Plot for Ten to Twelve Pager
A village discovers its land is sitting on a plethora of jade and a mining corporation pledges to buy their land in exchange for employment for the villagers and improved infrastructure e.g. school for the kids. The village votes and the village is turned into a mine.
A well-read girl called Thora excels in the school and is tipped to be the first to leave the village and pursue higher education and have a future. She is incredibly intelligent.
A mining-incurred landslide occurs and she is buried underneath. Many fatalities occur. Her parents perish in the disaster. She survives but sustains injuries to her head to the point that she can no longer discern letters clearly, a severe grade of dyslexia. She realises she can no longer go beyond the walls of the mine and pursue a better life or education. She is trapped. The head of the mine and his wife are barren and childless and decides to take her in and raise her as their own.
Twenty years later. The girl becomes a guard of the mine and is exceptional at what she does. As the sole female guard in her crew, she earns her place amidst a barrel of men and seeks to skin alive anyone who tries to rob the mine of this coveted gemstone.
Even twenty years later, the demand for jade continues to rise in response to the boom of the middle-class. Excavation has been relentless and the mine is slowly culled of all its natural resources. What remains is scarce and the mine company grows nervous as it faces the uncertainty of its future.
Miners and guards alike start to realize it will be the end of their careers too and they start to go awry, stealing the jade for themselves, becoming more self-seeking, more self-indulgent in order to secure their own future once the mine closes down for good.
Thora also is uncertain of what she is going to do if the mine closes down. There are not many options out there for an illiterate woman. With added rigor and almost desperation, she continues to do her job. She culls down more miners (even corrupt guards!) and searches them for jade, beating them, even killing one or two in the hope that what she salvages from these suspected thieves will be enough to fill the coffers and keep the mine open. On the side, she decides that she must learn to read just in case and is taught by an older miner, Yastar, who has a young daughter. Yastar is a good miner, loyal and trustworthy. He is one of the few who does not steal and actually wants to remain in the mine so that his daughter can continue to go to the school. The young daughter is precocious and bright and excels at her studies. Her intelligence and insight reminds the guard of herself, when she was young.
An excavation on the hills reveals a barley bush: the only thing that grows on the dry land. The guard decides to dig underneath it. She knows that when there’s moisture, crystallization and stone formation could potentially be nearby. She digs and discovers there is jade underneath the barley bush. Jackpot. They begin to mine it out. The guard and the rest of the crew insert TNT explosives to carve out a tunnel for the excavation to take place properly. The TNT is detonated and an explosion occurs - only later to realize that the miner’s young daughter had been playing on the hills and has now been caught in the explosion.
The young daughter is severely injured, shattered ribcage and intense fever. The doctor tells Yastar that there is a medicine that may dampen the fever and prevent it from getting worse. Doctor tells him of the cost. Yastar cannot afford to pay for the medication as he does not have enough wages and does not know what to do. Out of desperation, he goes back to the barley bush in the dead of night and steals a handful of jade, but just enough to cover the costs of the medication. No more, no less.
The guard inspects the crate of jade that is about to be shipped off to the marketplace. With the barley bush find, the crate has been filling up nicely. Now, it’s nearly reached the brim but one of the guards tell her that they are a few pieces short. The guard frustrated goes out to the barley bush mine and notices fresh footprints on the ground.
The guard sets out to find who stole the pieces and a game of cat-and-mouse commences. A party is held that evening in the mess hall, to celebrate the new jade discovery. The mess hall is filled with miners and guards celebrating. They pat Thora on the back but Thora has other things on her mind. She is set to spot the thief who is stopping the crate and their futures from moving forward.
After a series of cat-and-mouse continue in the hall and Thora chases the thief which is a shadow running on the hills. Thora tracks him down and shoots him in the back. The shadow falls but is still breathing. She turns him around and reveals that it is Yastar. Yastar’s jacket contains exactly ten pieces of jade and Thora extracts them from his jacket. Inside the jacket is also a map to the hospital and a wallet picture of him and his daughter. Yastar confesses and kneels down. Thora looks at the contents of his jacket and looks out at the city beyond the hills. She struggles to read the signs of the billboards speckled out there in the night and realises that there is a little girl out there who can read and may have a chance of recovering, and getting out of the mine’s confines in a way that the guard never could.
Conflicted, she starts to point the gun at Yastar’s head, pauses, then places the gun in his hand and lets him go. She gives his jacket and his photo. Aghast, he staggers then collects himself and takes off into the night.
A few days later, the guard receives a parcel which contains a note saying ‘Our gift to you’. She struggles to read what the note says but unwraps the parcel. It reveals a book ‘Call Of the Wild’ by Jack London, a book which she noticed on the bookshelf in Yastar’s cabin room during one of their lessons. She opens the book and something falls on her lap. It is a jade piece with a bullet in the centre, the jade piece in Yastar’s jacket that stopped Thora’s bullet and gave her time to decide to spare his life.
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
andulkaphoto
dededos
vaporwave
