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« on: June 05, 2009, 10:15:33 am »
Decided to take a stab at this whole text adventure thing. I'll sorta by following the same formula as the Octopus theory. I''ve had this story in my head for a while now, and this looks like a fun way to tell it.
The bus comes to yet another stop. It's taking 30 minutes just to cover a few blocks! You lean your hand against the window, looking up and down. It's not fair, the levels above and below you have no traffic, save for the occasional taxi. Soon you'll be old enough to drive, and then you won't need the bus anymore.
You look below you, admiring the city, with it's gleaming archways and beautiful parks, aqueducts criss-crossing the buildings, mainly just for show. The traffic extends all the way to the horizon, clearly marking out the road ahead.
You can't wait to get home - Two full weeks free from school, to sleep in in the mornings and maybe watch some TV.
"Oh my god! That car just fell!" A woman ahead screamed, staring out the front window of the bus.
Immediately everyone is clamoring to get a good view ahead. Cars never fall. Even if they do fail, the emergency battery would always kick in so it would slowly drift to the ground. But there it is, you watch as a car ahead of you falls the mile drop to the ground, crashing into a sidewalk below.
You suddenly feel vertigo. You're standing in a floating box that could fall to the ground at any minute.
"Those poor souls..." An old lady sighs.
"WHAT IS THAT?!" More struggling to get a good view. This sight is ten times more horrifying - Rising from the ground is some sort of rippling blue... energy? It looks like water but streaked with rays of light. It's approaching you very slowly, maybe 10 mph. But it's still almost here. How is it coming out of the ground? What's it made of? Suddenly you're glad you're at a higher level. As you watch, one of the cars below is engulfed. It shudders to a halt and then falls. They're all falling now, every car touched by this thing. It resembles a meteor shower, with the ground lighting up with hundreds of tiny explosions as the cars hit.
The driver desperately hits the Manual Drive button and steers the bus upward, ignoring oncoming traffic and causing many people to fall towards the back of the bus. Holding on to your chair, you observe as the blue energy penetrates the back end of the bus, passing over many terrified people. You're relieved to see that it doesn't kill them, but that doesn't mean it's not lethal. You can only stare as it slowly wraps around you.
It almost feels like the skin of a bubble. You feel it running over your entire body, and then it's gone, finishing it's journey through the bus and passing through the front end.
A silence for ten seconds, maybe the danger has passed? Perhaps the bus has an extra emergency battery that remained intact. You almost feel like laughing.
But it just gets worse. Suddenly theres an ear-splitting sonic boom, probably the sound catching up with the light. That seemed to be the last straw for the bus, as it, too, started falling. You feel butterflies in your stomach as you hurtle screaming towards the ground, but then your head bangs against the window and everything goes dark.
***
What happened?
Your arms and legs feel numb, but they still work. You're almost afraid to open your eyes for fear of what you might see, but you do. An entire side of the bus is missing, open to the sidewalk. How could you possibly have survived? There isn't even any dead bodies, but there are several blood stains. You stand up, but promptly fall back down again. Man, your legs feel like jelly. You pull yourself up and stumble out through the side of the bus.
A deflated parachute is covering the bus, so that solves the mystery of why you're not dead. Why only buses, though? Maybe nobody believed those huge, non-aerodynamic hunks of metal would ever fly.
There isn't any other people on the street. An alarm is sounding in the distance though, and you see another crashed car up ahead. Looking up, you see that there's a large chunk missing from a building overhead. Perhaps your bus crashed into it? You also notice several pillars of smoke rising to the sky, there's bound to be a lot of fires around the city.
What do you do?