Bumps in the Night

Urban legends. Something lurking in the dark, that will snap up bad children, lest they learn to behave.

That's why there are cannibals on my spaceship.

They're an urban myth, or whatever the spaceship equivalent of "urban" is. Eat your vegetables or the cannibals will get you. (Joke's on them, due to the impracticality of livestock on a spaceship, everything's vegetables.)

But maybe something is lurking down in the lower decks. Something with a craving for meat. Something just waiting for some unsuspecting victim to wander too close.

And maybe you want to point out that I could have lab grown meat on the ship, because for some reason every time I'm working on a story, everyone comes out of the woodwork with all these ways it should go. (*ahem* Sorry, I've had way too many people misunderstand the premise of my vampire novel.) Anyway, I thought of that. I thought of sides of beef grown in vats of nutrient juice, and frankly, it makes me want to vomit. I'd rather have cannibals and dismemberment.

Anyway.

The ship has a population of at least 8,000. So it's basically a small city. Or a large town? I don't know. I'm from an unincorporated community of under a thousand. I don't know what towns are. Point is, it's a city. Cities have urban legends, that might be based on a bit of fact.

I've been learning about all sorts of urban legends lately. Then I went and saw It: Chapter Two a while back, and that only added to it. So I realized that's where the cannibals fit in.

It's such a small part of the story, really, but I think it helps add some personality to the setting. I mean, this ship has like a 500 years history, most of that spent in deep space. Surely it would start to develop its own mythology after a while. Children would whisper in the night about the monsters below their feet. Maybe it's the rumble of the engines, maybe it's something out to eat your face.

Do I have a plot to my story? Sort of. Do I know what scares their children into going to sleep? Absolutely. Is this going to be relevant to the plot? Probably? Maybe.

I guess we'll see. I'll see you… eventually.

Sorry this post is so full of side notes and tangents. As an additional side note, I actually started writing this two weeks ago. I just never finished it because… things came up. I'm not going to get into it. Sometimes (most of the time) I don't post on time. And sometimes I think about just dropping the whole thing altogether. But then what about my five readers? So I'll always come back, eventually.