Right. This has been on my harddrive for months now, because I've been too nervous to ever think about posting a SI story because I'm just not an SI person. The few I do read are an axception to the rule, and because I rather like the author themselves. This is something of an experiment I did on a sleep deprived night. So I hope you enjoy and don't tear me apart too much. Though thoughts and stuff would be nice.
~~~
RUSTY
~~~
Waking up was less like waking up, and more like suddenly coming to life. I disliked the sensation immediately and immensely.
I'm not a morning person, or someone who can just wake up like that. I need a customary several or eight minutes to loath the universe before I can get out of bed.
However, that wasn't the main concern as I opened my eyes and was met with darkness. Or I think I opened my eyes. There was the intent, but the mechanical sensation of actually opening them wasn't there. More, it was like my vision just...flicked on.
Weird.
Normally, walking up to darkness like this would be ok. I'm your typical basement dweller and the sun doesn't reach me down here. Just how I like it during the warm season. Except I got the feeling this wasn't the dark of my room, with
something pushing down on me from above. At least, I think it was pushing down on me. There was
something right in my face, but I couldn't actually make it out.
Whatever it was on me creaked and moaned as I pushed and heaved, trying to get whatever it was on me, off. Whatever it was had my one arm trapped, and me in the dark beneath it as I tried to wrestle my way out, until I was able to force my arm free, and heaved. The sound of tortured metal rose to a low screech as something tore, flecks of something dropped down past my vision as it shifted, and finally fell to the side of me with a crash and an odd, digital buzz as my world lit up.
Curious.
I...I could feel a sense of pain, a dull ache, but at the same time
not. Like I was feeling it through a disconnect, a numbed sensation telling me it was there, but not letting me
experience it.
I didn't like it. Well, ok, I liked it for not actually feeling it, but the part of me that was actually smart told me that it was a bad thing. Pain is felt for a reason, it's the bodies way of telling you that you've fucked up, and now you gotta fix it.
Above me, sunlight filtered through specks of dust and pollen from the opening in the cave roof above, my joints grinding oddly as I pushed myself up into a sitting position with my left arm seizing up oddly while I heard a strange, mechanical whine. The kind of sound you hear when you are pushing something mechanical too hard and too far beyond what it should be operating at. My vision fuzzed as well, while my ears rang.
So many sensations, so many things I was feeling but not. Was I cold? I think I'm cold. Almost freezing. Like someone had poured liquid ice all over me. A loud clang fills the air as I settle my back against something, and I finally get a look at myself.
My first thought was along the lines of '
dammit, I'm a robot.'
My second thought was along the lines of
'I wonder if it'll buff out?'
Rusted, pitted, moss-covered metal legs weathered down to bare metal and devoid of paint lay before me. An inspection of my arms revealed the same, mechanical limbs, ending in an odd, four-fingered fist.
Okay. Okay. Who wouldn't like waking up as a robot? Chill, it's cool.
I put that on the mental list of things to keep telling myself till it becomes true.
I cast a look at whatever it was that had been on top of me when I woke up, and I found a similar thing as myself; a large, rusted giant of a thing except somewhat more evil looking with its few flecks of surviving dark paint and horned, scowling face. Tentatively, watching the cracked and dark lenses I think were the eyes, I reached out and scraped the moss off of it's armored chest, revealing the many-pointed star beneath it and the gaping hole where my metal fist had been before above that.
I recognized it, and myself now.
'Double dammit. That's a Contemptor Dreadnought of Chaos. Triple dammit, I'm a Contemptor Dreadnought, hopefully loyalist.'
I let that stew for a moments, as the realization hit me.
"Ah hell. I'm in Warhammer."
~~~
Getting up was an interesting affair as I restrained myself from cursing some random god or ROB. I didn't want to take the chance one of them might actually hear me and make the situation worse. Still, I ran through the the List of Who to Blame as an afterthought to distract myself from the main issue at hand.
Unfortunately it didn't help all that much.
Starting off, I was
fucking ancient. I was also freaking huge. You seen that scene from Overwatch where Bastion is covered in so much overgrowth you can't even tell he's there at first? That was me and my bunkmate Dreddy the Chaos Junkpile. I'm so overgrown that that I look like a walking moss bed. What I can see from underneath that was bad. The metal was in shit condition, any paint or markings long gone. How long had I been laying there?
Wait, well, not me.
How long had the me that is now me been laying there? Contemptors were a Horus Heresy thing…
Holy shit, my body was at least as old as the Horus Heresy. Holy shit, did I actually have meat in here?
Frantically, I clunked and banged on my chest. Was I the Space Marine in the Dreadnought, or the Dreadnought? I didn't know which one I wanted it to be. On one hand, cool, Space Marine. On the other, there is a
dead guy inside of me.
"Please, please, please be the Space Marine." I begged to myself. Still not touching that can of worms.
In the end, my panic revealed nothing. I was left unknowing which it was. My hopes were that whatever had brought me here had healed up and maybe revived the bundle of organic tissue that used to be a superhuman soldier for me. And that's all they were for the moment. Hopes.
Go-nope, still not going there.
Okay, calming down, taking a dee-
The reflex to choke as no air or the feeling of trying to take breath and failing kicking in almost started the panic again, before I strangled it back down. Okay, sure, not breathing. That's cool. I don't mind. Breathing was boring anyways.
I could almost swear something tightened in my chest as I tried to take another breath and failed, but whatever. Put it out to pasture and panic over it later.
Take stock. That's what the others do in this kind of situation, right? Take stock. Check self, check surroundings, check for cheats.
God I hope I have cheats. Can't remember meeting ROB and being told I'm getting any, so best hope that I'm lucky. If I was in prime condition I might be ok, but I'm a piece of walking history.
OKAY!
YA!
PSYCH UP!
What am I working with here? The act of looking down caused my whole torso to lean forward slightly, as I raised my arms in front of me to examine them in detail. Both left and right were the same, bulky and blocky assemblages of three fingers on top of the hand and a 'thumb' below. The rusted muzzle of
something poked out of the middle of what I was thinking as the palm of my left, crumbling into dust when I poked it lightly.
There was some kind of broken mounting on my under arms, telling me something used to be there as well.
Ok, so two hands. Close-combat dreadnought? Then those were likely the remains of storm bolters in my one hand. The other had a strange assembly that looked like it was supposed to open up, but remained firmly shut regardless of how hard I thought at it. But honestly, I was ok with that. Chances are, if I was anything but a close-combat type I would have a ruined piece of hardware for one arm and then a normal one.
So cool. Weren't these powerfists as well? Chances they were, since I woke up with my hand through another Dreadnought's chest. Maybe this guy was a real badass? Hoping he was and it was going to rub off on me. I was an unemployed Canadian male. I don't do fights. Have to figure out how to turn them on.
I checked the spots on my underarms again, noting the moss creeping into a pair of holes that lead deeper in the arms as I scraped it away. I definitely used to have something there. Whatever it was, they were long gone.
C'est la vie
The rest of me seemed to be in relatively good condition for being older than dirt. I was up and moving, right? Sure, my joints ground and I could swear there was something whining like the overworked fan on my computer, but otherwise I
seemed to be in good shape. No massive, glaring holes in me anywhere. Armor was intact. That's good. Even in this condition, Dreadnoughts are walking tanks. I'm a walking tank. Screw you life, I'm a multi-ton badass by design.
Experimentally, I took a step, my metal foot coming down with an almighty
crunch as loose stones and plant life were crushed beneath my tread.
"Yeah, that's what I'm talking about."
A few more steps, and I learned that my right leg lagged slightly, and my left had a tendency to just stop for a second before continuing moving. I learned this just in time to avoid face-planting back into the ground.
"Now, that's me done. What about where I am?"
Obviously, I was still in a cave. Above me, the sun had moved, and now shown down directly, illuminating the space. I was in the middle, on a small island surrounded by what would be knee-deep water if I was still a puny mortal. Behind me, Dreddy basked in the sunlight, working on his tan.
Around me, the cave spread out pretty far. It was less a cave, and more a massive cavern. Moss and plants blanketed everything, making the scene seem almost idyllic.
Yet the strange shapes cast in green gave me chills. Carefully, I started making my way to the nearest one.
Stomp, pause, stomp, pause, stomp.
"This is going to take some getting used to." I groaned internally.
Finally, I had made my way over and loomed over one of the many overgrown shapes littering the area. Carefully, I leaned down, and scraped away some of the moss.
The paint-stripped space marine helmet glared back at me, the the visor dark. Well, not dark. Just a gaping hole blown inwards. I could feel the mental bile rise as the concept that this was a dead guy hit me, but I fought it down as I continued. I gently guided my hand downwards, and scraped away at what I guessed was his chest piece. Hopefully, it had some clues as to who he had been.
Snap
"Dammit!" I cursed, as something came loose in my grip. Lifting up, half of an ornamental skull glowered at me before it finished deteriorating into nothing. And underneath, the disappointment of more paint-bare metal.
"What the hell? Is it this moss? I thought that this stuff was supposed to last forever or something."
I stood back up, casting my gaze around at all the other shapes. So it was that then. A battlefield. An old one too, if I was here. Where they all like this guy, like me? Time stripping away anything to identify them by?
For a half-second, my vision futzed and the ringing returned in my ears, and I lifted a hand to my... head?
There was that too. Whatever I was using to see and hear was mechanical, and it seemed just as worn out as the rest of me. I should be thankful it was still working at all really. The prospect of being blind and deaf didn't sit well with me at all.
Okay. So I was in a battleground turned graveyard. I imagine that my bunkmate wasn't alone, and that a good number of the shapes out here were Chaos Marines.
But looking down, I could confirm that this was at least an
old battleground. I'm not a wargear geek, but I'm pretty sure that the visor and grill design was one of the older ones. So the body I was in now could be at least ten thousand years old.
I gave a mechanical 'shrug' and smiled to myself mentally. Good shape for being ten thousand years old, right?
Now, where could I find an exit, I pondered, as I lumbered towards the dark mouth of a nearby tunnel.
~~~
Third thought of the day:
"These caverns are awesome!"
Fourth thought of the day: "
Now where is a freaking exit, before this places drives me crazy?"
They really were pretty incredible. Once again, I realize just how big I am now, and by extension, how large these caves are. Leaving behind the cavern and the graveyard of forgotten Space Marines, loyalists and traitors alike, I took to wandering the system of tunnels and small interconnected spaces. Which is pretty impressive. Last time I checked my fluff, dreadnoughts can push fifteen to twenty feet in a pinch.
How was it put again? Three times the size of a mortal man? You can give most people a solid five feet and change, average Space Marine clocks in at about eight feet, a Primarch around nine to ten?
Sounds right, but if I was back home and on the forums somebody would probably prove me wrong. So somewhere around the fifteen to twenty mark sounded nice. Round numbers. Gotta love 'em.
That said, I had to stretch my arms awkwardly to touch the ceiling, and I had maybe a foot of clearance to either side of me at a good time.
But honestly, the wonder of this entrancing place was wearing off fast. Especially as my foot sounded with a
*clang* as it hit something for what was closing in on the eleventh time since I started my journey.
"Please be chaos, please be chaos, please be…"
I leaned down, examining the moss-covered lump at my feet and using my blocky metallic finger, scrapped some of the green away.
Another marine visor stared back at me, as dead and lifeless as the others I had found in the tunnels. This one, unfortunately, was part of the number of those devoid of the warped and predatory features I was coming to connect with the remains of the Traitor Marines I'd seen so far.
"Loyalist then," I sighed in my thoughts. That was on my list of things to address. Figure out how to talk. Stupid dreadnought. Wired up to it, (I think) and I still can't get anything to work.
"What the hell are you all doing down here?"
I suppose the other prominent question was
"What am I doing down here?"
Ok, fluff-wise, it wasn't hard to get Loyalists and Traitors during the Horus Heresy to start fighting and trying to kill each other. A lot of old grudges and rivalries turned ugly when Horus had his temper-tantrum and turned to Chaos. But at the same time, they didn't fight for nothing. There had to be something to fight over here on...where the hell was I, now that I think about it?
No, don't start that. You got a whole, wide galaxy you could be lost in. Either way, they had to be fighting over
something. Maybe if the damn plant life hadn't spent the last who knows how long rendering everyone anonymous I would have a better idea. Unfortunately I wasn't that lucky.
Still, the facts left me a little depressed as I nudged the remains respectfully to the side, and continued on my way. Astartes put a lot of weight on recovering their own from the field of battle if they could. For no one to have done that here, to have separated the dead and given their brothers a honorable burial or last rites? Chances are that anyone who did care or had cared was probably long dead. Maybe they had all been here? It looked like case of mutual annihilation, at least so far.
For every set of remains I tentatively labeled loyalist, I found some I could clearly label as traitor. I had even found a few branches of the path clogged with the overgrown remains of the dead, claimed by the omnipresent moss where they had died. In a few cases, frozen in time as they killed an enemy and were killed in turn. I had found a pair locked together, perfectly preserved in a snapshot of battle, trying and succeeding to disembowel each other with chainswords.
I couldn't help but feel that I was backtracking through a running battle, culminating in the many caverns that made up this subterranean maze. But who was chasing after who? Were the loyalists chasing down the traitors, or the other way around?
Honestly, as I kept stomping my way down the tunnel, I had no idea. Alone with only my thoughts and the sound of my travel. Oh, and the corpses. But they didn't quite count. The last thing I wanted to contemplate was being lost down here indefinitely with them. The idea of being the minotaur to the labyrinth didn't sit well with me. I'd probably go crazy just wandering down here. I just wish I had something to help distract me-
~Hello darkness my old friend~
I paused as my hearing fuzzed for a second, before the chords started playing and the memorable voice of Draiman started singing.
I stood there for a moment, just soaking in the guitar and piano with a mental smile before continuing. I could imagine that my mechanical tread had a bit more spring to its step as I offered a silent but pointed thank you to
no one in particular, on the off-chance there was someone involved. I let the song choice pass, and the fact I somehow had music period, and chose to and focus on purely enjoying that I had it period as I continued my journey once more.
~~~
I stood straight again, thankful that I didn't sweat anymore as I gazed up at the incline in front of me. Specifically, at the dozens of overgrown lumps that covered the floor of the tunnel leading up. I could only imagine what it was like back when the fighting was happening. This place would have run like a red river, blood flooding down into the lower caves from here. Behind me, the remains of others who had been in my way lined the walls now, the Loyalists carefully handled in comparison to the traitors I had simply tossed out of my way.
All done to some heavenly tones as some Big Bad Voodoo Daddy played in the back of my consciousness. Honestly, it made the work go by easier. I wasn't exactly comfortably taking the fast-and-easy route of stomping over everything. I don't particularly care for the grimdark at large, but the least I could do was be marginally polite. Chances are the marines used to be the buddies of the dreadnought body I was in, and hell, they might have even been one of the comparably nice Legions.
And that was how it had gone for the last who-knows-how-long, and how it was likely to go for the next while. Thankfully I was a metal juggernaut that never got tired, or the view of countless bodies I still had to go through would have me cringing in expected exhaustion.
Back to work then.
I hummed along mentally to the tune, falling into a rhythm as I worked my way upwards and onwards through the remains. It became mechanical almost, and I found myself detaching slightly as I made slow but steady progress.
"Loyalist, to the left. Traitor the right. Loyalist. Loyalist. Traitor. Loyalist. Traitor. Traitor. Traitor. Loyalist," I rattled off mentally.
"Thankfully Chaos is pretty obvious about it's design ethics or else this would be a hell of alot more difficult."
If there was one thing I was for certain getting tired of, it was this
damned moss. It was
everywhere. It had been on me when I had woken up, it was on all the bodies, it was all over the caves, everywhere I went I found more of the stuff. I couldn't see the rock half the time beneath it, and it kept tripping me up. Something that I would think was a body was actually just a oddly shaped rock, and the other way around as well.
I was pretty sure the first time I had picked up a particularly oddly shaped rock only to have the moss crumble away and reveal a (thankfully dead) grenade shaved a few years off my life.
Then I remembered I'm nothing but armor and no fleshy bits to explode, so I tossed it aside and kept on going.
"Traitor, loyalist, traitor, traitor, loyalist, loyalist."
Before long, the slope started to even out, and I could hear a whisper of a breeze blowing past. I imagine that if I still had skin, I could have felt it. There
had to be an exit nearby. Or at least, a large enough space that I could maybe work on getting my bearings. The sooner I was out of this place, the better. I'd be happy if I never saw a plant again for the next few months at least.
The idea of freedom spurred me onwards, barely keeping track as I waded my way upwarded, devoting just enough attention to pushing aside the remains of fallen warriors that I didn't slow down. From above, I could see a pinpoint of light growing brighter and larger, and the sound of wind reached my electronic ears all the stronger.
To me, it sounded a lot like heaven.
"
Sorry if I'm rough folks, I think it's time for me to find some new digs. Crypts are cool, but I imagine there are better places I could be." I internally apologized to the fallen as I continued to hurry, the ground crunching my weight. I heard the occasional
crack or
snap as something other stone was caught under my robotic feet. My enthusiasm soared as my surroundings started to change. I could see things sticking out of the walls, that looked like metal struts, or the remains of them.
The light was blinding now, and the wind could be clearly be heard. I almost tripped as I took the last few steps and emerged past the glare into the light and what I hoped was the outside world.
Above and before me, a purple-tinged blue sky stretched far and wide as the horizon glowed with a setting sun promising the night. Below, a carpet of green in all directions. Trees, plants, all manner of things stretching out as far as the eye could see.
It was beautiful. Beautiful indeed.
I think I cried a little inside at the sight of all the greenery, but it was beautiful.
And I think I had it all to myself.
Now, was that good or bad?
~~~
