Cloisters (story)


Posted by Puffy on February 06, 2009 at 01:29:53:

Synopsis: Canniland University is a dangerous place, where traps abound.

Cloisters
By Puffy

Katie was in trouble. She wasn’t sure how it happened – those caught in the traps rarely did. Sometimes girls tripped and stumbled into the more obvious traps, with a moment of “Oh shit!” before they were hoisted up in a net or the ground beneath them gave way to a spike trap.

Katie had one of these moments just five minutes ago, but she managed to dodge the poisoned dart triggered by an ill-concealed piece of string. She’d spotted it long before it was a danger, but had tripped on a pavement block that was slightly out of alignment. The tripping that endangered her life also saved it, since the dart passed harmlessly over her head. She’d breathed her relief and rushed on to class – she was already late – berating herself for being so clumsy. Clumsiness in the cloisters was a key ingredient in the recipe for girl meat.

It wasn’t clumsiness that got her in the end; instead, the loss of concentration caused by her near-miss was how she ended up here now, strung by her neck three feet off the ground. Out from one trap and straight into the next! This time she didn’t see it: one moment she was turning the corner and the next moment she couldn’t breathe. Her sandals were kicked off her flailing feet and her dress fluttered in the breeze while she contended to the more serious issue of the noose.

This might seem like a harsh treatment of the student body, but like all frightening ideas this one was born out of necessity. Even with Canniland’s culture of cannibalism, resulting in a very short life expectancy for women, and thus making education quite a waste of time, many girls still enrolled at Canniland University. The university’s resources were stretched thin: very few of their students survived long enough to join the faculty since they were gradually filtered off through the lottery. Many others didn’t want to become educators. The university needed to reduce the intake of students to just those who were serious about their professions.

CU was hesitant to introduce any sort of standardised intelligence tests because it felt that populating the professional world with nerds would be detrimental to the health of society. Innovation, they reasoned, would result in natural disagreements with the conventional knowledge they could test for. And innovation had led to the establishment of the Canniland Constitution, so it was probably a good thing to promote. But if they could not test students on conventional knowledge, what could they test?

After three days of Russian Roulette among the female faculty staff – which was nearly the entire faculty – they came to a decision. Intelligent women, they agreed, should be able to avoid the best-laid traps the university could devise. And they wanted graduates who were intelligent – luck wasn’t such a bad quality either. The legal issues were easily resolved by making it a condition of enrolment for females that they lost all rights to opt if they were outwitted by a trap: they knew the risks and were ready to accept it, so it was completely ethical. The classrooms that were only accessible through the cloisters (staff had a back way in) were reserved for the most junior students: freshmen, with the gaps filled by sophomores. Male students, due to their special position in society, had classes well away from the cloisters. When only one student in one hundred thousand was male, you looked after them.

And so the cloisters were forever transformed into a death trap.

And the plan failed miserably.

Enrolments were at an all-time high. Students saw the cloisters as a rite of passage: any girl who survived her years of classes in the cloisters deserved to graduate and any girl who was caught in a carefully laid trap – bad luck! There’s always next life, they reasoned.

Yet, although the plan failed to accomplish its intended purpose, it solved the main problem anyway. The students who survived to graduation were more likely to opt out of the lottery system since they saw themselves as the intellectual elite and that it was their duty to live to pass on their knowledge to the next generation of cloister bugs. The unfortunate girls caught in the traps provided a nice boost to the university’s funds when they were sold off, and the occasional girl kept for the staff BBQs served as a great incentive for attracting academics to CU.

So this tradition lasted through the years.

But none of this helped Katie, whose face by now had passed through purple and was now a rich blue. Her hands were too tired to help support her weight and she was quickly losing the battle. Other students were milling around, looking up at her while avoiding the puddle of urine that grew beneath her.

While some traps were obvious and easily avoided – except by the klutziest students – the cloisters required traps that would outwit the majority of the student body. In principle, all of the traps should be spottable and avoided or negated with the application of intelligence and foresight. A student with more foresight than Katie, for example, would know to carry a knife at all times so that she could free herself from rope traps. Pit traps weren’t such a danger for those willing to bear the burden of unfashionably carrying walking sticks Yet, although dozens of students were now witnessing Katie’s demise, it would not occur to any of them to begin packing tools – and it was these students who provided the university with a steady supply of meat.

The students parted to allow the groundskeeper through, who cut Katie down and carried her to the staff kitchen. Everybody went back to their business, and one clumsy student fell and nicked herself on a dart that was lying on the ground.

The chef took over in the kitchen, checked the girl’s weak pulse and made up her mind that she would be perfect for the staff BBQ on Friday. She removed her head, to be prepared for presentation at the BBQ, and started readying the cuts. A second girl was brought in while she was preparing Katie – this one needed to age for a few days for the poison to completely decay.

The BBQ was held on the lawn outside the library, safely away from the cloisters.