Daniel walked out of the diner and looked through the window at Hoster and felt disgusted at what he thought the man was going to do. Granted, he never was told what happened when he was asked to go away, but he knew nothing good ever came from it. This was why they switched cars so frequently, he figured, often buying used ones off the side of the road with the side money Pern had told them to use for emergencies. This would be deducted from their pay, but Hoster said he'd take the brunt of it. Daniel knew he was probably lying, but he only needed enough to forge his pass and get out into the Stretch. From there, it wouldn't matter where he went, or who was looking for him. He'd be gone like a ghost, his dad would say.

The Stretch. He thought about the expanse almost daily, and without fail there would come fear and excitement when the idea of pure silence and dark black vacuum came to his mind. If there was one thing Daniel Yhog had never known in his entire life, it was silence. When he was young, he lived in Cochat near the Blue Land with his sisters Lis and Yhara. Lis was the oldest, and Yhara was younger than he, but they all looked similar and for a while Daniel's hair was grown out and all could pass for each other in certain lights. Daniel was told not to ask about their parents by Lis, but Yhara would tell him stories now and then.

When he was 13, Lis was killed in a grocery store in Osa by an elderly man who caught them stealing candy. They had been living in a half-house project shared by the homeless and Luddites after the Emigration. Lis had brought them to Osa four months prior, and promised no more hitching or cold beds, but instead they found begging and stained pallets waiting in the temp housing.

Mrs. Hessh had gotten them the room. A stout little relic of a woman, her eyes had fallen on the three when they showed up in the dirty town, huddled in the back of a dozer truck and sniffling into the cold. She took the children in, found Lis work, and made --- Yhara and Daniel ran from the store, chased by the man, who ran after them and howled obscenities about crank rats and blood babies. Yhara cried and begged as she looked over her shoulder at the wild man. Daniel pulled her, and never looked at the man. It was my candy, Lis. 

Daniel looked out at the road of dirty pavement and trudged across the warming ice patches that had crusted with grime. His boots crunched and squelched as mud met ice and rubber, but he rarely slipped as he continued to walk. His breath was cold and ancient as he imagined the dust emanating from the skull in a crypt. He thought strange things often, and 

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Author guidance for This story

Just a draft, it's pretty horrid right now, so it's a work in progress, bound to be a ton of edits, so if you don't like it now, come back later and maybe it'll be tolerable.

Essentially, I wanted to write a space story, but found that even doing that without some kind of grounding or familiar knowledge is incredibly difficult, and I have a very limited imagination, so I'm just going where the story takes me, no matter how non-spacey it feels.

As I'm writing this out, I'm starting to form the basis of the timeline and the circumstance these characters are in. In this story, which takes place at sometime after humans have the ability to leave Earth, and this ability is readily available to everyone, we stretched ourselves thin, and the surrounding area near Earth is like one big dust town- no one's really around and no one really cares. There's not much left on Earth, towns have been renamed, states collapsed in the US and there isn't a cohesive understanding anymore. The people on Earth don't want to be there anymore, and any important person of interest is so far out in the galaxy that most people move in herds through space, looking and exploring. There's government to restrict and preside over this, but like everyone else, it's stretched thin and little attention is paid to the radar. We are infants with too big of a bite in our mouths. Humans lost the glory of life, its dark and empty in space, there's no sunshine, there's no pretty sky, and it's incredibly lonely, and we don't know how to deal with it. So humans just drive, float on out anywhere they can.

Daniel, the main character, has done something. I don't know what it is just yet, but what little remnant of law and order that remains on this planet is looking for him. Currently, he's floating in space on 4 minutes worth of oxygen, and he's transfixed on a red planet or star in the distance. But at some point before this he takes part in some kind of illegal trading to gain money for a passage off the planet. He conducts the transaction and returns with Hoster, who I am currently figuring out but I can assure you, he's pretty wretched.

So that's where you're at, up to speed, right where I want you.

Characters:

Daniel Yhog- Main character, troubled past, on the run.

Gideon Hoster- Traveling companion, account advisor, murderer.

Eckerd Pern- Drug trafficker, supplier of "Omo", synthetic stimulant originally designed to alleviate muscle deterioration in zero gravity, now illegal due to break down of immune systems in users, but highly addictive.

Places (Just so I remember):

Manderas
Cochat
The Blue Land

updated Jan 2 by BearGrip