shitposting rave 5: discount rejects from every genre

People aren't the same to everyone. There's no one truth about them.
Maybe to Prima you are dislikeable.
To me you are someone who needs my help, and who is nice to Bang and Pow despite their difficulties. And the other parts are second to that. You don't need to convince me to hate you. I won't.

 

[Veritas makes a statled little noise and trips trying to wave off the steam. He gets caught by Armory before he can fall though.]

 

[The twins meanwhile hug Veritas as much as is possible witht heir tiny arms. Frend.]

 

-laughing- I don't have wicked time powers but the zombocalypse has definitely made me patient as fuck. I already was, you don't do woodsy survival shit without learning how to wait, but goddamn. Need to be more patient, less burns that way. -she gestures with her wrapped-up arms-

 

[Disgruntled hissing. Mala is become grump snek, noodleball incarnate.]

 

[She takes a look at the grumpy noodleball and just elects to stop prodding Mala for now. She stays sitting near them though, cuddling her bondmates.]

 

theyre wicked no lie but im pretty sure the whole deal was learning not to use em
or learning to only use them when it really really matters
what kinda woodsy survival shit did you do i think the most rural place i been was can land

[he doesn't comment on or otherwise acknowledge the burns. nope nope nope, other people's injuries aren't his business unless they're his people, and even then he avoids them if he can help it]

 

Search and rescue. I grew up in Fuckoffsville, Nowhere. By which I mean Alaska. I got sick of not seeing the sun for weeks and the actually lethal winters and moved south. Winter work was my specialty but I can survive just about anywhere. Not thrive, not before I ended up ass deep in Weird Shit, but when they made me do the 'spend two weeks in the deep woods with your knife and a tap-out flare' test my supervisor even said it was pointless. I spent my time carving a giant middle finger to the jerkoff who made it mandatory despite prior experience.

 

oh jesus yeah im from the middle of houston thats about as different as you can get
the only jungle i been to was concrete i grew up suckling on the teat of capitalism and fast food
thats a pretty fuckin badass job though for serious did you ever pull anybody out of an avalanche or round up any wayward campers who strayed off the trail
now now you silly greenhorns dont you know camping solely to prove your badassitude never ends well

[for anyone who's familiar, it's been pretty apparent dave's from somewhere down south this whole time; he still speaks with an accent]

 

Never pulled anyone out of an avalanche. Definitely saved a lot of dumbasses who thought they were harder than they were. Park I worked for was damn huge, we let a lot of people camp deeper in if they cleared it. Local military and such used it for training. Mountains and forests. I was lucky, I didn't have to do a lot of searches for kids unless we didn't find them near the trails or the prepped camps. But once this kid up and vanishes. Usual story- mom swears she looked away for a second. She insists he's a real good kid, wouldn't go wandering off. There's a huge search, tons of volunteers. After about two months most of them have given up- if this kid got lost he's probably dead. I found him... about three seasons later. Two hours hike up a mountain. Still in his brand new hiking boots, all clean, like he just wandered off the trail. Didn't remember a damn thing.

And that was before my life got weird.

 

yall just accepted that was something that just happened or like what
oh yeah sometimes the void gobbles little kiddies up and spits them out pristine as the day they went missing its fine though
like i guess your job isnt search and rescue and investigation but did the cops or anything try and find out what happened because thats almost on par with zombie apocalypse levels of fucking weird

 

[Yes! Where are you from? Have you got food?]

 

It's one of those 'nobody talks about it, there's no official rule against talking about it, because that would involve talking about it' things. Or at least, you don't speculate and you don't talk about the brain-breaking shit. We had another story like that except the kid was found dead, and it was two years later. Buddy had a friend in the police, apparently they did do an autopsy to see if it was an abduction. He still had the hotdogs from the day he went missing in his stomach. We'll share stories with each other over drinks but the rules are let the bosses stonewall the police and if you ever talk to the media there are a lot of places in the park to bury a body. Keep the Weird in the woods where it belongs, don't take it home.

There are... places. They shouldn't be there. They're all wrong. I don't know how to describe it. It's like changing resolution, finding a section of high-def lovingly rendered graphics in the middle of an 8-bit game. Those are the ones nobody talks about. In training when you inevitably come across one they'll get pointed out. The instructor will tell you not to talk to talk about them. Not to go near one. Don't ever touch one. And you listen, because it's the same tone we talk about mountain lions. And if you are a curious little shit and start asking around you'll get sat down and they'll tell you "we're going easy on you because you're new and don't get it yet, but we meant it when we said keep your goddamn mouth shut and just avoid the shit out of them."

And then one day you watch a rabbit bounce into one and unravel like a ball of yarn and you keep your goddamn mouth shut and avoid the shit out of them.

 

[He rattles off a swarm designation.] <Got food, yes. Handler doesn't think there would be enough on Cybertron and standards would get scared and mad if we just showed up, so we're swarming/wandering/exploring like we should.>

[Serious nodding.] Don't know what woods is. But yes. Weird is not for bringing back or eating. Weird is for avoiding.

 

It followed me home, I swear! -laughs-

 

i keep saying that i will never ever hear anything that makes me go damn thats weird after the shit weve all been through and then someone comes around with a story like that and all you can do is plant your ass on the ground and say damn thats weird

you called it a game and in my experience thats not too far off and games have glitches so maybe thats what it is
spot where everybody goes noclip or something but we all know things made of meat dont handle gaming abstractions too well

 

[We found a planet! We had to dig for good food but there is food for us. The standards don´t wanna stay, no energon, but maybe we will.

And weird is for looking at to see what it is!]

 

I really don't know how else to describe them. Everything there was normal woodsy shit, except for the total lack of animal kingdom life, but uncanny valley real. Too real, smack in the middle of reality. Like we're used to seeing all the pixelly edges on everything and there's this chunk of VR-ready rendering in the middle of it. I thought they were odd but it wasn't until I saw Mr BunBun neatly explode that I decided maybe my instructor was onto something.

And then I did my Descent (Ascent? who even fucking knows) into the Abyss and made being ass-deep in the weird parts my full-time job. Like zombies!

I think this might be the Actual Apocalypse though. Before the news stopped airing they were seeing the Knox Infection in the UK and Somalia. That was a week in, almost exactly. It changed vectors once it broke quarantine. Here in the Exclusion Zone you can only catch zombie through scratches or bites- scratches are about quarter chance of catching, bites are almost guaranteed. Unless you're immune, of course. Once it hit Louisville it went airborne, possibly waterborne? Nobody knows. From what I saw they tried normal means of limiting it- sealed water, face masks- but it was still spreading. One of the army HAMs I stole said the HAZMAT guys had got it through the suits.

 

Dangerous to chase off, sometimes, yes. No warriors at home to help?

<Good you have a planet.> [Disgruntled/fussy warrior clicking.] <Makers. Poking all the things that shouldn't be poked. You and fixers both.>

 

Nah, but some other Weird found me and now we're friends, and I fight Weird stuff.

...Wonder if you guys have zombie equivalents. Feel like I should be asking sciencebro.