ANARCHY!
Background: Our story begins in the 23rd century, two hundred fifty years after the ecological collapse of the 21st century caused massive desertifications all over the world. One of the regions most heavily affected was the Great Plains of the American Midwest. Deprived of its populations as people abandoned their towns and homes to emigrate to the cities, where everyone else was going, the fields of wheat and corn and maize and numerous other crops lay fallow, withered and died under the heat. Desert reclaimed the midwest, and crept ever further outward, eventually encroaching on the northern and eastern regions of the North American world. Yet a hardy few settlers persisted, fleeing from the anarchy and tumult of the great megacities of the West and East, fleeing from the rampant technology and slum warfare, into the desert. Here they stayed, eking out a bare and sweaty existence in tiny ramshackle communes in the middle of the desert, crouching next to the abandoned highways...
[BLACK]
[eerie, beautiful choral music plays, operantic and solemn, like the Requiem Mass, only somehow disturbing and tense]
[fade from black]
[pan from left to right, the sun causing a lens-flare as we look around]
A ruined and flattened yellow and brown landscape of cracked earth, dust and sand. The wind picks up, hollowly slipping past our ears, a hot and sucking breeze, dry and desolate. It picks up a cloud of dust, and somewhere a lone, dried tumbleweed unseats itself and tumbles across the landscape...
[fade to black]
[camera centers on a road]
The black stretch of asphalt looms into infinity, the heat of midday seeming to glint off of the smooth stretch of road, the yellow lines like the segments of a tapeworm, miles long, sweating ghosts of shimmering mirages, causing the air to dance and play before our eyes.
[fade to black]
[bird's eye view, zoom slowly in]
A flat yellow sheet. At first it appears to be some sort of paper, but as the camera zooms in we see a small, moving form. It resolves to be the back of a man. As we approach, the small pockmarks on the ground appear to be holes. Hundreds of holes in the flat, brown-white ground.
[level to the man's face]
He is sweating hard, a glossy sheen on his forehead. It is greasy and brown from long work in the sun, and brown dust and dirt clings to him. He pants and plants his shovel again into the hard, dry earth. He wears blue suspenders and nothing else. Wiry, water-deprived muscles ripple on his back as the dirt and dust rises in white and yellow clouds around him. The shovel's sound fills our ears, and another pile appears on the edge of the hole around him. He works diligently, only a grunt or two betraying his weariness.
[view upwards from out the shadowy circle of the hole]
[a woman's face, haggard, lined. Brown-black hair tied in a bun.]
Our woman stares down at the man's weathered, jagged face. She places a metal thermos in the hard, baked earth, dislodging a few pebbles in a fine cascade.
WOMAN: It's time to go in.
MAN [looking around]: Noon already?
WOMAN: I brought you some water for the trip back. Better get inside soon.
MAN: I got work to do.
WOMAN: Gangs on the road they say.
MAN: Really?
WOMAN: Come. You won't strike water - you never have. Let's go in.
MAN [dejectedly looking at the ground under him]: Yeah. Okay.
[he climbs out of the hole. camera follows him. They walk off into the dancing mirage, disappearing...]
OOC: Sorry, but why is a camera following them?
Atlantian Outcasts
24-11-2003, 04:04
very good, but you don't need to make it like a movie.
OOC: It's a new style I'm playing with, okay? Just think of it as regular RP, only more cinematic as opposed to story-ish.
[fading from white, to the shimmer of blue and yellow, as if passing through a mirage]
The blur of the mirage resolves into an image of a ramshackle settlement. It is a miserable cluster of sun-baked shacks constructed out of bungee cables, twisted wire, wood, metal railings, tubes, pipes, and assorted detritus of human civilisation. It is surrounded by a tall fence constructed from old car doors and tyres. Sharpened stakes poke out from it, and plastic and rags flap in the sucking of the passing, dusty yellow wind. A metal shack sits atop four rickety legs made from rusted metal poles, and from it poke a menacing set of crossbows and arrows. A guard tower of sorts.
The settlement is built in a circle around a tall, well-maintained old windmill, the blades slowly squeaking as they turn in the wind. A drive shaft connects to a water well, slowly drawing up supplies of precious water from deep underground. Clearly it was not built by the settlers, rather it had been taken over, refitted, and defended, like the gas-mines were in latter parts of the world. In the desert of the Midwest, sitting atop a live well would be akin to sitting atop a gold mine. The spikes and crossbows were not only to defend against wolves...
Our couple advances, is stopped by the defences for a moment, and the doors creak open.
[camera pan around in circles in the settlement.]
We see a small, malnourished-looking chicken, a mongrel dog worry at a bone, and numerous squatters staring sullenly out of the darkness of their shacks. They are dressed in rags, passed down from ancestors, scraped out of the few meagre resources available to them. Most children run about, browned and naked. Elderly and middle-aged people make up the majority of the settlement; there are hardly any young people, if at all.
[center on MAN's face]
MAN[voiceover]: Home sweet home. [sighs]
MAN and WOMAN move over to the large lean-to directly to their left, where an OLD MAN wearing a LOINCLOTH rocks quietly in a hammock, rheumy grey eyes staring bleakly at the courtyard, listening to the sound of the windmill turning.
If only anarcho-communism was possible on this game.
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Mliêstôlkakûmek(Love all as you love yourself)
Racism-the other stupid ideology
Peace, love, and girls with small waists and really big butts!
http://www.sulucas.com/images/steatopygia.jpg
[camera centers on the conversation. MAN's face is in the upper left corner, the Old Man, in the lower right still stares forward, rocking in the hammock on one leg]
MAN: I didn't strike water.
Old man does not answer, catatonically staring, stroking gently at his whispy white beard.
[camera centers on his beard, close up of hand, stroking at the wisps of white hair. It is flecked with bits of food and particles of dust, turning it a shade of pale yellow]
[recenter on faces]
MAN: I'll try again tomorrow.
OLD MAN: No you're not.
Old man's voice is weak, whispery, hoarse. Soft, but a strange, mad chord runs through it, though it is faded
MAN[incredulous]: What?
OLD MAN: I cain't let you waste the settlement's water anymore.
MAN: But- but, Methuselah Jacob!
OLD MAN: Enough, Tom. You are to do your work like a normal man. None of these crazy dreams. Abandon them.
MAN[gesturing with one finger]: I know there is water out there! I know there is! I just have to find it! It's out there somewhere...
OLD MAN: The aquifers have collapsed. This knowledge came from Methuselah Simon, and Methuselah Verne before him. It is ordained by He Who Punishes.
MAN: Well... if it's that case... Here, in the course of digging, I found this.
[camera centers on his hand, from a top-down perspective]
It is a small, dust-covered contraption, barely the size of his two, calloused palms. It protrudes with small wires and there are knobs and switches on its faded black surface. A twisted antenna sticks out of one side, broken at one end, rusted over. The old man gazes catatonically out, not even looking at the machine.
MAN: Look! See this?! I wonder what it does. I found it in the holes I dug this morning. May-maybe it is used to find water!
OLD MAN: Throw it away.
MAN: You can't be serious, Methuselah!
OLD MAN: Tom, it's about time you took responsibility. You go and you help ready the defences. Gangs are up the road - the scouts came back this morning with the word.
MAN: But, Methuselah! This-
OLD MAN: It is technology! You know the First Commandment: thou shalt not suffer a machine to be made in mockery of the hands and brains of a man. Now get rid of it! Technology is forbidden! It is an evil thing! I know of this from the teachings of the Methuselahs before I. You go and you find the hole it was in and you put it back - after we defend from the attack! Now none of this nonsense.
TOM: But-
METHUSELAH JACOB: Go.
TOM turns and moves away.
[camera stays, focused on his slumping shoulders as he trudged through the blinding white light of the sun of the courtyard to the wall, where he began to work.]