Full Armour Full-time 1

Author: themalevalproject
Title: Full Armour. Full-time. #1
Date: 09 June 2018

[First, I'd like to apologize that there were no more chapters of "The Maleval Project" (go to my profile to find them, if you're curious). It was planned as a story with several chapters, but somehow I got writer's block and also didn't find the time to go on. Maybe the project was just too ambitious. Instead, here comes a story that is not really combined with the Maleval stuff, but was fun for me to write. I hope that you'll enjoy it.]

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It‘s another hot and humid day. I'm firmly locked into my standard uniform. Full armour is mandatory for me. Massive helmet, iron gloves. All day long. Every day.

I'm sweating like hell in here. But I can't take this damn thing off. It's massive, horribly confining and so tight that even my breathing is restricted. I can hardly move in all the solid metal. The massive plates of my cuirass are pressed almost painfully tight around my waist, breast and back. The rigid, high collar of my gorget is bolted tightly around my neck. The thick steel plates around my arms and legs are fixed so extremely tight, and the joints of those armour parts are so unflexible and stiff, that it is very difficult to move my arms and legs. The heavy helmet, firmly fixed to the collar, restricts the movement of my head. The long, narrow skirt of plates restricts the movability of my armoured legs even more. From head to toe, my whole body is squeezed brutally tight into thick, rigid iron. The tight armour forces my whole body into a stiff upright position. I almost feel like a rigid steel statue.

And this is indeed, more or less, what I am now: I'm a steel statue. A rigid figure welded out of massive steel, polished and shiny, and with a living man crammed inside. I have some restricted movability in this rigid suit, and I'm allowed to take a few steps once in a while to keep the circulation going, but I'm mostly supposed to stand patiently still on my ordered position, looking straight ahead. I have been turned to a living, steel-covered mannequin.

It had started when the museum board decided to exhibit a full suit of plate armour with a real, living man permanently inside. As long as the weather would allow, he would be placed on a spot in the museum park, where all visitors would come by when entering the museum, and where the sunlight would make his polished iron shine, so he could not be ignored. At first, I really liked the idea. The visitors could meet a real man in armour, watch his restricted movements, touch him in his massive metal and ask him how it feels to be locked into such a martial iron suit. But I felt pity for the poor fool who would be stuck into this thing.

I like wearing armour a lot, but I had never endured more than five or six hours under full iron, on rather cool days. It would be damn hard for that pityful guy to carry a full suit of plate armour as his daily uniform, even in summer. But the requirements were clear: Full-time public presentation in full iron, also on weekends. They really wanted to keep that poor fellow locked into a full suit of plate armour – permanently!

I got the board‘s full planning scetch, so I could check what armour model they had chosen for this: A rather plain, undecorated full suit with a very tight-fitting cuirass with a rather narrow waist. Complete coverage of upper and lower arms and shoulders. A massive, fully closed helmet that was firmly combined with the steel collar. A heavy attached visor that could be opened, but not removed. Upper and lower legs completely encased, front and back. Fully armoured feet. Iron gloves with separate, fully enclosed fingers.

I noticed that all the joints of this armour, like at the elbows, knees, shoulders, wrists and even fingers, looked unusual. This suit had been designed to lock every single inch of its wearer's body into thick steel and encase the entire occupant as brutally tight as possible. This would of course restrict all movements of the wearer to an absolute minimum. But obviously, this armour was made to cover its occupant as tightly and completely as possible, from tip to toe, with extraordinary thick steel, no matter how severely this would restrict all of his movements. This meant that this armour would be unusually heavy, I guessed that it would weigh at least eighty, maybe even one hundred pounds! It would be quite hard to carry this enormous amount of metal all day. And furthermore: The extreme rigorous covering of every single inch of its occupant‘s body would make this suit almost airtight!

If there was any armour that was definitely inappropriate for long-term, daily wear, it was this one. To wear this massive, airtight, rigid steel suit full-time every day, would have nothing to do with a „job“. To be stuck into this thing for more than one hour would be a torture. This was sadistic, I thought. How could the board chose this massive suit to cram a poor man into it – permanently? I wondered who would be stupid enough to volunteer for this sadistic treatment and allow himself to get locked into this tourture device for good.