Endeavor

Endeavor is a short story written by CaptainLandr0ver, taking place within the Generation 2 continuity. It was written for the Okoto Writing Contest.

Story
For many minutes, the only thing Urgus could truly make out was the temperature.

Well, not really.

Of all the things he was trying to make sense of, it was the temperature that he was the closest to figuring out—and that still wasn’t saying much. The only thing he knew was that it was painful and searing in some areas, especially in his left leg. In other areas, it was less severe, with something else more subtly uncomfortable filling in for it. If he knew anything else about his situation he likely would’ve been able to determine by now whether this was heat or cold.

Oh no.

It was cold. Undeniably.

He then felt a wetness spread across his laid-down body, again most severe in his left leg. He shook it with all of the strength he could muster in this near-brain-dead state he seemed to be in. His leg, however, refused to move.

“Goodness, you’re alive!”

These breathy, wavering words shook Urgus awake, forcing him to open his eyes. Instantly, they were blinded by brightness and singed by fierce winds. He felt a thick hand grab him by the shoulder. Instinctively, he lashed out threw it off of him without much thought.

“Very alive.”

By now, he could see vaguely what was before him: the triangular, dark purple mask of a fellow Okotan from the Region of Earth looming a mere meter away from his own. He was able to move his hand in front of his eyes to shield them and slowly allowed his eyes to adjust before looking again. Even with his vision well, he could barely make out anything due to the utter confusion he was in. He couldn’t remember anything from the recent past, only distant memories which helped little in his understanding.

“Your leg’s stuck?”

Urgus tried to speak, but as soon as the sharp air met his mouth he gagged and coughed.

“Okay, just breathe. Ignore the pain. You’ll get used to it.”

Urgus acted accordingly and tried to maintain steady breathing, ignoring the resulting burning feeling coating the inside of his mouth. The pounding of his heart became less and less erratic.

“Your leg is stuck, right?”

He simply nodded, not wanting to risk another incident.

“Stay here, then.”

As Urgus’s breathing steadied further, he decided he should sit up from his odd position to try and see where he actually was. He already could recognize that there was snow around him, but couldn’t deduce from just that fact his location. After all, the weather on Okoto hadn’t been very consistent lately.

After digging his hands into the crusty snow surrounding his upper body, he was able to sit up. His head rising just barely above the snow, he saw a white, icy shore in front of him, speckled by strange, grey, fragmented objects. Some were embedded in the snow, but most were being dragged out to sea. He observed the multitude of light blue icebergs beyond the shore, some of which seemingly had chunks broken off of them quite recently. One iceberg, in particular, confused him. A considerable section of it seemed to be sinking into the water below in a ragged sheet, parts of it flapping in the wind when they had the chance. It took him a pathetically long amount of time to realize that it was not iceberg, but rather a large section of white canvas. Upon even further inspection, he found a large crow’s nest floating beside it which confirmed his fear that it was a sail.

He looked back, opposite to the shore, and saw against an icy cliffside a dozen Okotans, most adorned in black and/or purple armor. There were more grey fragments—which obviously were wooden—being dragged to a particular area where around half of them were congregated. One was casually walking to him with an ice axe in hand. He recognized him as the Okotan who had found him.

“Where am I?” Urgus spoke, his voice unusually hoarse. After coughing, he added, “And who are you?”

“I don’t remember you being the one to make the jokes,” the Okotan said as he approached him. “I thought that was my job. Captain said so, in fact.”

“This isn’t funny! Where am I?”

“Alright, alright… if you haven’t noticed, we’re on the shore of the Region of Ice right now.”

Just as Urgus feared.

“And you still know who I am, right?” His gleeful smile turned sour as he began to realize that Urgus was, in fact, not joking in the slightest. As he kneeled down next to Urgus, he muttered, “You don’t remember much, do you?”

“No,” Urgus said. He felt inclined to start shifting away from this stranger.

“Well, I’m Hatar, Second Mate of the freelancer freight ship, Endeavor. Does any of that ring a bell?”

“Possibly… I really can’t tell. Can’t remember anything.”

“We’ll fill you in later. For now, we’ve gotta get you unstuck.” After throwing Urgus a blanket, Hatar brushed the snow off of the ice pick he was holding and brushed the snow below Urgus’s torso away. Just as expected, most of Urgus’s left leg was frozen into the ground, while his right was free. Hatar commented, “This’ll take some time to chisel out.”

“What happened to the Endeavor?” Urgus blurted.

Hatar froze when he heard this, and looked to Urgus as if he shared his confusion. “I’m going to be honest and say that we’re not entirely sure.”

While freeing his leg, Hatar repeatedly asked Urgus if he knew anything about the Endeavor. He failed many times to try and spark some sort of memory in Urgus, giving up after a while and deciding to elaborate some more. Apparently, the ship was had been caught in a storm the night before, but most of the crew was too shaken up by the subsequent accident to know exactly what had happened.

After much struggling, Hatar successfully freed Urgus’s leg from the ice with the ice pick. Although the leg was sore, Hatar told him that he should walk on it to get his blood circulating throughout it and thaw it out. This didn’t stop the fact that the soreness intensified when he walked on it; he ended up switching between walking and limping constantly.

By the time the two of them had reached the other Okotans—the crew of the Endeavor—they had begun the construction of a pitiful little tent around the equally pitiful fire they had built, using any and all materials they could salvage. There was enough food recovered from what was left of the ship to feed all of them for three-to-four days, Hatar said. When Urgus got to the makeshift camp and saw the food collection for himself, however, he wasn’t too confident in that fact. He decided that they had likely rationed it into smaller portions already rather than arguing over it.

When Urgus commended them for such sensible decision making in the aftermath of a disaster, the crew gave him strange looks until one Okotan from the Region of Jungle—the boatswain, Kopul, apparently—replied, “Yeah, it didn’t take us long to get things figured out.” He then looked at Hatar with an odd glare which seemed to steal the attention of everyone present for a short amount of time.

After returning the look, Hatar turned to Urgus and said, “Well, what we do need to figure out is this tent we’re trying to make. Kopul over here has already got a design in mind, with his rope-tying skills and all, but he’s not doing so well in this cold weather. So…” he trailed off, first looking past Urgus, then to Kopul, then back to Urgus, and continued, “yeah, we just need your help directing the whole operation, I guess.”

“Directing?” Urgus replied.

What followed was an uncomfortably long period of silence. Urgus felt the soreness in his leg gently return. The wind howled, scattering sparse snowflakes across the area. The already setting sun began to slightly tint the cliffside a dim orange. The Okotans looked to each other, all seemingly frozen solid. As they were still, some of them began to shiver slightly, and those with blankets tightened them around themselves.

It was now that Urgus noticed that not all of them had blankets on. In fact, the ones that had blankets looked to be in better shape than those without. Those without blankets were dirty and their armor was irregular and had gone without repair for some time.

“What’s going on?” Urgus demanded, trying his hardest to make his voice assertive through his chattering teeth. He repeated, “What is going on?

“I wake up this morning—evening, I guess—half frozen into the shore of the Region of Ice with the remains of a freighter scattered around me, not remembering anything that happened the night before. All of you have done little to actually explain to me what’s going on, leaving me to figure everything else out on my own somehow. What, was I kidnapped? Why do I need to ‘direct’ this thing anyway? Why are we even setting up camp, anyway? We need to figure out exactly where we are and move to the nearest bordering region before we keel over and die!”

“I was waiting for you to start being vocal,” someone spoke up. It took him a while, but Urgus soon recognized him as Petiola, the Endeavor’s chief engineer from the Region of Fire, wearing at least three blankets around him.

“Petiola, no,” Hatar grunted. Kopul looked to the chief engineer with a speculative expression.

“He needs to see,” Petiola argued.

“See what?” Urgus bellowed. “Do you guys think this is funny?”

Petiola began to walk up to Urgus. The Earth Okotan shifted away, tensing up and giving the crew member a hard glower. Petiola lifted both of his hands up from under his blankets, letting one blanket fall to the hoarfrost-covered ground. Slowly, he then extended one hand to Urgus, who looked from it and his face and back several times over. “I know what might help you remember.”

Hatar continued to quietly object, with some of the blanketed Okotans joining in. However, the non-blanketed Okotans strangely began to support Petiola. Kopul scooted away from Hatar until he was a bit closer to Petiola than he was to the Earth Okotan. None of this helped Urgus in decided whether or not he should take the crew member’s now jittering hand.

“And if I object?”

There was more silence as the objection and support both died down at an alarmingly fast rate. The wind began to pick up, blowing the snowflakes hard enough for those who were lucky enough to weave between one’s armor to sting a bit. Petiola gradually began to retract his hand, keeping his eyes firmly on Urgus. Hatar, who had looked rather panicked, settled down, deciding to sit down to catch his breath.

“You really shouldn’t,” Kopul uttered loudly, almost jolting Urgus into giving him his attention. He looked to a group of the blanketed Okotan medics who had been working with something Okotan-sized lying and nodded slightly. The medics responded by looking to Urgus and removing some of the fabric from what they had been toiling on: an Okotan from the Region of Stone, who was wearing noticeably yellowed armor and had her shoulder bandaged extensively.

For reasons he couldn’t yet fully comprehend, the sight shocked Urgus. Sure, some of the other Okotans had looked a bit familiar, but this unconscious, barely-living specimen before him struck him as the most recognizable. He scanned the part of her upper body that had been uncovered, recalling memories for each of her distinct attributes. The chip in the lower section of her mask brought to him images of a particularly horrible storm at sea. The spikes that adorned her unbandaged shoulder reminded him of several times when, as she was standing tall, the sunlight would glint in between them. The color of her armor itself was enough to bring up almost a dozen memories on its own.

Having been struck by such a deluge of revelations, Urgus lost his balance and nearly fell over. As he continued gawking at the figure, Kopul said, “So, you remember her? The captain of the ship, of all people?”

Urgus took his eyes off of her long enough to look to the boatswain and reply with, “That’s Captain… Merdana… what happened to her?”

“So, you don’t remember much else?”

“I said, what happened to her?”

“That’s not—“

“Uprising,” Hatar spoke up. His voice was wavering, half from shivering and half from fear.

“A mutiny, you mean?” Urgus asked.

“No, an uprising,” Hatar replied, his shivering intensifying.

“Slaves!” Kopul shouted. The word hit Urgus like he imagined the Endeavor had hit the shore when it crashed—something which he was beginning to recall—and echoed off of the cliffs. “The slaves revolted, Urgus! We lost just enough of both them and crew that we’re pretty much even, now, except for you.”

The other Okotans began to mutter amongst themselves as Hatar stood up and looked Kopul in the eyes. In response, Kopul began to quietly berate the second mate for having given Urgus faulty information. Urgus himself quickly took several steps away from Kopul, all while looking around at the “crew,” at those with blankets and those without. Clean and dirty. Repaired and broken. The Okotans themselves were all looking at Urgus and seemed to be expecting something from him. In the background, the argument between Kopul and Hatar had swiftly concluded for unknown reasons.

As the murmuring among the crew and apparent slaves continued, Urgus sat down and stared at the quivering fire that laid before him. The heated it produced immediately began to dry out his eyes, forcing him to remove his mask and rub his eyes. Tears were smeared on his hands, although he wasn’t very sure whether it was the dryness that had caused them or not.

Around him, the murmuring had crescendoed into shouting and screaming and stayed as such until Hatar, Kopul, and Petiola were able to calm the other Okotans down. As soon as he considered them quiet enough, Hatar knelt down next to Urgus. He opened his mouth to speak but soon decided against doing so.

“So, now what?” Urgus asked, still staring into the fire. “Do we maim each other until one side comes out victorious?”

“That’s where you come in, I’m afraid,” Hatar said solemnly. “You might not remember, really—you may not even trust me when I say this—but you are the first mate of the Endeavor. Were the first mate, I should say.”

“And thus…”

“With the captain unconscious, authority over everything falls into your hands. Both the crew and the slaves.”

Urgus’s heart began to sink when he heard this. Hatar wasn’t lying, either. Some of the memories that the sight of Merdana had brought back suggested that Urgus had been the first mate. He just hadn’t been sure about them… or, at least, he hadn’t wanted to believe, no matter how true the memories were.

Alas, they were true, and now over a dozen lives had been shrugged off of his superior and onto his shoulders. Over a dozen lost, hungry, cold, angry, embittered lives, divided against one another into equal halves. He had to decide what they had to do, somehow.

Perhaps he could compromise with them enough to get them back to civilization.

Were they even going back to civilization?

Urgus could now explicitly remember his history in the slave ship business, owned by an anonymous criminal syndicate. He remembered the first time he decided to help man a ship carrying Okotan cargo. He remembered the raw dread he had felt on that day, knowing that his life would forever be associated with such vile acts, that his history would be eternally marred with something so grievous.

Then, he remembered what came the day after, on his next voyage, and the voyage after that, and the voyage after that, and the voyage after that, and so on. Every time he stepped aboard the Endeavor, he would seemingly feel the pain that the ship’s cargo was likely feeling, knowing their likely fate of laboring unpaid for the rest of their lives. However, with each voyage, his mind grew resistant to this feeling. It was “the grey,” and it had begun to cloud not only his senses but also his judgment. It didn’t matter how immoral his job was as much as it mattered that he received enough money from working it to feed himself. It didn’t matter what risks he was taking by doing such a job at what was likely the slow downfall of the illegal slave trade, because he needed to buy the things he wanted. He wanted to buy the things he wanted.

Now, overnight, the grey had been dashed to pieces, hopefully never to return again.

He felt free, now. It felt like he had been unshackled, somehow, something which felt rather ironic and almost humorous considering his job… no, his former job.

Definitely never to return again.

Urgus stood up, alerting everyone else present.

“What we’re doing is we’re returning to civilization, and we’re doing it now.”

The blanketed crew began to yell, some of them even throwing things at Urgus. The first mate was able to dodge only a few of these things on his way over to the slaves, who had congregated with Hatar some distance away from the crew, who had also congregated, and had sneakily collected a majority of the supplies, guarding them behind their own bodies. They too began to throw things back at the crew. Through the crossfire, one or two crew members rushed to the slaves, taking with them as many supplies as they could. Other crew members chased after them, however, they retreated when the slaves blocked them and confronted them.

After some time, Urgus elaborated, saying, “Well, we are going back to civilization, where these people can truly get what they need, and we’re doing it now. You guys decide to do whatever. Go feed Merdana to the sharks, I don’t know. Just decide knowing that your days are now numbered.”

Characters

 * Urgus
 * Hatar
 * Kopul
 * Petiola
 * Merdana

Trivia

 * Both Hatar and Merdana are characters in Cap's Generation 1 storyline. Their inclusion is meant as a reference to the fact that their Generation 1 counterparts
 * Originally, the story was going to be about a professional runner who injures himself during a race, disallowing from competing for the rest of his life, and the grief he goes through because of this. Although enthusiastic about this idea at first, Cap eventually decided that his writing style wasn't "right" for such an idea, that such a thing had likely been done before, and that it would feel strange as a BIONICLE story.
 * The idea to write about the story's current subject matter came to Cap when he was searching for names for the story. One name he liked was Endurance, which brought to his memory the ship of the same name in which Sir Ernest Shackleton sailed on the 1914 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition. This account ultimately inspired the story, along with the 1904 Jack London novel The Sea-Wolf.