As the dust settled across the vast expanses of sun baked tundra, the beast was dead but we had lost many precious shells in the encounter. As those few vital splashes of red stained the crystalline surroundings the group of us let out a collective sigh of relief that the noise from our defensive did not draw more of the horrid beasts from their unknown hiding holes in the various networks of caves that has been formed under our very feet. Only the permafrost provided the structural integrity we needed to just stand above these creatures. It doomed us to this hunter gatherer lifestyle, but it saved us from the horrors below. It figures, nothing is ever black and white, good or bad. It's varying shades of grey, brown, and red.
Sigmund Av Volsung poured over the corpse, salvaging the few usable bits of scrap, pulling out the knife he fashioned from the remnants of a Vuik door we had pried from the slavering jaws of one of the beasts. With every pelt we gathered, we remembered with a haunting stillness just how close we had come to losing thaluikhain that fated day. Even our tools had become symbols of our survival, stories etches through their crude construction that refused to leave our minds. Each day required a laser focus on the moments that followed. We couldn't have remorse, there was no time for it. The joys we had were short and sporadic. Fappy had managed to work out a primitive sort of field guide on the horrors that we faced. We felt it our duty to spread what little we learned to every soul we came across, to better prepare them for the harsh realities out here.
Here, there were only survivors...
With MarsAtlas tending to the wounded, there were many of us. The advances in understanding that had been afforded by the slow march of progress gave us the ability to stand on our own against these things. The lost relics of convergence provided our front line with abilities that transcended our natural limitations. Necessity had driven us past such arbitrary lines of demarcation.
Some of us took it lightly, with a smile on our face and a skip in our step. Danbo Jambo's clever use of words to describe our situation helped morale. We were heroes of old, comic book supers. Our abilities made all of the difference for hundreds, they lived better lives because of our daily sacrifices. It helped, probably more than any of us were willing to admit.
Our days became a fiction, tales of our exploits grew from murmurs to legends. the silence wove tales suitable to every taste from the exploits that in our every day life seemed to grow mundane. But still, they listened. They listened with rapture to hear how Anonymous Dweeb found a suitable hole in the permafrost to make a new water pump, even the technical details of the solar heating apparatus developed by Caramel Frappe's knowledge of optics seemed all the more amazing interpreted in these legends.
We became Icons, paragons, archetypes by which legends were born and laid to rest. Ratty was still rocking the shotty, a belt of shells holding up their denim jeans. JoJo had a pulled plasma rifle that somehow managed to deal lethal damage with only a 40 watt TDP. Their silhouettes stood in stark contrast to the vast expanses of white against the ever setting sun. Standing guard as we finished up this scavenge mission. Evonisia whistled, snapping me out of my contemplations and pointing to their watch. Yeah, we needed to hurry up.
I walked over to the great beast and started undoing the biomechanical enhancements. "Hey Sigmand... remember when we thought minecraft might just change everything?" I grinned a little, a rare moment of fun poking at the good old days. really seemed to lift spirits.... but then a low rumble sounded off in the distance, followed by the sharp staccato of an automatic weapon. We all looked up to the horizon, a dust cloud was barreling out of the white disk that was the setting sun. I flicked down my goggle's filters (Caramel Frappe really was a life saver) to look at the approaching object.
A 1970s muscle car, redlining with a veritable tanker's worth of petrol filling up the back, strapped to the sides, and with Rabbitboy at the wheel. Tailing him where an untold number of bandits, all looking like something out of a bad dieselpunk flick. Spiked hair, armor made out of bones and carburetors. The works. Shit, company.
We started to take up ambush positions at the instruction of JoJo and Ratty, leaving the corpse half-salvaged. Right now, only one thing mattered: those last few barrels of oil.
"... damn it Rabbitboy."
3)
