The rules: create the beginning of a story using 3 random elements (character, place, and event). Mine were:
• Robot
• Hell
• A relative pays a visit
Below, you have the result... :)
Field Work
by Bill
Over untold miles of Martian-red crags bobbled along a little gleam of gold under the unholy sun. So brightly did it glint in that oppressive light that to look at it would burn one's eyes– except that no one was alive to see it. For this little robot, this tiny toddling automaton, was picking its way through the very depths of Hell.
The damned paid it close attention; it'd been so long since any change in these parts that even their prescribed torments had grown routine: flay this, singe that... The robot turned its brass bucket-head to regard their twisted forms, and whistled to itself in trepidatious concern before hastily and squeakily wheeling away to distance itself from their tortured screams.1
In its momentary distraction, the robot's (admittedly undersized) wheels encountered a perfidious crumble of sloping shale. By the time its looking-glass optics focused ahead once more, it was already too late. The robot tumbled trashcan-like down the Hell-hill. It should be noted at this point that from the shiny explorer's back extended a gleaming plated cable, which billowed and bowed in the sky, stretching into the darkness of the clouds above. As the robot rolled downward, this cable was jerked and tangled, contorting in the heavens of Hell amidst peals of crimson lightning.
In a bunker deep within the earth's crust, a handful of rogue scientists turned, alarmed, from their instruments to address two sudden and grave developments: first, a regiment of military police pounded on the oaken door, demanding entry in the name of the queen; second, the plated data cable had ripped free of its mount on their boxlike primary instrument and was snaking its way along the floor, retreating into the sulphurous heat of the hastily bored earth-maw at the other end of the room. One particular scientist, of dark hair and rocky countenance, furrowed his brow at the splintering door and considered for a split-second his options and the whole history of his life, before diving with all his will and might to catch the cable's very end. As he slid along the floor of the ad hoc laboratory, he glimpsed his compatriots, now at the gunpoint of darkly uniformed figures, all turning to witness him reeled along like a great white fishing lure, disappearing finally over the lip of the dark and smokey Hell-mouth.
And so it was that Franklin Leroy, PhD. plummeted into Hades, alabaster lab coat blossoming among the hazy atmosphere. From its resting place in the rusted dust, the robot spied the distant descent, the golden cable against the grey sky wilting stemlike beneath mad white petals. Though its penchant for metaphor was strong perhaps among its kind, the robot was at heart a calculating machine, and it quickly disregarded the poetry of the moment for the nuts and bolts of the situation. Given the figure's unique dress and surmisable recent actions, the little automaton immediately recognized the identity of Dr. Leroy, its own inventor.
This realization brought an immediate sense of duty, and the robot struggled to regain its footing, whirring and wiggling this way and that, engaging its many parts like a pinball machine that's lost a ball. A minute of this, and its efforts had raised only a cloud of Helldust. The robot emitted a honk of frustration. What to do, when one's programming falls far short of the task at hand? Perhaps, considered the robot in some part of its capacitors, if it only tried hard enough– maybe it could learn. The robot flexed all of its internal mechanisms: circuits humming, tiny hammers clicking, and its head spinning (incidentally), it thought as hard as it could. Then, with a sudden Pop emerged its first original idea!
Dr. Leroy would later interject in cocktail party conversations in which his friends remarked wryly on the unpredictability of memory that sometimes, in fact, the mind archived events just as one might think it would, providing as an example the unavoidable lasting vividness of the impact which he was now experiencing onto the stony turf of Hell. Following this unforgettably unpleasant moment, which seemed to comingle many soft and crunchy bits of his person, Dr. Leroy spent a far less memorable span of time lying the dirt, afraid to move, his eye scanning the intimately close horizon, as if expecting some formal confirmation of his sudden death. As nothing of the sort came to view, however, shock gave way to clarity, which in turn led– as all roads seemed to for Dr. Leroy– to curiosity. Slowly he stood, utterly surprised to find himself whole, with no alteration to his condition save for the dust on his hands and the chill in his spine. With the issue of his health more or less settled, Dr. Leroy's attention turned to his macabre new surroundings...
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1. Although their screams were indeed directed at the little robot, the eternally tormented honestly held nothing against it; it was only that over the course of millennia, they had grown accustomed to raising howls of agony as a primary form of expression (and anyways, it was the only way to be heard above the crowd. Hell was not for the soft spoken).