Ricebowl 70

  Sleep paralysis was an awfully strange thing. The first time that you had it you felt absolutely terrified, your eyes being the only thing that could move with your joints and bones being bolted to the mattress and, although it ended in a few minutes, it would always leave you sitting on the edge of your bed, unable to sleep. Of course, the paralysis was only the second most terrifying effect of the condition as the first was the hallucinations that you saw, ones you assumed that were the result of sleep oozing together with reality to create some sort of coma state but there was always a feeling that they were real. You had only been paralysed a few times but everytime it was always the same, the being itself begin a dark shape at the edge of the room, like a shadow by almost certainly 3 dimensional, just standing there and staring at you, not moving a single muscle. When you were finally able to move again it would disappear into a blink, going back into your subconscious as yo...

  All your life you had been on the quest to find the most elusive catch. You wanted to become the god of the rod, the thing that fish fear more than anything else and since you got your first fishing rod and some cheap bait you scrounge up, catching cod and bass first of all, the fish being small at first. But, as time went on and your fishing skills increases, you caught bigger and bigger fish, you got better and stronger rods and you got much more alluring bait, your catches becoming more bountiful and the fish you caught becoming rarer. You were long past the days of merely catching cod and haddock with you having caught herrings and sawfish and Marlins as well as the beasts of the ocean such as the great white shark or the sunfish. You had even caught things that weren’t fish like crocodiles and lobsters with you even having managed to catch a horseshoe crab in the rain at one point. But you wanted more, you wanted a fish that no one had ever seen before and you wanted it now ...

  You could hear the sound of the waves lashing and hitting against the cliffs, a soft hum escaping your lips as you’d walk. You had always found the coast much more comforting than in the night then in the day, the lack of seagulls screeching out across the air and the much reduced traffic of ferries and haulers meaning that you could wander around with your own thoughts for once. You’d look over to the water, seeing as the darkness would shift up and down slowly like a chest moving up and down when it breathed, the waves lashing against the side wall and letting out a few noises that comforted instead of annoyed. Your eyes would trace the water, slowly moving across the waves before you’d see a yellow bead in the middle of the water with you recognising that as one of the coastal research vessels that they had brought over from the north. You had heard on the news that they were there to track a reported whale sighting in the area which they had thought was bizarre as it was both...

  One of the good things about the apocalypse was that there wasn’t any calendars which meant you didn’t have to worry about what day it was. The bad thing was that meant you didn’t get the weekends off anymore, the grind going on and on as you tried to make something of the ruined state that had been left behind when the bombs dropped. You had sided with the minutemen, figuring that they were the most rational bet given the other option were the armour clad maniacs and the people trying to populate the world with synths and since your involvement you had made your way up their ranks. You had also helped them innovate, the taming of beasts from the rad scorpion to the feral ghouls meaning that they had additional combat capabilities to the, as well as better defence of logistical veins. Currently the highest priority of the minutemen was food stability, the high command figuring that a better fed populace would be better at fighting raiders and other enemies which meant you were wa...