Inspirations of Daedalus

I’ve been writing a story for my Creative Writing class.  We found words written on signs or other places all over the school.  When we put them all together, we ended up with a list of 240 words.  The assignment was to write a story using 100 of those words.  We also have to use correct story format (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution), but beyond that we can write whatever we want, even the length is up  to us as long as we use the 100 words.

My partner and I decided on a story sometime in the future where there are cameras everywhere, you never know when someone’s watching you, and if you get caught there is no sentencing.  It doesn’t matter if you killed someone or stole a box of crackers (which one of the characters did), you get dropped in the middle of this giant maze.  If you can find the way out, then you’ll be free, but no one’s ever done that.

If you stay near the center of the maze—Daedalus—then you’re relatively safe.  There’s food, it’s in good shape, and the monsters don’t usually go there.  But, the further away from the middle you go, the more deadly it becomes.  There are various Challenges, monsters, puzzles, all sorts of things.  The monsters, of course, will kill you if they can, but the other things won’t harm you, but you can only pass if you get them right.

Also, there are different biomes (yeppers, totally just used a minecraft term there) the center is stone.  It’s clean and there’s sunlight, it doesn’t rain much, but there are some pools to drink from.  Other places could be anything.  One is frozen solid.  The floors and walls are made of ice, and it’s constantly in mid-blizzard.  One is all mirrors.  In one of them, gravity changes.

Anyway when the two characters (Cracker and Dillinger) find what they find (I can’t say what ‘cause that’d blow the ending) what they realize is that what they thought they wanted isn’t really worth it.  They’d been searching for what everyone thought was the best, but they figured out that to get it, they’d haveta give up what they already had, and to them, it wasn’t worth the tradeoff.

Writing this has really made me think about what I want.  Is it really me that wants it?  Or is it just the fact that society has told me all my life how good it is?  Have you ever asked yourself that?  If you really think about it, it can blow your mind.  Or at least it did mine.

-The Shadow Knight