Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26277607-20160710015306

''This is a remake of a story that I submitted a few years ago when I was new to this wiki. The story was terrible, so I made some major changes and kept the same theme. I hope that it's better this time and I would like to hear your feedback on it.''

We were on a bus, heading away from the city. I was 12 at the time, and I was with my whole school. The city was in ruins. Some buildings were still burning from the bombs. The teachers told us that the enemy soldiers were coming in and that we were going out to the country where we would be safe.

The bus ride was long. We were in the bus for about two hours before it stopped. By this time, it was starting to get dark. We had stopped at a building in the middle of the countryside. It was surrounded by a fence, and there was nothing else but fields in sight. We were removed from the buses and brought inside the building.

The building was dark and had very few windows. One of the teachers turned a light on and then started speaking to us.

“We know you’re all probably scared about what’s going on. You had heard about the war from the news but likely never thought it would come to you. But it has and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

Another teacher stopped him and started whispering something to him. I tried to make out what they were saying to each other, but I couldn’t. They seemed nervous and confused. The teacher resumed speaking.

“Anyways, like I was saying, the war is affecting you and we can’t do anything about it. So we are going to give you these.”          The teacher pulled what looked like some sort of mint out of his pocket. It had a smiley face on it. “It pains us to tell you this, but your families are gone. They were lost in the bombings.”

This aroused conversation. A few kids started crying. Many were becoming suspicious. Something didn’t seem right.

“Quiet down. I know it’s tragic, but let me finish. We have nobody to send you back to. There aren’t enough of us to take care of you all. This is what these candies are for.” We all looked at him with confusion. “When you eat one of these, it will put you into a sleeping state where you will live happily in your dreams. When the war is over and everything is normal, we will wake you up.”

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">This caused even more confusion. What they were saying didn’t make any sense. But they were teachers. They hadn’t lied to us before. One boy yelled, “This doesn’t make any sense. Scientifically, we would need food and water to live. How does this work?”

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">The teacher murmured something to his colleagues. A man walked up to him. It was the science teacher. “This is a new type of science; recently discovered,” he said. “Local scientists knew that something like this might happen, so they created these candies.”

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">Now we had confirmation from the science teacher. For many of us, this was enough. But there were still those like me who still saw something wrong. I knew there had to be a catch.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">The teachers started passing out the candies to everyone. I was scared. I felt like I shouldn’t be there. It felt almost like how you feel when you’re really late for something. I knew they were responsible adults and that I should listen to them, but everything felt strange. I snuck through the crowd of kids and found an exit. I ran out through it. There was a gate at the end of the fence where we entered from, but I didn’t want to be caught running through it. So I waited outside the building.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">I waited there for hours. Normally, I would have been bored out of my mind, but my mind was filled with too many thoughts. It was pitch black outside by now. I checked my watch. It was 11:00 at night. I heard noise coming from the building. The teachers were walking through the gate and onto the bus. The bus left, heading back to the city. There was something odd going on. I thought that their families were gone and that they would be killed by the enemy soldiers. Who would be watching the students?

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">I decided to walk into the building. I couldn’t hear anyone inside. It was pitch black, so I turned on one of the lights. I then mustered up the bravery to walk into the room that the teachers had given us the candies in. There, lying on the floor, were all of the students. Mice scurried around them, along with various insects. They weren’t asleep. They were dead.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">I saw a box on the floor near where the teachers had been. It was filled with the candies. I took a few of them. I started yelling for help. I wanted to wake them up. They looked dead, but they should’ve been alive. They were supposed to be sleeping. None of them answered back. I ran out of the building and down the road. I kept running, but got tired and started jogging, then walking. It was late and I wanted to go to sleep. After miles of walking, I finally found a village.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">The first house I found, I knocked on the door. A woman answered it and let me in. I told her about the city and the war and how I lost my family and how I wanted to know what happened to my friends. She calmed me down and said I could stay with them.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">The woman was married and had two kids. I ended up spending the rest of my childhood with them as their adopted child. My new father was very smart. I showed him one of the candies I had taken and told him about how it used some new science that allowed you to sleep without needing food or water. He was very skeptical about this and did some tests to it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about with this new science stuff,” he said. “These candies are poisonous. You should get rid of them so no one gets hurt.”

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">After the war ended, he said he would take me to the building. At this point, he was becoming more and more skeptical about my story. When we finally arrived there, nothing remained of it but ashes. “It looks like it was a storage building of some sort that got destroyed during the bombings,” he told me.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">As time went on, my family kept insisting that they help me find my original family. I didn’t want to go back. It was comforting enough to know that they could still be alive, and I didn’t want to live with the disappointment of knowing that they were dead if that were to be the case.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">After a few years, I left my new family. I moved to a new village far away from everything. I got a job at a farm and was satisfied with it. All this time I tried to put the puzzle pieces of everything that had happened together. I accepted the fact that the teachers lied to us and that everyone from my school was dead. It just seemed like a strange thing to happen. After reading some history books, I learned a lot about things that seemed strangely similar to my case. I learned about something called genocide, which is when a group of people try to kill the entirety of another group of people. There was this guy named Adolf Hitler who tried to do this with Jewish people and other groups. But if this was genocide happened, I couldn’t think of anything that we all had in common at the school.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">Apparently the suicide aspect of it isn’t too uncommon, either. I read that there were Muslim extremist groups that would convince young people to commit suicide attacks and that they would be rewarded in the afterlife if they did so. Similar things were also seen in Japan during the same time as Hitler. In ancient times, people were also sacrificed.

<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;line-height:107%;font-family: "TimesNewRoman",serif">I never returned to the city. Even after all of the research I did, I couldn’t figure out who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. I told people about my experience, but they all thought that I was mentally ill after experiencing the war. I never found out anything about what happened at the building or any of my teachers. Even though I’m certain it’s not the case, I can’t help but wonder if the teachers were right. Maybe my dad was wrong. Maybe they’re not dead and are still sleeping under the ashes of the building. Maybe the teachers will come back one day and wake them when things are back to normal.

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<p class="MsoNormal">''Just in case I did a terrible job with this story, I'm going to summarize what happened. Basically, this kid grew up in a country that's government was linked with an organization that believed in a certain genocide. The school that the kid went to was a school made up entirely of the demographic targeted. When the war hit the city, it was ordered for the genocide to take place against the school. Evidence of this was destroyed, which is mainly why the kid can't find out what happened. All of this isn't supposed to be crystal clear in the story because of the perspective that it was told in. However, I hope that I put in enough details pointing out to this that the reader can assume something along these lines happened.'' <ac_metadata title="Voluntary Death"> </ac_metadata>