we can through the rooms in the wall; I've nothing to go on anymore except the maps in my head, and I find they are surprisingly undetailed compared to what I'm seeing now. Two wrongs turns, one close call, and two stolen machetes later, and Hawlie and I come upon what can only be the door to the outside world.
It's the biggest freaking door I've ever seen.
We both take a single moment to acknowledge what we're about to do. The air in the outside world is said to be polluted, reducing life spans by ten percent. The air aside, rabid and mutant animals inhabhit this future world, and the virus lurks around every corner. We've got nothing but a couple of knives and my cyberarm for defense.
But one look at Hawlie's face, and my mind's made up. Ten percent less life is still better than a life without Hawlie, is still better than losing freedom of the mind. Stepping forward, Hawlie's hand still locked in one of mine, I press my free hand to the plate beside the door.
And then we step outside.
Here is a story I wrote for school, that Zinny demanded to read. XD Please note that I didn't bother going over spelling yet, so. Just ignore the mistakes, if you would.
Otherwise, I would really adore some extremely honest critiques! I don't offend easily, so please. Don't sugarcoat if you find any weaknesses. C:
Also, if anyone has any name ideas.... Cause I don't. XD
Teh Story
The world is in disrepair.
We've killed nature, and what's left of nature is now killing us. Mutant animals run rampant, caught somewhere between evolution and sorcery-- Because how else can I describe what we've done to the planet? We've cursed it. Rivers are nearly nonexistent, and the ocean smells like tar. The trees are baren, flowers are but myth, and the farms have long since succumbed to uselessness. Our buildings crumbled along with the greatness that was once mother nature, and in the midst of it all, a survivor was born.
A virus. A deadly horrible virus.
It affects the nervous system first, eliminating all rhyme and reason from the brain along with any personality, twisting the host to it's will. Then it affects the muscles, bones, and organs, both strengthening and enlargening them until the host is a mindless machine of sorts. A cure has yet to be found and I'm not exactly hopeful; this virus has been around longer than I have, and I'll turn seventeen in a week.
Rest assured, though, the government came up with the solution.
Or so it likes to think.
The idea of these happy little communities (Called 'compounds' encouragingly enough) was a tough one for the good people of America the Zombified to accept and rightfully so. Recall where else in history people have been forced to live within a caged community. Now tell me how many times it's worked?
Precisely.
But humanity didn't really have a choice. It was either succumb to a lack of freedom, or succumb to a lack of life. The choice was obvious for most people, though there were the few that chose to remain behind and brave the new world. And so we moved, every one of us that still had a will to live (Please note that I use 'we' loosely. I was hardly a twinkle at the time this all happened. It was probably twenty years ago, back in 2289). We moved into these covered compounds, away from the mutant creatures, away from the virus-infected stragglers (Dubbed 'zombies,' because we're nothing if not a creative race), away from the sun and the now-noxious air and the messed up world itself.
I don't really know who's idea it was to fight fire with fire, but whoever it was should be slapped with a mallet. Some brilliant scientist (One among so many these days) came up with the idea to fight these monster creatures, these 'zombies,' with monster creatures. Fight figurative machine with literal machine. And so the experiments began.
Laws were written and bills were formed, and they all went to supporting and defending the scientists struggling to negate the Zombie Virus. They labored tirelessly over what the cure might be, and in the meantime they built mercenary soldiers to protect us. It was supposed to be humane and painless (Hence the laws that were written and the bills that were formed) but they fell away from being humane in epic fashion. Most of their soldiers now obey without question, having no idea of anything aside from the job assigned to them, which is to kill and kill well, but there are a few of us who still fight back against injustice. Wherever that injustice may be derived from.
.... Yup, I said 'us.'
My own parents happen to be two of the most elite scientists in our compound. They're hailed as heroes because they've managed to graft a fully-working robotic arm onto a living subject without defect. This robotic addition lends exaggerated strength to its host, like any robot, and a multitude of gadgets. It's cold and heavy and inhuman, but it gets the job done when set against the attacking zombies.
I should know. The arm is mine.
It's the reason I was conceived in the first place.
Sneaking across the compound provides me with no problems. I've always been stealthy (It was a huge part of my training) and now is no different. I sprint silently across the courtyard, which is the only part of the compound that even remotely resembles the great outdoors, and pay a glance upwards at the fortified glass dome that serves as our sky, making a face as I run. It's not that I'm not solidly grateful for the protection it affords us, keeping out the mutants and the virus alike. I am. But that glass has fogged over in the twenty years it's been up there, and now the only light comes from not stars or the moon but spotlights set up to emulate their heavenly models.
Just once, I'd like to see the stars. I've heard they're beautiful.
I make it to Hawlie's building in less than five minutes, taking care to make my way in at the ground floor with my hand pressed against the security plate. Hawlie lives in the main dormitory, where they keep the soldiers and subjects who don't have a 'proper home' like I do with my parents. I've been here so many times, the layout is pretty much ingrained in my memory. I could run it in the dark.
Which is exactly what I do after clipping the wires in the main breaker box in the basement. We should have at least thirty minutes of pure darkness; I take off running for the stairs.
Two days ago, I found Hawlie's name on the list of upcoming experiments, even though I'd erased it like nine times already. In the past, she's had multiple mechanical additions, like me and my arm, but hers went deeper than just physical power. Hawlie's left eye was replaced completely with a robotic replica, giving her a mass of new abilities. And because of it's proximity to her brain, she was an obvious choice for the newest tech. The scientists developed a new microchip, that, when activated, gives them control over the disobediant part of the personality that I'd lately been exhibiting. Hawlie would essentially be a braindead puppet.
And curse it all if I'm gonna let that happen. Not with everything else I've let happen.
After flying up two flights of steps, counting my footsteps as I go to avoid tripping in the dark, I arrive on Hawlie's floor. Two steps into the hallway, I hear a guard pounding the floor up ahead of me and I dive to the side, feeling for a doorway to disappear into as he passes me. My destination is halfway down the hall, which takes me no time to get to, but then I'm waiting, twitching anxiously, for Hawlie to open the door and join me.
She didn't always live in this dorm, instead used to live on the streets of the compound, scavaging from the rest of us and hiding in the shadows under the bridge. That's where I met her, ten years ago when I was a scared six year old with a funny-looking new gadget on my arm. She calmed me, even with her rough nature and raspy six-year-old voice, and she ended up saving my life, breaking me out of my blindly obediant ways. She hadn't been raised by her parents to think like the rest of us, simply because she hadn't been raised by her parents. That made her special, and different. That is the reason that even now, I cannot bring myself to abandon her to her fate.
I knock softly on her door, but it opens before my knuckles make contact, and I almost tap her in the face. She grins at me, and though I can't see much in the dark, I can see her brilliant smile.
"Let's go," she whispers in a rush, closing her door with a soft thump and grabbing my hand to tow me away down the hall. Abandoning stealth in my surprise, I trip after her.
Hawlie takes the lead for two reasons. The biggest one is that her artificial eye can see in the dark ten times better than my human ones, and can pick up on heat trails; she'll know long before I will when a guard is up ahead. The other reason, that I deny whole-heartedly, is this: though we've both got egos that could rule the world, Hawlie's smarter, plain and simple. And she's got major leadership skills.
And I trip when I get nervous.
"You know you'll get us caught if you don't stop stepping on your own feet," Hawlie hisses from up ahead and I scowl in the darkness. She's got a habit of pointing out the obvious, which is only ever irritating when she's right.
"You'll get us caught if you don't stop hounding me," I snap back, and though she doesn't say anything else, I can hear her snicker to herself.
We make it the rest of the way down the hall and descend the stairs with no problems; as I was hoping, most of the guards have left us alone to go running for the power outage. I do the mental math in my head. It's been perhaps five minutes since I knocked out the lights. They've found it by now, for sure, but to reattach the wires again, and in the dark.... I'm still hoping for at least twenty-five minutes more.
As we run, I go through the layout in my head. The entire compound is built much like an anthill. That is to say, made up of many rooms, many tunnels, and not much else. The courtyard resides in the middle of it, and is the only place that allows for an 'outdoor experience,' otherwise absolutely everything else is indoors and surrounded by a thick wall. The inner hallways wind around in every direction, most rooms look the same, save for what purposes they serve, and the entire place could aptly be called a maze. The only thing keeping us on track at all is the fact that my parents have maps, and I have a photographic memory.
"Turn right," I tell Hawlie, and she obeys with protest, proving that we make a great team. Further on we run, at times ducking into doorways, at times turning into unused hallways, all in the name of hiding from the guards. We make it out of the dormitory building in no time, and then it's into the labs, which is the hardest part if only for the memories haunting the hallways. Neither of us say much of anything, except my quiet directions, but that's not to say it's a soundless journey. Some of the rooms still have residents, and the muffled but obviously pained moaning and mumbling is enough to give me chills as we slip past.
It's hard, leaving them behind, but I can't be the hero here. I can't save them without sacrificing Hawlie, and that's something I'm unwilling to do. So instead, I grit my teeth, duck my head, and breath a sigh of relief as we exit the labratory hallways.
The wall lies before us.
Though called The Wall by pretty much everyone in the compound, truly it is more of a ring of rooms, heavily fortified, that house many of the weapons used against the zombies. It's easily got the highest security in the entire compound, as well as the most cameras and guards.
Which also makes it the most fun to get through.
And then the lights flicker on. Tracks of lights like luminescent snakes run along the floor up close to the wall. This means the guards will be on our trail within minutes; I blink at Hawlie in shock.
"Well done," she says dryly.
"You know what?" I grumble, my shock wearing off just as quickly as it came. I step forward a little more hurriedly now. "I had literally hours to plan this vacation. Pardon me if my prediction was a little off."
Pressing my hand against the security plate beside the door, I jump a little as it pricks me. Taking a blood sample? A DNA sample? Either way, that's new, and it's a little unnerving when my name comes up on the screen, especially considering I've never once been this close to The Wall before.
"Let's step up the speed," I mumble, as the door slides open, permitting entry. Footsteps begin sounding down one of the halls we've already been through, and both Hawlie and I snap our heads around to look. The sound is far off, but not by much. She looks at me, a flicker of 'What happens if we're caught?' in her pretty blue eye. Quick frankly, I can't answer her.
I've never been caught.
"I say again," I repeat, this time grabbing her hand myself and dragging her along behind me. "Let's hurry up."
We race as well as we can through the rooms in the wall; I've nothing to go on anymore except the maps in my head, and I find they are surprisingly undetailed compared to what I'm seeing now. Two wrongs turns, one close call, and two stolen machetes later, and Hawlie and I come upon what can only be the door to the outside world.
It's the biggest freaking door I've ever seen.
We both take a single moment to acknowledge what we're about to do. The air in the outside world is said to be polluted, reducing life spans by ten percent. The air aside, rabid and mutant animals inhabhit this future world, and the virus lurks around every corner. We've got nothing but a couple of knives and my cyberarm for defense.
But one look at Hawlie's face, and my mind's made up. Ten percent less life is still better than a life without Hawlie, is still better than losing freedom of the mind. Stepping forward, Hawlie's hand still locked in one of mine, I press my free hand to the plate beside the door.
And then we step outside.