Re: The New Alston Aviators (Altamira)
Three days ago, the cask of water was filled from the Phaedorna river, and loaded onboard the merchant ship Skidding Sally. The container shook from time to time, as if filled with large, invisible fish swimming back and forth. Water tried to whip through infinitely small cracks.
Twenty hours ago, the quartermaster of the merchant ship Skidding Sally thought he heard a small singing voice coming from one of the casks in the storage hold. He was escorted down to the crew’s doctor--just to be safe, the captain assured him, no one at all thought he was mad--and was tucked into his bed very tightly during the night. With straps.
Six hours ago, the Skidding Sally made port in a town by the mountains, which was really no more than a jetty with a collection of inns and bars strewn about in a common area, and unloaded its cargo for air freight. Amongst the goods were one hundred-fifteen casks of water, one hundred-fourteen of which contained some life form visible to the naked eye, and one of which contained something that could be classed as "sentient". And, considering how the organism was currently being carried in said cask and surviving, it could also be classed as something that might scoff at the assumption that “sentient” implied “human”.
The crew of the Sally knew that it was at about this time in their journey that they were supposed to resist the urge to run off and find a tavern that sold beer with less salt than ocean water (even if it was only a little less—they were well aware of the practice of selling…secondhand…beer), and knew they were expected to buckle down and sort through the casks for any signs that gave away the fact that their supplies came from anything but an artesian well somewhere in the Alps. But…as soon as that first booted foot hit dry land, the last thing the men wanted to do was sort through more water. So they tapped every cask with a hesitant palm, and whatever didn’t try to bite back was loaded onto the awaiting airship and sent up the frigid mountains to the New Alston Aviation Research Centre.
When the casks finally arrived in the center’s loading bay, half of them were frozen. The dome itself was warm enough--but a trip up through snow and icy mist and high altitudes will do strange things to water. Partially-solid casks thudded onto the wooden planks and rolled for meters until striking a wall or one another.
One of the casks said, "Ow."
A boy wandering around with the mail (he imagined he should be delivering it, but every time he set out to find someone, he got distracted by one engineering marvel or another, and well...let's say some people had some bills that were very overdue) heard this noise come from what could only be fifteen-gallons of water surrounded by wood, and dropped the letters he was carrying to investigate. He pounded on each cask with a balled-up fist until he heard the sound again.
"Can you please stop?"
Young Tom bent down and drummed on the side of the talkative barrel again. This time, all he heard was a groan.
"Is...someone in there?" he asked. His imagination was too stunned to form a better question.
"Yes! Now, please open the cask and let me out! My legs are frozen!"
Tommy ran off screaming for the center's doctor, and his mother, and anyone who could convince him that there was no savage race of peoples that stuck young girls in casks of water for days on end. Some minutes later, a large man absent-mindedly sat down for his lunch break on a barrel, and thought he heard the seat of his pants whimper.
Eventually, the cask cracked in a surge of water that certainly couldn't have come from anything but an angry ocean god. Or, in this case, an angry ocean god's daughter.
Ancia stood up, stretched, and tried to collect herself back into a shape vaguely resembling normal. Her back ached like someone had dropped an anchor onto her spine. The flesh was water--but the pain was definitely human.
"Hullo?" she called, when she could feel her feet again. The sound echoed through the dome and came back to her, unanswered.
Last edited by Altamira; 03-12-2008 at 06:52 PM.