This was the sort of morning where I hit the snooze button as many times as possible and then convinced myself I still had one more snooze in me. I am running slow and day dreaming of falling into a vat of coffee and absorbing the caffeine through my skin. While I’m not certain Osmosis is the way to go, the coffee pot is brewing. So while I wait, let’s jump into the morning’s writing prompt shall we? So ready, set, write.
I kind of like this one. Its not my usual sort of thing, but I like the mistaken identity. I think as part of a fantasy story this could actually be an interesting character. Maybe not a main character, but something. I’ll have to think about it. After coffee.
Wednesday, January 12th: The hunt was just beginning.
The hunt was just the beginning. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he knew it now. He thought that if he could escape and simply evade capture then he would be free. Something in his mind termed the hunt for him as this thing that had a set point for both beginning and end. The beginning was when they found him gone and the end was when they realized they couldn’t catch him and gave up.
He controlled one end, but didn’t think the hunt would take too long to run its course. After all, he was nobody in the grand scheme of things. He was just caught up by mistake. They thought he was someone else and rather than admitting their mistake he was sentenced under someone else’s name for someone else’s crimes. As Micha hadn’t actually done any of the crimes and in fact was horrified by the list of crimes laid at his feet, he was no reason to actually accept punishment for them.
Escape seemed like the best option once he worked out how to do it. In his mind he thought that perhaps, once he escaped they might even take the opportunity to go after the real criminal.
He hadn’t counted on them not actually giving up.
In the grand scheme of things, the escape was fairly simple. While Micha was no master criminal, he was quite intelligent and very good at puzzles and games. He was also very good at seeing the patterns in things that others saw as random. The others in the prison, were locked up mostly for acts of brutality. Most were unplanned. Those with plans or crimes that required more thought tended to be executed fairly quickly. The men here were useful as labor and since they lacked planning capacity were not viewed as much of a threat.
As a result., those who were brought in to keep watch over the prisoners as they went about their set tasks were little better than the prisoners themselves. Many of them were members of the military who lacked the internal discipline everyday military life required. Often they served as guards to work off their own punishment as part of the military justice system. Micha thought it oddly fitting that criminal soldiers guarded criminal citizens.
Once he saw the possibility of escape, Micha worked out all of the details, more as an act of planning than anything else. He needed something to keep his brain occupied during his long days of hard labor. While his body worked at the set tasks, his mind worked out all of the little details. As he worked out each of the details and began to slowly accrue the elements needed for escape, his body changed, the labor of the punishment given him transforming him into something else. He lost much of the softness that he had before. His muscles strengthened and grew. Slowly Micha realized that the prison was trying to turn him into the criminal they thought he was. While he could accept that the increased physicality would help with his escape, he was not willing to stay and let the prison complete the transformation. It was then that his escape went from a planning exercise and became a reality.
Ten til Midnight 