The Shattered Fleet: Scattered
(First try at typing this out on my laptop)
“You want a tale of heroes who fought against the oppressive lords of their Home? well this isn’t a fucking fairy tale... both sides did some fucked up things, but beyond that... let me tell you the tale of the First among Equals... let me tell you about Thomas Gola, The Prisoner who became a Lord...” - Unknown Story Teller
the thing that awoke Tom was the sound of the morning bell, rising from under the same tattered cloth that once covered his mother’s body after she had grew sick and passed away to the wasting disease that swept the cell block when he was young and weak, when she was scared for his life and gave him her portion of the medicine the guard’s so ‘kindly’ gave to the Cell block Bosses.
he exited his cell, the door sealing shut behind him as the Guard’s sealed it once they knew he wasn’t inside anymore, a scrolling wall of text appearing on a small wall panel that he only glanced at to see his work-site for the day, and he sighed as it was the Smelter once again. He knew it was due to his mother sacrificing herself to keep him alive that he was always assigned the Smelter, his mother being a favored ‘comfort’ woman of the Block Boss, a mutated hulk of a man who was called ‘Little J’ by his crew of hanger on’s that did the more ‘unclean’ parts of the business so J can keep his hands clean so he can continue with his facade of a kind man that only fooled the children that he fathered.
the thing J had seemingly dismissed was the fact Tom was growing stronger each week he was assigned to the Smelter, the younger man having the duty of lugging the ‘lighter’ scrap metal to the massive Smelter pit from the ‘Guard Dump’ where you could see the shining lights of the Guard’s Towers from the top of the dangerous metal pile, many younger prisoners causing the metal to collapse and bury them under a tide of metal that usually left them dead, crippled, or simple and those last two states weren’t far from dead due to J ordering that anyone not capable of pulling their own weight has lost his ‘aegis of protection’ which usually had one of his crew killing the person by the end of the week.
He sighed as he started walking, waving solemnly at the few of his block mates that knew where he worked constantly, and how a single misstep or mistake could send him plummeting down into the molten metal to burn to death like so many ‘accidents’.
(how was this?)
