New General

Hey people! Well this was a dream, that I thought u would like! I'll see where it goes. Read on, lovelies!!!!

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Shiva was quiet, no one could deny that fact, but she was also a 'special' person in the program. The Program trains young people for the next inevitable war. By the time it would start they would all be grown and fully trained. The program only took the specials so there was only a few hundred of kids in the program, but the ended up dying all the time. So only a few, like Shiva, lived there for a length of time. The students who were expected to die early were often sent away to fight in petty political squabbles. They stay in the program just long enough to learn the bare necessities then kicked out. They never came back.

The students who lived long enough to become superiors gave the unnamed program a name. If was more of a nickname but it was a name nonetheless. The students had given it, was School. Of course none of them knew what a real school was exactly but to them the name felt correct somehow. Shiva was quite literally the smartest of them all, which was the main contributor to her living and how she became special among the specials. She read every book in the library and the School gave her a allowance to spend solely on books. She spent nearly every penny of it on ancient texts, manuals, rare books, and college professors novels. She didn't know what a fairytale was but she knew what Prometheus said when he was arguing against the gods. No one knew what she knew but she was so shy that she didn't even have a single friend, even the professors barely knew that she was even in the program. Though it wasn't their fault; she had hardly spoken ten words since she came into the program when she was ten, she had recently turned sixteen.

Once a month there was a activity planned for the students to see how far they had gotten in training. There were several endurance, speed, and strength tests, but she knew she would die if she attempted them. Being in a team with a total stranger meant certain death. If she did end up on some kind of team, they would probably take pains to kill her so they could finish faster. Shiva had observed this happen with alarming ease and devised ways to stay away from teams after that. Looking closely at the board of activities she chose the one that wouldn't require her to be part of a team or speak to others while still not being strenuous on the body. Swimming a race in the with partners that were attached to the lead swimmer by heavy chains. There had to be anchormen waiting at the end of the race to catch the life line that second swimmer would throw onto the strip of concrete. The anchors would swim to the end first without a partner and set up tents and fires for the other swimmers. She signed her name, which wasn't her real name. She had created a new identity because everyone always thought that she wasn't a student, but she was used to it, so she used a false name. Of course they believed her fake name which was Mary Johnson. A common Name in the school, so people rarely questioned it. The race would start the next day.

When she awoke, it was still early and the only ones awake were the post-dawn guards that stood sleepily waiting for their reliefs. She looked around her room still a little sleepy and dressed in her wetsuit that she had purchased the other day. It hugged her small body tightly and she pack a waterproof bag of cloths that were thermal and packed food, drinks, medicine, and bandages. She had read the injury reports from the infirmary, and each year the rate of injured students had multiplied by 10% in five years. Even though she had brought multiple types of medicine, there were certain types that a student couldn't get without a Captions permission.

She jogged down to the river edge, skirting the edge of the Forest of Teeth. People were terrified of it simply because they couldn't comprehend what went on inside the dark depths. The forest seemed to eat light as a hungry lion would eat a fresh kill. There were animals that no one had ever seen before and the sounds. . . . often reminded her of screeches of dying humans and the roar of viciously fighting animals. The wind shook certain parts of the trees violently, but if it shook the tree on the left, the tree in the right would be completely still, even of they were only a few inches apart. Shiva was writing a book about the Forest of Teeth, recording what she saw and drawing the animals, explaining the wind, and cautioning against certain flowers that are carnivorous. She spent days inside the forest creating a map of it sectioning off places that would mean certain death to anyone but her. Simply because she knew everything about the forest.