JAHpowBump, write something thrilling/scary. Characters, setting, and all that jazz are up to you!
Devastation.
That was the first and only thing that came to mind amidst the wreckage. The bow of the ship that had collided with ours was in tatters and jutted out nearly through our entire main deck, leaving unhealable scars on our vessel. The panic leading up to the collision was quite quickly settled as crew members began running up left and right to assess the situation. The fog lights were fluttering and beginning to dim as we donned our flashlights, the waves breaking against the stern more violently by the minute. Casualties seemed to be at a minimum, but worry began to set as the vastness of the ship that had breached us dawned upon us.
A massive freighter, nearly triple in size compared to ours judging by the size of the bow, had hit us and moored into our vessel like a latching claw. Reports quickly came in that we were not in immediate danger - the punctures to our hull by the freighter were also being sealed tightly by it's massive weight and minimal water was pouring in. Nothing we couldn't manage - for now. The collision had damaged our sensory and communication arrays badly, so all hails went unnoticed by the both the freighter and any nearby ships. We were stuck in the middle of a mid-sized storm in the middle of the Baltic Sea, so some charter ships were bound to run by us sooner or later. However, that seemed to be the least of our worries amongst the contained chaos.
Engineers on the deck kept raving louder and louder while waving their flashlights on the looming, massive bow above us. Taking a closer look, the freighter seemed to absorb light that hit it. Not instantly, but slowly. Batteries from carried lights were checked repeatedly at first due to a reason for finding a logical reason for the phenomenon. Logical reasoning was soon left behind. One of the still operational larger searchlights was pointed beyond the bow of the freighter, and the tension could be felt in the air. Before the spotlight was flickered and dimmed into oblivion as the other light sources, we could all see that the ship was absolutely massive, a size that would never fit into the Baltic sea under the Storebaelt bridge in Denmark and while the darkness seemed to play with our heads, the width of the ship seemed unimaginably large, ballooning in size as the light ran longer upon its port side. If the storm wind and the roaring waves had given up for a moment, the scared gasps of the crew witnessing this could only have been outdone by the eerie silence afterwards.
The hookshots had been handy in placing our ropes to rappel aboard the freighter - something that seemed to vanish from existence for a second when you blinked. All available emergency flares were shot up into the sky to give us light, less to inform others of our position. The waves had calmed and the rain was letting down. We took our first steps onto the freighter, trying to convey the damage it had befallen while looking down at the smear it had left on our vessel, nearly cutting the front deck in half. But nothing moved. Everything sat still. No creaking of metal. Not the faintest of sounds. The emergency flares, aimed to land as close to the top of the freighter as possible were starting to flicker and dim out. We moved ahead as carefully as possible.
One of the engineers who had been the most silent aboard our vessel while examining the damage took point. It's not like any of us understood what taking point even means outside the fiction all of us had witnessed in our lives, watching movies and shows and playing video games. But we moved accordingly. Out of nowhere, the freighter became alight. Again, it was a scene straight out of a film, as if we had been wearing night vision goggles imbued with phosporent green light and suddenly had to rip them off due to being focused on by a spotlight of immense power. Some of the boarding crew spat out a spit take, nearly vomiting, by the sudden and overwhelming intrusion of light. And that's when we heard the screams.
Beneath us, the sounds emanating from our vessel. Groaning of steel as it bends and breaks upon tons and tons of weight it was never meant to bear. A few shots of gunfire, possibly from the shiphands who always kept going on about a possible kidnapping attempt as if we were in Somalian waters. The instantaneous explosion of all of our wooden structures underneath the main deck exploding at the same time into millions of indirect shrpanels across the ocean night. The combustion of our fuel storage into an uproaring ball of flame shooting out from beneath our aft deck, still unable to brighten ourvision more than the freighter's sudden light discharge. All of this, that we seemed unbelievable, was drowned out by the screams. The screams of everyone left behind. It only lasted little longer than ten seconds when we all realized they were gone. The screeches of agony came to a sudden halt as fast as they had begun, like they were being succed into a vacuum. The light emanating from the explosion disappeared like a blip. We had heard a few distinct words and voices from those who were now gone, but none of us could make sense what had been said amongst the chaos. One of the stewards shook in place like the rest of us, but ran to the side of the freighter to look down. He was silent, leaning on the edge, and came back up with one of the hookshots. The rope was cut precisely in half and not a smidgeon of our vessel could be seen in the waters below as the freighter's engines were heard firing up below deck.
The night-come-day situation kept us moving forward in a state of shock, none of us being able to grasp the reality, or unreality of the situation. The gigantic size of the ship creeped on us slowly, almost too slowly. It was clear now that this ship had to be of extraordinary origin as it seemed to be more in an oval or half-cylindrical shape even with it's arrowhead-shaped bow that had hit us, something that shouldn't be able to breeze through the water like it suddenly did. There was no freight on this freighter, that much was gathered by the first glances we could make after our eyes began getting used to the soaring light. The light seemed to emanate from everywhere around us, yet from nowhere, with no visible light source in sight. There seemed to be a sort of superstructure in the... middle... of the ship. Size was starting to become harded to grasp as we moved on. A muffled scream was heard from behind. One of our engineers was gone, leaving nothing behind but his flashlight, rapidly flickering and dimming on the deck of the ship. Someone shouted for us to run as fast as we could towards a hangar-like opening near the superstructure's looming side. We ran. There were four of us. We got to the large doorway that led to the hangar and it opened up instantly as we approached it, like a hundred ton garage door. As we got in, the light permeated the insides of the structure as well and the door shut behind us. There were two of us left. No screams were heard.
It didn't come quickly, but it came soon. The darkness. The more you looked at the lit up floors, walls and ceilings of the structures, the less you could see. We soon hurried up and half-blindfolded ourselves, changing the fold from one eye to another as our visions began dimming. It was clear now, more than ever, that this ship somehow absorbed light and used it as a source.. for something. It could even use the light that our eyes use to see and reflect into vision, for something to absorb light out of. We kept moving our blindfolds and moved up along the superstructure's stairs, winding in a peculiar pattern along the walls but still climbing higher and higher as we went. As we reached the top, the freighter's "own" lighting had begun to dim, and we could feel the rumbling throughout our beings. Whatever this was.. is... it was hungry for more.
**This post was edited on Sep 27th 2017 at 4:27:28pm
