Kargrazia
29-10-2008, 18:33
Rails rattled, paper rustled, and mid-morning sun warmed the faces and narrowed the eyes. A man three seats forward cleared his throat, and Nicole's gum smacked, releasing strawberry scent to cram the places that sun and sound left unfilled.
"Oh, they're not real, Sash. Honestly! Your face!"
"Well... hmph..."
The bridge of Sasha's nose did that thing, the little scrunch indicating her disgruntled disposition as this less than confident young person tried to make herself contest the scornful assessment of her frizzy-haired friend.
"But... it's not doctored or anything, and it says..."
She shrugged, Nicole clearly not even a little bit interested, and gave-up the conversation. But, as the old commuter train clattered on towards town, the girl never quite managed to move past the story and the images at its centre. Perhaps she was just intelligent enough to be moved by it, though she struggled to understand how anyone could fail to be likewise touched.
N(ews) I(nquiry) M(agazine) had, by unidentified means, got hold of some pictures of unidentified origin, and was doing its darndest to whip-up a storm of edition-shifting interest. Shouldn't be too hard, with a head in a box.
Easy, then, with ten thousand boxes so-filled.
The mysterious series of photographs recounted a macabre storage facility, an otherwise unremarkable warehouse stacked with boxes and shelving units that happened to contain and display disembodied human heads. Heads in various degrees of preservation. Heads of the young, heads of the old. Heads that wore scars and marks of post-mortem tampering and heads that didn't. But all heads that were fixed with tags, impossible to read without closer inspection than the photographs would allow.
Some magazine in some nation, somewhere in the world, had broken a story -or perpetrated a hoax, perhaps even fallen victim to one- that made a mystery of countless thousands of human heads in storage, and nobody seemed to know more.
But, as the week rolled on, more media sources produced more images of the weird collection. If it was not an elaborate hoax -for it was certainly not a thing that anyone could identify- the catalogue of images now appeared to be part of a deliberate record of tens if not hundreds of thousands of severed human heads.
Stacks of shelves and rooms full of boxes, containing heads possibly on their way to shelving units of their own, were marked with roman numerals. Large numerals -three, two-hundred, seventeen, and so on- above smaller inscriptions. The smaller text could be seen ranging between MCMLXXVIII and MMI.
Some people around the world called for investigations into the origin of the images, others dismissed it all as hoax, and some experts suggested that -to the best of their learning- no known disaster or atrocity around the world explained the manner in which these disembodied heads were kept.
OOC THREAD (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=570631)
"Oh, they're not real, Sash. Honestly! Your face!"
"Well... hmph..."
The bridge of Sasha's nose did that thing, the little scrunch indicating her disgruntled disposition as this less than confident young person tried to make herself contest the scornful assessment of her frizzy-haired friend.
"But... it's not doctored or anything, and it says..."
She shrugged, Nicole clearly not even a little bit interested, and gave-up the conversation. But, as the old commuter train clattered on towards town, the girl never quite managed to move past the story and the images at its centre. Perhaps she was just intelligent enough to be moved by it, though she struggled to understand how anyone could fail to be likewise touched.
N(ews) I(nquiry) M(agazine) had, by unidentified means, got hold of some pictures of unidentified origin, and was doing its darndest to whip-up a storm of edition-shifting interest. Shouldn't be too hard, with a head in a box.
Easy, then, with ten thousand boxes so-filled.
The mysterious series of photographs recounted a macabre storage facility, an otherwise unremarkable warehouse stacked with boxes and shelving units that happened to contain and display disembodied human heads. Heads in various degrees of preservation. Heads of the young, heads of the old. Heads that wore scars and marks of post-mortem tampering and heads that didn't. But all heads that were fixed with tags, impossible to read without closer inspection than the photographs would allow.
Some magazine in some nation, somewhere in the world, had broken a story -or perpetrated a hoax, perhaps even fallen victim to one- that made a mystery of countless thousands of human heads in storage, and nobody seemed to know more.
But, as the week rolled on, more media sources produced more images of the weird collection. If it was not an elaborate hoax -for it was certainly not a thing that anyone could identify- the catalogue of images now appeared to be part of a deliberate record of tens if not hundreds of thousands of severed human heads.
Stacks of shelves and rooms full of boxes, containing heads possibly on their way to shelving units of their own, were marked with roman numerals. Large numerals -three, two-hundred, seventeen, and so on- above smaller inscriptions. The smaller text could be seen ranging between MCMLXXVIII and MMI.
Some people around the world called for investigations into the origin of the images, others dismissed it all as hoax, and some experts suggested that -to the best of their learning- no known disaster or atrocity around the world explained the manner in which these disembodied heads were kept.
OOC THREAD (http://forums.jolt.co.uk/showthread.php?t=570631)