Broken promises

[Zebren Avern]

This is an AR thread started with a vague purpose in mind. It will eventually wind up to that goal, which depicts an event which took place before Zebren came to Marn. Feel free to join in.

Smoke rose on the horizon, as the horn blared to signal the end of the day's toil. Black smoke, thick as anything Zebren had ever seen before, blotted out the stars and the moon behind it, the night sky camouflaging the smoke so as to hide it's origin.

Zebren sighed, and stretched out his arms, flinching immediately and regretting the action at once. The fresh welts brought to his back less than ten minutes previously shot pain signals all the way across his back, forcing him to arch it in reflex response, which in turn brought him more pain. Despite this, he bit his lip, made no sound. A trickle of blood ran down his chin from where he had bitten through the flesh, which he wiped away as his nineteen year old eyes filled with tears.

This was wrong, but he was used to it. Fifteen years of veritable torture had taught him that staying quiet, even whilst the adults threw lines of fire and screaming pain down his back. His lips were a multitude of scabs and scar tissue, open wounds and healing ones, from the amount of times he'd bitten through it. Still, it looked better than his back, which at the present time was dripping black Danteri blood down to splash tiny craters in the sand beneath him. The flesh hung off his bones, spine just visible as a series of bleach white dots amid the mess of black and pink his back had become.

He would have shrugged, but wisely refrained, resolving instead to set off home, towards where the smoke was coming from. He'd seen that kind of smoke before, the billowing blackness, the stuff that consumed the night and blotted out the moon. That was all that was left of someone's house; the dark of night prevented him from seeing which one most clearly. Still, it was an hour's trudge with a back in such poor condition as his. Walking was difficult with severed tendons and muscles hanging out of the cavity that once filled out his clothes.

Eventually, he reached the half-way mark, and stopped for a rest. Though it was night, the temperature was still outrageously high, which made walking all the more arduous. He had no water, nothing to drink or eat until he got home, another half an hour away, and he was longing for the solitude of his parent's hut, for that was all it was, really. Still, they had basic sanitation, which was the ditch and gully at the back, and someone cam round once a day to drop off a large vat of water off, and take the old one away. That water was meant to serve four people per house for bathing, cooking and drinking in the desert heat.

It failed. Just another of the government's broken promises.

[Gizmo]

On this night, there was another creature nearing Zebren's halfway mark, one that suffered a vastly different form of imprisonment. One would have to be blind not to spot it, even on a night such as it was, moonless and cheerless. The windswept, chalky road recoiled beneath Gizmo's plates as it cascaded forward in full spherical form, coming from the opposite direction. And within the sphere that was Gizmo spun three platforms, and atop each of these platforms sat a generation of the Pockbert family: The son, the father, and the old grump.

"Stop 'ere, Junior." The voice was Quasar Pockbert's, spoken through an aluminum horn that traced its piping between the three platforms so that the gnomes might communicate above the gyroscopic roar of Gizmo in high gear. Flipswitch (Junior), whose platform had just dived below the equatorial "Living Room", geared down more slowly that usual, so that his platform might come up and connect to the Living Room before stopping fully.

Regibald, the eldest of the three, muttered: "Aye, the young upstart is goin' fer the armchair again." As Gizmo was about to come to a halt, Regibald jerked a ratchet on his platform, juttering the great ball forward another few notches, so that Flipswitch's platform rose above the equator and left him dangling under the ceiling and shaking his fist. Meanwhile, Quasar took the opportunity to leap from his platform and land on the equator, opposite the armchair. Regibald, having none of that, threw a book at him, which caught poor Quasar square on the nose.

Meanwhile, Flipswitch had pulled his ratchet to pummel Gizmo forward another few meters, and then applied the emergency brake, leaving poor Regibald stuck beneath the engine core. As Quasar stood there holding his nose in agony, the sprightly Flipswitch leapt from his platform onto the Living Room floor and began racing for the armchair, leaping over a stack of books as Regibald's indignant ravings echoed up from below. Quasar, quick to recover, was on his son's heels, and managed to tackle him in midair. The two fell to the ground with a thunk and a volley of literature, and began wrestling furiously as Regibald climbed out of the engine hatch and took his place in the armchair.

The old codger had already finished packing his pipe by the time his progeny realized they had lost, and he smugly asked one of them to open up the ceiling a little as he set flame to his rich tobacco. Flipswitch and Quasar looked at each other, the father fixing a stern gaze upon his son, until Flipswitch sighed and set a ladder up to the platform that was now highest on the walls. A quick tumbling of steel alloy columns, and the starlight was twinkling off of Regibald's pocketwatch as reams of smoke wreathed his beard in a slow-motion harem dance, making his smugness ever-so-much-more superior than it would have been without the pipe.

Quasar, ever the leader, was quick to cut his losses and change the subject. "Now, ye two idjits. What we seen back thur was doonright lunacy. Et's our moral duty te carry word of et to the next settlement. The little buggers are too quick fer Gizmo, we canna' stop the attack on our own. Tha's why I called the retreat, we jus' woulda en't up doin' property damage chasin' 'em aboot. Now, Paps, where are we?"

Regibald exhaled saucily, still patting himself on the back for his recent success. "The nex' settlement is barely on the horizon, but the road is straigh', we'll be thur soon enough. Junior, why doncha take a peek?"

Flipswitch snatched a telescope from a messy pile of contraptions on the floor, and climbed up to the top, poking the telescope out, followed by his head. The mounds of shaggy blue fur bolted on to Gizmo's armour plating hid the young gnome well from any watchers, and he scanned the horizon without fear of being noticed. It was then that he saw something that made him recoil more than a little, indeed, a creature that looked fit for the frying pan. He studied the poor soul for a moment, and then receded into Gizmo.

"Aye, the nex' settlemen' ain't far off, but there's sumtin' even closer 'an that. Some raggedy man creetur with a whalloped back 'n a mean look about 'im. I think it's one'a them Xenetians. Jes' a stone's throw away, if'n we'da fought over the dam chair much further without payin' attention to where we wur goin', we mighta' run the bugger over."

This awarded young Flipswitch with bellows of argument from his elders: "Well, just cuz yer the one what's runnin' the engine don't mean ye kin land yer own bloody platform right nex' te the chair ev'ry time, ye selfish runt!" "Respec' yer elders!" "Watch yer mouth, lad!"

Raising his hands, Flipswitch apologized loudly and in a thoroughly insincere manner. "Alrigh', alrigh'. SORRY! Grandpa, ye oughta put the pipe out, we don' want 'im seein' the smoke-"

Quasar, taking back his authority, cut in: "Yes, that ye should, Paps. An' we should assume our platforms an' be on our guard fer this feller."

The other two muttered between themselves a little, but eventually Flipswitch gave in and was the first to ascend his platform, setting Gizmo in gear and rolling backwards along the road ever so slightly so that the other two could mount their sections directly off the edge of the Living Room.

Quasar's voice was heard through the aluminum piping: "Right, men, les' stay alert."