MINERVA: Episodic, Single-Player Half-Life 2

Juvenilia 1 - Mole People - posted by Cargo Cult on Wednesday August 16 2006

Quiet day of work. So I'm clearing out various old documents and things. Interestingly, I've uncovered a load of creative writing stuff. By me. Unsurprisingly, unpublished.

So, with a captive audience pandering to my every whim, I thought I'd have a week of posting stories and things to this very blog.

Here's a deliberately cheesy snippet of an unstarted, unfinished story, circa March 2003:

... hatch, the rusty metal scraping against the concrete. He stopped, panting. Could they be following him? The surface should be too exposed for such beings, but what about this deserted industrial district? No time for such questions, it was time to get moving.

Brian got up, his ankle a knot of pain, and started to stumble towards the street. Silence. The orange streetlights strobed behind the wooden fence, a constant stacatto in the corner of his eye. Then movement. He threw himself to the ground, and fumbled in his pocket. His gun, or his camera? The breeze picked up, blowing the paper bag further along the path. He relaxed, pulled himself to his feet, and reached for his phone.

"Brian?" Claire's voice was almost deafening in its normalcy. "Have you found it?"

"Yes, but they found me." A whole subterranean world, edited from society's collective consciousness. "I'll get back as soon as I can."

A helicopter pulsed in the distance, its searchlight faintly visible in the smog-laden air. The police, chasing or abetting criminals. A fragment of his world, now shattered by the discovery he had made deep beneath the cruel city streets.

Brian jogged towards where he had left the van, limping due to the jump he had made in his bid for freedom. Two metres? Ten? The darkness, the ...

That's the entirety of mole-people.txt. Lucky you.