In a distant solar system, spacebound was a single planet, orbiting a single sun. It was flanked by two moons, yet the nights invited a noir void into the skies. The void gave dominance to the myriad of stars in the sky, and the comforting nebulas divulging their galactic pulchritude centuries of light away.
The celestial loneliness the planet faced was all but rectified by its life. Its biodiversity was radical and rivalled every other planet in the galaxy. Its species were intelligent, many of which had evolved beyond instinct. Its atmosphere was riveting, protecting tens of millions of species from the harsh realities of space, and allowing them to breathe pure air.
It was only a matter of time before the most intelligent of species began claiming this paradise as their own. In hindsight it seemed ephemeral when the hurling of spears and stones evolved to the raining of atomic bombs and bullet shells. To the sufferers it seemed eternal as they crumpled into pools of blood.
Alas, the wars proved efficient in claiming nature as one's own. The conflicts eventually settled and nations began making peace, diverting from strife in order to create their own governments, economies, and borders. The sapient races titled nine continents and brought hundreds of nations to fruition.
One of those nations spanned an entire continent, commanded a nuclearized army, but suffered an unregulated economy. It had six citadels and millions of inhabitants, ranging from the malnourished slaves to the outrageously wealthy corporates.
But the most striking of all was that throughout these radically different citadels, six teenagers saw through their detrimental differences and became the best of friends.
They’re never done anything remarkable. But they’re the focal point of the story anyway.
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That was definitely the most pretentious monologue you’ve ever gone on. You don’t even remember most of it. The only tangible recollection you have is something about the morality of war, Vwraath’s nature, and your degenerate friends. The juxtaposition makes it all the more memorable. You can’t recall a night where you haven’t ventured into a half-assed soliloquy. You even omitted the fact that Voidea doesn’t actually have six citadels; it has five. There’s also the whole debate of if indentured servitude is actually slavery, but you’re currently too sane to allow yourself to fall into that rabbithole.
On that note, you elect to remove the mouthpiece of your eNova from your mouth, setting the narcotic vaporizer onto the sill of the window you were lifelessly staring out of. You’re kind of surprised that you saw enough of the stars outside of your window to inspire an internal discourse; it has developed so much dirt and grime that almost everything outside of it has been visually obstructed. You should probably clean it one day. That day, however, is not today. Or tomorrow. Or probably within this entire cycle.
Standing up from your chair, you stretch and gaze around your chamber. Your walls were structuralized from a rather strong enameled metal, and were reinforced by onyxwood logs; an inexpensive, sturdy material that’s incredibly common to the South of Val-- the continent governed by the Voidean Federation, which you happen to live on. Both the steel and reinforcements were entirely visible from the inside, but you don’t deem it an eyesore anymore; it reminds you of the relative safety found within your destitute apartment. Besides, your walls are decorated with posters that reflect your personality, so you’ve made the ugly architecture your own. Said posters consist of erotic pinups, outdated political and corporate propaganda, and videogame merchandise. Your friends always question why you have corporate propaganda, and you can never unironically answer. You hate corporates and may or may not believe they should all be lined up and killed.
Your walls also boast rather relaxing LED light strips, and potted plants that are pushed up against them but are actually on the floor. The radical difference between technology and nature is definitely an artistic liberty in Voidean interior design, but you love it. The lights cycle through every attractive color perceivable by your kind’s eyes over the course of half an hour. The best part is that you got it for free. The First Citadel populi discards technology like this all the time as garbage, and they usually drop it in the Fifth, where you live. It’s the only decent part about living here. You can’t imagine how your friend Mavvor lives in the Fourth. No “garbage” handouts, just crime.
Your floor is made from the same blackwood that your supports are, except the logs have been cut into planks to be more monetarily friendly. Whatever material the builders of this particular room used to fill in the gaps between the planks has been crumbling ever so slightly for the past few cycles, and now you have clear vision of the room below you from certain areas. You’d find this interesting if only the exact same was also true for whoever lives there. You do, however, take advantage of being above them. You often find yourself sliding incomprehensibly heinous pornographic pictures through the cracks in the floor. The resident of the apartment has taken interest in laying them out evenly on a table perfectly visible from the largest gap in your floor. You’d like to imagine that he actually gets off at them, as opposed to doing it ironically like you do. It’s incredible that such a concept exists, actually. Without the term “ironic,” the only term you could possibly describe your actions and interests with would be “degenerate.”
In lieu of the cracks in the floor at the east side of your chamber, most of your furniture is at the west. Your bed is pushed up against the northwest corner, and your desk is a few meters away from your bed and pushed against the west wall. Ironically, the only wall that has furniture up against it also bears the only window in your entire room. It’s right above your desk, which is just small enough for you to reach the window sill. It can still fit everything you need it to, though-- aka your computer and nothing else. Your computer chair is the chair you sat on when going on your monologue.
To the east side of your apartment, but not against the wall, is a table with three chairs pushed in under it. That said, the “table” is actually just the glass panel of a window that you stole from the room under your downstairs neighbors’. You understand that it would have been more convenient to steal the window of your immediate downstairs neighbor, but you want their room to be an enigma for the rest of your life. You’ve been sliding down porn, political posters, and entire erotica novels for the past four cycles, ever since you moved in. You do not want to know what the living conditions of someone who-- potentially unironically-- keeps stuff like that, are like. You also don’t want to risk seeing what they look like, for more or less the same reasons.
The chairs are just chairs. Because of their canonical insignificance, you find the act of describing them to be asinine. They are chairs, and they look like chairs. Your desk, on the other hand, is definitely canonically significant-- it’s probably the most expensive furniture item in your house. When making it, you actually decided to steal the windows of another chamber as well. You often wonder just how angry it must make someone to have their window stolen, and nothing else. It must be incredibly distressing. You couldn’t imagine someone breaking into your apartment while you were busy dealing drugs, just to steal your window and promptly evacuate.
The “legs” on your desk may seem normal from afar, but in actuality they are simply rifles masquerading as desk legs. It really is the perfect crime, and you commend yourself on the intelligence it took to manifest such a creative personal furniture item. You took four rifles of moderate quality and affixed their stocks to the bottom of the single glass panel. You really don’t like admitting it, but it looks like total shit. The only reason you go on tangents about the exaggerated inventiveness it took to create it, is so you can distract yourself from the eyesore it’s become over the last few cycles. It hurts even more that you actually forgot to unload the guns before you created the damned abomination, and their combined weight is simply too heavy for your anemic limbs to hoist. Every day is a fight to gather the courage to sit at your desk. An elaborate, nigh-implausible fall is all it takes to fire one.
Many a time do your friends bring up the argument of, “can’t you just unload them without lifting the entire thing up?” The answer you always supply them with is “no.” You’ve never actually thought as to why you can’t, and the only feasible truth of the matter would be that you could, but you still don’t allow yourself to imagine a reality where you could, for some reason. This is all a kafkaesque, commendably indolent ruse, contrived for the sole purpose of you never having to bend your back in such a sociopathically unnatural manner to unload one. On top of that, you’d have to do the same for the three OTHER rifles. You choose to live dangerously in exchange for blissful sloth.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
On top of your glass desktop is, ironically, your laptop. Well, someone’s laptop. You actually stole this from ANOTHER apartment, so as to not add insult to injury in lieu of the previous two’s stolen windows. The thing is, you’re actually pretty sure you did the poor sod a favor. The laptop functions periodically, once every twelve hours. You can get about thirty minutes of time on it before it crashes. It could be that the environment the laptop used to be in was simply too hot. After all, this is the Fifth Citadel-- the only one that’s not walled off, and hence the only one without massive shadows cooling a fair bit of the citadel. You invested into an advanced air conditioning system about half a cycle ago with saved up narcotic money, and you don’t regret it one bit. Sadly, despite being an indisputable need, a regulated temperature is seen as a commodity by the capitalistic Voidean Federation. The only people that don’t need to pay for thermal regulatory services are slaves, and ever since the wall of the Fourth Citadel got finished, the government has lost almost all major use for them. You’re not even sure why the Fifth Citadel is called a citadel. It’s not protected.
For the most part, that’s your entire room. Your clothes are scattered about the floor, and your bathroom is a public restroom shared by the rest of your complex. It looks like you finished analyzing your living space just in time, because you just heard an iconic notification sound unique to VIPER; the most widely-used instant messaging application on Vwraath. The title is actually an acronym for “interjection platform.” Every day the longing to kill whoever came up with it grows stronger and stronger. Anyway, someone probably invited you to a chat.
You sit on your chair and pull yourself close to your desk, opening the application and beginning an online discourse with your friends.
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Anarchic Assailant invited Redoubtable Radicalizer, Vwrazian Vagabond, Subatomic Spoliation, ₥₳₲₦₳₦ł₥ØɄ₴ ₥₳Ɽ₮ɎⱤ, and Cybernetic Centurion to a rendezvous!
[CC] good thing you just invited me now! had you set off that notification sound when i was busy taking account of my surroundings for the sixtieth time today, i would have been fucking infuriated.
{AA} Why do you do that so much, anyway? Are you some kind of paranoid schizoid trying to make sure military contractors aren’t hiding anywhere?
[CC] i really don’t know, katras. i just find myself blanking out and staring lifelessly into my bedroom remarkably interesting.
[CC] anyway, why the sudden rendezvous?
{AA} I’ll get to that, believe me.
{AA} I’d rather wait until everyone is here. Or at least until more people are.
(RR) im here
(RR) but im kinda busy with something
{AA} Whatever you’re busy with can wait, Mavorr. All you even do is furiously masturbate 24/7 anyway.
(RR) okay and? what could possibly be more important than that
{AA} One of you degenerates launched a life-sized statue of Joseph William Utsler through my window at like, 20 fucking kilometers per hour!
(RR) PROOF OR IT DIDNT HAPPEN
[CC] what the fuck
{AA} This should be sufficient.
(RR) then its barely a fucking nomination you dumbass
[CC] i also nominate mavorr as a suspect
[CC] you two are the only ones that live in the same citadel
(̴͇͖͕̫̙̯̎̊̆₥₥)̵̤̝̠͂́̐̉͑́̏͘͘ ₩Ⱨ₳₮'₴ ₩ł₮Ⱨ ₳ⱠⱠ ₮ⱧɆ ₴Ⱨł₮₮Ɏ ɆĐł₮ł₦₲?
[AA] What’s with the shitty font you’ve been using for the past cycle?
(̴͇͖͕̫̙̯̎̊̆₥₥)̵̤̝̠͂́̐̉͑́̏͘͘ ł ₮₳₭Ɇ ₥Ɏ ₥Ɏ₴₮ɆⱤłØɄ₴ Ⱨ₳₵₭ɆⱤ Ⱡ₳Ɽ₱ ɆӾ₮ⱤɆ₥ɆⱠɎ ₴ɆⱤłØɄ₴ⱠɎ.
(̴͇͖͕̫̙̯̎̊̆₥₥)̵̤̝̠͂́̐̉͑́̏͘͘ ₮Ⱨ₳₮ ₩₳₴ JɄ₴₮... Ʉ₦₵₳ⱠⱠɆĐ ₣ØⱤ. :(
(̴͇͖͕̫̙̯̎̊̆₥₥)̵̤̝̠͂́̐̉͑́̏͘͘ ...₳Ⱡ₴Ø ł ₦Ø₥ł₦₳₮Ɇ ₥₳VVØⱤ.
(RR) seriously what the fuck have i ever done to you guys
{AA} You broke my window using a life-sized statue of Joseph William Utsler.
(RR) okay but like before that
[CC] nothing. it’s just that you’re in the same citadel as her.
(RR) whatever
{AA} So you’re admitting it?
(RR) yes you idiot
(RR) i’m admitting it
(RR) what are you even going to do about it
{AA} Nothing. I just wanted to know who it was.
(RR) anyway have you slid any more random shit down the cracks in your floor vashnu?
[CC] not since yesterday. i’m starting to run out of taboo fetish porn and political propaganda
[CC] i mean, i have unironic porn but what’s even the point in that
(RR) you start ironically getting off to the unironic porn so it becomes ironic
(RR) then you harass them with it
[CC] i wouldn’t use “harass,” the fucking degenerate made a shrine of some of it on his table. i can view it clearly from one of the cracks
(RR) i wouldnt necessarily call that “degenerate”
(RR) youre the one enabling it anyhow
(RR) have you ever stopped and considered why you do it?
(RR) have you ever considered that maybe you’re bastardizing irony?
[CC] irony is dead, anything goes now
[CC] this is just post meta-irony
{AA} You can’t just keep using “irony” as an excuse for everything, Vash.
{AA} Anyway, I have to go clean up the glass shards that are... fucking everywhere. I’m going to interrogate you in person, Mavvor.
(RR) whoa whoa whoa i thought you said you werent going to do anything
{AA} That is true, but I have questions that I cannot ask through VIPER for reasons of larp.
[CC] why did you even do that, mavvor?
[CC] like i understand it was funny and shit but like
[CC] why?
(RR) ...
(RR) irony
[CC] oh shut the fuck up
(RR) anyway i need to go barricade my door in preparation for katras bye
[CC] bye.
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Very few times has an online conversation with your friends ever been that convoluted. Without Zakari -- who goes by Vwrathian Vagabond online, things do tend to get a bit kafkaesque. She’s the most mature person in your friend group, and she spends most of her time watching imaginary numbers go up and down. Your entire clique despises capitalists with acrimony, so it is rather perplexing that she of all people associates with you; especially due to how alien it is for reykans, a subrace of Xet, to associate with veykans, the other subrace. Reykans are seen as inherently ethnically superior by the Voidean Federations, and only they are permitted to be in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd citadels. They are recognizable by their light blue to light purple skin, black horns, black hair, and white eyes. The veykans are seen as beasts by the government that are only useful for backbreaking labor. They are characterized by red skin, white hair and a lack of horns-- except in the rare instance of a halfbreed, which you happen to be.
Your horns are incredibly unique; only about ten thousand voideans out of the fifty million that live in the citadel have anything resembling them. They’re hooked at the end, and pure white in hue. Your skin is a light red, and you have patches of black scales in random patches throughout your body, but most common on your kneecaps and elbows. Your white hair is loosely styled into a softcore textured fringe, and your eyes are of a deep black. Furthermore, your frame is rather pathetic by the standards of a veykan male; your height only equates to 1.78 meters, and you’re deprived of any useful muscles. The only way you can defend yourself is with your arsenal of firearms that you somehow grazed over in the analysis of your bedroom.
There are a variety of rifles, handguns and shotguns affixed to your walls in a surprisingly organized manner. You have no idea how many guns you have. All you know is that it’s not enough, and you always feel the need to attain more. You have no idea where you keep your ammunition-- you kind of just expect to find it whenever you need it. That said, all of your guns are loaded at all times. Especially the light machine gun set up on your floor, pointed directly at your door. You have no idea how you forgot to mention such a noticeable piece of equipment.
As soon as you stood up from your chair, you were immediately hit with tiredness. It does make sense; you’ve been awake for a while. It takes a long time to analyze your living quarters so many times! Also, you have an important drug deal that commences at night tomorrow, located quite a ways away from your home. You’ll need plenty of rest.
You adjourn to fall onto your mattress and sleep the rest of the night away, not bothering to turn off the relaxing light strips. Your bed is a sorry excuse for something you’re supposed to sleep on, but you suppose your mattress can feel rather soft when you’re tired.
Closing your eyes, you drift off to unconsciousness.
END OF UPDATE ZERO, 6/21/21
THANKS FOR READING <3
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