Mountain Sound | Four
Efa stands still and silent as Harper wipes away the grime smearing her ceramic skin. She could be powered off, nothing more than a statue, but for the soft whirr within her. Her chest doesn’t rise and fall with the breath of the living; she has no twitching muscles, no fluttering eyelashes to betray her feelings.
Harper had thought cleaning Efa would have been like cleaning machinery, like washing her mother’s car. Instead, she finds herself hesitant to touch Efa’s body, as if she were a real human woman. There’s a strange quiver in her chest, something intimate, delicate and, yes, afraid.
Mountain Sound | Three
Fair hair splayed around her head like a storm, the human girl—Harper, Efa reminds herself—seems so oddly at peace when she sleeps, so unlike her conscious self. Awake, she is angry, near-feral like the weasels and wildcats that terrorize the chickens. Efa has never met anyone like her, though she can’t say she’s met many people beyond this farm’s borders before now. Perhaps the war the Farmer has mentioned has turned Harper into this wild animal, but Efa can’t picture her any other way.
“War brings out the monsters in people,” he’d said, his eyes focused on a horizon darkening with smoke. “Some days I can’t help but wonder if your kind might be better at humanity than us.”
Mountain Sound | Two
A chill breeze brushes her skin, icy fingers prying her from a slow, fever-blurred death. Her eyes are sticky, covered in a film that glues her eyelids together like a thick ointment. With the breeze comes scents from a childhood long gone; animal musk, pine and grass and earth. Above all, there’s the clear freshness of land untarnished by city smog.
She is sick, she is delirious, and none of this can be real. In her final, aching moments in this forsaken world, her brain has constructed a story of fresh air and itching grass, of blue skies dotted with fluffy clouds that come into sharper focus as she blinks away the fog. Too real, she thinks dimly, watching the clouds meander across their candy-blue field.
There is the sound of small feet rustling grass, then a creature’s velvet snout is suddenly snuffling at her face, little huffs of air tickling her heated skin. The dark eyes and animal sounds are so new and surprising, the girl has to suppress a scream as she raises her hands to push the sheep away.
Only one hand meets the creature’s face, startling the sheep away with a small, twisting leap. The other hand—her damaged arm, she recalls vaguely—will not move no matter how much she wills it.
Something is wrong.
Mountain Sound | One
Mist wraps around the mountains like a thick cloak, stained grey-pink with early morning light. There’s an unnatural stillness in the air, the heavy silence that comes from the sudden absence of human life. In the distance is a massive downed ship, smouldering still in the distance; a dead, metal behemoth so like just another mountain on the horizon.
A bleat breaks through the silence, then another, and another still. Shadows move behind a curtain of fog, until the pale tendrils peel away from a grassy outcropping where the dark shapes manifest into a flock of sheep. In the midst is a faceless guardian, standing against the bitter breeze with a branch-turned-staff clasped in one cold hand while a velvet face, haloed with frosted breath, nuzzles the other.
Mountain Sound | About
Starting (northern hemisphere) Friday next week, I’ll be releasing my FIRST serial fiction story: Mountain Sound, with a new chapter every third Friday from then on.
With the cities aflame and massive warships silhouetting the sun, the human race is once more on the verge of destroying itself. The countryside was supposed to be far from the war, but death spreads like a virus—not that Efa would know. An android built for many jobs, Efa was given only one: to protect the sheep placed under her care.
Until a dying girl stumbles upon the flock, shattering Efa’s peaceful existence and forcing the android to think beyond her basic programming. The war is coming—has already come—raising new questions neither of them can answer alone. All Efa knows is that she cannot abandon her sheep.
Mountain Sound is a story about humanity, love, responsibility, and sheep. I don’t know exactly when it will end, but I’m planning around 10 chapters. I have a page dedicated to keeping track of chapters and characters, and it will be updated as the story progresses.
This is an effort to start showing my creative writing more, as all I’ve done publicly for the last year plus is write editorials and book reviews, with my creative stuff hidden behind-the-scenes. No more!
Patrons will get to see chapters early, on Wednesdays!
Bloom; a Game About Surviving
When you have a chronic illness, it starts to become the core of your being. It becomes hard to not let your illness define you, to actually live a life. It also becomes hard to explain your experiences to your healthy friends and family and I’m somewhat glad that I have friends with similar experiences for support (though I am not thankful they also have to live with these struggles.)
I’m not sure when I first heard about the interactive narrative tool, Twine, but from the start I had a feeling that, as someone who wants to get into game narrative, it was the kind of thing I’d want to experiment with. My first idea was based around chronic illness, and trying to illustrate what life is when you have one.
And so, I created Bloom.
