Binary_Arcana

  OH MY GOD. HE FINALLY KILLED SOMETHING.

  This has got to be the slowest slow burn in the entirety of the Fracture-verse fanfic archive. We’re how many chapters deep? And only now do we got the first on-screen death by Zeke’s hands. It wasn’t even a real fight or a real challenge. Just two nobodies scavenging a train.

  I get that you’re going for the whole “realism” angle or whatever, but c’mon. This is Fracture. Where’s the teeth? Where’s the danger? Where’s the violence? Where’s the point?

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Wow. So glad that you blessed us by rejoining the thread, Binary. I thought you rage-quit.

  And hey, sorry that my first two murders didn’t meet your action quota. I’ll make sure to go out and stalk some new prey for you. Maybe I’ll even throw in a boss fight or some witty one-liners if I’m feeling extra spicy.

  BrokenKing42

  It has been slow. Gotta agree with Binary about that.

  I read fanfics for the adventure. I want to see some stakes. Most fics here hit the ground swinging. In Frontiers the first five minutes of the game see you cracking skulls with a pipe that you yank out of a wall. These chapters have really just been a long slog through a desert and a shit ton about feelings. Not exactly the greatest adventure novel.

  RustTide

  Pile on time! The slow burn has been a little too much slow and not enough burn. We’ve got a dozen scenes of Zeke walking past wreckage, eating canned food, and having existential dread interspersed by fear and cowardice. Now we have a single moment where he kills two randos on a train. There wasn’t a chase or a shootout or a big action sequence. Just tension and then a quiet stab.

  I’m not saying that you gotta write a non-stop bloodbath, but you gotta give us something. This is Fracture, not Hello Kitty Island Adventure.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  I keep having to point this out, hoping that y’all will finally start listening. This isn’t a game for me. This isn’t a fanfic. I’m actually doing all this shit.

  I didn’t have a stealth takedown prompt pop up into my vision when I went to go kill that guy. I didn’t crouch behind him and press F and watch a clean animation of me snapping a neck. I didn’t get a golden glow of XP telling me that I leveled up.

  I had to shove a dull utility knife in someone’s chest while he was still breathing. I felt his weight give out. I felt his body realize what just happened to it. The whole thing wasn’t all dramatic or cinematic or epic…it was just death.

  You wanna know what that feels like? You want to know why I’m hesitant to do it again? You want to know why I’m not aching to head back out into the Deadlands to hunt some scavengers or monsters or whatever else is out there?

  Head into your kitchen and find a knife. Then you go outside and you find a random stranger. Then, try to really imagine stabbing the shit out of them. Get close. Hold the knife in your hand. Feel the weight of it. And then imagine plunging that knife into their chest.

  That hesitation you feel, that sickness that crawls up your spine? That’s the feeling that keeps people from turning into monsters.

  Sure, there’s gonna be a couple cynics among you that say “people are three skipped meals from turning into animals.” But there is something deep inside us that holds us all back and keeps us from going murder hobo on people.

  I keep saying this, and maybe you’ll all start believing me now. This isn’t a game to me. This isn’t GTA or Skyrim or Dark Souls where I can just go out there and stab a bunch of people and run them over with cars and then just reload a save or something. There are real consequences to my actions. There are real emotions that I’ve gotta grapple with after killing for the first time.

  So, yea, maybe this thread doesn’t move fast enough for some of you. Maybe you all want boss fights and shootouts and explosions and massacres. But right now, all I’m trying to do is survive. And part of surviving is not getting my ass shot or stabbed or melted by a fireball. If that’s not entertaining enough for you, feel free to stop reading.

  Shootingblnks

  Nah man, don’t listen to them. That scene with the tender car hit. It felt raw and made me miserable in the best way. Keep doing what you’re doing. I love the grimy and real fics. More of that, please.

  BrokenKing42

  Woah. Calm down. Not saying you gotta get a headshot every paragraph. How about you just start with a little less introspection. You finally got your hands dirty, so now let’s do something with it.

  Here’s to hoping that the pace picks up now that the seal has broken. You got blood on your hands now. Next comes the chapter where you punch someone in the face without crying about it for four full paragraphs.

  Zaizai

  Zeke getting ragebaited. Knows he’s getting ragebaited. And still falling for the ragebait.

  VoidWalker23

  I’m here for all the drama and the weight. I like that Zeke doesn’t know what to do with himself after his first kill. There are a million fics about badass protagonists who shrug off killing like it’s nothing. This isn’t one of them. This fic is what it looks like when a real person commits violence.

  DrindleSprinkles

  Maybe it’s because I’ve played a shit ton of video games, but I’m desensitized to violence. I don’t think I’d be panicking after a kill. You do what you have to in that situation. Survival mode kicks in. That’s how it works.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  Yeaaaa…you’d think that and you’d be wrong. All those hours you spent clicking heads in CoD or running people over in GTA don’t mean shit when it’s real. When you stab someone it’s not just something that happens on a screen. You feel them go stiff, then you feel their body go limp. It goes slack in real time. You’re still holding the knife when they take their last breath. You see the light go out of their eyes and your hands start to shake and you try not to panic while your shirt gets soaked in their blood.

  So no. You wouldn’t be fine. You wouldn’t be calm. You wouldn’t blow up a building and walk away without watching the explosion while smoking a cigar. And if somehow you did manage to stay calm during all that, and if somehow you were fine afterwards…that’s not a survival instinct. It means that something is broken in you.

  Z3ke (Original Poster)

  But enough about my moral crisis. I’m still chewing on it and I have been for the past couple days, but I’ll spare you all the burden of my thoughts.

  I know how this forum works. If I sit here and try to unpack the ethics of violence, half of you are gonna vanish while the rest will take turns calling me a weak coward. Either way, nobody would send me useful advice to help me survive.

  Instead, I’ll get on with the story and not talk too much about my thoughts on murder.

  My trek from the trainwreck to The MIZ isn’t all that interesting. I looted the two guys that I killed. It felt weird doing that. I wasn’t really ready to dig around in some dead guy’s pockets, but it was better than just letting their supplies rot on the floor of an abandoned train.

  Both of the guys had a couple items that I wound up tossing into my dimensional storage. There was a half-full canteen, a crumpled pack of dried meat, an old flare gun that had a single round left, cracked desert goggles, a folding knife, and two brass tokens stamped with a symbol that I didn’t recognize.

  Since you guys all yelled at me for the whole gilder thing, I guess I’ll give you a description of the brass token and you can tell me what it is.

  Imagine the \ mark on a keyboard. Now take the ~ key and rotate it so that it’s pointed up and to the left of the \. That’s the symbol on the front of the coin. Let me know if the coins are useful or if they’re shit and I can trade them away without everyone yelling at me.

  After the looting I headed to the front of the train. Parked out front, propped up on kickstands, were two big bikes. They were ugly bastards, covered in dirt and grime. Obviously they were the rides that the two scavengers had that brought them to the train.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Each of the bikes looked like they’d been built by some dieselpunk mechanic with a shit ton of spare time on his hands. They had wide tires with sand-grip treads, leather-wrapped fuel tanks that were welded together, exposed engine guts, and pipework that was poorly maintained. One of the bikes had bones attached to the handlebars and I was hoping that they came from an animal, but I wasn’t gonna bet on it.

  I grabbed the bike that looked slightly less eager to impale me if I took a turn too sharply. It had a few spikes on it and a cleaner seat. My problem is that I’d never ridden a motorcycle before. I’ve lived most of my life in New York and grew up riding the A train. The most challenging part of my daily commute was dodging the rats on trash day. The closest I’d ever gotten to motorized wheels was those coin-operated pony rides out in Coney Islands.

  Still, I somehow got the bike working. The engine roared to life and I pointed it in the direction the train had been going, then I twisted the throttle and was off.

  The ride through the Deadlands wasn’t all that interesting. Sun overhead. Grit in my teeth. Dust on the horizon. There weren’t any Mad Max chases or highway duels. I made a few pit stops along the way at a couple half-collapsed structures and abandoned rest stops, most of which had been picked clean.

  Eventually the bike crapped out on me. The engine coughed and gurgled and I rolled to a stop. Looking at the gas tank I found it bone dry, which made me realize that it most likely hadn’t been built for long-distance treks. It was more likely that the bike had been meant to make short runs between raider nests.

  There was a part of me that didn’t just want to leave the bike there. For a moment I thought about trying to stash it behind a bush or something. I could mark the location down and try to come back to grab it later. I couldn’t toss it in my dimensional storage. I don’t know if it was just too big of an object, or I couldn’t lift it on my lonesome and that’s why it wouldn’t fit in my storage. Whatever. It was a piece of shit anyways and not worth the calories that it would take for me to carry it.

  So I left it behind and kept walking. Back to the tracks. Back to putting one foot in front of the other. Back to the sun slapping against the back of my neck and sand creeping into my shoes and sweat soaking into my shirt. By the time I stumbled my way into The MIZ, I’d gone nose-blind to my own BO.

  The MIZ rose out of the horizon like some kind of fossilized god-machine. There were steel towers that had been stitched together with catwalks. Smokestacks coughed out gray pollution that floated up into the sky. Pipes were fitted onto everything. The whole city looked like if someone had asked a kid in the 80s to draw a post-apocalyptic town.

  The train tracks led straight into the city. I followed them into a massive station that was all vaulted ceilings and layered platforms. It reminded me a little of Incheon Airport. I had a 16-hour layover there once, flying from Korea back to the United States. I remember it being 3 am and the entire terminal was abandoned. Shops were shuttered, escalators were frozen, and there was nothing around but miles of polished floor that echoed my footsteps in a weird, hollow silence.

  That’s what The MIZ train station felt like. Vast. Hollow. Cathedral-like. It was so gigantic that the entire thing stopped making any sort of sense. I could see the rest of the city through the giant windows. Outside were buildings covered in grime, and avenues that were drenched in shadows. And there, crouched above the city like a winged apocalypse, was a massive dragon.

  The moment I saw it my heart stopped. A real fucking dragon. I know that this world has some magic to it. The House of Seasons was evidence enough of that. Hell, I had a pocket of space where I was storing a bunch of stuff. But seeing a dragon…that was something different. That was terrifying. It was perched atop a tower, jaws open in a roar, wings frozen mid-stretched. The thing looked ready to melt the city into slag.

  I crouched low and picked my way through the train station, trying to be as stealthy as possible and not draw its attention while also searching for any sort of weapon that might help me out. Eventually, I found a kiosk that was pressed into a wall. It looked like one of those phone-charging stations that you’d find in a train station. Four or five tablet screens were locked into the station and I reached out to tap one of them.

  The screen flickered. Then it glitched. It was exactly the same thing that happened back to the computers in the library in Harbor Glen. It was the same flicker, the same squiggly lines, the same warped interface. For a brief moment the screen blinked and a crawl of broken code flashed across the screen. Then it snapped back into focus and a familiar icon bloomed in the upper right hand corner.

  People started to show up around about then, and I quickly grabbed one of the tablets, signed into the forum, typed out a plea for help and you all showed up.

  You all explained that the dragon wasn’t actually alive and told me to head towards it. So I did. It took a while, but I eventually made my way out of the station. A busted maintenance stairwell led to a half-collapsed platform and from there I slipped into the city proper.

  Most of you already know all about The MIZ. I mean…you’ve all played the games and read the wikis, so you probably know what it’s like. But me? I’m still trying to figure the whole place out.

  For the sake of storytelling, and because I know someone is gonna complain if I start skipping the flavor text, here’s what I saw:

  The MIZ is a dieselpunk hellscape. It’s a scrapheap of a city where industry has outgrown reason and the entire place has begun to rot.

  Every building I saw was absolutely insane. They either were welded at crooked angles or stitched together with piping and rivets as big as my fist. Steam hissed up from vents in the streets at random intervals, and I wondered if there was some government department in charge of making sure that happened. I mean…they probably got paid a lot to build the ambiance of the city.

  Thick hydraulic cables snaked across alleyways and chain elevators groaned as they crawled up the sides of gutted towers. I passed a diner and, when I glanced inside, found a chrome-plated figure in a grease-stained apron flipping a piece of meat on a sizzling grill. At first I thought I was hallucinating. I was dehydrated and hungry and thought I was having some kind of fever dream. But then I saw more chrome-plated figures. Dozens of them. Tall machines that walked and talked like people.

  Automatons. Full-on autonomous metal creations. The whole thing is batshit insane.

  There was a guy selling engine parts out of a repurposed tram. He waved me over to take a look at his stock but I just kept walking. Junkers lined the street, trading carburetors and coolant, shouting out their inventories. High above the ground was a monorail and I watched as a train shrieked along a skeletal track, sparks shooting out from it and showering the rooftops as it passed. The entire city reeked of hot oil, melted rubber, iron shavings, smoke, and something that was rotting away in the gutter.

  I wove my way through a run-down strip of buildings with crumbling facades, past a church that had been turned into a mechanic’s shop. The stained glass windows had been broken and replaced with a pulley rig that was lifting a massive engine. The cross above the door had been replaced by two fuel nozzles welded into an X.

  After what felt like hours of walking, I finally reached the dragon. It had been pretty easy making my way towards it since it was so large it dominated the skyline. It was frozen mid-roar, its mouth yawned open like it was waiting to breathe fire down on all the little people in the streets. Its wings were stretched wide as if it were ready to take flight. Its scales were blackened and cracked and smoke drifted up from its mouth, pushed along by fans that kept the illusion alive and made it look like it was spitting fire.

  I know you all told me that the dragon was dead and stuffed and nothing but a landmark now, but staring up at the thing, my brain still couldn’t accept it. I was sleep deprived and starving and dehydrated and all I could do was look up at that massive beast and try to push down a primal part of me that wanted to scream and run away.

  But as I got closer to the dragon, I was able to start picking out the flaws in it. Giant steel cables anchored its limbs to the ground and curled around its torso. Scales were stiff and mummified and there were a few spots on its torso where someone had stitched wounds closed. The entire thing was taxidermy on a scale I’d never considered possible.

  The wings stretched out to create a canopy that shaded the streets below. Tucked under the shadow of the massive wingspan was a bar with a rusty sign and scrap-welded walls and a broken rail-car for an entrance.

  The Roaring Drake.

  An ogre stood off to one side, his arms folded across his massive chest. His grayish-green skin showed signs of burns and cuts, and his arms were covered in thick black tattoos of swirls and sigils and runes that I didn’t recognize.

  I gotta say that it’s incredibly weird for me to type “an ogre stood off to one side” and for it to be a completely normal thing. A few days ago I was a normal bartender, and now I’m in a fantasy world with a bunch of strange creatures.

  When I saw that orc on the train, my brain short circuited. I remember standing there staring at it, wide-eyed and stupid, like some backwoods hick who’d just seen their first foreign exchange student. But this time I didn’t even flinch. I just strolled past the mountain of muscle standing guard under a mummified dragon like it was just another Tuesday.

  The bar was filled with a hodgepodge of randos. Four guys were hunched over a battered wooden table and each was holding dented tin cups. They were playing some sort of dice game. They watched each other like wolves, eyes darting all around and mouths twitching. It took a bit for me to eventually recognize the game: Liar’s Dice.

  Next to the bar, perched on a stool that was clearly modified, was the man I was there to talk to: Patches.

  He was a gnome. Maybe three feet tall with a shock of white hair that looked electrically charged. He was wearing a jacket that was an unholy mosaic of patches, each square a different color or material: linen, denim, leather, mesh, torn upholstery, scales, some kind of weird foil. He looked like if you took Albert Einstein, shrunk him down to half the size, and then made sure to get him shit-faced.

  I stepped up close to him, waiting for him to acknowledge me. But he didn’t. He just kept sipping his drink and watching the dice game. My patience wasn’t all that great considering I was half-starved and fully dehydrated, so I dropped the line you all gave me.

  “Seviat owes you two tokens.”

  His head turned. His eyes went hard and suspicious but as soon as he took me in they turned curious.

  “...say that again.”

  Now, I gotta admit that my first thought was you bastards had set me up. It would’ve been on brand. I could imagine a bunch of you laughing your asses off because you sent me to some dive bar filled with cutthroats and you got me spouting off some nonsense code phrase that gets my ass kicked. Then I’d log back into the forum, tell you what happened, and you’d all laugh yourselves sick.

  But I was committed. In for a penny, in for a beating.

  “Seviat owes you two tokens,” I repeated.

  Something shifted behind his eyes. His face cracked into a grin that was part recognition and part disbelief.

  “Well shit,” he laughed. “Haven’t heard that one since the Bone Salt job.”

  He spun in his stool and gave me a once-over.

  “Where’d you hear it”

  “Some friends,” I shrugged. “They said that if I needed food and a bed, I should make my way to the Roaring Drake and drop the line.”

  He snorted and shook his head. “Don’t know if they told you the background to it. That phrase goes back to a fuck-up I knew. Went by Seviat. He was a broker with the bad habit of overpromising and underdelivering. Bet me two tokens he didn’t have and ended up hanging upside down in a meat locker. That line became a signal that meant you were down bad, but not dangerously so. Clever way of saying you weren’t out looking for blood.”

  He slapped me on the back and, despite his diminutive size, I felt a jolt go through my spine. The little guy was strong as shit.

  “Welcome to the Drake. Ya made it.”

  I nodded, mostly because my words were starting to fail me. My body was finally crashing. After everything that I’d gone through - the Deadlands, the sun, the heat, the sand, and the blood - I’d finally stumbled into a place that wasn’t filled with a bunch of monsters trying to kill me. Now, everything about me was starting to shut down.

  Patch pointed to the bar and a man standing behind it. “Garrick’ll get you sorted. You hungry?”

  I nodded again, making my way into one of the seats in front of the bar.

  “Then eat something. Rest after. Ask questions when your brain reboots.”

  I looked over at the bartender, Garrick, and noticed that he definitely wasn’t human. I couldn’t tell you what he was other than: not human.

  He has way too much hair and his eyes are all wrong. Gold and narrow and dangerous. His hands looked like they could crush bones. When he saw me looking his way he gave a short, single nod and then turned back to what he was doing.

  “Don’t cross him,” Patch warned, still grinning. “He’s not the kind to scream at ya. Instead, he’ll just rip something off you and hand it back all polite-like as if ya dropped it.”

  Behind us I heard one of the dice players hoot over a winning roll.

  “We run the place together,” said Patch. “Me and Garrick and Grom.” He jerked a thumb towards the ogre standing guard.

  Garrick slid me a chipped glass filled with water before disappearing into the back, hopefully to wrestle me up something edible.

  I looked over at Patch. “Thanks for this.”

  He waved that off and instead just squinted at me, something unreadable in his expression.

  “Don’t thank me yet. Eat first. Sleep second. Then we can talk. You’ve got the look of someone who’s walked too far, killed something, and hasn’t figured out how to feel about it yet.”

  That caught me off guard and I stared his way, wondering what the hell tipped him off. How had he known all that about me? I mean, sure, I probably stank like weeks old roadkill that was left out in a sauna…but how did he know that I’d killed someone

  Before I could ask him, he shot me an answer.

  “It’s just one of my many talents. I’m a pathfinder. I can see routes and outcomes and where people are heading. And sometimes I can get a read on where they are coming from. I see their…trajectory. Their weight in the world. And you, my outsider friend,” he grinned, his eyes twinkling. “You look interesting as hell.”