Roland woke up feeling cold and wet. He flailed around in the pitch blackness, finally gripping the comforting sturdiness of the steel warehouse shelves and swinging out of bed. His “bed” was sunken and soggy with water, the cereal boxes it was constructed out of having sagged towards the floor. He was shocked to feel his feet splash into water – icy water almost a foot deep. Still groggy with sleep, he wandered vaguely if his house was flooding. And then it hit him: his safe haven had finally been breached. He was going to drown here, alone and in the dark.

He sucked in the briny smell of seawater mixed with stale air and forced himself to calm down. He needed to think calmly. He still had time, after all. The warehouse was huge and it would probably take days to fill up. Probably.

He could hear a far-off trickling sound coming from somewhere, but the noise was weak and echoed by the shelves, and he had no idea where it was coming from. Obviously, his first step should be to get some light. He reached instinctively to his wrist and tapped his Coordinator and instantly a weak light filtered through the screen of the watch-like device, illuminating displays of the time and date, upcoming holidays, and outdated news from weeks ago, before the disaster. He tapped the screen again and at once the light became stronger and the beam spread out, illuminating the area around him.

A calm, mechanical voice from his Coordinator stated Error: cannot connect to network. And: Ten minutes of power remaining. Find light or other electro-magnetic radiation source for automatic recharge. He had ten minutes of light left. The chilled water lapped threateningly at his feet as he bleakly assessed his options.

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Author guidance for This story

An experiment--a city built in the depths of an ocean--has gone terribly wrong. Something happened. Some event decimated the city. Now, the few survivors, cut off from each other by the destruction of the event combined with the crushing pressure of the depths, try to survive, and, ultimately, find their way back to the surface.

Create a character, or use one you've already created. Put them somewhere you might find in any average city, but deep underwater and now entirely isolated from other sections of the city.

Third person past.

I'm hoping for eventual character interactions, which might mean we'll eventually be writing other people's characters into our chapters. It'd be best to keep that to a minimum since we won't know the character's of others as well as our own, but it'll have to happen eventually. The reason I mention this is that I think it'd be best to pick a character you aren't too attached to so you won't be offended if someone else needs to write your character into their chapter.

I'm starting with Filmer. He's kind of a neurotic janitor. He tended to the cleanliness and small matters of maintenance of the governmental quarters before the event. He's been isolated to this place and survived off of the non-perishables he's collected from the quarters. He spends most of his time doing what his limited skills allow to keep the leaks in check.

If you'd like, I can put in here a brief description of any new characters introduced for reference purposes.

updated Sep 12 '10 by Atropos