Episode 10.0 - The Long Journey's End

Episode 10 - The Visitor's Return

10.0 - The Long Journey's End

How long has it been? Weeks, months? Since what, the end of the world? Epona's fall? Since we came to this accursed world?
      Epona ran that night, harder than ever before, her flank so terribly burned from the drone that shot her. Stamina long surpassed, she burned her very life to run as far and as hard as possible.

Have you ever seen a horse know it’s dying and decide to run itself into the ground? It might as well be an act of suicide. I have never known anything akin to it, but I suppose in our modern world, the number of people to experience such must have dwindled to the single digits. I do not feel blessed to now be counted in that number. I do not appreciate how 'realistic' Escape is anymore.

 It struck me as she clattered over the sodden wasteland that Black Bess would have been a far better name in the end.

We rode all night until finally she buckled before a small cave. I tried healing items on her, but it seemed the world had already marked her as beyond help. And yet, she wasn't dead. She lay sprawled on the ground, panting and in such agony, those deep, intelligent eyes of hers staring right into me, as though asking if she'd done me proud. How could that even be a question? How could anyone have asked for more? What companion could have matched her sacrifice? And yet she still wasn't dead. How long would that take?
     How long until her wounds and exhaustion let her go to her eternal rest? Could I have really just stood there and watched her in pain after what she'd just given me? No, I had to, I…

Two entered that damp cave, just one left. I exited a changed man; I had a purpose now.

That stupid game, WarLands, where the drones and other sci-fi crap came from - I was a stellar player, I was the best! I won my ticket to Escape by coming first in a tournament of the American server, the largest one.

 I wasn't some shut-in back then, you know. Not everyone in this world was some loser back in the old world. I was a fairly normal guy. I attended the odd party and social gathering. I worked hard and had a career path before me - but I was bored by the world. I played games to inject some spark of joy into my dreary life, and that ticket, to come try a new world, it seemed so alluring.
I guess that sounds like an awfully flippant reason to leave behind my old life, and true enough, I can vaguely remember other reasons, other justifications and logic - but boredom is the one that stands out now, coming to this hell out of stupid lethargy.

I used the menu, updated with items from WarLands; I knew exactly what I needed. Currency was limited, my player base had been in the capital. One of those pretty archway buildings that carriages pass under, with plenty of stabling room inside the courtyard. Me and him ran that place happily, until the day he suddenly disappeared.
      I didn't know I liked horses. I had never had the chance to meet one in the real world, but I came here and fell in love with the beautiful creatures. Running my little delivery business was a life I couldn't possibly have imagined feeling so fulfilling - and then the world ended, as though the entire thing had just been a mockery, a taste of our dreams only to be snatched away.

Still, I had some leftover currency. I bought a 'field-chainsword', cheap and middling in power but easy to fix on the go and durable. For armour, I bought an old ‘meme-set’ from the game: A low-poly-count dome helmet and short breastplate that leaves your stomach and flanks utterly exposed. I bought it because, despite being a meme, all WarLand’s veterans learned its value as extremely cheap yet highly defensive, capable of blocking even drone laser bolts. It doesn't cover much, but that's fine by me. The one expensive item I chose was the very rifle I used in-game to climb the leaderboards, a weapon capable of cutting through any armour.

Geared up, leaving my only companion behind in her final resting place, I set about my mission: To kill the one who'd shot her.
     The Killer-Drone Commander with the black top-section, marking him as a field-captain. In-game, such a unit would spawn only after you'd built a sufficient number of lesser drones. It had higher stats, better armour, weapons and programming - rare and very useful. In this world, that translates to something exceedingly dangerous, but I don't have all this knowledge of the game for nothing.
      I began to stalk the ones that had once hunted me. Laying traps and ambushes, picking lesser drones off one by one, using their corpses to refuel my equipment, scurrying and crawling through the dirt.

I did away with sleep and food. You can't actually starve in Escape; the feeling of hunger is simply another force pushing me forward. Sleep likewise doesn't function the same way as the real world, after all, we're just naughts and ones. There are side effects still, exhaustion, debuffs, hallucinations - but all of those are acceptable to stay permanently one step ahead of the enemy.

Ha, if I actually had anyone to tell all this to, they'd probably think me mad, and I could hardly blame them. I speak as though Epona or the drone-commander are real people, with thoughts and feelings, and not just coded characters in a game world. Sometimes I go days without thinking about that, days forgetting that it wasn't always like this, that I had a normal life, an ordinary job in a relatively decent country. Alright, it was America, but close enough to normal.
      Spend a full day lying in shrubbery waiting for the perfect shot on your target, and time starts to become awfully illusory.

My armour paid off, covered in dents but never shattering, it has protected my head and vital organs from more than a couple scraps.

 My target is strong. A surprise attack likely wouldn't be enough, and I might never get a second chance, so I focused on taking out all his subordinates first - this unfortunately backfired. At some point, he and his troops started heading away from me in a determined direction. When I finally caught up, what I saw chilled me to the core: An assembly of the drones, an army, hundreds of them. Gathered down in a dust-bowl valley, they were lined in rows. At their head, that bastard, the commander, now more protected and unreachable than ever before.

 I think it was just a hallucination, but I could have sworn that after standing, staring at the sight from about a half mile away, every one of them turned to look at me. They don't have any obvious eyes, but I’m convinced a few hundred dustbin heads swivelled to stare at me in unison.

I bolted. I have a mission, but to face that army alone would have been a kamikaze attack at best. How could I face my steed if, after all she did for me, I just threw my life away on odds that impossible?

I desperately headed south. Before long, the army was too. They weren't moving at top speed, and they made no attempt to catch me. I guess, wherever a group that big is going, it likely doesn't care that much about my single life; I'm probably nothing to them, vermin that's running in the same direction as they are anywhere.

 I tried to think where there might still be life in numbers high enough to warrant such a gathering of the drones, and my mind went to the southernmost area of Escape, to some villages and a market town I had visited long ago. It struck me that I had initially been trying to go that direction before Epona fell. That town had had a player, a real human. A young man, a bit boyish and immature, but someone I could call a friend or at least an acquaintance, along with a few hundred, maybe even a couple thousand villagers.
      To my shame, despite all that talk of treating the drone captain like a real being, when I thought about the villagers, my first thought was how I could use them to distract the drone army and potentially sneak up on the commander in the ensuing chaos, sacrificing them all in order to complete my mission.

All those thoughts were washed away when I stumbled across it. Coming over the bluff of a hill, I stared gobsmacked at a view I never expected.
     I had forgotten that there was something else down south, what my original goal had been to reach so long ago. Wet from rain that only stopped a few minutes ago, my eyes went wide at the sight of it. A towering fort piercing up into the sky, made of sturdy, weathered old brick and stone - how did I forget? The home of three player characters, no less, including the one who'd warned me, prevented me from returning to the capital.
     
It's strange; my face should have dried off by now, but it's soaking wet - from my eyes down is all soggy.

The place has changed; the hill around the tower is lined with little windows and doors. Further out is a whole village of somewhat simple wooden homes. There is farmland and waterwheels along a river that must have been rerouted to get this close. A line of windmills stands vigil in front of it all. Anti-radicoativity windmills, you could build them on some maps of WarLands to safely set up outposts and mine rare materials. Funnily, I don't think I ever used them; it was easier just to send cheap labour units to mine and replace them with more when the radioactivity got them. All the same, I recognise their piled stone construction and twirling, stubby little blades.

Without a doubt, I've found a town, built around a fortress, clearly in the process of expanding and thriving. I find my feet oddly trembling as I half stumble my way towards it.
So I wasn't the only thing left living in this hell; there is still life. Epona really was taking me to a sanctuary.
     That massive army of drones isn't far behind me, I don't doubt this is their target. Perhaps life here won't last long, but look at it! People living, humans like me and NPCs alike. Buildings and grass, smoking chimneys and rough pathways between it all.

I suddenly feel the weight of my journey, of my sleepless self, of my stomach empty for so very long, of a desire to just talk with someone again. If nothing else, perhaps they can offer me a towel; honestly, how can my face still be so wet when the rain has passed?

...Epona, I delayed and went off course, but in the end, I think I finally made it.