Sketcher's Row [Prototype]

Act I / Chapter I

Soal could see his ankles for the first time. They seemed to bear an unstable presence in the three-dimensional grayness through which they were being dragged, hazily and constantly shivering in and out of vision.

There flew many other new sensations into his head. In addition to the awareness of the rest of his body, he had gained an awareness that he was far from Sketcher's Row, and further yet from the school. The brushstrokes defining this new world were so minute and undetectable that the warm, vibrant fuzz of his homeland had been lost to an impression of grim photorealism -- an impression he shut his eyes to avoid until he lacked the option not to.

Soal knew he was being taken somewhere. Dust rose in trails when his feet moved, as they were. He felt his arms to be slung around someone else's, who made no audible effort to make their existence known. And his body was fully limp, incapable of freeing itself from the grasp of this unidentified entity, nor standing to investigate his location.

On that subject, Soal's surroundings were, as far as he could tell, built of numerous heaps of near-monochromatic objects on a ground of coarse, vaguely chromatic dirt, as far as the omnipresent, sky-blotting smoke would allow him to see (or smell). These surroundings had already rubbed off on his mightily bruised arms, and supposedly would continue to do so.

Partly from shock, partly from exhaustion, Soal dozed off. When his battered eyelids lifted again, he was slumped against a concrete wall on a tiny concrete floor, hooded by a concrete ceiling, with one almost burnt-out candle on a chandelier hanging tenuously from it.

A familiar schoolmate sat opposite him. Soal had seen them before once, but never learned their name, or much else about them.

Soal rose above the floor, testing his legs for the first time in a fairly decent period. Upon more closely examining this person, he was alarmed to find them in a state that could not be attributed to either life or death -- paralyzed by horror, their eyes blankly peering into the distance, of which there was little in this claustrophobic compartment.

Soal sought to verify their capacity for communication. "Hello? Do you know where we are...? Is this... Are --"

Amid these queries, a thinly defined door halfway up the wall to Soal's right thrust open, coming close to striking his head, and extinguishing the flame of the chandelier, only to spill a far greater (almost blinding) light into the chamber. There was a silhouette occupying that door, and it was unwilling to answer his prisoner's questions.

"Come on, come on -- 1039. You have places to be.

"1039," the figure in the door rasped, turning to a similar shape behind it. "Overdue for measurement, yes?"

"Yes," that similar shape muttered. "Don't be shy. Come out of there! It's only a dream!"

Soal's hands were in cuffs before he even had the option to resist them, or recognize the consequences of his obedience -- or recognize that his escorts were birds, of only slightly less than his own stature, and adorned in tenuous humanoid attire that had shifted halfway to rags.

A highly uncanny quality drifted from these creatures, whose feather-coated arms pulled Soal through a grimy iron corridor. Their appearance was consistent with the wasteland outside, and their bipedal demeanor (with all the joints of a modern primate) was contradictory to their absurdly designated species, the specification of which Soal was unsure.

Their assurance of this world as a dream was, ironically, the only thing keeping him from passing out and waking up due to the utter strangeness and unfamiliarity of the situation. Soal had never actually experienced a dream, however, although they had been thoroughly described to him, and he had pretended to have had them to elicit laughs from the "audience" of the school. His lexicon may not even have been wide enough to comprehend the definition of the term at all.

The birds brought Soal to another dour chamber, where he was seated on a pale wooden chair. A cracked plaque on the wall gave him what one would think to be a bewildering approximation of what was happening:

"THEY ARE EWYK. I AM A CHARK."

I WILL REPEAT THIS TO MYSELF UNTIL TOLD TO STOP.

START NOW.

"You're a literate?" the shorter, more wrinkled bird groaned, as if he had carried out this procedure hundreds of times already. "You can read?"

Soal nodded warily.

"Then... keep reading."

There were no other plaques in the room.

*     *     *

"This one's a five," one of the birds -- ewyk -- signaled to his colleague, in reference to their captive. "What do the laws say about charks between five and ten frames a second?"

"They go to the mines, Cormac," the other ewyk grunted. "You've been doing this job for a whole year, and this dumb chark can understand the system better than you?"