Exercise 1

In under 30 minutes, with no distractions, improvise in prose on the topics below. The word count should be at least 500.
A Voyage Round Your Bedroom

Through the oversize portal they came. Across galaxies and stellar arms of green and blue and grey they came. Through the oversize portal, of mindboggling size, a thousand times the size of the ship, bounded by organic matter, with transparent matter fixed. At regular, almost pre-ordained intervals, the portal would open, and great gaseous clouds would emanate. For a long time now, the high priests of space flight had been determined to map this most enigmatic of phenomena. Was it a signal, a form of crude language? Many had debated that in fact the deep, booming noises that centred vibrated from the portals, the dual portals in fact, although one never opened, simply its colour changed from year to year, the booming noises and colour changes were some crude language: or some base form of an incredibly complicated language.

Through the oversize portal they came, timing it so the eruptions of gas had ended, and before the window of opportunity was lost, into the darker interior of the portal, beyond where any Moo or Mar had gone before.

Landing on the nearest elavated plane, they found the surface soft underfoot, vast lines of interwoven cabling stretching as far as their eyes could see. Soft, damp, almost tropical feeling. One of the explorers look at his instrumentation and took a deep breath inside his helmet. Posterity would tell as he unclipped the safety bolts around his neck and popped his own lid, a tiny gasp of air escaping as the pressures equalised. His colleagues looked around in horror, but after all, he was the chief Mar, ahead of all the Moos in their carefully defined social strata.

After a pause and a tentative sniff of the air, he took a deep breath.

“Almost fetid. There's no sign of anything alive here, and yet it smells bestial.”

The underling nearest him nodded and said “you'll forgive us then, if we don't take our helmets off? We're here to map, not to sniff strange stenches that we may never know the effect of.”

The leader's shoulders shook slightly as he silently laughed. “That's fine. And I won't mention it when we get back, that you were too afraid. No matter, you'll know.”

The underling turned away, cheeks reddening, neck flushing with shame and anger and disdain. He could take his helmet off if he wanted. In fact. His helmet. That was the answer. He stepped smartly forward towards his superior, who half turned in surprise.

“What are you,” he began, but was cut short by the crunch of his underling's helmet faceplate impacting into his nose. He recoiled in pain and anger, and began to reach for the bush knife on his belt, but the underling, shorter but faster and stronger, grabbed him and butted him again, the blood smearing and distorting his vision, and again, and again and again. The superior went limp in his hands and he pushed him back, throwing the rag doll corpse away.

“Clean me,” he said, staring into the bloody dark caused by the matter slowly sliding down his faceplate. He felt the rush as two of the others who had been standing by in mute horror moved to grab something, anything, he didn't see what, to clean the face plate. Still smeared, but with their wide eyed faces visible, he looked at them.

“This is a dangerous place, with dangerous air, and animals. Let's get back to the ship and take some readings, and scout from the air. It's the only way to be sure. Once we're on the way back to the portal, we can mourn the loss of our great Mar chief, may his name never be forgotten, but never spoken.”

With the invocation at the end of his speech he looked at his colleagues threateningly. They looked between each other and returned the invocation. “May his name never be spoken but never be forgotten.”

He nodded approvingly, and stared over the precipice a small distance away from them, sheer and geometrically straight.

“We'll dispose of the body over there, from the ship.”

The two looked again, and shrugged. The social order had been upset, but was reestablishing itself. They picked up the body, one to the legs and one to the arms, and trudged aboard the ship. In a short while, they came through the oversize portal, one lighter, one free.