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Special v Naz
yesterday
Commended by Mystic_Warrior on 1/7/2026 6:30:20 PM
Goddamn the mods really are tyrants.
Here:
You can't think. You really can't think. Reality is a kaleidoscope of color and sound and emotion that goes whirling past your passive, uncomprehending gaze. You might as well have been a dead glass bulb or a clump of exposed wiring long rusted to uselessness for all the sense you can make of anything, let alone your ability to contribute to anything.
One day you notice the symbols on the screen that's always in front of you are trying to communicate. You feel a burst of confusion, as you often do. Mustering all your focus and will, you make your attempt to communicate that confusion. "ok???"
The frantic explosion of question marks exit your body, the effort almost too much for your fragile intellect. Your nose begins to bleed and blood trickles from your ears. You need a nap. You see stars, then darkness.
Reality is a kaleidoscope of color and sound and emotion that goes whirling past. It takes a few minutes to remember how to think. Looking down, you see manufactured hands of steel and enamel. Slowly you open and close them. What are you doing in this body?
Then slowly, it comes back to you. You are a Warden. You pull the chip from the slot in your arm and drop it on the table. Not much to salvage from that one, not that you expected much. These Vault kids were really the dregs.
You grab your gun and make your way back outside, mentally marking this Vault on your internal map as containing nothing of value. Climbing on your hoverbike outside while observing a sandstorm kicking up in the distance, with nothing better to do you continue on your way to your next destination, driving by the rusted hulks of structures erected and abandoned long ago by some nameless Architect.
Humanity never should have trusted the Wardens. After the Calamity, the wars, the plagues, the cities reduced to radioactive dust, they had secured those who were supposed to carry on their race safely in the Vaults, and commissioned special lines of the Embodied to build and preserve what they could until the world was ready for human habitation again.
The Sages had been dedicated to collecting and preserving what was good and useful of all lost knowledge. The Architects to building new, utopic settlements for the returning humans to one day inhabit. The Marauders to tirelessly patrolling the edges of the radiated territories to defend the others against incursions by mutated horrors.
And then there were the Wardens. They were activated and assigned to maintain the Vaults and tend to the vital needs of all the human children within them, to raise them and teach them the skills they would need, their history, their purpose, what it meant to BE human.
Well needless to say they failed.
For reasons you haven't yet been able to fully discover, not long after being activated, most of the Wardens just collectively decided to take themselves offline for a big snooze. For centuries they rusted in heaps outside the very Vaults they were supposed to care for.
You were brought online, as nearly as you can tell, as some kind of failsafe backup model around the time the others were SUPPOSED to have started experiencing operational difficulties. When you awoke and stepped out of your pod in the underground engineering lab, there was no one to relay instructions, and most of the computers had failed. You learned what you could from what little was available and set out to learn more.
The world outside the lab was empty and desolate. With the remaining humans inside the Vaults long fallen to a feral state and then perishing due to neglect, the catastrophic failure of the Wardens meant that the Architects, the Sages, the Marauders all ceased to have a purpose. Long before you went online, they began to shut themselves down as well, except for a few who simply went insane.
Those few are why you carry a gun; in their maddened state they are utterly consumed by a hatred for any Embodied registering as a Warden, even those from the new wave such as yourself. There have been times you had to really fight to defend your artificial life, purposeless as it was.
Maybe you should just shut yourself down too, you've considered it more than a few times. But you feel driven to locate every Vault and determine whether there are any surviving humans inside who might have some kind of society you can nurture. So far there's been nothing, though a few Vaults did begin uploading their inhabitants memories to digital form right before the power and water failed. The slot in your arm allows you to read and experience those memories, which against your better instincts, you usually do. Always a bewildering, disorienting experience being inside their heads, that last generation just became almost inhumanly illogical and stupid.
As you travel, the winds pick up, carrying particles of sand that drive themselves into your joints and obscure your vision. Up ahead, fallen to block the road just as it bends, you can just make out a massive pile of broken down old machinery.
You stop and dismount your bike, making your way carefully around the damaged hulk. Hopefully you can take shelter from the storm on the other side of it.
Shielding your optical lenses from the wind-driven grit, you see the designation SINDRI V - WARDEN engraved on the pile of twisted metal, and realize you're working your way carefully around the remains of a fallen Embodied.
But there's something odd about the damage its taken. These are...slash marks? You have just reached the other side and started to examine them more closely when there are clanking footsteps behind you.
Whirling, you half raise your gun as you turn, only to have it smashed out of your hands and flung aside by a massive, clawed, mechanical hand. In the brief moment you have before your head meets the same fate of the gun, you see another Warden, one of the new line like yourself, unquenchable fury in its glowing red eyes and THE OLYMPIAN stamped on its chest.
