@NyantaStarhunt @Cerebrate
Anna: “Well, I’m twenty years old, and according to Val, things’ve been this way for a looong time… At least over a century and a half, if I recall. When it started, in Val’s words, ‘meteors rained down from the sky for almost a month’, peppering everywhere across the globe. The meteors themselves acted as carriers for a wide assortment of extraterrestial creatures, while anything that closely encountered the craters would mutate into similar kind.”
“I’m not sure though if events leading to Niraya’s lockdown were related, or just merely coincided, but some time after that and as the meteor showers had subsided, the Souterain complex had been feeding meteorite fragments into their disassembler plants for study, just before things went sideways there too… That gelatin-eyeball thing over there’s partly made because I tossed just a few pebbles of meteorite into a mix of XNA, prions, and excavated viroids… Now that I think of it, I should probably dispose of that thing, instead of just leaving it there. Textbook biohazard, if not worse.”
%>->%
As the box-tendrils reach Nyanta’s pawtips, they even finish down to his claws; feeling rather exceptionally sharp as well… along with a tad case of pins and needles.
After the box drains, and the tendrils recede, Anna leads Nyanta’s new arm to a faucet to wash loose protein-strands and suspension nanofluids out of his fur, before finally ruffling up and drying it with a towel. “…There we go, Nyanta. Good as new.”
@Jinx
Val:
Tossing up a handful of small beads, the vibrantly-colored bits of plastic levitate audibly into a 2D map, with a route drawn from (New) Pahrump; the town they’re within, to the ‘‘Arc Dome’’ mountain surrounded by what’d once been the Humboldt-Toiyabe national forests.
“…We’ve divided the radius of nasties crawling out of the Arc Dome–that’s where Souterain’s been built into, by the way–into four concentric radii for mapping out the dangers by intensity.”
“The
Red Zone’s the outskirts, which as you can see, our town of
New Pahrump is in. We were attacked on that road southeast of here, probably by a scouting party of those wastewalkers looking for a chink in our town’s wall defenses… It just so happened that party must’ve also been on lookout for anyone thinking they’d be relatively safe going in.”
“Further in’s where one’ll likely encounter more stuff like those armed zombies actively patrolling around, alongside whatever hideously-mutated minions they can tame. They’re nested right within
Amargosa Valley, so most of our town’s defenses are of course along the west, northwest, and north. If they were to try sending an all-out attack again like they did during the Cataclysm, by now, we’d happily incinerate’em in one go, along with the entire mile-radius around them, and let’s just say we certainly have the firepower to do so.”
“The Orange Zone; far more dangerous… as if whatever experiments were being run inside Souterain decided to up sticks and dig, crawl, or fly out into the area this zone marks. That old town there too, ‘Beatty’; after the Cateclysm, it was built like a fortress, just like ours I guess, but over there, by some weird cult of Techno-Cabbalists of some sort—never really understood the theology myself. The place was a city-state in its own right, with a lot of dependent settlements scattered around what’s now inside the orange circle.”
“Now, Beatty is a ruin. You’ll see scatterings of burnt-out, dust-choked dome reservations on the way in, then the citadel itself, glassed at the center by someone who suicided by tac-nuke. What’s left died quickly in the aftermath… There’s a tunnel-bunker system beneath the citadel a bit like Niraya’s there but for community habitation, and on the surface numerous buildings that partially survived the nuke, leaving a lot of ground to explore for scavengers. Most of the place is irradiated, though.”
“
Green zone’s everything the other two zones were, but even worse;
‘Moguran bunkers’ dotted here and there like an extended perimeter around Souterain, cranking out craploads of mutants, zombies, and even warbot fliers and ground drones.
This is where I source all of my equipment from. Sometimes I’ve seen fiery clouds billowing out of the bunkers as if under their volition, though I’ve never investigated closely enough to find out what they really are.”
“The bunkers themselves; about half feature entrances big enough to let a normal-sized person in. Those are the ones I work the most. The others either have no apparent entrance, or the entrypoints are too small. Quite a few connect to some very-well-advanced
pilot plants, a few of which we’ve even relocated to here in Pahrump. There’s also a few breeding and genetics labs down there, though nothing like Niraya’s, and, well… I just don’t think it’s a good idea to meddle with the equipment in there. It’s grody and putrid in there, and I swear the mutants they pump out are infectious.”
“The purpose of those bunkers with small or no entrances isn’t clear to me. None of them are the type used to shelter the drones or mutants in that zone, but the track-like ridges running down some of their narrow entrances suggest that they were either manufactories, charging stations, or both for some type of bot. Others have even smaller openings that are probably missile launch tubes, but no one’s plumbed to the bottom of one yet.”
“Those few I’ve heard who’ve been persistent enough to squeeze into the claustrophobic depths of these bunkers said they haven’t much to show for it. Some have never come out, possibly torn apart when they ran afoul of still-working machinery in the bunkers’ guts. Others had to stop at hatches that couldn’t be cut open in such cramped confines. They say that none of the spaces in these bunkers are any bigger than they absolutely need to be to admit whatever type of bot they were designed for, but that they’re riddled with tiny access ways apparently designed to allow movement by something small.”
“Lastly… the
White Zone. In wake of the Cateclysm, what was left of the US military flew out of
Homey Airport at one point, dropping bunker busting weapons right unto the Arc Dome, as if by drilling into it they’d kill some beating heart of evil… I mean, shit, are things ever that simple? I’ve got no clue what’s in that place myself, as nobody’s ever ventured that far.”
“Guess we’ll be the first.”
@EclecticInspiration
Venturing off into town on his own, he soon reaches his residence, greeted by two ‘Olde Ratt Skittertail’ elderly citizens. Mr. Skittertail senior’s on the front-porch, perusing an old reprinted sudoku puzzle, nooking a pair of reading-glasses down unto the tip of his snoot as Benko steps unto the porch. %- 3-%
“Back already from the annual trip to that office-town, Benko?”
