It felt good to talk about his previous life under the pouring rain. The petrichor mingled with the stench of battery acid, wafting through their noses that left the nostrils tingling afterward.
Elena listened to Aurelio’s recounts. She listened to him talk about the trials and tribulations that were his exams to enter graduate school. She listened dutifully when he brushed at bits of his lesson plan examination in front of his chairs and other peers to acquire his graduate degree.
He talked, at length, about his cat Goblin. About how he’d rescued the one-eyed puffball from a shelter when it was young and had raised a cuddly little demon in an apartment barely big enough to hold a bed, a kitchenette, and an adjacent bathroom.
He avoided talking about his brother and about his brother’s fiance. The personal loss of his confidante to the situation he’d found himself in had since settled into a comfortable pit in his stomach and he did not wish to disturb it from where it rested.
Aurelio hoped that Elena would offer up information about herself but she was still unwilling to meet him that far. She had the tact to avoid needling questions at least, and for that he was grateful.
It felt strange talking to Elena the way he did. She was a blurb in a tabletop game he’d play with his brother, her stories a fiction that he’d consumed with a wondrous zeal. A part of him wanted to ask her if those stories were true but he knew better. Sating his curiosity on that front would be an admission that he only perceived her tribulations as fodder for consumption, that her experience was something fictional, that she was fictional.
Whatever circumstances would arrive ahead of him, Aurelio wanted to consider the people he was around to be people and not autonomous characters acting out lives they never had to play at the companion role.
That sort of thinking was abominable and that kind of life was cruel. Better to accept them as people than numbers to be crunched, fleshy interfaces to be prodded in certain ways to spit out wanted results.
Phineas and Cantwell joined in to listen to his stories when it was clear that the pair had made up.
In the loosest sense anyway. He felt she was just drained from it all and couldn’t muster the energy to bite back with the zeal she had earlier.
Aurelio grabbed hold of the peace though and relished in it.
His talk of pets and squalid living conditions led Phineas and Cantwell to offer up their own origin stories. The pair were orphans living on a junkyard station. The majority of its denizens were culled and they lived in that generation's discarded goods.
The pair were thick as thieves quite early on, with Phineas navigating the wastes as a spry scavenger and Cantwell assembling the junk he’d rummage into salvage worth selling.
They were both Stars. Their parents were crushed under the weight of an avalanche composed entirely of garbage. Them and a quarter of their village, gone in a single night.
Despite the tragedy, the pair never stopped throwing themselves at the waste pile, looking for the next score that’d give them enough funds to get off the station in a ship of their own.
They never found that score, but their skills as scavengers were a real highlight to Commander Kalani of the USS Skipper.
“The moment she saw us, she knew we weren’t wet behind the ears. Appraised us worthy from the moment she bore witness to greatness.” Phineas puffed up his chest.
“Phin cried the first night.” Cantwell offered, deflating his friend's ego.
“Disregard what this meathead’s said,” Phineas bounced back, “From the moment we boarded the commander's ship, we were invaluable assets to the crew.”
Elena chuckled.
“Cantwell was valuable from the onset. We needed repairs done on the Skippers thrusters at the time and he was the only mechanic worth scrap in that rinky-dink station of yours. As far as we were concerned, y’all were a package deal. We weren’t gonna get the mechanic without the added baggage.”
The pair argued as the downpour around them weakened.
Tensions washed away when the rain subsided. The bridge between Aurelio and Elena wasn't burnt in his mind, but there was no foundation to its bottom that'd let them cross through each other's spaces in a comfortable and understanding fashion.
He was thankful at least that Phineas and Cantwell had facilitated the mending of their connection by proxy.
"Are we ready to keep going?" Phineas asked, nervously eying the sky for any new developments.
"Yes. We're good to go." Elena stated.
"Where?" Cantwell asked.
Where indeed.
"If the rain blew through the area, then that should mean there'll be less mushroom stalks to deal with when locating and following our paths." Elena observed. She turned to Phineas, "How soon do we hit the Vessel?"
The scout paused, "Two, maybe three clicks. Its movements are long and erratic so I'm basing this on assumptions."
"And how far are we from this distress signal? Is it still even up?" Elena followed up.
Phineas gave Aurelio an inscrutable glare before turning to his scouting device, "The signal is still up. If we head to the east, our path is a good click and a half away."
"Let's take advantage of the weather's aftermath and head to the distress signal. When we get close, I want us to split into corner formation. Aurelio, you and I will be the scavvies point of contact."
Aurelio nodded, refraining from making any comments, lest his point of praise be misinterpreted as a sly remark.
The expedition continued with the added acoustic of radiant stalks occasionally flopping around on the ground to reorient themselves upright and continue in their strange dance.
Most were too withered and eaten away to continue, the volume of their fungal caps eaten away to reveal a complex network of webbed wiring within.
A part of him wanted to linger and investigate their composition but he thought against it. They were already shifting course to investigate the signal. He wouldn't give Elena a reason to shift gears so soon after extending this olive branch.
Their speed behind Phineas was a quick forward progression until he raised his hands with the stop command.
The group stopped in their tracks. They looked to Elena for input and she wordlessly motioned for Cantwell and Phineas to cover the far corners of the perimeter.
They'd stopped in front of a hooded clearing. Former scavengers had pitched a tent using the external walls of a dilapidated freighter vessel with pinewood columns holding up the less structurally sound sections.
The roof was coated in a sheen that left the metal chrome and pristine in appearance. A moat had formed naturally around the campsite, a small one about two steps long and three steps deep.
The pair slowly walked towards the encampment and found a sight he'd never had described in the game material before.
There were cables of various sizes strewn on the floor, their slithering lengths spilling out from the carefully carved guts of the pinewood. They were like veins with the way that they pulsated rhythmically. They offered up their power to the neglected machinery in the campsite.
"Is anyone there?" Doc called out.
Aurelio looked at Elena. She raised her finger up to her mouth. Silence. Wait for further instruction.
They moved towards the source and found what they'd been looking for.
"What in the fuck?" Elena muttered.
Aurelio was equally gobsmacked.
Wreathed in cabling in a nest of coiled wires was the head of a robot.
Its silver eyes flashed red before shifting back into their silver hue, "Hello there. You're the rescue party I presume?" Doc asked in a glib tone.
"It's a severed head," Elena turned to Aurelio, "Why is it a severed head? Did you know about this?"
"No." Aurelio barely found the words, the surprise now intermingling with the myriad of questions forming with the discovery.
"Hey, brainiacs. I'm not just a severed head and I'd appreciate it if the two of you would carefully lift me up and out of this bundle here and carry me back to the Outpost." Doc asked them.
Elena whistled and the other two joined in the surprise.
"Hm." Cantwell offered, unceremoniously picking up Doc by the scalp to look at the base of its neck.
"Is that our source?" Phineas asked.
"Does the sky piss acid rain and chew metal?" Doc spat back in an undignified manner. It was hard to take the insult seriously as Cantwell manhandled the head for a thorough inspection.
There were other species on the planet that Aurelio was familiar with. The machines were a species that scavengers would turn into, more often than not, with various events both within the settlement and across the biomes presenting scavengers with the opportunity or the forced conversion to turn flesh to metal.
There were mechanical benefits to doing so. Any mechanical species benefited from additional armor plating as their bodies co-opted the energy of the core and added their suits like an exoskeleton to their own limbs.
They also gained increased stats, converting an otherwise unimportant fodder unit into a capable member of the outpost.
Mechanically, their downside was that the core used for ignition weapons and skills were artificial, which meant there was no natural regeneration to their points like humans or the Monolids experienced.
They were capable early game warriors but shifted into tankier Frontline in the late game as the job for damage was left to those with the Ignition to burn.
How that downside would translate to the real world suddenly spiked to the top of his priority list.
"Hey, can you tell your oafish friend here to quit poking at my neck? I can feel the prodding and I do not like being on the receiving end of this treatment." Doc implored the crew.
Aurelio gestured for Cantwell to have the dismembered head rest back in the nest and the man obliged with all of the grace of a thrown brick.
"Ow!" Doc cried out.
"Hm." Cantwell responded, seemingly satisfied with an observation of his own.
Aurelio knelt down to look Doc in the eyes, "We're the expeditionary force that's come to rescue you, but we've got a couple of questions."
"Oh for star's sake," Doc rolled its eyes, "I don't mean you any harm and I'm not even capable of it so scratch that off the list, love. Anything else?"
"What's your name?" Phineas blurted out.
Doc attempted to use its chin to turn to Phineas, to no avail.
"The name's Oja. My previous crew called me Doc, Bones, Oja, or Sugar." Oja chuckled at the last name.
"Were you fabricated or are you a convert?" Aurelio asked. Elena was inscrutable behind her visor. He hoped this wouldn't constitute a withheld secret.
"Ahhhh," Oja intoned in a satisfied manner, "Looks like we've got a bright bulb in the bunch after all."
"You shouldn't go about insulting your saviors." Elena menaced.
The robot clicked its tongue, "Oh it's in jest, in jest! Clearly I've got no leverage as a severed head so at least give me the satisfaction to play along in the little jokes I can afford to make."
"At our expense?" Phineas chimed in.
"Well, who else's? I've only recently been booted back up and I've exhausted all the comments I could give myself to have ended up in such a sorry state. Variety is the spice of life and your group is just what this doctor has ordered."
Aurelio suppressed a groan.
"You didn't answer the question though."
"Ah yes, fabricated or converted. Well, if you must know the sordid details, I casted away my flesh in favor of what you see here." Oja answered.
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
"Why?" Cantwell asked. Aurelio was surprised to see the man invested in the conversation, or in anything that didn't pertain to the immediately mechanical in nature. Oja was cast in steel and wire but they registered as more person than automaton in his mind.
Oja laughed at the question, "Well, I volunteered to cast my flesh into steel and servos. A previous expedition facing off against one of those condemnable Fountainheads had left the scout and I crippled and out of commission. I'd lost both my legs in the fight and the ink it shed shared that fate with our scout, Tobias."
There was a melancholy to their recollection. It was an expansion of the question he'd asked but they were too spellbound by the robots narrative flair to stop it.
"Seeing as our crew was dwindling in numbers and us bottom feeders were occupying space," Oja chuckled darkly, "Well the cripple crew and I jumped out at the first opportunity to make ourselves useful again. And after all that service, here I am, back to square one."
They gave Oja a moment of silence.
"What happened to the rest of your crew?" Elena asked.
"Wish I knew. Leadership switched hands to a faction that was much less amenable to folk like us so we were forcibly relocated to the swamps. Those of us incapable of handling the stress of living on the planet discarded their shells and uploaded their minds to the Binary world. I was one of the few that stuck around, mostly out of spite. To not give those assholes the satisfaction of seeing my spirit be broken."
They were kindred in that regard. The flames of spite were as good a motivator as any positive emotion.
"How many are in your crew?" Oja asked.
Aurelio shifted uncomfortably on his feet, "Five total."
Oja buzzed an approximation of a whistle, "Did you guys suffer some losses recently or what?"
Cantwell shook his head.
"No losses," Elena interjected, "And we'd like to keep it that way.”
“Don’t mean to touch nerves there, gang. Just a surprise to have so few scavengers manning the outpost. Any hint to the whereabouts of the other crew members?”
Aurelio winced, shaking his head no.
“Ah,” Oja peeped, “Guess I outlived those bastards after all. Thought that feeling would’ve felt better but I’m still hollow. Hm.”
Phineas looked at his scouting device and turned to the crew, “I’m sure we can continue this conversation on the go? Paths are starting to shift again and I’d like to not have the way obscured by those fucking mushrooms if I can help it.”
Oja laughed, “Ah, mushrooms. Their mind’s a big ol’ clusterfuck. Pretty easy to keep track of their general hive command but tracing them down to the colony level leads to some interesting perspectives.”
“You can talk to mushrooms.” Cantwell stated, taking the ability as fact over the question that the rest of them had.
“Of course I can talk to the mushrooms here. They won’t listen to anything I’ll have to say but if it’s got wires and a connection to the Binary world, then I’ve got the means to communicate with them.”
Low thumping sounds could be heard outside of the camp site, the fungal stalks dragging themselves with vigor across the swampy landscape for an encore performance.
“Don’t think they’re all that interested in communicating right now.” Phineas observed.
Elena gathered the crew and took point with Phineas. Cantwell gathered Oja’s head and fashioned a harness on the side of his hip, expending a point of ignition to CONSTRUCT the apparatus.
The implications of performing that ability outside of combat rang various bells in Aurelio’s head but he shelved their insights for now. He wanted to remain attentive and focused and settled on collecting what usable equipment there was in the campsite for the group's use.
|Chosen gained x1 Scrap Effigy Passive Gear|
|Chosen gained x1 Salvage Basic Resource|
The little prompts on his spoils appeared in his heads up display. These were not the benefits that the Distress Signal event provided in the base game. The fact that their ally was mechanical and not a human like the rest of them had Aurelio leaping to tentative conclusions.
Maybe the planet with its transition to an end state, no longer had enough flesh to offer a Chosen like him. Maybe they were yet to discover the fate of the other scavengers and would find hints to their whereabouts given enough time.
Why these scavengers would leave the outpost was a branching subject and one he didn’t want to have. Their sanctuary gave him peace of mind and it’d do them no good to ruin that.
It wasn’t lost on him that Oja described themselves as “booting back up” to find themselves where they did. The circumstance left more questions than answers.
As did everything else on this contemptible planet.
There were no transitions that muddled his mind when they dismissed themselves from the campsite.
Aurelio was properly off the beaten path and the system didn’t bother to offer its services to him.
“So,” Oja asked aloud, “What are we hunting?”
“Vessel. Pure variant.” Aurelio answered.
“If you wanna tell them to lie down and die, be my guest.” Phineas quipped.
Oja scoffed, “You nitwit. Those things are corruption incarnate to the likes of me and the rest of the living flora on this planet.”
He didn’t say anything but he concurred with the robot's assessment. There were two events he was familiar with in the Vessels toolkit that related to the Binary world, neither of them suggesting a harmonic synergy with the biomes they found themselves in.
“Eyes up and focus. I think we’ve got company.” Elena wrangled the group back to attention. She pinged a dense section of fungal stalks to the distance and the crew focused in on the source of interest.
They heard it before they saw anything of note.
The screech of high-pitched engines whirring incessantly.
Toxic smog followed, ominous clouds billowing from its source, snaking above the earth to corrupt everything it passed around.
“Black Miasma.” Aurelio identified.
“What does that mean?” Elena asked him for clarification. The smog crept closer, his eyes darting between the ambient threat and the sudden realization that this Vessel was not the one they had marked on the map.
They could find other monsters roaming the biome.
This had to be a feature exclusive to abandoning the system that governed his abilities. Too many odd coincidences with its absence for him to believe it to be a streak of chances.
“Close combat is going to be a pain for you and Cantwell. I’ve got the only ranged weapon of the group and Phin’s got the reach if he keeps the [Black Needle] in its rigid state.” Aurelio answered.
“Any idea how we get it to stop?”
He shrugged, “Let Phin and I unleash the opening salvo. If it works like I think it does, damaging it’ll get the monster's program to restart.”
As far as combat arenas were concerned, their crew were at a severe disadvantage. They were caught in a battlefield filled with densely packed fungal stalks. Mushrooms that threatened to shift around and leave the earth upturned and unsteady in their activity.
Aurelio looked at his sheet in their moment of pause.
[Piloting] - Scrap Suit
[Piloting Proficiency] - 1
[Innate Weapon] - F.K.S.B. (2+ Spd |10+ Acc | 0+ Str)
[Current Weapon] - Ember Lance (1+ Spd | 6+ Acc | 3+ Str)
[Stored Weapon] - Metal Spike (2+ Spd | 8+ Acc | 1+ Str)
[Passive Gear: 1/5] - Scrap Effigy
[Active Gear: 0/5] -
[Trinket: 1/1] - [Odd Stone]
[Equipped Core] - Faulty Core
[Thresholds] - Warm Up (1) | Danger (5) | Critical (7) | Meltdown (10)
His eyes hovered over the newly generated ‘stored weapon’ section of his sheet and he smiled.
He crossed his fingers and hoped that the system wasn’t required to activate the [Metal Spikes] effect or it was going to be another piece of scrap metal bearing its weight down on him.
Elena dived into her element like a fish to water. There was a bloodthirsty edge to her commands.
She wanted this.
“Aurelio provides us with the opening shot from five squares back. He’s got the movement to keep pace so don’t worry about him catching up if the quarry decides to charge in another direction. Cantwell, you and I are gonna go at it like last time. I got its front, you’ve got its back. Phin, you’re gonna needle this thing. Weave in and out of its threat zone. Don’t want you getting pummeled like the both of us.”
Everyone took to their positions, immediately grasping their role in Elena’s game plan.
“Break a leg out there.” Oja provided their gallows humor. “If you do, I should be able to tend to your injuries once we’re back in the outpost.”
A worthwhile consideration but Aurelio wasn’t planning to throw himself in harm’s way and suffer.
They positioned themselves where Elena stated.
|AND SO YOUR STRUGGLE BEGINS|
The Vessel did not give Aurelio the chance to make things easy on the crew.
Where the Broken variant consisted of a mismanaged shell full of holes and gaps that exposed the blueish black sentient sludge within, the Pure variant was akin to a demigod in demeanor and function.
Its armor gleamed of chrome alloy and gold. The creature within was housed in the ancient suits helmet, its transparent visor showing the crew the Vessels hungry red eyes.
It took advantage of the suits systems and propelled itself towards Aurelio, the Black Miasma it vented out of its body trailing behind it like a viscous billowing cape.
Aurelio was surprised to spot that there was no prompt to contend with as it charged directly at him. No dice appeared overhead asking him to let fate handle things for him here.
“MOVE!” Elena yelled through the comms.
Shaken out of his stupor, Aurelio reacted to the creature's charge and channeled his ignition towards his legs.
|Chosen used JOLT|
His ignition gauge flared to life. He’d avoided getting caught in the monster's charge.
If only it were playing by the rules.
The Vessel followed up on the assault, dismissing all the rules of engagement he was familiar with. Its body was graceful as it trailed behind Aurelio, doing its best skewer him with its pointed regal blade.
“Elena, Cantwell! Take point! Give me some space!” Aurelio shouted.
The crew abandoned their positions and vigorously threw themselves into the fray.
The Vessel swung its saber overhead and clashed directly with Elena, her [Carbon Cleaver] grinding against the opponent's pristine implement.
“I’m gonna leave you full of holes after this!” Elena bellowed.
|Exonaut drew zero wounds|
The Vessel was expecting Elena’s approach and responded accordingly by venting the Black Miasma directly over her visor. Her overhead swing failed to connect with the creature.
Before it could retaliate, Phineas slinked into combat and stabbed at the monster's flank.
|Scout draws one wound|
|Scout deals one wound|
The angle of his attack was off but the piercing power of the [Black Needle] was enough to catch the Vessel off guard.
The Black Miasma around the monster's body started to sputter out into nothing.
Small victories.
The Vessel rewarded Phineas’s efforts by swinging its arm in his location, finding no purchase with the scout.
Weapons with reach were a pain like that.
“Grah!” Cantwell caught the Vessel off guard with a swing of his own, the arc made with his [Slab of Iron] promising devastation wherever it landed.
|Engineer drew zero wounds|
Despite becoming boxed in between the fungal stalks and his crewmates, the Vessel avoided the brunt of Cantwell’s blow by deftly shifting between the trunks of two sturdy mushrooms. The [Slab of Iron] lost momentum as it pulverized the first fungal stalk in its wake.
“But now you’re mine, you bastard.” Aurelio muttered under his breath. He reset himself, the [Ember Lance] in his hand promising power if he wielded it responsibly.
The engine in the chamber roared to life and he pulled the trigger.
|Chosen draws one wound|
|Chosen deals one wound|
Instinctively, Aurelio reached out with his INSPECT ability and scrutinized the integrity of his enemy.
[Enemy] - Vessel (PURE)
[Tier] - 1
[Trait] - Overconfidence: The Monsters Blindspot is located in the front of the Monster. Being in the Blindspot is now considered to be facing.
[Basic Action] - Flail/Reboot Sequence
[Movement] - 6
[Plating] - 8
[Current Integrity] - 9/11
It felt good to have all that information in his fingertips. He didn’t need to depend on his faulty memory to keep track of the monster's capabilities now that his ability did it for him.
He wasn’t done yet. Attempting to keep the tide firmly in his court, he channeled the heat in his chest out to the rest of his body and summoned his ability into being.
As an Archivist, he had the REFERENCE ability in his disposal. A cerulean die composed of astral stardust and demure flames floated into his hand and he rolled for the result.
Six shimmering pips appeared on the die’s face.
Evens.
The die exploded, its six glowing pips homing in on the creature to embrace it in his cerulean flame.
Whenever his REFERENCE ability rolled on evens, he’d be able to reduce the plating of his enemy by the rolled amount. Beneficial for Phineas and him considering the low strength on their weapons.
He was hoping to roll odds on his die but the fates weren’t on his side there.
Didn’t seem like they were here at all.
It didn’t matter to him anyway. They were going to chew this Vessel up and spit it out for thinking it could take any of them in combat.