Can’t Make It Back Again BY: ALLI WOOD
On a planet known only for its misfortune there lived a boy everyone called Rose.
Rose was half Toge and half human. Fujin was the planet ’s name. It was named after the Japanese Kami of winds, Fujin, because in its most prosperous days people glided in ships across the skies for a chance at luck. Toge are humanoids best known for their two horns that poked from their head, and you know what humans are. Rose operated a machine known as the Roku-Kama, Kama for short. They were insect-like machines that harvested the rock for resources which had become less than abundant in recent memory. His company had not given thought to replace the same twenty year old models that his mother and father once piloted. To him and his colleagues, today was the same as every other day, the same day he had been forced to repeat for seven years.
He boarded an elevator, a ratchety old machine that screamed and quaked for hours on end.
He wore a hat above his horns, resting on a mess of fuzzy black hair that curled around pointed stone grey ears. The doors had been so heavily beaten and rusted that opening it was considered a job with a paycheck. As it took him deep below ground, the same doubts danced around his mind. He countered them with success, but each time they reincarnated with a greater fighting spirit.
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HE COUNTERED THEM WITH SUCCESS, BUT EACH TIME THEY REINCARNATED WITH A GREATER FIGHTING SPIRIT.
As a child, even today as a semi-sturdy nineteen-year-old, the mines were the same as
the oceans. He could never see the bottom, and if he could, he would lose all his breath and be forgotten. This was not to gloss over the hundreds of strange monsters which lurk in those hidden depths. He swore he felt an odd skin-crawling sensation at the thought of what could potentially meet him there at the bottom.
