Strange Shores

By Tobias White

Samuel N. Faust, a private detective for the supernatural, is on the trail of a serial killer by the name Freakshow and now it is personal. While in pursuit, he is thrown into the future and on to the shores of Panmyth, the city of the lost, a city beyond space and time. He is now in a brave new world, but he isn't the only one.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tobias White
• Release date: Jul 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781005731618

Book preview

Panmyth: City of the Lost

Strange Shores

Copyright 2019: Tobias white

ISBN: 978-1-63625-171-4

Edited by: Tisha B Wibeto

Cover Artwork: Tobias White

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Author's Notes

All characters, places and monsters are a work of fiction and any resemblance to real life is purely coincidental. While drawn from history and current events, this book deals with alternate timelines and alternate historical events; it by no means, designed to defame, insult or cast a positive or negative light on true historical or present-day personalities. This book is intended for entertainment and reading pleasure, none of it is real.

Contributors

Nathan Maher

Jeanette Gordon

Jen Labut Cannon

Forward

Thank you for buying this book and if you did not, well then, you are an obvious thief. In either case, I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it. I will be upfront and honest with you. When I began writing this novella, it was merely a loose script for an online comic I intended as a promotion for a tabletop-game called Panmyth: City of the lost. However, the script I was writing became increasingly more detailed, so that I could work out the imagery for her artwork. I thought, well, maybe I should just write it out as a short story, so I could interpret my own writing. The more I wrote, the more ideas I generated. It was flowing out easier than I had hoped, so I thought, well, might as well write a novel. The more I got into the story the more I realized that the overall story arc would be quite large, so I decided that I would break it up into smaller novellas. By breaking up the stories of Sam, Jessie and the others, I felt it would make it easier to digest and be less daunting than an epic novel.

Like I mentioned before, originally this was to be a promotional online comic for the game I am writing, and it is still my intent to do so. Panmyth is a cyberpunk/fantasy tabletop roleplaying game about a mythical island city that resides in a pocket dimension beyond time and space. The city of Panmyth is where all beings and objects eventually end up once they are lost, forgotten or abandoned. These lost beings and objects find a new life in the city of Panmyth. While the game is set in the year 2230, it is a place of all eras, because for those who arrive in Panmyth find that they do not age, but while no one dies from old age they can die from hunger, disease, grievous injury or murder. The city is ruled by, a supposed, democratically elected council of gods and goddesses who are now CEO’s of mega-corporations. They all vie for domination of Panmyth through business or violence. The citizenry of Panmyth are humans or other mythological beings who have washed up on her shores, or they are the cityborn who is a race unto themselves; they all have the spark of magic. Those who live in the city struggle for survival by accepting, rising above or riling against the status quo.

Join the System, Change the System or Break the System. The choice is yours.

Lastly, I want to give thanks Jeanette Gordon, Jen Labut Cannon and to the rest of the Facebook group We Be Geek, who helped me work out some of the details of my fictional world. I would also like to give a special thank you to my mother and to Nathan Reese Maher. They took the time to give me feedback and encouragement for this first novella and without them I would not have been able to finish this book properly.

Prelude

The trio quickly made their way towards gate thirty-two, its automatic door whooshed up and they hurried through. Many chapters high, they emerged out onto a small narrow platform that overhung the city. Their breath stolen, Sam and Jessie were taken aback, for as the city spread out before them, there seemed to be no end. The city’s overall style could only be described as Neo Art Deco, but amongst this predominant style, were various neo-stylizations of different eras and cultures. With megalithic and statuesque façades, the skyscrapers penetrated the clouds and burrowed deep into the earth. The buildings were interwoven with a complex network of elevated walk, road, loop, and railways. Choked with activity, the air was filled with the congestion of flying cars, blimps, and pollution. The whole city was alive, it had its own pulse, it thrummed with neon light, rapid motion, industrial sounds and the holographic animations of various advertisements. Sam and Jessie were spellbound.

Panmyth

City of the Lost

Strange Shores

Chapter 1: Castaway

"Every life has a measure of sorrow, and sometimes this is what awakens us."

–Steven Tyler

As he struggled for his very life, the midnight waves crashed repeatedly over and over onto the man, threatening to drown him into the bosom of the sea’s inky depths. However, these struggles were in vain when a strong undertow quickly pulled him under, dashing away any hope of success. In those final moments, when all hope seemed to be lost, he was assaulted by flashbacks of the woman he loved and the pursuit of the monster who killed her. He fought his way back to the surface, but not from any primitive instinct to survive, but rather, from a burning desire for justice and revenge.

He broke the water’s surface, greedily inhaling the night air, but this reprieve lasted only a mere moment as he was mercilessly sucked back down into the abyss. Once again, the man was assaulted by past images, past images of the war that scarred him, past images of flashing sirens for a crime he did not commit, and the past image of the news headline: The Freakshow Killer Strikes Again. Fueled by boiling rage, he thrashed upward, only to be greeted by an eldritch smelling fog that choked its contours. Off in the distance, through this miasma, he could see the lights of a city and so he swam, he swam for his very life.

Eventually he reached far enough into the shoreline to standup on his own two feet. He stumbled to and fro, his mind feeling confused and primitive, but still he pushed forward. Unexpectantly, he lost his footing as the shore just sank away; he then realized he could not see the city lights. He twisted this way and that, only to see that the lights were now behind him. He tried to turn around, but with skewed senses he turned left when he should have turned right and what was up seemed to be down. He was not sure if he was suffering from battle fatigue, if someone drugged him, or if he was just exhausted from survival, but he compensated and made his way back to the shoreline. Waist deep in the briny waves, it was here in the malevolent mist, where shadowy shapes of vehicular skeletons appeared before him.

This strange shore was a giant graveyard filled with the flotsam and jetsam of different places and eras. His head pounded with pain, and through this pain, he fell to his knees, he fell to his knees penitently, he fell to his knees humbled, and he continued to fall, he had fallen to his knees, utterly, and ultimately, defeated. Filled with irrational guilt, he thrashed against the sides of his head, and then against a heart scarred with overwhelming lamentation. Finally, from the depths of this heartache, he let loose a tortured and wretched moan. He questioned his very existence; he had survived, but why did he survive; did he even deserve to survive? Afterall, he was unable to save his only family, his reason for living. Suicide however was not in the cards, for his heart was not yet numb from the pitfalls of an indifferent and uncaring universe, as it was still filled with hate and vengeance. These raw emotions provided the proper motivation to push forward. Shakily, he rose back to his feet, and with extreme fatigue, he pushed onward, one final mission for a wayward soldier.

Upon reaching the decaying hull of an oil tanker, he grasped for dear life to its rotting carcass; it was in this moment when he saw them. From the fog, one by one, the strangers emerged, until three of them had him surrounded. Distorted, liken to the refraction of water, their forms wavered both in size and shape. They cautiously approached him, wearing hooded cloaks and white cassocks displaying a strange red cross, their faces obscured by gasmasks.

The center cloaked figure pointed her finger towards the man, and with a muffled radio twang, she said, Take him!

The others silently obeyed and slushed forward through the shin deep water to flank the castaway. Eyes burning with white hot rage, lust and wild abandon, the castaway sent the left assailant flying into the water with a wicked uppercut, but in turn, to only be dropped into the water by a roundhouse from the other flanker. Before he could recover from this blow, both men restrained him by the arms. The woman slowly approached the castaway while he wildly raged against his captors.

With annoyance she said, We don’t have time for this! and with her left arm, that had the force of a pneumatic piledriver, she slugged him in the diaphragm, stealing his wind into unconsciousness.

As the castaway came to his senses, he found himself being carried between the two men, his arms over their shoulders; the woman confidently took the squad’s point. He tried to free himself, but shackles and exhaustion made escape impossible.

With urgency and contemptuous annoyance, the woman said, We must hurry, the salvage gangs will be patrolling this area soon, and I rather not deal with that kind of headache.

Head still swimming with confusion, the castaway found the strength to raise his head, just in time to see a strange city emerge from the parting fog. Impossibly massive, this metropolis appeared to reach more than a mile into the sky. It was a mixture of old architecture, towering futuristic skyscapes, tiered