A Night Alone

The woman leaves the throne room behind, walking through the high vaulted halls of the keep; rumor has it that the keep had been here since before the fall; plaques stand beneath ancient portraits of generals long past, their faces barely legible after so many years alone with the elements and the slow march of time.

The plaques are worn, many of them rusted and can no longer be read if anyone cared to look. Nowadays they are mere decoration and sign of status, a wastelander’s idea of what high class means; owning extravagant shit for no reason.

The marble floor is covered in scuffs and snow slowly drifts inside through several broken windows, reminding its inhabitants that no matter how far into the heights of extravagance you go, the wasteland is always nearby, within arms reach.

Mox is quiet as she walks, her lonely steps echoing off the large, empty halls, every so often she take a long swig from her bottle.

Down the hall behind her she can hear the rising moans from the throne room; it seems the God-Empresses entourage got there way after all.

The door to Mox’s room opens with a creak, the large oak door having been patched numerous times over the years with mismatching sheets of plywood and cardboard marring the once elegant dark wood.

Stepping into the room is like stepping into another building entirely, all pretense of class have been stripped, replaced with the atmosphere of a garage or an armory.

Numerous tables lay across the space, displaying weapons in various states of disassembly or stages in creation. Large weapon hang from chains along several walls, each of them much too big for any human or even mutant to wield, each one an ongoing project to add ranged capabilities to the mech, each custom made of course and each host to a list of structural or logistical flaws, flaws Mox struggles to overcome.

The creature comforts in the room are few, a bed that may had been high quality once upon a time, now it’s a shell of its former glory, several legs of the bed frame have become shorter then the others necessitating the use of old magazines to even it out. The mattress itself is ancient, several large portions of the surface have dipped from time and constant use.

Across from the bed is a lazy boy chair and a tv, the blocky casing hosting a collection of burns and stains as though it were caught in a fire in its time before it had come into Mox’s possession.

With a sigh she drops herself into her chair, the warn plushness of the cushions enveloping her frame, had she a proper replacement for it, she’d have this chair into her cockpit, but that’s a development for another day, for now she’s content to enjoy this moment, after a moment she leans forward, just far enough to reach the tv and press the power button.

In this part of the wasteland, hell maybe in the entire world there is but one channel; channel 238, The Crimson Relay, host to televised blood sports, acted out renditions of stories heard from across the wastes and occasional use of propaganda for its patron The God Empress.

Or so it HAD before it had been taken but rival warlords, as the previously blackened screen is set alight with colors and shapes, it appears that Mox had tuned in at just the right time.

At present the screen depicts a woman, dressed like the God-Empress, is doing battle with a mutant using nothing but a rusted old machete, her quarry is particularly malformed even for a mutant; the folds of its stomach part, revealing sharpened bone, creating a disturbingly accurate facsimile of a gnashing maw, made even worse by ribbon like tendrils that spill out between the teeth, attempting to drag its prey closer.

To her credit, she’s holding her own, green blood staining her blade and chopped off appendages indicating that the fight had been going for some time before Mox had tuned in.

Eventually though, the inevitable arrives, one of those ribbons manages to wrap around her ankle and with a tug, takes the woman off her feet and dragged closer to her doom.

She’s pulled into the maw, screaming all the way, before the feed cuts. Clearly a public slight to the God-Empress, meant to elicit shame in her and malcontent in her people, which is likely to warrant outrage when news of this reaches her.

Mox sighs, sinking just a few inches further into her chair, it’s inevitable that she’ll be ordered to march on the station, especially after this public display of disrespect using the propaganda engine that so recently rested under her thumb. A shame really, it WAS a good show.

Reluctantly she rises from her chair, if she’s gonna have a whole week of downtime, at least it will give her an opportunity to return to some of her projects.

Striding over to the table she glances along the many devices in various states of creation, her many half finished projects that have given her such grief in the past, many being weapons but many more being little things, comfort items.

She had experimented in the past with a cooling system, supposedly old world Rig-Wrights had it all figured out, the use of fans had some promise but the energy drain on the engine was too high especially if used over extended periods which is necessary given her demands.

Before signing on with the Empress, Mox had workshopped an idea for rigging up solar panels to the roof, it would never supplement the need for proper gas, but it would lengthen the periods between fill ups. However just about every feasible model she could come up with were obvious and easy targets for enemies, not to mention fragile.

And that’s not mentioning the myriad weapons that lay strewn across the room, each custom made, and as such requiring specialty ammo or special designs to fit onto the mech.

There was a time where Mox had played around with the idea of a mounted cannon, plenty of old world war-rigs have models to work from but the fatal flaw lies in the simple fact that those old rigs and the mech are wildly different shapes. To look at those rigs it’s obvious that the entire thing was built around the gun; heavy, squat and operating on a tread system as opposed to mechanical legs, the simple fact is it takes a LOT of design tweaks to make such a cannon viable without risking putting the whole mech on its ass with each shot.

There was also a period where Mox had wished double down on the physical might of her rig, a giant sword is great when you’re faster then your target but just about every enemy rig on the dunes can outpace Mox, as such she figured a harpoon mechanism would level the playing field. By forcing the fast enemies into cutting range, she’d be able to negate any speed difference, however this is all well and good until an enemy simply shoots the chain, which as things stand, would just be standard chain made from steel.

As she began to mull over the ideas, she came to a frustrating realization, as she glanced at the materials she’d have to work with, she found far less then necessary to experiment with the design in any practical sense. Most, hell, ALL of her materials, scrap metal, salvaged components, ammo, it all comes from The Temple Of The Leaden Lady.

Another of the Empresses old vassals, a cult that worships weapons and as such, they held a special regard for the war machine Mox had created so many years ago, and so as part of their tithe to the Empress, they donate excess materials for Mox’s experimentation.

But now that they’re gone? All Mox has to work with is what she had left over, the components that didn’t fit anywhere else, anything more then that she’d have to tear out of the city of Rime Rock.

Another place Mox would be destined to retake, or at least crater in the name of the God Empresses spite.

With a groan she slinks back to the warm embrace of her chair, with any hope, and the help of ‘shine, the week will pass swiftly.