November’s Pictonaut Challenge

And so we find ourselves on the home straight of 2013. The days evaporating away into the æther only to rapidly condense into the sticky and turbid liquid that will become 2014. November is a silly month. Scores of you will now be desperately trying to grow a manly moustache (and almost certainly end up looking like a prat.) Others of you will be hammering away at your keyboard like it has dishonoured you and your ancestors, as you vainly try and churn out 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo. These 50,000 words will almost certainly be purest, unadulterated dross. But for those of us who are follically challenged or don’t much fancy the idea of chaining ourselves to our desks for a whole month, I have an alternative. For as ever, the Pictonaut Challenge rumbles ever on with Regent; with gunpowder, treason and plot (Adjust proportions to taste.)

This month’s image is part of the concept art from the recent computer game “Dishonoured.” As dirty, filthy Brit one of the main features of November is of course Guy Fawkes night; remember, remember, the fifth of November. Hence the previously mentioned gunpowder, treason and/or plot.  For this month it was an obvious choice to big something which reflected treachery, intrigue and general all-purpose cloak and dagger shenanigans. Treachery? A Regent? I’ll let you do the maths.

For the uninitiated the Pictonaut Challenge requires you to write a short story (or wordascope) of one thousand words, which is quite a small and entirely reasonable amount compared to the fifty thousand some folk will be attempting. This wordascope should be based on the above image. Interpret it how you will. Then we all share are stories and much fun is had by all (fun is mandatory.)

So let’s pay off the guards, assassinate a few awkward magistrates, lace the soup with poison and set fire to the summer palace. It’s treachery time!