Caverns & Taverns

It's been five years since I've started this adventure, and I'm honestly surprised that I'm still here. This began merely as an attempt to see if I could do any creative writing; an exercise into something different. I had little clear vision of what I was doing at first, and I would have thought that after so long, I would have finished at least one of the stories that I set out to do. A deployment and finishing school has interfered with writing as much as I used to. Still, I'm proud of what I've done, and want to thank you all for still plugging in. This has been a great community to be a part of, and look forward to sticking here for a while longer.

You wake up on the cold hard ground alone, feeling groggy and confused. Your memory of where you last were is fuzzy, and you don't have any idea how you got here, wherever here even is. You push yourself off the ground and onto your feet, finding yourself in a darkened space with but a single lit torch, mounted against the wall. As you slowly rise to your feet, you brush some of the dust off, and let your eyes adjust to the darkness, noticing that the clothes you were wearing are completely gone! That's not right, you know that much. Wherever you came from, whatever you were doing, you had some form of clothes on, you're sure of it.

You tepidly reach for the torch and pull it from it’s mounting on the wall. The perfectly circular room is small enough that you can easily see from one side to another, despite the dimness. In the center of the room is a pool of oil. You take the torch to the oil and light it, filling the room with much more illumination. Here, you can more clearly see the confines of the room. Into one side of the room is a gate of sorts, with large metal bars in the way. Curiously, the light from the oil doesn't seem to illuminate far past the bars. What lays on the other side is unknown, but it has to be better than in here. Along the brick walls of this circular room are mounted a seemingly endless menagerie of items. Mostly weapons, but not exclusively. On either side of the barred gateway is a full sized mirror embedded into the walls, allowing you to see yourself completely, nudity and all.