He didn't know how he got here. Frankly, he didn't care. When he came to, he found himself in the dead bowels of a small, crashed voidship, his body barely functional and missing the entirety of its left arm. The right arm was a little more intact, but it was still gone up to just below the elbow.
There was almost nothing of use to be found in the wreck; it seemed that everything useful had long been stripped clean. Just some tattered fabric on a few polymer rods for cover from the sun and a few stray ceramic plates scattered around the airlock, though why it was so he had no clue. The ship clearly wasn't designed to use ceramic ablative armor, going by the curves. It didn't look like it was even designed for re-entry in the first place. The medbay was empty, so was the cargo bay, even the containers were gone.
He figured the scavengers would've stripped him for parts too, if the pilot's cabin didn't have relatively good security. Too much effort to crack it open for too little potential reward - either the scavvers didn't understand the value of a 3D printer, or didn't know there was one in the cockpit.
With how beat up his braincase got upon landing, he didn't exactly remember when, where, why, or how his predicament came to be, but at least he knew one thing. He had to find a town and get some stimulants.
A nonexistent chuckle sounded in his head. How fortunate that the crash site of his voidship was within sight of a town. Sure, that didn't mean it was even remotely close, but it was something. It was certainty. And it wasn't as if he could die of dehydration. Overheating, however, was still unpleasant.
So, he did what he thought any sane man would do. He took one of the ceramic plates in his mouth, bringing it to the pilot's cabin. It took him almost half an hour to get it done with half an arm and his tongue, but he got the 3D printer to carve the piece of ceramic into something vaguely resembling a mask. It wasn't pretty, but it fit. It would have to do.
The fabric making up one of the makeshift tents would have to do as far as clothes went. He used his teeth to rip the patchwork sheet in two pieces, then made holes for his head.
It took him a few attempts and mouthfuls of sand to finally get his head through both of them, but when all was said and done, they sat on his shoulders pretty well and covered most of his body.
And so, he began walking.
Left. Right. Left. Right
The sun-bleached, dead, cracked soil seethed with radiant heat, the air shimmering as though possessed by some sort of malevolent spirit hellbent on extracting every last drop of moisture from all those who wish to pass.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The persistent whine of his legs and the occasional gust of wind became the only things to keep him company. He walked on for hours, his sight set stone-still on the town off in the distance at first. Soon enough though, he began looking around the sun-blasted wasteland all around him.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Desert flats stretching for kilometers on end, with a mountain range off to the north, what seemed to be greenery far, far off to the south, and a whole lot of nothing to the east. The mountains were bisected by a tremendous canyon, one too sheer to have formed naturally. It looked as though they had been cleaved asunder.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The sun had gone down mere hours after he left the crash site. The planet's moons were as numerous as the stars in the night sky, and were only a bit bigger than those distant, cosmic lights. The blasted fields around him were illuminated even in the dead of night, brightly enough that the eyes of a normal man wouldn't struggle to see - let alone those of a creature such as himself.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
By the time he got to the town, the sun had risen high into the sky. It was a typical settler town. Prefabbed buildings. Polymer walls. A bashed-in gate that had yet to be repaired. A pair of massive, tattooed lizardmen clad in little more than… Loose, knee-length shorts. He expected loincloths, but he supposed that civilization held its grip even this far from big cities.
They didn't move from their posts as he approached the gate, though they stepped in to bar his path before he could pass. He could tell they were on edge, but they didn't seem too eager to fight a man who looked like he had barely enough strength to support his own weight.
Gazing up at the pair, he noticed that the tattoos covering their skin were part tattoo, part artificial scar, creating a layer of thickened, brightly colored scales where there would be exposed skin otherwise.
It took a solid eight seconds for his voicebox to boot up, a garbled mess of static bursting out from under his mask before it quickly transitioned into words. He was certain the two giant lizardmen tensed up at that. Probably thought he had gone mad for a moment.
“H̵̨̀̀͡g̢͜͡k̴҉̢͞͡ŕ͡͠͡r͏҉k̸͟͞͏̸-ould you let me in? My voidship appears to have crashed some distance to the east. I only need some stimulants and supplies and I'll be on my way.”
For almost half a minute he just stared up at the two titans of scales and muscle, his eyes unmoving, unflinching, unblinking. He could tell they were considering what he said, gauging how threatening he appeared.
Then, they stepped aside.
“Thanks,” he said as he walked through the gate.
The town was as he expected. Pre-fabbed buildings, perhaps two or three different shapes. Single-floor ones, two-floor ones, usually some variation of a rectangular cuboid with windows and a slightly customized facade on one side.
It had a single main street running from gate to gate, with stores and businesses running all alongside it, while homes, warehouses, and other structures made up the remainder of the town.
Even the signs above most storefronts were just LED panels in various colors programmed to display something different. A few of the nicer-looking stores even had rapidly rotating bars of LEDs contained in polyglass cases, which produced a sort of faux-hologram effect.
Truly, the spirit of industry and advertising persisted even on the frontier. Not that he was one to complain - thanks to these very signs he had an easy time finding his way to the town bar. On his way there he passed a store that particularly stood out - “Repair and Reclamations” in bright pink. There was a smaller panel just below it with text in garish blue - “Quality Reclaimed Tech at Reclaimed Prices”. There was a third sign hanging on the door, a simple rectangular polymer board with “Now also stocking archeotech!” written on its surface in faded letters.
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He made a mental note to visit the place, see if he could at least find a functional scrap arm, hoping that whoever ran the store was the kind of person to trade goods for insights.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The bar had a simple sign. Cherry-red rectangular outline, with the word “BAR” in pale blue, blocky letters. It was almost disappointing that the building had completely normal sliding doors, rather than those he had seen in cheesy, low-budget westerns.
He tripped over the precipice after struggling to open the door, as it seemed to slide open of its own volition after he stood in front of it for a few seconds. Either the system that controlled it was particularly sluggish when it came to recognizing people or it was a manual switch, he thought to himself.
A step past the precipice. A glimpse of what the bar looked like on the inside.
A tower of meat and scales, immediately in front of his face.
...He was pretty sure he depleted a considerable portion of his energy reserves trying not to get swatted by that gigantic, savage-looking she-lizard for what felt like minutes. It seemed to shock her, when she finally grabbed at where his left arm would've been, only to pull up his poncho to reveal a distinct lack of any arm at all.
However, it was a quiet voice from the corner of the bar that stopped the onslaught.
"Oi, let 'im go. Can't you see the lad's had enough of a beating from life already?”
A sigh of relief would've escaped his mouth, had he any lungs to breathe with.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
The bartender, and, he presumed, the sole proprietor of the establishment, was a surprisingly human-looking lizard. A lizard-man, even. He didn't seem to have visible tattoos, but he had a distinct feeling that they were merely hidden by the lizardman's sleeveless shirt.
“Strongest stims you have, please," he forced out through his voicebox.
He had hoped that the mix would at least not be too toxic, let alone taste remotely good. Hell, he was hoping it would even be properly mixed, given the fact he was asking for handouts.
...Only to be pleasantly surprised when the bartender reached under the counter and brought out a bottle of costly, name-brand stimmix. It was like asking for a shot of flat, piss-tasting energy drink, and receiving a bottle of preserved artisanal coffee.
It didn't seem like the lizardman even wanted anything for it. He slammed the bottle down on the counter as though he was, in fact, giving him liquid garbage. However, he was not one to turn his nose up at good luck. He pressed the bottom of his mask against the edge of the bar, making it ride up halfway his face. He then attempted to get the top of the bottle in his mouth, but it slipped and nearly tipped over. The lizardman looked on with what seemed to be mild amusement in his face.
Another attempt, this time successful. The bottle still had the cap on, but that wouldn't be too much of an issue. It was just a degradable polymer that would break down into various nontoxic chemicals upon exposing the inside of the bottle to common waste-disposal agents.
Still, the lizardman finally broke just as he was about to bite the throat of the bottle and suck out the drink that way. The alien even reached out with a hand as he spoke.
“Hey, I'll open it for yo-”
His hand froze in the middle of the motion, as did the words on the tip of his tongue when he heard a crack and saw the pinkish, opaque liquid inside the bottle slowly start to drain. The armless man before him kicked his head back and emptied the seven-deciliter bottle of what he considered to be horrible swill in four seconds flat.
The bottle dropped onto the counter, the top entirely missing, bitten off. The armless man turned and started walking towards the door, and just as the sluggish sensor registered him and opened, the bottle slowly rolled off the edge, clattering to the floor. He could've sworn he saw the corners of Rika's mouth quirk upwards as the armless man walked out the door, but she quickly drowned any semblance of facial expression in her massive tankard of borderline toxic stim-swill.
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Sure, he’d swallowed the top of a polymer bottle. Sure, it didn't go down all that smoothly. But having that sweet, sweet nectar to wash it down was more than he could've hoped for.
It had only been a minute or so since he downed the bottle of stimmix, and he already felt the condition of his body improving. Between the stims and the biogel content, it was the perfect way to kickstart his self-repair subroutines and keep them going for long enough to matter.
Frankly, he was feeling great - being stuck on an assbackwards frontier world and disarmed aside. Hm. Disarmed. Could do as an alias. Disarmed. No, needs work. He disembarked that train of thought as he found himself at the door of the scraptech shop which he intended to visit earlier.
The single main street was seemingly deserted, though he was certain he'd draw a few sideways glances if it wasn't. The building had a much more involved way to enter - what seemed to be the doorbell rack from an apartment block, rigged right next to the door. Instead of different tenants, the different buttons were labeled with… Some sort of symbols he didn't understand. Looked like a runic alphabet. He pressed the top one on a guess. The camera lens of the module emitted a quiet whirr as it focused on him. The speaker emitted a burst of static, what sounded like scrambling and stuff falling over, and the door opened.
Within the shop, he witnessed a scene of purposeful disarray straight from a romanticized, eccentric inventor's workshop. The room was a simple, rectangular floor plan, with a counter splitting the room roughly one third of the way from the back wall. There was a polymer door with a jury-rigged ocular scanner at waist height behind the counter.
He saw bits and pieces of technology strewn all over the place, on the counter, on tables, in boxes piled to the ceiling, on the window parapets, obstructing the view. Everything from indistinguishable pieces of scrap electronics, to what looked like either well preserved or masterfully restored pieces of ancient cybernetic prosthetics and organs.
The nicer pieces were proudly hung up all over the walls. Placed on shelves, some were even in bulky display cases with thick polymer viewports and solid shielding, as though they were some sort of hazmat containment unit. His eyes wandered across the walls, his mind did so through the possibilities of where the proprietor of the store might be, or whether he would be willing to cut a better deal than scraps of info for scrap parts.
“I'm comin', I'm comin', just you wait there!" he heard from the back room. A raspy voice, he'd say it was like that of a heavy smoker, were he to know what one sounded like. He could, however, hear eagerness in the creature's tone.
The backroom door hissed open and then closed, though he didn't see who passed through until a few seconds later - when a diminutive, reptilian biped climbed up onto the counter from the other side. Its eyes went wide at the sight of him, the frog-like horizontal pupils expanding vertically, much like the pupils of a reptile or feline. It reminded him of someone going wide-eyed from a discovery, despite the fact the lizard's actual eyeballs seemed only able to open or close, and nothing in between. How strange.
“Ooh, lookit you! All covered up and masked and mysterious! But I can tell, you's not fully organic. None of the meatheads ever come by my shop, not unless they absolutely NEED a prosthetic. May the archdrakes condemn them, the primitives.”
The bitterness in the lizard-man's voice was… Far from subtle. Now that he thought of it, the little alien kind of sounded like the small voice that stopped the giant reptile-woman at the bar from flattening him against the wall. Not quite the same, but similar enough
His voicebox hissed with a bout of static before spitting out the words.
“I need spare parts. Anything, please...”
“I dunno lad, y'look like you're in a good enough state to walk n' talk. Maybe if you'd lemme take a good look at what makes ya tick…”