One moment, you're pulling up your desk chair, ready to play Borderlands. The game felt like a guilty pleasure sometimes, writing up and down and occasionally groan-worthy, but you still liked most of the characters and, hey, it's still fun to shoot guns at bad guys and watch numbers go up when you get new ones, despite it all. Well, right now that twinge of guilt feels more like a splitting headache as, in the next moment, you find yourself opening your eyes to a bright, graphics-card straining expanse of sun-blasted sand as wind hurtles across your entire body. You're no longer sitting down in an overpriced, not-as-comfortable-as-advertised gaming chair, but lying back on a hard sheet of metal! You try to bolt upright, but you find your arms and legs lashed down, leaving you spread out in an X as you feel a rumbling underneath you. Craning your head back and finding a dirty but thick windshield, you realize you've somehow wound up on the hood of a big fuck-off jeep, hurtling across a desert as the breakneck wind whips and tugs at your ratty t-shirt and jeans. As you turn your head and see the driver of this demented automobile, a scar covered woman in a filthy tube top and hockey mask, you think "Wait, this is just like the intro to Borderlands," and accompanying that much delayed revelation, you hear music kicking in over the car's radio, and whoops and cheers from the driver and the other women riding along with her.
"Can't stay at home, can't stay at school/Old folks say 'You poor little fool'/ Down the street I'm the girl next door/ I'm the fox you've been waiting for!"
You scream and the girls shout as the car slams straight through a large canine-esque animal-- a skag, you realize-- and as you turn your head to avoid the spray of alien blood you see two more cars coming up from the side, a figure leaning out of one with something in their hands and-- holy shit, you're getting shot at! The ladies properly riding in the car just squeal in excitement and return fire.
"Hello, Daddy! Hello, Mom! I'm your, Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Cherry Bomb!"
The woman who'd been riding in the passenger seat, much shorter than the driver, hops over the windshield onto the hood and moves to toss a grenade at one of the oncoming vehicles, before catching a bullet in the gut, grenade flying out of her hands as she scrambles for a handhold, and what she finds is your t-shirt, falling to the side and tearing it straight off before getting literally left in the dust. The head of the sun and the heat of the engine scorch you on both sides as the fight continues around you, and the only thing louder than your pumping heart is an eventual explosion, courtesy of a rocket launcher wielded by one of the other cars. You get launched clear, the other passengers not sounding so lucky, your bonds fraying as the hood flips over and over through the air, towards a sole building out in the dust, and you brace for impact as you hurtle towards a window!
With a sound of breaking glass, splintering dust, and tearing fabric, you fall to the floor with a thud, free at last of the hood, which remains part way lodged through the wall. Also newly adorning the decor of what appears to be a dingy bar, is a streamer of blue fabric; your jeans, you realize, having torn clean off on what used to be the windowsill. Coughing from the dust and shivering with sweat, you slowly look up as footsteps approach, your gaze going from the shoes to the very familiar face of a woman that was entirely fictional from your point of view right up to this second.
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