About half an hour later, Farrah gave up on figuring out anything from the reports directly. She’d taken a seat on the bed, legs folded under the duvet, and was going through her notes. She’d shared notes with too many Collectors to count, and she was sure some of them had mentioned spending luck points to trigger certain events.
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Map
Obelisk
Domains
Zombies
Misc
…
[…]
=== New skills ===
= A =
Luck stats can be used to force the System into giving you quests you want!! To be fully tested, but I did manage to make it give me an easy Trained quest for Lonley. It used 3 Luck points, and only made me kill 90 instead of the 100 (average, I don’t remember the exact decimals you people are getting) zombies. Naturally I spammed it, and got down to 20 needed kills. (And then almost died like an idiot because I had nothing to burn to regen, but it is what it is).
It never triggered a quest, but it unlocked the skill ‘Rigger’.
Description: Use luck to your advantage. Spend Luck points to influence an outcome.
It’s domain-independent, and the cost varies, so I really suggest you check the screen before using it. And also how much Luck you’ve got left. It will only tell you the cost after you’ve tried something, but then it’s the same cost all the time. But it’s super inconsistent.
For the Tech domain at trained, it was 23 luck to lower the difficulty, also for the Trained quest. So yeah, idk.
Sometimes it works.
=B=
The other cool skill I managed to unlock is a variation of Arena, […]
Shared Bob A.
Shared Bob P.
Shared Bynn J. S.
Shared Callie F.
Shared Camron P.
…
So, it was a gamble. Farrah wasn’t a fan of skills that just popped up. She’d only rarely tried doing the things that would trigger the ‘Untrained’ version of those skills to appear. Only when she was in good company, who would help if something went wrong.
The problem with these ‘natural’ or ‘innate’ skills as some Collectors called them, was that their underlying requirements were close to random. There might have been a reason why her ‘Cartridge Change’ skill was stuck at the same level as ‘Calibre Change’, even though she used the former much more often than the latter. And Farrah had tried doing this before, in the early days, where she’d try an bargain with the System, to take some of her luck away in exchange for food in the next building, or an intact pack of cigs.
She reached out for the soda, only to find it empty.
Well, she could at least try. She spent over an hour going through the rest of her notes, trying to find anything anyone else would have said about this skill. Another Collector did mention the other meaning of the name, but couldn’t elaborate more on how they’d unlocked it. Farrah glanced at the documents and tried another scan.
Scan
- Focused
- Seek: [Obelisk base]
Cost: 1P per 5m2.
Nothing.
Scan
- Focused
- Seek: [Obelisk outpost]
Cost: 1P per 5m2.
Nothing.
Scan
- Focused
- Seek: [Obelisk military base]
Cost: 1P per 5m2.
The greyish overlay vanished once more, having not highlighted anything.
Farrah sighed and got up from the bed. There was one Collector who’d managed to combine the skill with ‘Identify’, allowing him to occasionally see extra information about a target, when or if it was available. So perhaps she could combine it with ‘Scan’.
Farrah picked up the printed reports, the theft of which would have likely been considered a regional act of terrorism against industries and commerce, and headed downstairs.
Thankfully Vega wasn’t sleeping. She was fixing the black straps on her outfit when Farrah entered the living room.
“Hey,” Farrah greeted, putting the documents on the table, “What are you, umm,..” She wasn’t sure how to phrase the question.
It looked like Vega was trying to get some of the straps on her forearms off, but elastic material was sewn to the polymer – it couldn’t have been nylon because it’d easily blocked walker claws during the fight – in too many places.
“Nothing!” She quickly straightened her posture.
“How is that still in one piece after the fight with the wall crawlers? I mean, I can accept your healing skills, but there was a lot of blood, and the suit is intact.”
“Polyhexacarbonyl, mostly,” Vega shrugged. “Did you them, umm, find the place?”
Farrah shook her head.
“I will try and unlock a new skill,” She took a seat at the dining table, putting her torch under it, to somewhat mask the light, in the unlikely case a zombie would stumble past. She briefly raised her eyes to meet Vega’s as she was about to ask why the woman had been fiddling with her suit in the dark, but the reflection of the light in her red irises unnerved her further, and she decided against it. “Now,” she patted the stack of paper, “I know we just met today, but I trust you to – not let me die in case this goes wrong.”
“Huh?” Vega looked at her, her eyebrows raised in shock.
“There could be some medical emergency. You know the drill. CPR, cold water, pressure on bleeding.”
Vega didn’t look like she knew the drill. Farrah pressed her lips into a thin line, trying not to think of the things that could go wrong. After all, this was not a physical skill, so there was no reason for her to have any type of medical emergency. The perspective of a psychiatric emergency did not reassure her either, but she needed a clue. A hint. The next step to finding Obelisk.
“Okay, ready?” She asked.
“No!” Vega protested. “Let me at least grab some – uh – there’s no bandages, umm,”
“Just stand here,” Farrah gestured to the side of her chair. “Here goes…”
Scan
Scan
Scan
Scan
The screens flashed in Front of Farrah’s eyes, overlapping each other and glitching – for lack of a better word – through both the table and the stack of papers. In the dim light, the blinking of oscillating shades of blue hurt Farrah’s eyes. But nothing seemed to be happening. No great revelation, no –
With a loud deformed cry, a bone-covered limb shattered the window. Wind rushed in, racing the heavy zombie to the table. The documents flew in all directions, and it took Farrah all too long to refocus on the physical threat in front of her and reach for her gun.
Thankfully Vega reacted in time. She rushed past the table and broke off one of the spiked bones extending from the zombie’s back. It shoved to the ground, and raised its hands, linking its fingers to create a single hammer-like mass of bones. Vega waited for it to bring its fists down, to jolt up and jam its own rib into a tiny gap on its neck, where its overextended muscles had pulled the bone plating apart.
It grabbed Vega and threw her to the side. Blood ran down dirty yellow bone. If not for that spark of red, it would have been impossible to tell which of its protruding ribs had been the improvised weapon.
“Oi, big guy,” Farrah called out. Her pistol was aimed at the zombie’s head, and ready to fire several rounds of 0.303.
She never did so. Vega lept up, from behind the heavy, and grabbed onto the rib she’d planted in its neck. Using a combination of gravity and skills that Farrah wasn’t going to waste Power to asses, she pushed it further into the zombie’s flesh, until it suddenly fell to the ground.
It continued to groan and moan, and weakly bobbed its head up, failing to turn around its protruding jaws to grab Vega.
“Smart,” Farrah nodded, holstering her gun. The bone plates on its neck still kept its head attached to the rest of its body, but it was obvious from the amount of dark-brown rotted blood that pooled under the seams of those plates that whatever flesh, nerves, and unholy power that was keeping it upright had been severed.
“We dealt with a lot of these. Best not to waste ammo on their plating.” Vega replied.
“Who’s we?” Farrah smirked, as she started collecting the documents.
The heavy was incapacitated, but soon its blood would attract its siblings. So they needed to make a move on. A scan of the area indicated that there were already four walkers and another heavy incoming, as two separate groups, about 400 and 320 meters away. The dot for the incapacitated walker was a greenish-yellow.
“I … don’t remember,” Vega replied.
Farrah spun around and gave the woman a questioning glance. Unlike all the previous times her amnesia was brought up, this time she sounded sincere.
“Reason more to find that factory slash warehouse slash,” Farrah scanned the room again. She zoomed onto the heavy on her minimap, and sure enough, the vectorised lines thinned down enough to reveal a green dot on the table. “It worked?” She muttered.
Scan
- Focused
- Seek: [Object unknown to user].
- Seek: [Rigged target].
- Seek: [Undefined [REAL] object. Type{document}].
Cost: 1P per 5m2.
Farrah yanked the green sheet of paper from the small stack that hadn’t been taken by the wind. She looked at it in disbelief, as the green glow slowly faded.
“AeroSolar Renewables Ltd.,” Farrah read out loud the small print on the building permit. “I vaguely know the address, but I can check it on my map once we get closer. It’s a 6 or so hour walk, I’m not sure I can,”
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Power
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
Luck
Conditions
Goals not fulfilled
Addiction
“Ish…” a shiver ran down her spine.
Her luck hadn’t been this low in a Derelict domain since last spring. There wasn’t really a reason to worry as long as they didn’t shift domains. But if the factory was in a Technology domain, then she’d be a goner.
“Are you alright?” Vega asked, after a few seconds of watching Farrah read her System screen.
“Yeah,” She put the permit on the table, neatly on top of the scattered sheets. “Pack up, we’re leaving through the garden.”
She knelt, and picked up the torch, dimming the light coming out of its sides even further. A groan came from the door, followed by the rattling of the door handle.
“More company…” Vega whined, as she pushed the heavy zombie towards the door, using it to further barricade it. It tried biting at her leg several times, as it desperately and frantically moved the only part of its body it still had control over. The other walker was quickly down the street, and it wouldn’t take it long to leap through the already broken window.
“Vega, let’s go,” Farrah called out as she ran down the stairs, securing her rifle and zipping up her jacket.
“Sir,” Vega replied, picking up the torch with one hand, and her scavenged supplies – now resting in a locally sourced handbag – in the other.
----------------------------------------
It was late afternoon when the women set out again. Farrah needed at least another 5 hours of sleep to fully restore her stats, but with their goal so close, she couldn’t bring herself to wait until the next sunrise.
She munched on some dry pasta, as they walked down a wide band-less road through an industrial complex. The sun had decided to come out, peaking from behind thick white clouds that threatened the possibility of rain any minute.
“You can finish it,” Vega handed Farrah the can of vegetables. Thankfully they were the pre-cooked, ‘to be reheated’ kind.
Farrah briefly considered insisting that Vega finish it. She’d downed, for lack of a better word, her pack of pasta, and seemed utterly unbothered by the cold slimy sauce in which the veggies floated. But Farrah hadn’t eaten anything that wasn’t ultra dry or soggy oats in days, so she thanked the woman instead. She carefully sipped from the other side of the can, making sure not to get her side labret ring caught on its metal trim.
“What will you do if you find it? The, umm servers,” Vega asked.
Farrah threw the empty can into bin by the side of the road, before returning to the centre of the passageway formed by parked lorries.
“I’ll keep going. Keep looking for the Obelisk. Once I have a better idea of what it is, I can make up my mind about how to deal with it.”
“How so?” Vega sounded almost weary, which was strange considering coming here had been her idea.
Farrah could have explained her reasoning around gathering intel first, so she could come up with the ideal way of finishing this quest. She could have voiced her worries about this quest being her last, and what the System would do to her once she completed it. Instead, she shrugged and lit a cigarette.
“We’re about half an hour away,” She gestured on the projected map that only she could see. “Some bridges are best burnt once they’re reached.”
Vega nodded, frowning either at a dislike of the metaphor or Farrah’s vagueness.
They walked in silence for a good part of that half hour. Somewhere in the distance, over the oversized parking lots and tall fences lining either side of the road, machinery hummed. It wasn’t any distinct melody, and had there been any sound at all other than the women breathing to interrupt those songs, they would have been lost to the wind. But the industrial complex respected those parts of it that refused to embrace the welcoming arms of its dead parent city.
Once, humans operated those machines. Perhaps their love for their work had been so great that they’d continued to do so even after their death; that they’d changed their form and rearranged their limbs to continue this monotonous and soothing production of goods. Not for the UDR, not for the mainland, but for their own pride and accomplishment. This was a much softer lie to imagine than the other possibility of underpaid and overworked heads of families being trapped in the heartless guts of their workplace, forced to slave away even beyond their graves.
“What will you do?” Farrah asked, drowning out that distant song of steel and product.
“Huh? I guess … I’ll get some of my memories back, and then figure out something from there,” Vega quietly replied. She had a nostalgic look on her face, and she kept her eyes on the even asphalt ahead of them. Perhaps she’d been listening to that melody, remembering days when the motorway that ran two kilometres south would have masked it, and when angry lorry drivers would have honked at them for walking in the middle of the road.
“That’s it,” Farrah gestured to a large docking station a few hundred meters ahead. “On my map, it says there are about 200 walkers inside, and a lot more of the annoying crawling hand things. There’s also several screamers. But no heavies.”
“That’s,” She sounded like she was about to say ‘good to know’ but changed her mind. “What’s the plan?”
“The usual,” Farrah replied. She took out one of her hatchets. “We try and stealth through. We get far enough inside for you to confirm that this is the place, then we split up and look for the servers.” She wasn’t a big fan of that idea, because she didn’t fully trust Vega, and what she’d do if she found the servers first. But the solar panel factory was massive, and they only had four or so hours until nightfall, when the light of their torches would be a deadly giveaway.
“So, no killing?”
“Aim for the legs, the spine, the usual,” Farrah nodded. “But avoid confrontation if you can. We will be on a timer once they smell blood.”
Vega glanced at Farrah’s hatchet, then locked eyes with her.
“They won’t smell blood if I’m the one doing the maiming.”
Farrah raised both eyebrows, taken aback. Before Vega could explain further, Farrah crossed the distance between them and put her hand over her shoulder:
“Listen, unless you have some quest you need done, this isn’t a zombie extermination campaign. There are too many of them for us to safely take out, and even if there weren’t, killing the things would achieve nothing.” She was going to lecture further, but the texture of the bodysuit, not fully plastic, nor quite synthetic enough, made her lose her train of thought.
Vega awkwardly pushed Farrah’s hand off.
“I have a quest,” She said, not meeting Farrah’s eyes. “I need to kill 100 of them.”
“Today?”
Vega nodded.
Farrah groaned and rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“Why didn’t you tell me earlier? We could have farmed before coming here…” She sighed. “How much time do you have left?”
Vega checked on her System window.
“9 hours 42 minutes,” She replied.
“Oh, that’s fine,” Farrah didn’t bother masking her relief. “We can do it on the way out, in a more appropriate place.”
“We?” Vega looked puzzled. “Why would you get involved?”
Farrah shrugged.
“I can help you round them up. Where do you the quest from anyway? Which skill are you levelling up?”
100 kills in a Derelict domain sounded like a level-up quest to either Novice or Trained. With Vega taking too long to come up with a reply, Farrah assumed it was overflow from quests she picked up the previous day, and hadn’t resolved. Her sharpshooting friend was another example of taking too many quests at once. Perhaps Farrah would have been guilty of this too, had she been able to.
“It’s for one of my physical skills,” Vega eventually replied. “I don’t think you have it.”
“We could share,” Farrah chuckled, with full understanding that at this point they won’t.
“So, stealth then?” Vega changed the subject.
Farrah nodded.
They made their way to the loading bay, to where one of the docks had remained open. The air inside was several degrees colder, and they passed by neat piles of solar panels, each worth over 6000 in the old world’s currency. Now, they were simply left to rot. Blood dripped from under one of them, like a metaphor for what the rare metals they were made of had done to the countries where they were mined.
Then, two hands and several ears crawled out from under it. Farrah stomped on them, trying not to alert the nearby walkers with the noise.
----------------------------------------
Vega stood over a robust metal desk, as she held a file in her hand. The other woman, Farrah, was still trying to figure something out with the servers on the lower level.
Vega looked up, at the sun setting through the dirty single-glazed tiled windows that overlooked the assembly line of the windmills. Well, at least that’s what Farrah said they were, after reading some plan in one of the offices on the lower levels, and Vega had no real reason to doubt her.
She took a deep breath and opened the file. A picture of a much younger girl, with shorter hair but equally spotty skin looked up at her.
This was it. This was what Farrah was looking for.
Not the detailed skills report, but the project under which all of this fell. Seven capital letters, separated by periods, started at her from the top of the report.
O.B.E.L.I.S.K.
They had her life in their grips for so long, and now she finally had a chance to break free. To move on. To do something. Rebuild. Recover. Thing was, there wasn’t much of a world left to rebuild in, and Farrah had been the first, albeit on a somewhat short list, civilian to act friendly towards her.
It was just her luck that that civilian needed intel on OBELISK. And that she’d refused to give any information on what she’d do once she reached the main research labs. In fact, she’d never expressed that the labs were her ultimate destination, but there wasn’t much else that could fall under finding the project.
Vega looked up again, trying to pick up any incoming footsteps. When she focused, she could hear Farrah’s regular breathing and a soft hum of a computer. Further down, undead creatures were wandering the hallways. But the fire-stopping doors of the admin wing did an excellent job at stopping the creatures too.
So, Vega skimmed over the document.
She remembered some of it. Well, she remembered everything before 2009. Then, the tests and missions blurred together. There was an explosion. Perhaps too. The last entry was from June 2014, about starting the acquisition of physics-defying. Vega vaguely remembered them being informally referred to as magic, and that her healing had technically fallen under that. But then nothing. She didn’t know how many months or years she was missing.
She took a deep breath, trying to calm her nerves, as footsteps echoed down the hallway.
She had a few seconds to decide. Perhaps she’d never be free from OBELISK. But if she chose to stay, Farrah’s questions wouldn’t stop. And there was only so much so much she knew, and even less she felt inclined to share. She could take her file. Just hers. And let Farrah piece together the rest while she’d make her way back out into the wasteland. But to go where?
On the first page of the file, right under her name, and MOS, on top of a list of traits the words ‘engineered to follow’ stared at her. It seemed the decision wasn’t hers to make anyway.
“Got a USB stick, five floppy discs, a town, and a name,” Farrah grinned as she appeared in the doorway. “Everything was wiped, but I dug around and got some files from the cache. They’re either encrypted or corrupted, and either way, I didn’t want to fiddle with them further. And then there was a sticky note, a virtual one that is, that read ‘If you seek the truth, find me in Glenwick’, signed: Daniel. It deleted itself after I opened it, which led me down memory lane with console commands, where I found the corrupted shit.” She lifted the floppy discs to show them to Vega before continuing, “And these were just lying around.”
Vega smiled nervously.
“I found some files. Umm, not sure if any of them are useful, but they do mention OBELISK,” She spoke, as she discreetly slid her file back into the desk drawer.
“Let’s have a look,” Farrah practically beamed, as she moved past Vega, and let herself fall into the office chair. “These are …” She pulled out several brown files, “All personnel?” She flipped through them. “Military, military, military,” she paused “Pilot.” She pulled out a few more “Military, …”
“I’ll go check if there is anything useful further down the, umm, hall,” Vega excused herself.
“Uh-uh,” Farrah nodded, not fully paying attention, as she took out everything from the drawer, putting it in a pile on the desk. “We’ve hit gold! Tell me when you want to do your kill quest, this will take more than one evening to unpack…”
“Sir,” Vega agreed, before making herself scarce.
Perhaps she could turn this into a negotiation, she reckoned. She had some knowledge about the organisation, she wasn’t that low in the hierarchy – just generally disinterested in their workings and politics. And Farrah knew a lot about the wasteland. She had useful skills for detecting the creatures and knew the region. She would make for a good ally…
“Fuck,” She quietly swore under her breath. If she’d decided on that goal earlier, she should have hidden or destroyed her file. Now the choice of an alliance was truly out of her hands.
----------------------------------------
Night had fallen all too quickly. Or perhaps Farrah had just spent that long reading, hand over her mouth in shock until the black of the letters blended fully with the beige of the paper. Only then did she scan the area to check where Vega had gone. Of course, the woman didn’t show up on her map. But over a hundred yellow dots did.
She quickly shoved a selected few high-profile files into her rucksack, along with the USB stick and floppy discs. Then she picked up as many as she could carry under one arm and headed down the hallway, pistol in her free hand.
If it were up to her, this whole record station would get burnt down. A few well-placed rockets, hell – even setting fire to one of the lorries in the docking bay and letting it spread – would be enough. But that’d attract too many zombies.
Farrah bit down her lip, letting her labret ring slide under her teeth, before she headed back.
With a silenced shot, she blew up a window and hastily threw all the files into the front courtyard. She prayed for the elements to take them before a human could.
The last thing anyone needed was for some sick scientist to try and recreate these experiments – to graft skills to a person by exposing them to extreme and complex combinations of conditions. Collecting skills and quests was one thing. But this … was inhumane, even if done on volunteers and army recruits.
More worryingly, Farrah’s findings raised the question of what the System was, and what kind of war was it developed for. Perhaps it was the war. Not against the Eastlands, or any given country, but against modern society.
Farrah stopped in her tracks. If that was the case, then why was she currently looking for one of their soldiers?
The answer came as quickly as the question. Because Vega hadn’t chosen that. Farrah had found her file, more likely than not by the woman’s own design, as it was the only one not filed alphabetically. No last name was mentioned, no past. Even if she had for some reason chosen to join that program, what they’d done to her there was wrong.
“I found more soda,” Vega appeared at the end of the hallway, a large bag of vending-machine snacks hanging over her shoulder.
“Amazing, let’s go,” Farrah replied, perhaps a tad too abrasively and hastily.
But it was getting dark, Vega had a quest to finish, and they could always discuss this under better circumstances. It seemed Vega understood it too, as she silently followed, with a smile on her lips.