I'm doing a bit of tidying around my writing folders (it needs doing every now and again), and thought I'd finally admit that this particular stub is never going to get turned into anything by throwing it up here for you guys to read. It's fairly purple (and massively influenced by a most-excellent play called Scaramouche Jones) but I actually kinda like it as a trashy sci-fi opening. I just wish I had a trashy sci-fi story to go with it!

(The name of the file is "Pit Fights and Bulldogs" but, since it's just a stub, it probably needs a simpler title.)

How many of you have "unfinished tales" like this gathering dust on your harddrive?


Fighter

I guess I've always been a fighter. I arrived on this mortal plain with a lung full of fluid and hole in my heart; on board a battle-gray ship called Tempest, half-way between Earth and Everest. Within that dull exterior, my entrance was heralded by a riot of colour and noise: the panting purple of my mother's face, the sickly yellow of my jandiced skin, and the crimson gushings of blood that just wouldn't stop. Beeps of ship equipment, shouts of nurses, fading groans from my dear mother, were all swallowed up by my own enraged screams.

My mother didn't survive the trip to Everest. She wasn't a fighter.

That was twenty years ago. Twenty Earth years as determined by the calender-clock that hangs above the thoroughfare like Death's hourglass. Everest is a near-sun orbiter, forever angled to catch the fullest of the precious golden rays. There's no day and night here, let alone seasons to count the years with. I grew up in an ever-light world of variable-shifts and supply tokens. There are no banks on Everest and no banknotes, but everything has a price.