RE: SeaWyrm's Talon Exercises
11-08-2012, 11:23 PM
It dug through the ocean, its pincers chattering away as it thought.
The ocean was thick and crusty, and the pincers were having a hard time of it. They pushed and pulled on the thick bed of viscous foam that it had reached, spending great effort to make tiny amounts of progress.
It would need air soon. That was the primary thing on its mind. This wasn't alarming to it, merely irritating. There was bound to be an air bubble around somewhere. Probably just past this foam layer. But the going was slow.
The foam finally came apart. Sticky bits of it were lathered across the creature's forelimbs. Hrmph, it grunted. That would be a real bugger to clean.
Beneath the foam, there was no air bubble. Instead, it had reached a pocket of granularity, loosely-packed sand-like material - only not sand, of course, but seawater.
Dang.
It began tunneling through it in resignation. The granularity was even tougher to dig through than the foam - it tended to collapse back in on itself, making hours of hard work vanish in seconds. It considered trying to find a way around - but no, that would mean giving up. It hated to give up. This would be obnoxious, but just a matter of time. It would make it through eventually.
And with that thought, it suddenly found it had rammed face-first into a Whale.
Slightly stunned and panicked, it flailed wildly for a moment, instinctively pulling its carapaced tail up to protect its underbelly. Then it got itself under control, and reached out tentative feelers.
The gray, fleshy surface in front of it was still, though whether the Whale lay dead or just dormant was uncertain. The size, also, was impossible to judge, and that was the really troubling thing. In the best case scenario, it might have time to go around, but it certainly didn't have time to find out and discover that it was wrong. It was already starting to lose feeling in its extremities, and the chronometer strapped to a secondary limb was starting to vibrate a forlorn note of caution. No, the whale wasn't going to like this, but it couldn't go around - it would have to go through.
---15 Mins---
I'm unlikely to continue any of these as FEs - that starts to ruin the spontaneous, anything-goes quality that FEs should have, either because I have to remain consistent with the earlier material, or because I have to worry about building a solid foundation for later stuff.
It's conceivable that I might continue some of them as proper stories, though I don't really have plans to do so right now. If I do, I'll post about it in this topic.
The ocean was thick and crusty, and the pincers were having a hard time of it. They pushed and pulled on the thick bed of viscous foam that it had reached, spending great effort to make tiny amounts of progress.
It would need air soon. That was the primary thing on its mind. This wasn't alarming to it, merely irritating. There was bound to be an air bubble around somewhere. Probably just past this foam layer. But the going was slow.
The foam finally came apart. Sticky bits of it were lathered across the creature's forelimbs. Hrmph, it grunted. That would be a real bugger to clean.
Beneath the foam, there was no air bubble. Instead, it had reached a pocket of granularity, loosely-packed sand-like material - only not sand, of course, but seawater.
Dang.
It began tunneling through it in resignation. The granularity was even tougher to dig through than the foam - it tended to collapse back in on itself, making hours of hard work vanish in seconds. It considered trying to find a way around - but no, that would mean giving up. It hated to give up. This would be obnoxious, but just a matter of time. It would make it through eventually.
And with that thought, it suddenly found it had rammed face-first into a Whale.
Slightly stunned and panicked, it flailed wildly for a moment, instinctively pulling its carapaced tail up to protect its underbelly. Then it got itself under control, and reached out tentative feelers.
The gray, fleshy surface in front of it was still, though whether the Whale lay dead or just dormant was uncertain. The size, also, was impossible to judge, and that was the really troubling thing. In the best case scenario, it might have time to go around, but it certainly didn't have time to find out and discover that it was wrong. It was already starting to lose feeling in its extremities, and the chronometer strapped to a secondary limb was starting to vibrate a forlorn note of caution. No, the whale wasn't going to like this, but it couldn't go around - it would have to go through.
---15 Mins---
I'm unlikely to continue any of these as FEs - that starts to ruin the spontaneous, anything-goes quality that FEs should have, either because I have to remain consistent with the earlier material, or because I have to worry about building a solid foundation for later stuff.
It's conceivable that I might continue some of them as proper stories, though I don't really have plans to do so right now. If I do, I'll post about it in this topic.