A place

If there had ever been a time when this world was beautiful, that memory is lost - but while no heart-wrought poems would ever be composed to the golden sunsets of Peralta or her shimmering mountains or blue seas, she had for a time borne herself with a stately majesty. Her mighty factories and vast arcologies dazzled rather than charmed; what waters still faced open sky were penned in vast cooling lakes that tempered the beating nuclear hearts of a million power plants. Where nature's green was to be found, it was arrayed in ordered rows that marched for leagues. The streets of the cities were vast caverns between towering walls that let no light reach the dusty tracks below.

But even that stark majesty was lost when Peralta was cracked.

The planet had been struck by the focused cosmological necromancy of The Enemy, harnessing intergalactic energies that struck her with the impact of an incomprehensibly mighty maelstrom. Her core had been split and her skin broken in a million million places. She was fractured like a crystal seeing sphere dropped upon the marble floor of a Hierarch's auditorium. Her cities had crumbled; the waterways spilled their boundaries and flooded down through the leagues of structure below, spewing steam into the sky to mix with the smoke from countless fires. Factories had crumbled like a child's palace of twigs, molten metals and solutions eating through the surrounding cities in waves of consuming chemical flame.

But that had been years ago. Though the nuclear embers still smoldered and glowed, steaming sores that still festered on the skin of the world, most of the fires had died. The bursar's portion of the steam pillars had faded. Poison rains had washed the soot and ashes from the ruins of the hive dwellings and into deep undercity caverns that boiled and breathed toxic vapors through the dark hidden places below.

It was here that I had been delivered, to this corpse world of Peralta. The dromon that had carried me from the shining light of the Imperator's holy presence to this place had dropped from The Path only long enough to expel my descent craft before disappearing in a shattered-mirror prism of refracted starlight.

My sentence here is the Imperator's gift to me of my life. It is also his condemnation of me to my death.

Theme: A Setting

The theme for today is to write a setting. You may have a character in the setting, but nothing is to happen: you are to focus on creating a real space in the viewer's mind.

A few seconds in first person

The bell rings as I enter the store. The girl behind the counter is terrified, I can almost feel her fear radiating off of her and past the man with his back to me. I immediately look for the signs. I see her eyes darting left to right trying hard to neither look at me, at the man in front of her or towards the back of the convenient store. The other criminal is there. I can see his reflection in the glass of the beer cooler as he stands perfectly still waiting for his partner to act. His partner, the man at the counter, is standing like a statue slightly to the left of center of the counter. This places the cash register in front of his left hand; his wallet is in his right rear pocket; this makes him right handed. That will be his gun hand of course.

I know it would be a mistake to simply walk back out as these are armatures. They would just start blazing away and in their panic kill the girl. I walk up to the counter giving the girl a reassuring smile. The gunman spins bringing his pistol - a Ruger .380 - up towards my chest. Idiot. He practically hands the gun to me. I check the pistol with my left, jab the inside of his wrist with my right and twist the gun up and away from and an upper cut with the elbow snaps his head back, a strike to the throat with the butt of the Ruger crushes the windpipe and he stumbles back and out of my way.

In the second and a half it takes the other would-be killer to come running from cover I slide the action to chamber a shot and aim. He rounds the corner 20 feet away with a scream and a misplaced shot as if he's a thug from a Tarantino movie. I put four shots into the center of mass just to be sure. His momentum and adrenalin takes him into the candy aisle and he'll be dead before his body stops moving.

The first guy scrambles to his hands and knees his eyes wide with monkey brain terror as I step between him and the camera over the counter. Two shots to the face and he goes down clutching blindly at empty air "Please no..." sputtering from his lips.

The girl is close to going into shock. I need to talk her down before...damn it. The little prick nailed me with that one wild shot. Well, at least this is a convenient segue. "Girl...Megan (according to her name tag), I need you to focus for me!"

I grab wash rag from the espresso counter and press it to the wound. "Young woman, here, hold this right here. You need to keep pressure on - listen to me girl! Focus! Ok, now, I'm going to dial 911 while you keep me from bleeding out."

Now

A bell jingles as I pull open the heavily-barred door and I am hit with a wall of super-chilled air, almost painful after the scorching dry heat of the parking lot. I step into the store and stop for a moment to take my bearings. My shirt becomes cold where sweat has caused it to stick to my chest and back and I pluck at the fabric to pull it loose from my skin.

The store is one large room mazed into a series of corridors by dented and dingy beige metal shelving. Near the entrance glass cases have been arranged into a square with an open space in the middle for employees; the outside perimeter of the store is lined with a similar array of glass cases. A variety of goods squat on the shelves and in the cases: musical instruments, amplifiers, rings and bracelets, desktop lamps. On the right side of the store a row of dirty bicycles lean drunkenly on each other; beyond, a cluster of lawn mowers. The store is lit by banks of blazing fluorescent tubes on the ceiling; everything is evenly illuminated and looks artificial and cartoonish. There are no shadows.

I walk to the nearest counter display and pretend to look at microphones while the lone employee helps a young couple looking for an affordable (read: cheap) ring. The sweat is drying on my back and under my arms but a cold trickle runs from my hairline down my neck and into the collar of my shirt. It is not the result of the temperature.

Finally the couple commits to indecision and leaves without making a purchase. The salesman - a skeletal figure who could be in his thirties or forties, badly shaven days before - comes over to me and offers to help.

"Yes. May I look at your guns please?"

Whitewater Here & Now - 7/4/11

I'm sitting in the bow of this canoe, craning my neck to see how the rafters ahead of us are running the line. Ken's in the back, and we're both paddling backwards gently, slowing our approach to the monster waves in front of us so the rafts will be clear when we drop in.

My gut's cramping up a little, and my heart rate's definitely trending upwards. I can feel that ache in my palms that says "quit choking your paddle to death, Lucas!". I ease my grip & take a deep breath. Feel the cold water sloshing over my toes, and hope we don't get too much more than ankle-deep when we pound through the beast in front of us. Five, six big waves, a hole to miss on the right, just after the pour-over from the rock - oh, my god, look at that hydraulic! DEFINITELY miss that, then punch left through the wave train, try to miss that next big washed-out eater, and then stay upright until the train ends. We're drifting closer to the tongue, the start, the big drop.

"Okay, paddle ahead!" Ken's voice reaches me even as I'm taking that first stroke. We're a good team. I'm getting a surge of adrenaline, increasing those butterflies and making my hands shake. I need to move, do something, or I'll just get dizzy, so I'm paddling ahead, concentrating on pulling the bow into the perfect place. Damn, this water's pushy, the river's high, we don't have as much time to manuever, it has to be perfect. Wish we'd brought the smaller boat, it turns quicker, but it's less stable, well, too late to think about it now, right?

The bow's dipping, the first wave is rising over my head - god, sometimes I hate being in the front! I can't see what Ken's doing, although I can feel him back there, and I'm always staring right into the scariest parts of rapids, no breathing room. Ken's yelling "Okay, keep it straight!", and I'm holding a brace as I get whapped in the face with ice-cold river water. Shake my head without moving the paddle as we get whipped towards the right - there's that hole, motherfucker! I'm pushing away from it and bracing as we arc over that first wave. The bow smacks down in the trough. Time to make the next move.....

"Now LEFT!"

I'm throwing a cross-stroke across the bow to pull us radically left, and I can feel Ken's steering brace from the stern. All that water gives us a huge push on our left-side ferry, and we're suddenly zooming across the face of the next wave, quartering it, a little scary but we have momentum, it'll be okay, we're just going take on some water, aw shit, that lip's gonna.....

"Pfft-!!" I'm blowing silty water out of my open mouth and shaking it out of my eyes again, feeling the water in the bottom of the boat sloshing over my ankles now - shit! - as we surge into another wave. The extra water makes us heavier, less manueverable, so I'm digging into the face of the wave as we rear up it, keeping us moving ahead. Sliding backwards on that daddy would be unthinkable, so I'm not thinking about it. Move, move, move-! Brace, brace, BRACE when that cross-current slamming off the shore threatens to tip us sideways, makes a scary slosh. I'm feeling the thigh-straps bite into my legs when I throw my whole torso into another life-saver with the paddle.

"NICE, honey!"

Holy crap. Two more waves, no problem, almost there, just stay upright.....I'm feeling a second surge of adrenaline, the one that eradicates the fear. Almost there, then we can pump out the boat and set up for the next one. I'm feeling lighter now, grinning hugely even as the cross-chop is threatening to swamp us. Flipping on the last wave....it happens. I'd hate to swim, it's cold and fast, it'd be a bitch to retrieve the boat and pull it to shore. My paddle's staying in the water, we're almost there...

Unpleasant Scene - 7/1/11

The gal standing in the checkout line was wearing a tight, low-cut jean skirt that showed both her substantial muffin top, and the back of her lacy red XXL thong. Well, it could have been regular-sized underwear, but I suspected a thong. Her shopping cart was filled with cheap kids' clothes, and every type of synthetic food imaginable.
The little boy in her cart was screaming with anger, tears running down his face. He was clutching an action figure in his grubby little hands and blowing snot all over it while he wailed like a fire engine.
The gal's face was turning a stony pink-red while the kid's volume continued to climb. She was hissing at the boy, "Shut up. Shut up RIGHT NOW." The kid's face began to turn purple with the effort of maintaining the howl.
A fat arm snaked out and slapped him in the face, momentarily interrupting the kid. He gulped, shocked, then screwed up his face to start again. Another slap, accompanied by loose flapping arm flab.
"You CAN'T HAVE IT, you little shit! You wanna be gay like your dad? Just keep it up!"
More howls. The arm lifted up for another swing.
I couldn't look away.

Topic: Here and now

New topic: a sense of immediacy. You are to write a scene in which you are doing something or about to do something. The goal is to build a sense of mounting tension; your technical restrictions are that you will write present tense, first person - "I am walking into the store" rather than "he walked into the store".