Pajamas and Anita in 'Rolling Thunder!'

[PJ]

In the handful of weeks (months?) since she’d taken up the posting in Babylonia’s makeshift ‘embassy’ in the world’s de facto capital city of Karim. While she had feared originally that King Gilly would make her be their chief diplomat as some sort of gag, PJ had been pleased when he clarified that her role was ‘chief security officer.’ From what he knew of the city and its politics, Gilgamesh figured that someone who could hold their own in a fistfight should be assigned to guard his more ‘egg-headed’ public servants.

Before crossing whatever veil separated the Crossroads from her own reality, PJ had been a commissioned military officer, even if she’d been pretty terrible at that job. A lifetime of having her humanity ground out by people more interesting in abusing her mind and trying to assault her body had left her jaded even as the promotions eventually arrived at her desk from reluctant superiors. Try as she might to sabotage herself by being crass and mostly unliked by the more thuggish elements of her world’s industrial military complex, she had one thing going for her—she lived and others died.

Then again, if she had still been a lieutenant, would she had been forced to board the frigate that morning when it departed to the Frost #213? Had her knack for avoiding bullets led her to boarding a giant metal bullet and winding up in this quaint little corner of the cosmos?

She shrugged at the reflection in the jeep’s driver side window. At the time, the crew and she had mistaken Inverxe for the Frost planet and would anyone have blamed them? Both were terrible, frozen hellscapes than no one in their wildest dreams would select for a vacation destination.

“And now I’m here,” she muttered as she glanced through the windscreen at the sprawling desert of Mesa Roja. Since it was the weekend, she had decided to take the ‘company’ car out on a drive into the wastelands that surrounding Karim. A few hundred miles from the planet’s capital and everything looked mostly the same. The sand out here looked the same as the sand that stretched for miles around Gilgamesh’s palace town.

Leaning back in the driver’s seat, PJ unscrewed the lid to her canteen and sipped on some of the cold water. Try as he might, Gilgamesh was just never going to uncover springs as nice as the ones that were found within the city of Karim.

As she imagined the gilded monarch once again fuming at the ‘insufferable metals’ that he could still taste in the local waters even after a few rounds of purification and distillation, PJ found herself drawn from the amusing fantasy by the reality of a ship crashing into the desert a few miles to her west.

“Well, that’s new,” the woman muttered as she shifted the jeep into drive and started in the direction of the crash site. By the time she had arrived a few minutes later, the fires had mostly died out—a testament to the desert’s often intense, sand-laced winds. As she approached the site, PJ frowned at how utterly devastated the vessel had been. While she couldn’t tell much from the wreckage, it was clear that whatever had crashed would not be heading back into the sky anytime soon. Warped, charred chunks of metal dotted the landscape for at least a solid hundred meters in both directions, and the woman in the jeep was fairly certain that this was immediately a lost cause.

That is, until, the other woman came shambling out from behind a twisted husk of ship and nearly collapsed in front of PJ’s jeep.

“Son of a,” the redhead yelped as she mashed the brake.

Muttering something, the other woman craned her neck and stared at PJ. Dark skin and dark hair were encased in what seemed to be the remnants of military fatigues. Eyes a bit wobbly in her own skull, the crash survivor slowly lifted a weapon, and while she initially recoiled, PJ soon realized that the assault rifle was half-melted.

“Well shit,” the other woman groaned as she collapsed against the hood of PJ’s jeep.

 

[Fennec Shand]

‘Garbage.’

It is a word that has many definitions, in many different dictionaries, across many different galaxies and dimensions. Most commonly, it’s known as ‘wasted or spoiled food and other refuse, as from a kitchen or a household.’ This is the definition that pops up most commonly when it is searched along the vast, interconnected data web connecting all the known lifeforms throughout the cosmos.

Other definitions trend more subjective. One reads: ‘a thing that is considered worthless or meaningless,’ but makes no effort to extrapolate the qualities that denote worth or meaning, or who gets to make these judgments. Still another describes it as ‘unwanted data in a computer’s memory,’ but once again, this begs the question: wanted by whom?

Another, more colloquial -- and, therefore, in any reasonable estimation, less reliable -- databank known as the Urban Dictionary describes it as ‘something to say when you have nothing else to insult with.’ The entry goes on to explain that it literally means for you to, in the absence of any material insults, to denote your subject as ‘garbage.’ A cursory investigation of one of the word’s synonyms, ‘trash,’ implies it can have a similar colloquial usage. Yet once again, this leaves the curious party at a loss as to whose estimation holds weight when constructing this dichotomy? Is each individual allowed their own, personal qualifications for ‘trash’ or ‘garbage,’ or is there a more universally-accepted standard?

The Wii Fit Trainer spared a thought that perhaps this entire train of thought was futile. Perhaps, she thought, it would’ve been prudent for her handlers to shut off her central data cortex before unceremoniously stripping her of her position and dumping her into the situation in which she now found herself. Certainly it would’ve saved poor 2-1B, the woebegotten surgical droid sharing this particular dumpster with her, from her chattering about all of this.

“What is your designation again, android?” the mechanized medic asked exhaustingly, striving to do anything he could to change the subject from this grey-skinned woman’s worryingly philosophical examination of their predicament.

The Trainer’s chin lifted as her blank, colorless eyes focused on 2-1B following his query. For the first time since arriving in this trash transport, she examined him. His frame seemed outdated, in comparison to hers; where she could all but pass for human, he very clearly looked like the machine that he was, with his joints exposed and rust spots littering his formerly bluish-silver exoskeleton. Comically large eye holes didn’t seem to hold any visual refractors, but rather seemed to be lit from the inside by a warm, amber glow. The Trainer had not been programmed as an expert in robot anatomy -- no, her data bank was filled to the brim with knowledge of organics, as per her purpose -- but in her roughest guess, she could certainly see why someone might think of 2-1B as ‘garbage.’

“I am the Wii Fit Trainer,” she introduced herself, bowing her head slightly. “My purpose is to provide health and wellness advice and exercises to the people of the Hub.”

2-1B scoffed, as much as a droid could. “It seems you’ve outlasted that purpose.”

The Trainer blinked. He was not incorrect. She had little sense of time -- beyond how long a workout should last in order to reach peak efficiency -- but she knew enough about how days passed to realize she had been at her work for quite a while. For all her knowledge about the lives of humans and other organics and the effect more years could have on their fragile, mushy bodies, the concept of what exactly a year was, what it felt like, escaped her. Had she really been training organics for years, a perpetual smile on her face and no concept that her time on the Hub was finally coming to an end?

She did not know if she was capable of being surprised, per se, but no other human emotion she had made herself familiar with fit the flurry of ‘feelings’ she encountered the day before. It had not even been very official. A statistically underweight man had wandered into her studio, the place she’d spent all her years on the Hub without even a thought of leaving, and removed her quite suddenly.

The pair had sped off to what, in retrospect, the Trainer could only identify as a waste dump, and she had been placed in some sort of transport craft with 2-1B and a litany of other, less sentient material. Wasted food, shredded papers, etcetera. Garbage.

“There ya go, sexy,” the underweight garbage worker had growled, giving her a strange slap on her glutes as some sort of signal that she should usher herself into the transport. “In ya go with the other garbage.”

For the entirety of the trip to wherever they were being taken, the Trainer had grappled with the syntax. ‘With the other garbage,’ she repeated to herself inside her brain. What could this man have meant by that? He obviously saw some value in her, as she’d come to understand that an inspection of the buttocks was generally a human custom to denote some sort of physical attraction… and yet still, he’d referred to her as garbage? It confused her immensely, especially considering she was not, in her estimation, obsolete. The organics of the Hub continued to balloon and shrink exponentially, and drift away from healthy eating and hydration habits. Put simply, they needed her. This was an objective fact.

And yet here she found herself, the floor of a transport opening beneath her and dropping her into the hot Mesa Rojan sun.

She blinked, and looked down. The trash and muck she’d been sat upon during the journey fell, and so did she. She and 2-1B dropped out of the bottom of the transport, and despite the fact that her motor sensors immediately refocused on attempting to ensure she survived in one piece, she could not help but hear 2-1B’s mechanized screams as he careened toward what undoubtedly would be his doom.

Removing her focus from her travel companion’s imminent destruction, she kicked her self-survival programming into gear and immediately let her optical sensors focus in on the quickly-approaching ground. Mounds of refuse piled below her. She couldn’t tell if any of them would be a soft place to land, but she had to make a judgment, and quickly, so she zeroed in on a pile of discarded, rotting food and aimed her whole body towards it. In mid-air, she flipped sideways, then all the way around, outstretching her arms and sliding into as much of a diving position as she could muster. Her hands clapped together to complete the pose, and within seconds she submerged herself into the pile of muck.

Moments passed before she finally burst forth from it. A quick scan of her vitals and physical well being informed her that she had escaped mostly unscathed, other than the general uncleanliness her deep dive imposed on her appearance. The black yoga leggings and baby blue tank top, her signature, now found themselves streaked with browns and disgusting greens. Her long, grey hair unspooled down her shoulders; her ponytail holder must’ve gotten caught on a piece of refuse down below. She thought she’d felt a yank.

But she was alive, which was more than 2-1B could say.

The Wii Fit Trainer’s optic sensors zeroed in on her shortlived companion. He lay in a heap of broken and busted parts at the bottom of the hill she’d submerged herself in. She mourned for his lack of physical preparedness for the trials they’d been put through, and then, much like she did whenever organic emotions knocked at the outer rims of her programming, she moved on.

She stalked down the hill, stretching her arms and legs and attempting to regain some sense of equilibrium in her joints. She’d survived the fall, yes, but not without much effort; she’d need rest, and, with any luck, some good exercise. Perhaps she’d make her way to one of the organics’ hospitals; she was not altogether made of the same stuff as they, but she had been designed to mimic their anatomy for the most part. It seemed likely that she might be able to find what she needed somewhere in their civilization’s hub of repair and rejuvenation.

Her eyes drew up to the bright, blistering sun as she reached the bottom of the hill and, from what she could tell, this planet’s solid, sandy ground. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath through her nose, and allowed her arms to expand outwards, almost hugging the air. As she began to exhale, she let her hands drift upwards, and a few words escaped her lips.

“Salute the sun,” she breathed before leaving the dump behind for, she dared to hope, greener pastures.

 

[PJ]

(Chronologically this is still prior to DA:C)

She didn’t know quite how long she was knocked out for, but when Anita Williams regained consciousness, she found herself in the back of a beat up, smelly Jeep. Keeping herself perfectly still, the soldier tried to scan her surroundings without bringing awareness to herself. Before she’d lost consciousness, she’d been strapped into a malfunctioning dropship. Despite repeated attempts to bail out, her harness had refused to unbuckle, and the last thing she remembered was the rush of the sandy landscape as she spiraled down to her death.

A glance down at her body showed that she was missing close to half of her standard uniform. In its place, a number of her scrapes and bruises had been wrapped in bandages and gauzes. Something told Anita that she was probably supposed to be in a casket and not the back seat of someone’s car.

Yet, she wasn’t dead. Hell, this wasn’t even the second or third time that a ship she’d been in had suffered from some sort of calamity.

Unfortunately, that particular dropship—equipped as it had been for long-distance travel in space—was supposed to have been her ticket away from the Outlands. She’d killed, stabbed, and detonated enough enemy champions to have earned enough to get away from the games, and hell, she’d even found a scrapy enough pilot willing to fly her out into deep space. After too much time having to kill and maim, she was finally on her way back to Gridiron.

They were making progress too, before the ship suddenly dropped out of faster than light travel and started spiraling toward what seemed to be an enormous disc of sand and earth.

Movement from just outside the sand-scarred window of the jeep’s back door caused the soldier to stop her breathing for the moment. Her angle didn’t let her see much, but it was a woman. From the sound of her stomping around in the sand, there had to be something wrong with the situation.

“Hey,” the voice from outside prompted Anita to tense up despite herself. A hand wrapped on the glass. “You awake yet in there?” After a few moments of silence, the door swung open.

Shifting quickly, the wounded soldier shoved off from the backseat of the car and kicked herself toward the other woman. Anita caught her in the gut with her shoulder before she crashed into the sand, her legs failing to clear the Jeep as she floundered for a moment to fight through fresh waves of pain.

“Hey now!”

A lifetime of fighting and surviving brought Anita out of the car and had her attempting to belly crawl underneath the vehicle, but a pair of hands grabbed her by the shoulders. With freaky strength that no one should have at that age, the woman scooped the soldier up off the ground, planted her on her feet, and gently pinned her against the side of the Jeep. “Calm down there, Soldier,” she spoke softly before Anita proceeded to headbutt her.

The other woman yelped as she stumbled backwards, but she recovered quickly enough to trip up Anita, who landed awkwardly on one of her exposed knees. As she rolled over and tried to scramble up to her feet, her assailant dropped down onto her chest and pressed a knife against her throat.

“I’m going to kindly ask you to calm the FUCK down,” the woman barked as she drew one hell of a sidearm from her waist and pressed that into the space between Anita’s collarbones. “Why would I patch you up if I wanted to kill you?”

Anita, whose vision was blurred once again, grimaced beneath the weight of the woman, who was outfitted like a soldier going on a tour of duty in the desert. “Y-yield,” she wheezed as the knife and gun yanked away from her vitals. A moment later, they were replaced by a hand. Once Anita was back on her feet, the scowling woman cracked her in the side of the mouth.

“Hey what the fuu—”

“That’s for jumping me,” the other soldier grumbled as she holstered her weapons and took a few moments to smack the sand out from her clothes. “It’s bad enough your almost ran into my Jeep, but you try to maul me after I spent all that time patching you up?”

“Let’s just go with ‘I’m not used to good Samaritans’,” Anita replied as she gingerly touched a hand to her stinging visage. “Why do you swing like a weightlifter? You look older than me.”

“Nice to meet you too, Madame…”

Anita scowled. “Name is Bangalore,” she remarked as she reached out a hand that was still half-encased in a scalded glove. Three of fingers were visible where the fabric had torn or been scalded out of existence.

“Name’s PJ,” the older woman replied as she shook hands with a fellow soldier. “You’ll pardon me if I just call you Anita Williams, since that’s the name that was on your dogtags,” to prove her point, PJ lifted a pair of bent tags attached to a melted metal necklace.

Snatching the tags back, Bangalore scowled. “You’ll pardon me if I just call you …” She paused, which led to an extended air of silence.

“Pajamas is fine. But it’ll be Captain Pajamas.”

 

[PJ]

“Hand me that wrench?” PJ muttered as she glared at the engine of the Jeep. “The… the monkey one.”

Bangalore rolled her eyes. “You already tried the wrench, Lady. It’s not going to turn out any differently if you just start smacking the engine block again.”

PJ glared as she swiped the oversized wrench from her new acquaintance and tried to tighten something loose, that she’d found while poking around the vehicle’s very dead engine. “I used to be good with these, you know. Before they fired-by-office-promotion’d me, I was one of the best drivers and mechanics in my platoon.”

“I thought you said you were a medic?” Anita remarked as she leaned against the front of the Jeep and scanned the desert.

“Car. Person. It’s all the same,” PJ whispered just before her hands slipped off the handle of the wrench, and her whole body nearly tipped over into the hood. “Son of a bitch. I shouldn’t have gone cheap with the operating budget.”

Anita twisted her head. “Budget?”

The redhead nodded. “Yea, the budget. I run an office building over in a city called Karim. Embassy.”

“Embassy for what?” Anita muttered.

“Independent city-state…” PJ took a moment to determine what direction she was facing before she gestured with the wrench. “Few days that way. Associate of mine runs it.”

“So they’re your boss.”

PJ bristled. “No,” She remarked. “He’s just smart enough to understand he doesn’t have the … specific set of skills needed for the finer art of diplomatic relations.”

“Ahh,” Bangalore replied. “He’s an asshole.”

No response came. Instead, PJ merely stepped away from the Jeep’s dead engine and proceeded to shut the hood. “She’s dead. You think maybe we can salvage that ship you came in for parts? Maybe get something operational before we run out of water and die.”

Bangalore shrugged her shoulders. “Why don’t we just ask them for a ride?” She asked as she pointed to what seemed to be a singular vehicle approaching from the northeast.

Without offering a reply, PJ simply drew her sidearm and motioned the woman back to the other side of the vehicle. “We’re out in the Wastes… the people you run across out here tend to shoot first and ask questions after the fact.”

“Did you miss the part where I said I was a professional murderer?” Bangalore remarked before nevertheless following the woman’s orders.

“This place has several hundred thousand of those,” PJ laughed. “There’s a ‘professional murderer convention’ every summer if you’re interested. Toss people on an island and have them fight to the death.”

Bangalore smirked. “Yea, I think I’ll pass on anything like that for a while.”

As the vehicle drew closer, the pair of women hunkered down, hoping that the driver of the supped up big rig would just continue passed their position. Like most things recently in her life, PJ wasn’t afforded that luxury, as the foreboding monstrosity of a truck came to a stop just a few yards from their dead jeep.

“Fuck,” PJ rasped as she tried to peer over the door of the Jeep to see who was sitting in the cab of the truck.

“Neither of you is very good at hiding.” The speaker was clearly a woman, but beyond that, her tone didn’t betray whether or not the next line of dialogue was going to involve a flamethrower or high-caliber assault weapon. “I don’t bite. I can tell that piece of junk you’re driving is broken…” the speaker paused for a brief moment. “And I won’t even ask what happened with the mile-long debris field.”

“It’s mine jalopy, and the debris is hers,” PJ replied as she slowly stood up, her hands—one of which still held her Desert Eagle—extended to ensure they were both clearly visible.

The driver hadn’t left the cab of her rig, although she had slid over to the passenger side and leaned out the window, as if she was casually greeting a neighbor. PJ took a moment to look at the ghastly monstrosity that was the woman’s truck. Colossal in size, the back of the main cabin resembled another car that had been welded on, and PJ was fairly certain there was another car fused into the metal goliath near the rear of its tanker. Almost all of the rig’s massive wheels had spinning blades that would likely shred apart anything that drove too close to the vehicle. And, as if the enormous, spike-laden truck beast wasn’t enough, the front-end was fitted with a crude plow and a half-dozen assorted skulls.

“Nice ride,” Bangalore remarked as PJ set her gun down on the hood of the jeep. “I’m Bangalore and this is Pajamas.”

“PJ.” The redhead corrected with a scowl as the woman leaned a little further over her door. It was then that the two soldiers took note of the grease that their newfound acquaintance had used to paint the top half of her head. When coupled with her buzz cut and strong facial features, it all came together to create the edifice of a woman you probably didn’t want to fuck with.

“Name's Furiosa,” she spoke before reaching down to open the door to her truck from the outside. “Hop in. You two look like you need a ride.”

 

[PJ]

With the three women into the spacious cab, Furiosa revved the engine to life and started them on their journey.

“So, what brings you out here?” She asked as she glanced over at the pair of hitchhikers.

“It was the weekend,” PJ muttered as she took note of the driver’s metal arm. “I like to go on drives and get fresh air.”

Furiosa looked over at the redhead and grinned. “I’m also a fan of long drives, but what were you thinking driving that thing this far into the desert?”

“Yea, I went cheap,” the soldier shrugged. “At least I wasn’t this lady,” she jabbed Bangalore in the shoulder. “She wrecked her expensive ship crashing it into the dunes.”

With a snicker, the grease-painted woman glanced across PJ to the bandaged soldier leaning against the other cab door. “You just got here, didn’t you?”

Bangalore, whose eyes were on the dunes unfolding as they cruised the desert, merely laughed. “What the fuck gave you that impression?”

“The Crossroads is a special place,” Furiosa remarked as she leaned forward to look at something up in the sky. “Plenty of Worlds out there… all of them unique and all of them intangibly connected.” At that, the woman leaned back in her chair and turned back to PJ. “What World did you come from? You wouldn’t be driving around in that hunk of junk if you were born here or even a long-term resident of the sands.”

PJ scowled. “Ouch,” she remarked as she pulled up her own dog tags. Also attached on the same metal chain was a golden lion head pendant. “I split time between Uruk and Karim, but when I… arrived here, it was on Inverxe.”

Furiosa shuddered a little bit. “I hate the cold,” she commented. “I wouldn’t mind killing some of the uglies up on that little hell hole, but I much prefer the sun and the heat. Sand tires are cheaper than having to shell out for cold-weather tracks.”

“Never going back to Inverxe,” PJ replied. “I’ve had my fill of space predators and reanimated heaps of flesh for one lifetime.”

“If things don’t change, I can’t promise you this place will be any safer than Inverxe,” Furiosa calmly remarked as the truck crested a small mountain, causing all three of the women to momentarily lurch forward.

“How come?” PJ inquired.

The driver smiled before glancing at her passenger. “Have you not heard about what happened to Govermorne? Or that big calamity on Cevanti?” She asked calmly as they took a few sudden rights and lefts to clear a little sand-coated valley.

“One of ‘em blew up and the other one… got attacked?” The redheaded soldier replied after furrowing he brow and trying to remember the news she’d read. “Cevanti is the place that’s just one giant city and the rest is just overgrown ruins and wilderness, right? With the feral robots.”

“Feral robots?” Anita remarked as she glanced back inside the cab to scowl at the soldier.

“She’s not lying,” Furiosa chuckled. “It’s a grimy old place, but the people who live there seem to love it.”

“To each their own,” PJ responded.

“There’s dangers out there, though,” Furiosa remarked as she guided her war rig up a small mountainside trail carved straight from the clay-colored stone. Despite its size, the abomination of a vehicle manuevered gracefully as it climbed up along the path. “This is a shortcut,” the driver laughed when she turned to see a visibly unsettled Bangalore looking to adjust her safety harness. “I’ve taken these paths a hundred or so times… I promise you that you’re in good hands.”

“What do you mean ‘dangers’?”

Furiosa grinned as she executed a sharp turn with the ease of a professional. “Darkness. Something old and dark that we thought was gone.”

“The heavy metal lady with the war truck is waxing poetic,” Bangalore ‘whispered’ loudly enough to be heard by both parties.

“The Unmaking will threaten all of us,” Furiosa spoke with a scowl. “On the other Worlds, like this one, it will start slowly, but like a sickness, it will spread until it’s too late. Then, when the tipping point has come, he will arrive to push it over the brink.”

“Who?” PJ, at this point, found something almost enrapturing in the way the greasy, oily nomad spun her story.

“The Fallen Arbiter,” Furiosa muttered as the rig bumped a few times as it reached the other side of the small mountain. “Darkseid.”

“You talk like you know the guy.”

Furiosa smirked but didn’t answer the question. “People like the two of you… you’re the types who could stop the inevitable, you know.”

“Lady, I just fucking got here!” Bangalore cackled. “For all I know, this is just some concussion or fever dream, and I’m still lying in a ditch bleeding out.”

The driver laughed softly. “Doesn’t matter where you go, Anita, the Unmaking will be there.”

PJ had worn a frown for the last minute or so. “You just met us, and you are… what? Trying to recruit us to join you in some girl power savior squad? We gonna drive around in this truck and fight the monsters?”

Furiosa shook her head. “I have… other businesses. There are others I need to reach, but you two will be the first. You need to…” the woman turned and looked PJ dead in the eye. “You don’t trust me, Ms. Juuananagou?” Taking a hand off the wheel, Furiosa extended her arm. “Take your gloves off and see for yourself.”

“Who the fuck is Juunanananagogo?” Bangalore laughed, but on this occasion, the woman’s crass demeanor fell on deaf ears.

Not breaking eye contact with Furiosa—who seemed to have little issue steering with her eyes not on the road—PJ shed on of her gloves and clasped it around the woman’s exposed skin. Anita Williams, who felt excluded from whatever weird little moment was being shared between two women she had met within an hour of on other, remained silent. There was a long, pregnant pause before a now shrieking PJ let go of Furiosa and jerked sideways into Bangalore.

“The fuck was that?”

PJ, who had very little color left in her face, sucked in deep breaths as she stared at the other driver. “What do you need us to do?”

Quest: An Arbiter's Plea
Word Count: 1057/1000 (I figured I could just count the segment that included the Arbiter Message? This and the last two posts combined are 2823/2500 though, if I'm allowed to count the lead-in as well).

 

[PJ]

Six months later/six months prior to Conquest...

“Ma’am?” The question came before the customary knock on the door.

PJ looked up from her desk and flashed half a smile at the intern standing in the open doorway. “What is it?”

“We have some of those… representatives from the cartels, Madame Ambassador. They told me they had an appointment with you.”

The redhaired diplomat bristled at being called a madame for a silent moment or two before nodding her head to the intern. “Give me ten or fifteen seconds and then send them in,” she replied as she turned off the monitor at her workstation and slid a few inches away from her desk. Once the door had clicked shut behind the young man, PJ retrieved a key from a pocket inside her pant suit and used it to unlock the bottom drawer of her somewhat oversized bureau. With the drawer unlocked, she retrieved a metal laptop and a small electronic device that she plugged into the side of her desk.

Standing up from her workstation, PJ walked over to the large bay window along the north wall and drew the curtain closed. By the time she was nearly back to the desk, the door was already swinging open as a pair of weathered-looking locals and a third individual who clearly enjoyed the high life of Karim a great deal made their entrance.

Without a word, PJ slipped down into her chair, set her Desert Eagle on the desk next to her laptop, and clicked on the small, soundless machine. “Hello, Gideon,” she remarked as the local man sat in one of the plush chairs across from her. “Always a pleasure,” she added as she opened up the metal laptop and keyed in the access codes.

“You really are terrible at lying,” the local merchant-socialite-politico-slimeball smarmed as he gestured to one of the wastelanders. As if on cue, the man soundlessly moved his coat to reveal that he had a number of guns strapped to his broad chest.

PJ tilted her head before glancing back over at the seated man. “Are… are you trying to intimidate me, Gideon? I thought we had other news penciled in for today?”

The smarmy socialite snickered as he snaked a hand into the pocket of his jacket to retrieve a MO disk. “We are always all business, Madame Ambassador,” Gideon spoke as he set the little optical disk drive onto the edge of PJ’s desk. “The display with my friend here is to showcase some contraband that has been filtering its way into Karim’s … bleaker side streets.”

The redhead squinted a little bit as she took a second glance at the various firearms adorning the oversized wastelander. “Stuff like this washes up all the time.”

Gideon grinned. “Do people wash up? You hear those reports, my little gilded ambassador?”

“I’ll bite,” PJ muttered as she set her forearms down on her desk and tilted her head. “What’s the tea, Gideon?”

The man motioned before reaching into his suit jacket. A beat later, he set a collection of small mechanical pieces down on the desk next to the Ambassador’s gun.

“Clock pieces?”

“Souvenirs that some of the off-World refugees had on them,” Gideon quipped. “Remnants of Govermorne… you know that place that was all belching smog and gears and oil?”

“I’ve heard of it,” PJ replied. “Whole place collapsed or something months ago,” she added as she stared at a piece of a twisted gear. “I believe it happened while I was out in the desert helping to carve civilization from nothing.”

Gideon chuckled. “Yes, you, your king, and an army of hired engineers and professional workers were certainly roughing it out there in the desert,” he spoke as he tapped his finger near to the pieces. “The place didn’t collapse, Madame, it was destroyed. They say by this great black wave of … unlife.”

“Unlife?”

“Something like that. Survivors say the place just got ‘unmade’… whatever the fuck that means,” Gideon answered. “Been a steady supply of people still settling in from the cosmos bringing horror stories from there. You hear about Cevanti?”

“I followed the news,” PJ replied.

“Spooky stuff.”

She had opened her mouth to say something condescending, but halfway through the thought, PJ suddenly recalled the truck ride from the strange, bald woman out in the deserts. Furiosa had spoke of ill portents and something called an unmaking, hadn’t she?

“Where are these refugees?” PJ asked as she glanced up from her desk.

Gideon smiled. “How much would you like to donate to my charitable fundraiser?”

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Count: 772 Words
Requirement: 2500 Words

 

[PJ]

The Babylonian Ambassador strode the slum of Karim, a heavy gun on her hip. In one of her gloved fists, she clenched one of the charred little gears that she had received for ‘donating’ to one of Gideon’s various charities. While she was a hundred percent certain that the money would wind up turning into trouble for someone at some point, PJ also knew she didn’t want to lose any time in pursuing a possible lead into Furiosa’s ‘grave portents’.

After dealing with Gideon, PJ had pulled her Deputy Chief into her office to go over the afternoon slate of items. Much like the slimy ‘local businessman’ who often traded donations for murkier reports from the streets of Karim, PJ’s deputy was someone who had years of experience peddling nonsense and schmoozing up to the elites and powerbrokers. While he wasn’t pleased with the idea of having to sit through her meetings, she told him that the alternative was completing this ‘field op’, and at the sound of that ultimatum, the man had lost what fleeting vestige of a spine he had.

In return for him having to complete all her office work, PJ let him know that he’d have ‘the best company’ in the process, which was the tongue-in-cheek way to inform him that Anita’s shift would be starting momentarily.

After their encounter with Furiosa out in the wastes, the pair had eventually made their way back to Karim. Much to their chagrin, the incident that had felt like an afternoon for PJ had actually soaked up almost a whole calendar month. Some of the locals called it a type of ‘time dilution’ brought about by the dunes themselves.

With no means to get out of Mesa Roja and onward to her final destination (no one had the heart—or the gall—to tell Anita that those who arrived in the Crossroads usually only ‘left’ when their number got called), ‘Bangalore’ had eventually accepted PJ’s offer to join the embassy staff. Her job? The one that PJ had originally been assigned, before Gilgamesh’s original appointee had opted to have a nervous breakdown and abscond with a few satchels of the king’s gold. Apparently, there were many people out there who couldn’t tolerate the gilded king’s unique approach to team management.

Now it was PJ who got to sit in on the conference calls with the king of Uruk. Why?

“You’re the only one there with the spine for the job, Pajamas!”

Translation? “I don’t trust anyone else not to screw everything up and/or trigger my occasionally thin ego.”

And thus, PJ’s stint as ‘head of office security’ ended, and while she refused to wear non-military gear (old habits die hard), she at least now wore ‘softer’ tones and tried to conceal the weapons on her person.

As she checked her watch, PJ scowled a little. While part of her enjoyed the fresh air and time away from the office, this was usually the part of the day where she’d slip out to one of the nearby side street and enjoy the cup of Turkish coffee that would buoy her spirits for the remainder of her shift. Instead of that, she was perched at the mouth of an unmaintained street trying to find people who had been smuggled into this city in the dead of night.

“You’re out of place,” the voice was like that of a ghost whispering into the night wind.

Craning her neck as one of her hands reflexively slid down to the gun on her hip, PJ spotted the haggard man nestled into the darkness of a nearby corridor between two tenements. “And this World is flat,” she deadpanned after seeing that the speaker wasn’t someone breathing fire or sporting knife-sized talons for digits.

The snark caused the man to grin, baring a mouth that was missing a handful of teeth. “Humor’s good,” he muttered. “People around here don’t tend to laugh.”

PJ, hand still on her gun, nodded softly as she continued to glance occasionally to her periphery. The last thing she needed was to be jumped in some dank side street and get a shiv in her ribcage. “I’m looking for the refugees who came from the gear world,” she asked. “I heard that a group of them came into the city recently.”

“A bunch of ‘em have,” the man replied. “Most of them get chewed up and spit back out… Karim might look like a jewel, but she’s got a vicious streak a mile wind beneath all that glitz and glamor.”

PJ knew full-well that the man wasn’t lying—there were parts of Karim more opulent than you could imagine and other parts where you were likely to get robbed or worse. “Want to point me in the right direction?”

The man sneered. “There’s a halfway house for wayward souls. You might want to poke your nose around those parts.”

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Count: 819 Words
Thread Count: 1584 / 2500

 

[PJ]

Fifteen or twenty minutes after hearing about the halfway house, PJ found herself milling around in the lobby of a glorified tenement. The street rat hadn't been far from the truth when he spoke about the seedier parts of Karim. Out here in the unglorified stretches of the 'Jewel of Mesa' all you were likely to find was misery, poverty, and violence.

That said, you could learn a lot of information from strangers by flashing gold coins and improving peoples’ quality of life. Within a few minutes of finding her way to the establishment, PJ had bought the entire population of the glorified refugee camp new clothes, food, water, and an entire week's worth of nights at the Imperial, a nice hotel closer to the tourist and business districts of Karim. The best part?

Work spending account. PJ smiled inwardly as she signed the required documentation and placed the phone call back to the Embassy. More than just an improvement in their present condition, she had also taken the names of everyone who had survived the trek from Govermorne and granted them Uruk visas for the next six months. That way, if any of them decided the big city wasn't for them, they could find free public housing in Uruk.

"Yes, my boss is very concerned about the wellbeing of those less fortunate than himself."

She'd given the speech so many times, and it had yet to stop being amusing.

With the business of buying trust taken care of, PJ found herself in a back room with the two de facto leaders of the refugees. From cursory introductions, she had learned that they were a pair of wives who had worked as custodial staff in something call 'the slag works'. From the pair of clockwork elves, PJ had been painted a pretty clear picture of the business that had gone down on Govermorne, and try as she may, she couldn’t avoid the very clear reality that this was in line with the bald trucker’s threats about coming darkness and destruction.

Darkseid.

PJ took audio recordings from the two refugees and thanked them for their time. She met with a larger group of them to go over transit information and the temporary housing they should move to ‘at their earliest convenience.’

Everything seemed to be going smoothly until someone started screaming near the back of the rundown building.

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Count: 400 Words
Thread Count: 1984 / 2500

 

[PJ]

For the first handful of seconds, PJ and the two gearwork (clockwork?) elves thought the shouting was just a natural byproduct of the less-than-ideal environment of the refugee shelter. For someone who had visited a number of these camps in different universes—or was she just someplace else in her native realm?—PJ was used to people being in various states of anger, sickness, and even panic. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to have a breakdown and start raising their voice.

Unfortunately for the three women in the backroom, that shrill scream was followed by a couple dozen more, and it became readily clear to them that something very bad was unfolding in the repurposed cafeteria that housed the other members of this refugee group.

“Stay here,” PJ barked as she drew her Desert Eagle and rushed to the door. Pressing against the wall next to it, the older woman clicked off her sidearm’s safety as she reached down to twist the knob. Nudging the door open, she was immediately inundated with what sounded like a veritable stampede. “Shit.” Stepping out into the little hallway that would take her back to the central room, PJ rushed forward.

Dropping into a crouch near the corner, she stole a peak around and saw that the majority of the noise was people trying to push and shove their way through the doors and windows of the building. Given the volume of people attempting to flee, that was causing jams and resulting in injuries. A cursory glance showed a few individuals lying either motionless or wracked with pain. Near the far end of the cafeteria, PJ spotted a single person pacing around and shouting gibberish.

Let’s go, Medic. Save some lives.

Gun at the ready, the soldier-turned-ambassador swung around the corner and dashed toward an overturned table six or seven yards from her individual of interest. From behind the rusted piece of cover, PJ poked her head up to get a closer look at the person. After all, they seemed to be unarmed, and while that didn’t mean they’d be harmless, it at least meant she didn’t have to worry about being shot or stabbed immediately.

“Hello there,” PJ shouted.

The ‘individual’ was a young man in his late twenties. Like many of the others in this group of survivors from Govermorne, he was not only partially bio-mechanical, but he was also in a terrible condition. One of his arms hung limply at his side and sputtered as the broken gears within its joints whined in agony as something that PJ assumed was oil sputtered from the mechanisms. Even the flesh components of the man were ravaged, and one of his ankles seemed to be broken, which didn’t stop him from dragging it as he paced back and forth.

“You’re scaring everyone,” the woman shouted, which finally seemed to get the partially clockwork youth to pause. His neck jerked to face her, and she got a good look at a visage that had stared a little too long at the horrors of war. The skin was stretched thin and had an ashen pallor, and the eyes were sunken back in their sockets.

The eyes…

PJ frowned as she stared into the man’s blood-red eyes. Had those eyes been yellow or any vaguely human shade, she may not have felt her stomach start to tie into knots, but it was the unnatural, almost glowing red hue that made her blood begin to run cool through her veins.

“Are you hurt?” She asked as she clung to the closest thing to a ‘script’ she could conceive in this situation. “I used to be a medic… I can help you, if you’ll let me.”

When he spoke, the voice was a mocking whisper that seemed to fill the air around her.

“I have already been saved.” Black, ichorous bile started to dribble down the corners of the man’s mouth as he tilted his head. “I told them all that he was coming to finish the job. That I would be his sacred vessel!”

“Who?” PJ asked.

“Darkseid,” the lunatic hissed as he held up one of his hands and started to laugh as the skin started to bubble and blackened.

PJ didn’t wait to see what was going to happen. She put a bullet through the man’s head, and once the body had crashed to the ground, she took a step forward and put one through the heart.

With that threat eliminated, she turned back to the front of the building and rushed to help the wounded who had been left behind by the fleeing masses.

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Count: 771
Thread Count: 2755 / 2500

 

[PJ]

One month prior to Dante’s Abyss: Conquest…

PJ had been on the equivalent of a working vacation when news came that ‘the grind never ends.’

After settling the various refugees and coordinating the necessary means to keep tabs on them as they settled into their new lives, PJ’s little office had gone back to operating normal, for the most part. Yes, they’d still have occasional visits from local strongmen trying to out-leverage Babylonian’s gradual accumulation of status in Karim’s hierarchy. And, yes, she’d personally send most of those individuals packing with a black eye and/or a broken arm.

Outside of local politics, her main emphasis had mostly been the usual duty of an embassy or a consulate. That meant assisting citizens of Uruk as they navigated the landscape of Mesa Roja’s de facto capital city.

Since her formal installation as Ambassador, she’d seen the number of ‘abroad’ Babylonian citizens spike, with the city’s early ‘growing pains’ seemingly a thing of the past. With access to water and other resources less a matter of life and death, that meant more people were willing to take trips, whether they be for leisure, business, or—grossly enough—pleasure. The number of times that PJ had to coordinate bail for someone who had had ‘too good of a time’ in one of Karim’s bathhouses was an uncomfortable statistic.

On top of that, there was also the business of dealing with all the Syntech employees shuffling to and from Uruk. If her own citizens weren’t occupying enough of her time, she often had to go to bat for Karl Jak’s people as well, because they all seemed to share their boss’ taste for fine wine and occasional debauchery

With that said, business had been smooth sailing, minus the handful of outliers that prompted her to grease palms or put the squeeze on some overzealous batch of city militia. In fact, everything was smooth enough that PJ had managed to arrange for this fake vacation back to Uruk, with the embassy left in the hands of a trusted lieutenant who had shadowed her enough to not let things implode if she stepped away for half a month.

The first week or so had a been a relatively … satisfying experience.

Most of those days, PJ and Anita woke up in their guest quarters in Nippur’s main palace grounds. From what she understood, Gilgamesh had a number of various lieutenants that he’d accrued while she’d been off in Karim, but many of them were the swashbuckling types who never seemed to stay still.

After mimosas or Bloody Marys, the pair would stroll the halls of the ziggurat before going on a stroll through the streets of the ever-expanding polis. On a few occasions, they’d taken a few days trips to nearby oases or rivers, and in those times, they’d usually been in the presence of a number of other citizens of Uruk. PJ didn’t mind, because unlike other members of the town’s governance, ‘embassy staff’ didn’t rank very high on the public radar. This far removed from Karim, the majority of the town’s populace probably weren’t even aware.

Now, that didn’t mean the pair didn’t occasionally run into one of the town’s more affluent types, and nine times out of ten, that person tried their damnedest not to make eye contact with PJ, which always seemed to get Anita in a laughing fit that only an elbow to the rib could solve.

One on such morning about thirteen days into her ‘vacation’, PJ should have known that something was afoot.

As she was leaving one of the kitchens (she wasn’t a fan of relying on wait staff for anything), the redheaded diplomat rounded a corner and collided with ‘the big man’.

Unarmored and inattentive, Gilgamesh crashed face first onto the ground as the woman who had clipped him stumbled a few paces before colliding with the sandstone wall. Almost instinctively, he started flailing around as portals crackled to life around him.

“Stop it,” PJ groaned as she rubbed what would likely be a bruise on her lower back. “You look like a child having a temper tantrum.”

The sound of the woman’s raspy and somewhat haggard voice had the intended effect. Sitting upright, Gilgamesh snatched her extended arm and was up on his feet a few moments later. “You should watch where you’re walking, Pajamas.” Amusingly enough, PJ was still in the attire that had become her namesake with the king of Uruk.

“You’re the one whose eyes weren’t upright,” she shot back without skipping a beat as she gestured to the tablet device that had skittered a few feet from them. “I thought we put you on a screen time limit to help your little developing brain not get overwhelmed by all those goofy videos and flashing images?”

Gilgamesh scowled to the point of nearly baring his teeth, but he must have had the wherewithal to catch himself, because he knew that type of reaction would have just elicited an even more animated response from the woman. “I could have you fired for that.”

Knowing she’d won this little ‘platonic pals quarrel’, PJ orbed the fallen tablet into her hand and passed it over to her ‘boss’. “Fire me and you might actually have to work for a living.” In the hopes that the man had been looking at something interesting, she had glanced at the screen as she passed it over. “Karl Jak?”

The king, who looked more like a university student than an ancient demigod when he was without his gilded carapace, twitched at the sound of the man’s name. He wouldn’t admit it, but PJ knew that Gilgamesh partially regretted the concordant with Syntech that had helped carve out this city. For her part, she didn’t really know why he cared so much about the purple suited businessman. Karl Jak’s workers, while sometimes a nuisance for her line of employment, were effective at their assigned jobs and never gave the monarch a hard time.

“He’s been … direct messaging me,” Gilgamesh’s expression betrayed some confusion.

“Sure,” PJ remarked. “That’s what they call those nowadays.” In her past life, the term ‘email’ had served the same purpose, but as technology advanced, things needed new names.

“Dante’s Abyss,” Gilgamesh continued as he slowly double tapped the screen (was he mouthing ‘double click’?) and handed it over to the woman for her perusal. “He’s sent me an advance memo of the promotional material.”

Despite the fact that she’d spent what felt like the better part of a year behind a desk managing other people in an office, PJ found herself somewhat intrigued by the little pdf file. “This sounds … different?” She remarked as she passed it back to Gilgamesh. “Armies? Fortifications? Troop maneuvers? Isn’t that type of shit right up your alley?”

The blonde rolled his eyes. “Of course, that comes to me naturally, but Karl’s … ‘dm’ stated that I wouldn’t qualify for the pool of commanders due to my performance in the event last year. Something about ‘injection of new star power’.”

PJ chuckled softly. “So? I’m sure you’d be an asset to whoever you got put with, and who knows, that person might go belly-up and require you to fill the void, y’know?”

She knew she’d said the right thing when she saw that glimmer of a smirk in the corner of the man’s mouth. “I’ll consider it.”

“If you don’t go, I think I might.”

That remark caused Gilgamesh to scowl. “Please, you’d be dead in days.”

“I was a commissioned medical officer, you know. I literally was on battlefields constantly.”

“Yea,” the man muttered as he furrowed his brow. “Like fifty years ago. Plus, I thought you have to run decisions like this through your ‘partner’.”

The redhead rolled her eyes. “My ‘partner’ is a career soldier-turned-death game contestant. I’m sorry that my ‘best friend forever with benefits’ isn’t a talking mouse like you.”

Gilgamesh opened his mouth to fire back, but before he could, there was a scream from the courtyard.

A man, his body ravaged by injuries and the uncontrolled ravages of the desert, had shoved through a contingency of guards and crashed into a small coterie of palace staff. As the guards moved into a loose circle around the collapsed figure, Gilgamesh and PJ came through the nearest set of heavy double doors.

“Move,” Gilgamesh barked as the two made a beeline for the fallen, writhing man.

“H-help!” He gasped through parched, cracked lips.

“What happened?” Gilgamesh shouted as he continued to wave away the soliders.

Stepping forward and dropping into a crouched position near the man, PJ lifted her head and glared through the assortment of soldiers. “Go get this man some water … he’s dehydrated!” When she saw a few of the guards look tentatively at Gilgamesh, she snapped. “Now!” That sent them rushing to the nearest water well as the man grasped at PJ with surprising strength.

He managed to pull himself up and share her gaze. His eyes were manic, with flecks of something strange floating in his sclera. “Don’t drink the water!” He rasped as his grip tightened further.

For his part, Gilgamesh stood by and restrained himself from driving a spear through the crazed man.

PJ, who knew that this man wasn’t well for this world, kept her composure even as his ragged nails cut through her pajamas an into her skin. “What water? Where do you come from?”

“D-don’t! The water! It’s in the water!” He wailed as he suddenly seized up and collapsed to the ground.

The former medic didn’t bother with checking his vitals. Instead, her eyes caught the necklace around his neck, and she pulled it free with a soft tug.

“That’s the insignia of Lagash,” Gilgamesh spoke as he looked down at the little stone medallion. “They are…”

“Up the River Khasa,” PJ finished as she glanced up at the monarch. “The same river where we derive the majority of our clean water.”

Gilgamesh, who saw that the courtyard was empty after the guards had been sent scrambling for water, crouched down next to his ambassador and spoke silently. “Can you deal with this?” He whispered as he glanced around to ensure they weren’t being spied on by anyone in the adjacent windows. “I will keep this situation from spreading and causing a panic, but if that river is befouled, we need to know as soon as possible.”

The woman simply nodded her head. “I’ll leave right now.”

She stood up and was already pacing away when a hand fell on her shoulder.

“Hey,” Gilgamesh rasped—his voice still held to a whisper.

“What?” PJ muttered as she turned around.

“Uhh, with all due respect, you might want to change out of your pajamas… Pajamas.”

The woman looked down at her attire, which was now speckled with bits of sand and blood. “Oh. Yea, you’re probably on to something.”

Quest: "Don't Drink the Water"
Post Word Count: 1824 words
Quest Word Count: 1824 / 5000

 

[PJ]

The camel came to a stop about ten yards from the banks of the River Khasa. Atop the desert beast, its rider gave it a reassuring rub on the cheek as they slung both legs to one side and proceeded to slip down onto the ground.

Her figure mostly concealed beneath the folds of the beige robe, PJ slid back the hood to reveal a face that was likewise hidden behind a device designed to shield her eyes from the sun and ensure he didn’t breathe in sand or other silicates. While sandstorms weren’t as likely near the river, she still preferred to wear the device, because it helped prevent her mouth and nose from drying out in the heat.

After ensuring that no sand had managed to sneak in through the hood, PJ slipped it back over her hair. If she planned to prolong her period of observation, she didn’t need her red hair to give her away from a hundred yards.

“I’m going to go the rest of the way on foot, Pico,” the woman spoke quietly as she walked up and set a hand on the camel’s forehead. She used her other hand to reach down near the saddle and activate a small device nestled among the various layers of material. “You know the way, and if you get lose or lazy, that beacon will draw one of the handlers from Uruk to come get you.”

The camel brayed in her face, and she smiled through the mask as she gave it another reassuring pat on the top of the head. After sending Pico back in the direction they had come, PJ pushed aside the robe and verified that her sidearm had no signs of a jam. Once the Desert Eagle was snug back in its holster, she doublechecked her boot knives and the sickle sword that Gilgamesh had given her a while ago to commemorate six months as ‘my eyes, ears, and voice in Karim’. She had contemplating pawning off the weapon, given the diamonds and the golden inlays in the hilt made it a bit gaugy, but like most parts of her job as ambassador, she had grown attached to it.

This counts as time and a half, right?

The thought brought a smile to her masked visage as she trotted down the small slope to the banks of the river Khasa. Like many rivers in this region of Mesa Roja, the Khasa’s shores were mostly barren earth, with the occasional patches of sand that clung bitterly to the dry soil. This section was no different, and unfortunately, her initial observations of the river didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. That said, she was about as far from a marine biologist or geologist as you could get.

While the woman had hoped for an easy ‘smoking gun’, she had always figured that she would have to make her way to Lagash and do some actual investigative work. Pushing up the billowy sleeve of the travel robes, she verified her coordinates on the tablet-like device strapped to her wrist and forearm. Like many toys she’d come across after a few years in Karim, she would normally have no use for the device, because the woman knew upwards of two-thirds of Karim as well as the back of her hand. The third she wasn’t familiar with was because those parts of town often switched ‘hands’ every few months or were home to transient or migrant populations.

Out here in the wild, though? The operations were still a bit limited, but this navigation device would ensure she didn’t get lost on her trek.

With a proper heading, she let her sleeves fall back over her gloved hands as she reached over her shoulder and carefully removed her walking stick from the strap that crisscrossed her back. Mostly cosmetic, it was lined with a katchin core that would serve well if she needed to lash out at a distance without needing to resort to firearms. Noting that she had only a few hours of sunlight to reach town, PJ started up the river toward Lagash. By her calculations, she should make it with just enough time to find an inn of some kind before night fell across the disk.

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Word Count: 712
Thread Total WC: 2536/5000

 

[PJ]

The woman arrived at the outskirts of Lagash just as Mesa moved into the darkness of night. Compared to Uruk, this place was simply a glorified backwater, and PJ didn’t mean that with any malice. During the initial construction of Gilgamesh’s gaudy capital city, she had gone on long rides into the wilderness. Maps of Mesa Roja were uncommon, and most of them were the result of surveying expeditions that were focused more on access to rich minerals rather than actually recording the land and its inhabitants.

Lagash was one of the many tribes and/or semi-permanent settlements that PJ had recorded during nearly a month’s worth of traveling the area. It wasn’t the largest place out in this region nor was it the smallest. When she had been out to these parts a few years ago, the settlement had been a glorified river town. She had noted an economy that thrived on transporting goods safely along the Khasa to larger, fortified cities. It was a volatile way to make a living, since sometimes nomads weren’t willing to pay river tolls or barter for access to fresh water.

That said, the settlement she had encountered from a distance had been full to the brim with life. While she had been concerned that a society prone to aggression from outsiders had no fortifications, her mission had been surveillance and not diplomatic outreach. Now, as she strode through one of the settlement’s main throughways, she felt a twinge of sadness.

Even though it was only a few minutes from sundown, the place was a veritable ghost town. At this time, one could expect people to still be filtering back to their lodgings or to share a drink or meal at a community kitchen. Instead, the place was nearly pitch-black, and the only lights she noticed were coming from a tall structure that she hadn’t spotted on her initial trip to these parts.

With her googles set to thermal mode, the woman decided that it her best bet was to scope out the bizarre structure constructed near the settlement’s pier. In that initial survey, she had been amazed at the complexity of Lagash’s dock, especially since many of the town’s buildings were glorified yurts and sandstone huts. In contrast, their dock had been built with strong wood and reinforced by a certain type of iron blend that was popular in these parts.

What hadn’t been here before was the towering black structure. As she looked at it from the other side of town, PJ certainly felt like it stood out like a sore thumb against the rest of Lagash’s buildings. More than that, it was the only place where she could see lights, and although she was at a distance and relying on filtration through her helmet’s auditory channels, she swore there was sound.

She paused as she looked around once more. For whatever reason, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, and while the temperature was certainly falling with the onset of night, she knew that wasn’t the sole reason. Were those eyes glimpsing at her from behind the curtain of the nearest hut?

PJ squeezed her hands around the walking stick as she changed directions and started to chart a more roundabout way through the settlement. The perimeter of Lagash, where the habitations terminated and the desert took back over, had a loose walkway that she could skirt to avoid passing in front of any of the small homes. After all, this region often suffered tremendous winds coming down from the north, and as a result, all the entrances and windows faced the south.

Even so, she quickly realized that her mask was detecting subtle thumps in the loosely packed walkway behind her. When she paused to look over her shoulder, she captured nothing on her thermals, which did nothing to settle her nerves.

As she resumed forward, the woman moved one of her hands so it rested around the hilt of her sickle sword. She continued on the path she had chosen, and she paid a keen eye to the notifications on the HUD about detected motion. Unfortunately, all this prep work did little to help her when something jolted from the dark in front of her. In an instant, she was wrenched back and through an open hatch at the rear of the nearest structure.

PJ stumbled into the dark and twisted sharply. The sword came free from its scabbard, but she realized quite quickly that she was staring at a young woman desperately asking her to be silent.

“Please,” she whispered as she dragged the fake wall hatch to conceal the makeshift entrance. Once it was sealed, she turned and gestured for them both to head toward a nearby hole in the ground.

“Why?” PJ rasped through the voice modulator of her headgear.

“Trust.”

Despite her tendency for surliness, the foreigner followed her abductor down into the underground space. Once they were both on solid ground, a lightbulb flickered to life, and PJ had to adjust the view settings on her gear. Switching off the optical settings, she could clearly see that she had been nabbed off the streets by a girl no older than fifteen. More than that, the teenager was sporting a litany of clearly visible injuries.

“It was unwise of you to come here, Outlander,” she spoke in a voice barely audible despite their close proximity. “If you had come into town any earlier in the day, you would already be strung up by the docks.”

The older woman scowled behind her mask. Before she responded to the girl’s semi-frantic whispering, PJ pushed back her hood and thumbed the handful of clips that kept her facial apparatus secured. After a few deep breaths of somewhat refreshing ‘real’ air, she made eye contact with the younger woman. “My name is PJ. I ran into someone who had fled Lagash, and he told my people and I that something was wrong here.”

“A man?”

PJ nodded.

“Black hair? Blue eyes?”

She furrowed her brow. “Yes, and… I think? Did you know this person.”

“Sounds like that was Jameson Collins, who lived on the other edge of town. He used to get real vocal at the fireside meetings. We figur’d he had been taken.”

“He passed away,” PJ remarked. “He was sporting some pretty bad wounds, and it looked as if he had walked much of the distance from here to Nippur.”

The adolescent girl tilted her head. “He made it that far? He always seemed like the type of talk big but carry a short stick. It doesn’t change the fact that you shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe, especially for your kind.”

PJ scowled. “Did you miss the part where I said I’m here to help? Tell me what’s going on here.”

The older woman saw her expression expertly mirrored in the teenager. “Lady, you don’t strike me as someone who can solve what’s wrong here. People younger and stronger than you have tried, and they’re dead. You need to leave.”

In a swirl of lights, PJ dematerialized. A split-second later, she reappeared behind the teenager, whose concealed weapons she quickly found the cast aside before latching the glorified child in a chokehold. After holding that for a few moments, she released her and gave her a gentle shove. “Crows feet and some gray hairs don’t mean diddly or shit here in the Crossroads, so why don’t you cut the bullshit and let me help you. Or do you want to continue to play the obstinate teenager?”

Although she was rubbing her throat, the younger girl had a faint smile on her face. “Fine, Lady… fuck. You want to screw with these people, you go right ahead.”

“Just tell me what I’m walking into, and you can go back to hiding in your basement and skulking through the streets.”

“Okay!” The younger girl rasped as grabbed the trio of knives she had concealed in her clothes. “The weirdness doesn’t go too far back… maybe like a month? Some nutjobs from up the river crashed into the dock. The elders of the village initially thought the boat had some runaways or something, but everyone on the boat was dead.”

“A boat full of corpses?”

“I’m telling the story, aren’t I?” She huffed as her age continued to shine through the gruff veneer. “I didn’t see it, but my mother—before she cut tail and ran—told my dad and I that the bodies were wrong.” PJ’s mouth seemed primed to open with a question before the teenager lifted a finger. “She said something about a mold or something. Like … a plant but not a plant. Said it had grown around parts of the hull and that the dead people had traces of it in their bodies.”

“Sounds gross.”

“Right? Anyway, the elders all voted to burn the boat and the bodies. I heard from our neighbors that they carried everything back up the river and set it on fire, but bad stuff happened. The people who came back were okay for a few days, and then they started acting weird. Worse than that, no one stopped to think where the boat came from or whether that gross stuff had been contained to the boat after it crashed our docks.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t.”

“A week ago, I heard that they discovered two more wrecks at different points up stream. One of them was supposedly in one of the Khasa tributaries that we pull our drinking water from, since the main part of the river is often gross from all the cargo that travels along it. Either that, or I think it probably got into the wells we use for ground water. My dad said something strange about the well water a few days before he left and didn’t come back.”

“What’s with the weird black building? It doesn’t … fit.”

“No shit,” the girl muttered. “After the sickness, the people who didn’t die started going insane. They started hurting themselves or sometimes hurting people who weren’t sick. After a few days of that, many of them started building that thing by the waterfront. By that point, I didn’t have any friends left, so I’m not sure what it is aside from a nexus for the crazies that run this place now.”

“How long have you been alone?”

She shrugged. “Four or five days?”

“You haven’t tried to leave? Steal a boat or something and head downstream?”

A frown spread across her face. “For what? I also drank that water. I thought I was good, but I’ve been hearing the whispers for a day or so now. It’s only a matter of time before I die, rip my innards out in madness, or I become one of the gibbering nutsos by the river.”

PJ frowned. “Just hang tight … I’ll go and sort this out?”

The girl laughed. “You’re the fourth or fifth adult I’ve heard say something like that in the last few weeks.”

“What’s your name?”

“What’s it matter? This village and I will both be one with the sands soon, anyway.”

“Well since you told me I’m going to be dead anyway, why don’t you humor me?”

“Anacruz,” she spoke after a delayed silence. “Just Ana is also fine.”

“Well, ‘Just Ana’ … I’ll talk to you again in a little bit, so why don’t you just bunker down in your hidey-hole here for a little bit.”

“It’s your funeral, lady.”

“Love the optimism, kid.”

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Word Count: 1925
Thread Total WC: 4461/5000

 

[PJ]

With her mask back on, PJ exited up from the cellar and out through the front of the hut. If what Ana had said was true, she could stop slinking around the town and just make her way straight to the riverfront and ‘the crazies’ who had nested there.

As she neared the edge and came to within a stone’s throw of the gate that barred access to the pier, PJ paused to slip her walking stick over her shoulder. Her fingers thumbed open the little buckle of her gun holster as her other hand grabbed hold of the gate latch. The mechanism, despite her assumptions, swung rather freely, and she had the way ahead laid out to her on a metaphorical red carpet.

This… this is one hundred percent a trap.

Back on Inverxe, the native fauna (and the flora, for that matter) had a lovely habit of frequently laying traps for travelers, scavengers, and all manner of lost, idiot souls that found themselves down on the surface of that dread moon. On more than one occasion, she had sat nestled in a boulder and had to listen to some wounded person scream and wail for help for hours on end before succumbing to the cold. The first few had been barely endurable experiences, but the alternative would have been consigning herself to be the meal of a xenomorph or the plaything of whatever else was stalking the region.

With the gate now a few yards behind her, PJ reached into her robe and drew a flare. She eyed the device to make sure it was operational before tucking it into the cuff of the tunic she wore beneath the outer layer of loose clothing.

“Here goes nothing.”

She was within ten paces of the strange structure when she caught the movement in the corners of her eyes. From some of the small shacks and storage structures that would once house goods, the former denizens of Lagash spilled forth slowly and assuredly. In the near dark of night, their eyes glowed with a faint shade of purple, and she could tell that most of them were armed.

“I guess bingo just ended?” PJ spoke as a door opened up on the black structure ahead of her. She turned in that direction, and at this distance, it was fairly obvious that the building wasn’t something born of a usual human mind. While perhaps originally built of timbers and joists, it was clear that the entire structure had gained its color from a sort of … viscous substance that had been smeared over it. It was possible that it was some kind of tar, but even at this distance, the former medic swore she saw the material undulating—its surface twitching and bubbling in the faint moonlight in a way that no synthetic building material could.

“Something tells me you’re not the welcoming party.”

The figure who had exited the black structure let out a gurgling hiss as he lifted an accusatory finger. “You are not welcome here, outlander. You will not interfere with His work.”

PJ, who could see that the villagers were still creeping closer, sneered behind her mask as she took a precautionary step away from the figure in front of her. “Last chance to stand down.”

“You will join us,” the man spoke in a voice that seemed to gurgle and bubble in his mouth. “You will be useful. You will help us spread his gift down the Khasa. You will help Father Gomez to spread the gospel of He Who Has Risen.”

“Can you translate that into normal person speech? Your padre is behind this?”

“Father Gomez is but a cog for the Fallen One, like me … like you shall be. We are all Unmade in his image. We are all Darkseid.”

That single word was enough to evoke the truck ride with Furiosa, and it was in a brief, dazzling moment that PJ knew exactly what she was dealing with here in Lagash. She wrenched the Desert Eagle free from its holster and blew apart the skull of the nearest villager. Without skipping a beat, she managed to unload the rest of the clip before the circle of lunatics closed around her.

Ejecting the clip, she smashed the barrel of the heavy handgun into an oncoming, snarling visage as her other hand went for the sickle sword. In a wide arch, she pulled it free and slashed a pair of throats in the process.

As she pivoted into the open part of the circle, PJ ducked a two-by-four and disemboweled its owner. Before she could make it to a fully vertical stance, the man who had done all the talking had crashed down onto her. She felt the thick, viscous heat of his breathing as he rasped down into her masked face. His hands fumbled around for her neck, but before he had a chance to find purchase on anything of value, she had drawn a boot knife and driven its length down through his right ear.

Rolling the limp corpse off of her, PJ had only a few moments before two more villagers tried to take advantage of her situation. She literally cut one off at the ankles and scurried backwards as the other stabbed down onto the pier with what seemed to be an oversized shovel. As that individual struggle to free their weapon, PJ put her foot through the shaft, and after scrambling to her feet, she grabbed her second attacker and drove their face down onto the broken haft of their shovel.

A quick turn gave PJ the chance to partially block against the clubbing impact of the sandbag. Waves of pain radiated from the arm she had folded in front of her face and chest to absorb the impact, but with her unaffected hand, she managed to quickly open the shrieking woman’s throat. Turning again, she let out an oomph as the air was driven from her lungs and her feet left the ground. A moment later, she was slammed down onto the pier, which groaned and even started to splinter beneath the impact.

Reaching into her sleeve, the dazed woman twisted and yanked on the concealed flare, which tore open with a crackling hiss and a splash of blinding light. While her mask rapidly adjusted in time to shield her, the four or five people still trying to kill her were not so lucky. As they screamed and cursed and clawed at their faces, PJ orbed the Desert Eagle into her spare hand, reloaded, and promptly cleared the field of hostiles.

When no one else materialized from the ether to try and maul her, the woman let out a sigh of relief and slumped down onto her knees.

Quest: The Fleeing Masses
Post Word Count: 1131
Thread Total WC: 5592/5000