Whoop. Just two more episodes left in the season. Panic! (okay... don't panic. The author is the only one allowed to panic here. We good? Good. <3)
Special thanks to my A-Team (one in particular) for helping pick up the slack with this chapter. I hope we did the characters we focus on today some justice. (*braces for tomatoes*)
Now the housekeeping: as a refresher for long-time followers of the series and a reference for those who are new, "UHC: Foundation" is a long-running series set in the expansive 'Severance' alternate universe and follows the fates of that universe's incarnations of the Minecrafters we've come to love and respect. As per protocol, for further information and reading, refer to the World Dossier (here) and the compiled story/serial document (here; alternatively, one can follow the story through here.)
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Gathering Storm
==Game Time Elapsed: 90 minutes==
“Wat da fsk do ya meen itz been five days already?!”
The massive Scandinavian swung his crude stone shovel in wide arcs around him, cracking open zombie skulls left and right. His dark-brown, cropped hair and beard were standing on end and his clothes were rumpled and flecked with mining debris, but even in the midst of battle, he never even sounded winded.
Poised back-to-back was an equally tall but noticeably leaner fellow, also sporting a beard but a longer head of hair, further juxtapositioned by his comparatively calm and calculating stance; using the bladed end of his pickaxe tool, he levered precise strikes against each individual in the undead horde that dared to step within reach, leaving them flailing with missing heads and arms.
“Five days, four-and-a-half nights,” the zen master replied over one shoulder to his berserker friend as casually as if they were strolling through the green fields around them in the most brilliant of daylight—not fighting for their lives in the literal dead of night against a seemingly unquenchable onslaught of reanimated corpses moaning for fresh bodily fluids.
“Dat makes no fskin’ sense!” Anderz immediately shot back, smacking another zombie squarely in the temple and sending its decomposing skull flying like a grotesque game of golf-turned-piñata.
Avidya employed a well-placed kick to free his axe from the collar of his own most recently expired opponent, catapulting the corpse into the churning legion of shambling monsters and keeping the unholy mass at bay. “There’s a lot of things that don’t make sense right now,” he replied, an ounce of sorrow creeping into his otherwise serene voice.
As far as Anderz was concerned, that was the fsking truth of the century right there.
None of this madness made any sense. He was still trying to process in his liquor-addled brain that a full five days had raced past outside the winding mine system that he had spent barely an hour and a half trawling through in search for precious minerals and other resources. At least he was pretty sure it wasn’t more than an hour and a half. He was good at keeping time beneath the earth, even through his constant state of mild-to-severe inebriation. That only really screwed itself up when he started tipping into sober territory.
He had been forced to use the medkit already. Twice. Usually a few gaggles of underground bats, cave spiders and creepers wouldn’t have been remotely enough to work him into a sweat … but the nicks and gashes he had suffered, along with the bruises from his typical trademark ‘method’ of mining, had piled up all too quickly with none of the accelerated recovery that he, as a Vanali, had come to take for granted.
Another zombie head rolled to the ground, crudely hacked off by a swing from Anderz’s shovel. It didn’t help one iota that even the dead would not find rest here.
The Scandinavian was given a brief moment to glance at the sky. Holy crap did night come fast. The sun might as well have just fallen from the heavens and no-one would have cared. And with the darkness came the risen dead, pouring out of the ground like locusts the moment the daylight orb’s last evening glow faded from the blackening sky. Not even that made any sense. Anderz was used to obnoxious wildlife getting in the way, but this was ridiculous.
Out of the corner of one eye, past the ever-present green overlay of his headset display, he noticed Avidya snatching up another freshly chopped-off head and flinging it into the undulating crowd of grasping hands and shuffling feet. It bounced off of something; there was a loud hiss and then an explosion that reduced a good handful of zombies to rancid fumes and peppered the surrounding shamblers with stinking flesh and ripped cloth.
Creepers. Of course. Never stop expecting the creepers; that’s when they got you.
~||~
Lord almighty—
Pakratt wasn’t the kind of man who would spit curses, not even within the confines of his own head … but even the most straight-laced warrior would have their moments.
A mere heartbeats earlier, he had been quietly minding his business down here in the comforting earth, limping along with a stubborn sprained ankle, stopping every now and then to rest, or pry loose select chunks of valuable ore from the winding cavern walls with the meagre tools at his disposal. This rocky spire had turned out to be surprisingly benevolent in its subterranean riches; his backpack was filling up for the umpteenth time, and fast. He’d have to make another storage deposit at this rate.
He had been picking away at a point of raw iron gleaming in the stone, so occupied by his never-ending internal flow of thought that he never noticed the silent flash of green in the darkness behind him.
Too late did he hear the telltale *hiss* of the most infamous and hostile fauna that roamed this world.
*BOOM!*
It was only by the grace of his superhuman reflexes that he escaped the most immediate detonation radius. Although the walking ‘splodey garden hedge and its ambush didn’t prove immediately fatal to the preacher, the collateral damage turned out a lot more substantial. Even as he rolled away across the now thoroughly singed stone floor, he saw the cracks running through it at critical speed, reaching him and compromising further under his weight. Sheer instinct took over the injured warrior’s mind and he made one last-ditch, mad scramble for safety, but the rapidly disintegrating cave floor had other ideas.
He didn’t even cry out when it gave way completely and he tumbled head-over-heels into the pitch-black below.
He woke up to the soft, green glow of his headset’s HUD still sitting neatly superimposed over his left eye. He quickly took in its displayed stats; his heart was still beating, and his fellow compatriots were all accounted for. He couldn’t tell how long he had been unconscious, but given that he wasn’t being devoured by the undead, it was likely that it had only been a few minutes at most.
Looking up, he could spot the flickering light of the dying torch he had wedged into the tunnel wall before attempting to mine that one jinxed iron deposit. The torch had been sent flying by the creeper’s attack and now lay precariously on the edge of the freshly carved pitfall, barely illuminating the cracked and jagged opening through which the preacher had fallen.
It was a long way back up.
For what it was worth, Pakratt didn’t see anything crop up on the short-range radar integrated in the headset. He still had a measure of breathing space.
He carefully began to move. He was covered in bruises, but each of his limbs checked in dutifully, sensation and mobility one after another. He slowly put his hands on either side of his chest, pushing his torso off the floor; he had landed in a natural pile of gravel, likely responsible for breaking his fall. While it would take a great deal of force to break any of his bones, being an augmented Moderan expatriate, there was no telling how badly his muscles and tendons would have suffered if he had hit solid rock.
He breathed a quiet but grateful sigh of relief. … it could have been worse, hallelujah.
>Interesting. That was quite a trip-up you had there. You should have died first. You are very lucky.
Damnation.
Pakratt exhaled a rather exasperated sigh. Not another one of those annoying texts again. He wasn’t sure if he was the only one being targeted by this faceless troll, but he had been quietly arguing with these snide little snippets cropping up in his headset display ever since he was unceremoniously abandoned on the mountaintop … Pakratt stopped for a moment to reconcile his sense of time. It must have been an hour and a half ago … or was it five days? Time was royally screwed up in this place, and he wasn’t so certain that he was right about how long he had been roaming around beneath the surface—or how far down he really was.
At least the text complimented him this time. That was a first. A backhanded compliment, granted, but a compliment nonetheless.
Wisely, he chose not to retort as he slowly staggered back to his feet, brushing gravel and stone dust from his clothes. He carefully tried his already sprained ankle; at least it hadn’t been made worse by the fall. Although the light from the torch above didn’t quite reach the floor, the headset display provided enough ambient light to allow the supersoldier preacher enough guidance to locate his knapsack, his pickaxe—which had conveniently wedged itself into a conspicuous ore vein nearby—and the handful of crude stone tools he had cobbled together from mining dross over the course of his dogged resourcing progress.
He allowed himself a wan smile as he looked over the small lapis lazuli deposit that the wayward bladepick had so graciously pointed out to him. Lucky, indeed. It took a modicum of effort to pry the pick loose from the ore before he set to work again, liberating the material from the stone in the hopes that whatever resources he found down here would be of some benefit—any benefit—to the grand plan the cadre had devised in that dreadful steel pit-cell. Lapis wasn’t an immediate concern for raw crafting, but it still had its uses … and its potential.
Seeing potential where most others did not had become something of a widely-known asset of the expatriate preacher.
Leaving the collected lapis in a neat pile, Pakratt rummaged through his knapsack for some leftover wood and coal to make another torch. Next, he brandished his stone shovel upon the gravel pile, sifting through the conglomerate collection of chunks and rough sand to find the sparse, but highly valuable flint that tended to accumulate in these loose sediments, even this far below ground.
He knew privately that he struck an odd sight; a deceptively athletic man in a torn and tarnished navy-blue suit, striking two jagged chips of flint together to light a raw coal piece stuck to one end of a crudely carved wooden stick that he held between his teeth, but he was finally able to ignite the torch and raised it high over his head to illuminate the cave.
… he immediately wished he hadn’t.
>Lucky you.
The first thing he saw were the bones. Not just haphazard piles, either; they were fully composed skeletons, still bedecked in ornate chainmail armor from a Minecraftian age long since forgotten, laying strewn across the floor and lining the walls, right alongside ancient, notched bows and swords. Some of the long-dead warriors were stretched out on their backs, some thrown about like rag dolls, others sitting like barbarian kings of old amidst unearthed gravel and unevenly jutting rock.
Despite himself, the preacher took a metered step back; the gravel pile crunched softly beneath his boot heel.
A chorus of hollow groans greeted him in return.
Pakratt’s blood ran cold as eyes lit by the unholy fires of necrotic magic popped to life in the stifling dark beyond the suddenly all-too-narrow cone of light from his torch—tone pair of cold flames at a time, appearing and settling into deep, empty eye sockets staring out from beneath the sculpted brows of cracked iron helmets. The haunting whispers that had kept the preacher company throughout the time he had spent down here in the depths of the earth now rose in his mind like a crashing tidal wave as deathly silent figures stood slowly all around him, creaking fingers grasping weapons, metal clanking against metal along with the dull rattle of bone against bone as the small platoon of revitalized, archaic soldiers slowly arranged themselves in precise circles around the now coldly sweating man in their midst, leather-bound feet standing to attention right at the edge of the quivering pool of torchlight in which Pakratt stood ensconced.
Then the smell reached his nostrils; the inimical stench of decomposing flesh, coupled with the unmistakable shuffle of naked feet still wearing muscle and sinew but no longer moving under the impetus of a sentient, living mind. He saw their movements next, dragging themselves with disjointed twitches in-between the perfectly ordered rows of the skeleton warriors, edging their way into view; green, pale, rotting skin contrasting nauseatingly with the crisp whites of bone and the dark browns and grays of leather and iron preserved by lack of oxygen. He couldn’t see what clothes the zombies were wearing; it mattered little. The fabrics were so thoroughly soaked through by the creatures’ congealed fluids that it would have been impossible to discern their original colorations even in the brightest daylight.
Pakratt moved very slowly, very deliberately; he pulled the backpack onto one shoulder, still grasping the torch with his other hand which he lowered, broadening the pool of light at his feet and forcing the zombies to shy away on godless instinct while the skeletons stayed put, their discipline as immovable in death as it must have been in life. He no longer thought of the little pile of lapis he had procured, the tiny treasure lying forgotten at his feet.
The preacher never spoke. There was nothing left to say to the dead that wouldn’t rest as dead should. He drew the stale cavern air into his lungs without hurrying, letting his ribcage expand.
And, with a pulse of thought and adrenaline, crouched down and catapulted himself into the air, sailing high over the assembled undead horde.
He came down with an expert drop and roll, just outside the tightly packed ring of unliving opponents; he suppressed a pinch of vertigo as he felt gnarled, decaying hands reaching out to grasp at him, and dove forward into another roll to give himself some much-needed room. The torch flame in his hand lashed desperately, as if trying to buy him more time, and cast its light on a yawning cave opening ahead.
He didn’t think twice.
Endorphins coursed through his veins, suppressing the throbbing pain of his still-compromised ankle as he dashed head-over-heels away from the cave, every other sound drowned out by the combined war cry of the small unliving army that immediately gave chase into the mountain’s unknown depths. Even then, his vastly augmented mind kept track of each twist and turn that he barrelled his way through, each crossroads that he flung himself past, guided only by the rebounding echoes of his feet and the oncoming deluge of death behind him. He never allowed himself to even think of the possibility of taking a wrong turn, ending up in a—literal!—dead end; the grace of the divine did not stay with the doubtful for long.
>Run, run, little apostle, chimed the accursed text in his headset.
They were everywhere. While that first wave of zombies fell behind the comparatively superior celerity of their bony allies, new pursuers appeared from the tunnel openings around him like an underground avalanche of man-sized roaches and vermin, throwing themselves at him, leaping from ledges above and nearly sending him sprawling to the floor; he never stopped, never caught his breath, knowing that the instant his momentum faltered, it would be his end.
What a pitiful way to die in a game intended for gladiatorial combat.
He burst into a larger cave opening, coming onto a small ledge that ended in empty air; the headset’s close-range radar along with his augmented sight and hearing registered the teeming mass of undead in the depth below him, and he flung his torch into their midst, forcing them to disperse with gurgled growls and phlegmatic hisses. Without a moment’s pause, the preacher sprinted along the edge, catching sight of its counterpart on the other side of the cave in the waning light of the plummeting torch. Under more peaceful circumstances, he would have lovingly crafted a cobblestone bridge to span the gap properly … but time and options were at an all-time premium.
With another surge of adrenaline, he bunched his muscles together at the tip of the rocky spur, and launched himself into the air with all his might.
His sprained ankle nearly became his undoing. Misjudging the distance by barely less than a meter, he threw his arms out and grasped onto the sharp stone edge with a deadman’s grip fuelled by desperation, fear and fury in equal measure. His feet flailed futilely in the air, narrowly evading the reaching hands of the zombies below him; he heard a whistle and a clatter of an arrow striking the stone next to him, and that gave him the impetus to haul himself up and over the edge, rolling onto the ledge and to safety.
He sprinted over to the next tunnel opening, ducking and weaving through the oncoming hail of projectiles peppering him from the skeleton warriors’ bows from across the cave behind him, and dove into the partial lee of the exit corner, yanking a few errant arrows loose from his jacket where they had gotten stuck in glancing blows. At the very least, he hadn’t been hit directly.
He took a moment to catch his breath, listening to the undulating cadences of the zombies realizing with their automaton-like perception that their quarry had eluded them. The arrows continued to ping against the stone wall behind him for a while longer before they fell silent, the skeletal warriors wisening to the waste of their ammunition. He could hear their creaking footfalls receding in the distance, while the zombies continued to mill about, eternally driven by their sole remaining, basest desire for living flesh.
>You’re a tenacious one.
Pakratt grimaced, a mixture of resigned annoyance and the first creeping onset of actual physical exhaustion. He took a moment to make sure that he did at least still have his backpack; it was still with him, securely slung over his shoulder and closed tight. Drawing a deep breath, he shoved himself away from his momentary sanctuary and pushed onward, letting the glow of his holographic headset display provide what little ambient light he needed to at least see where he was putting his feet.
His surroundings brightened almost too gradually for him to notice; it wasn’t until the soles of his boots struck wooden planks that he stopped with a lurch and a disoriented blink. He looked up, staring in a moment of distant reverie at the torch that sat secured to the smoothly carved wall above him in a rudimentary, but clearly hand-fashioned, leather setting wedged into strategic cuts into the rock.
He turned around slowly, taking in his new environment. Beneath him was a wooden causeway; ahead and behind were sturdy support beams lining the ruler-straight passage at precise intervals; and here and there was the faint flicker of a torch still burning dutifully where it had once been placed by people far more civilized than the ghastly mob he had only just managed to leave behind.
It was an abandoned mine shaft.
A broad, genuine smile broke across the preacher’s lips.
Lucky, indeed.
~||~
==Game Time Elapsed: 95 minutes==
“So … five days.”
“Aye.”
“In two hours.”
“Give or take.”
Anderz growled sullenly, shaking off zombie brains from his shovel. “Dat still doezn’t make any fsking sense.”
Avidya didn’t reply, but he glanced sympathetically at the burly Scandinavian while cleaning rotten intestines off his own pickaxe.
They were still in the midst of the grassy field, decomposing remnants of the night’s undead horde scattered in piles and smeared across the ground all around them. Somehow, unbelievably, they had managed to weather the storm of this reanimated deluge, and although it was still dark, no more zombies had risen. Yet.
“Five days een two hours … dat’s, what … how many minutes?” Anderz muttered to himself while he drove the shovel into the ground and pulled a bottle of moonshine from his backpack.
“Twenty minutes per day,” Avidya answered, crisply but serenely. “Ten minutes of daylight, ten minutes of nighttime.”
The berserker shot the other man a cross look. “And you yust counted de seeconds while you walked trouh dat fsking desert? You sure de heat didn’t get to your fsking head?” The war-veteran merely looked back, raising his eyebrows, and Anderz quickly caught himself with another half-hearted mumble. He extended the booze bottle as an unspoken gesture of peace; forgetting for a moment that the zen master didn’t drink. At least not the kind of liquor that could just as easily be used for cleaning cross-country jeep hubcaps.
Avidya simply smiled politely and declined with a raised hand.
Anderz shrugged dismissively and downed several deep gulps, corked the bottle thoroughly and rummaged through his backpack, pulling out a shiny red apple that he bit into with great vigor, fruit juice oozing onto his chin.
He caught himself again, gesturing crudely with the already half-eaten apple in hand. “Y’wan’sum?” he offered, his mouth still full of that last bite of fruit.
The other man continued to smile and patted his own backpack as way of reply. “I’m good.”
Anderz finished off his quick snack swiftly enough, wiping his beard with the back of his hand and yanking the shovel out of the ground. “… we ought’a keep going,” he mused off-handedly, squinting into the distance. “Don’t want to be caught in de open like sitting ducks.”
The berserker willfully ignored the fact that he had just repeated very nearly exactly what had just been broadcast to him across his headset display in glowing green text. He didn’t need that kind of thinking right now.
Avidya let out a pensive little “hmm”, looking to the horizon as well. There wasn’t much to see; the entire perimeter was cut off by a thick, wholly unnatural fog that was damn well impossible to see through. The dawn was already fast approaching, the sky lighting up second by second, as if the glowing daylight orb was being jettisoned up from whatever deep, dark place it had been incarcerated.
Both men flinched minutely at the distant crack and rumble of thunder. They turned on cue, just in time to spot the flaring light-echo of a lone lightning bolt shining through the fog that cloaked the skyline.
Neither of them exchanged another word as they set off across the plains on a single, unspoken signal.
~||~
*KRAK-THOOOM!*
“FSK!!!”
Guude Boulderfist flung himself in the spitting image of a flailing spider monkey out of the canopy, narrowly catching himself in a tangle of vines that snapped and slung around his squirming form, slithering at lightning speed through his panicked grip before he was able to seize his momentum and swing into relative safety against a neighboring tree trunk. He felt the ripples of static wash over him and risked a glance over his shoulder; his blood ran cold at the sight of what had been his night perch up until a split second earlier—the thick, sturdy branch was shorn asunder, its halves hanging uselessly at awkward angles while stray leaves, visibly singed by the thunderstrike, fluttered morosely down towards the jungle floor far below.
>Wakey wakey, General.
He cursed freely under his breath while he clambered back up to a more stable vantage point, his every sense on alert in the potential that there would be any unwarranted creepy-crawly attention coming his way … luckily, this canopy seemed about as secure as the one he had just been very forcibly inclined to evacuate.
He glanced apprehensively up into the sky. ‘About as secure’ was the phrase here. Maybe it would have been a better idea to spend the night on the ground instead—
His train of thought was cut off by a soft, almost imperceptible pitter-patter. He spun abound, hunting knife at the ready, half-expecting to see baleful red eyes glowering at him from the darkness …
… instead, the pitter-patter simply increased steadily in volume, until he noticed the leaves and twigs around him starting to bounce errantly, quickly being covered in a bright sheen of wetness.
He looked up again, this time outright glaring at the thick, dark cloud layer that had swept in out of nowhere, completely blocking out whatever sunrise that might be approaching.
Rainstorm. Great.
The deluge intensified almost on cue, forcing the green t-shirt-wearing rogue out of the open and into the partial lee of the new stately forest member he had sought temporary sanctuary in. It was far from an ideal situation; deprived of the opportunity to fashion a proper cover and support, Guude was left clinging awkwardly to the branch beneath him and resting uneasily against the trunk, doing his level best to ignore the particularly heavy rain droplets finding their way through the leaves above and splashing unceremoniously onto his head and shoulders at intervals that were just irregular and sparse enough to jolt him out of every ounce of momentary respite he could conjure.
He sighed heavily and rubbed his eyes. The lightning strike had emblazoned its after-image onto his retinas, and it kept floating through his field of vision even now—an inverted, dark purple tear across the world around him that didn’t make the surreality of his situation any less poignant. Five days that had passed in an hour and a half, wildlife that seemed to appear and vanish at the beck and call of the same faceless nutjob that was likely projecting the strange and unsettling texts into his headset with alarming acuity and timing, and nights filled with dark whispers that he just couldn’t shake.
The still very vivid memory of the near-fatal lightning strike brought his ailing thoughts around to the moment just before it had hit. He had been fast asleep, dreaming.
That dream.
This was the second time in as many nights that he had had this particular dream … or outright nightmare, rather. Even now, the imagery was already failing him, slipping out of his immediate scope of recollection, leaving him only with a deep, churning sensation of impending doom in his gut and a razor collection of icicles that did their level best running his heart through from every angle.
He shook his head weakly. It was just a dream. He was in a horrible place; it was only natural that his psyche would start reacting like this.
The only thing was, nothing was really happening to him so far. If it weren’t for a few decidedly conspicuous events, he’d be utterly convinced by now that this jungle was completely devoid of life. He had yet to notice the slightest presence of any of his fellow war-brothers, and what little natural game he had encountered could be counted on his left thumb.
It wasn’t like he had sat idle, either. He had made good time and progress, if slowed somewhat by the curious absence of the Minecraftian ‘blessing’ that every Vanalian had learned to cherish and expect. There was just no way this jungle was that huge with so little to show for it.
The idea that maybe, just maybe he was simply going in circles needled his mind for all of an instant. He swatted it aside like the proverbial gnat. No fsking way. He was VPF General Guude Boulderfist, the Barefoot Rogue, sovereign supreme of these jungle canopies and feared scourge of arachnids and wayward Moderan scum alike.
He didn’t quite feel like all of that right now, huddled against a naked tree trunk while a tropical rain-powered water torture kept impinging on both his physical person and his emotional composure. There would be no point in trying to navigate the jungle with the heavens coming down like this; the ground would be too waterlogged and everything would be too slippery to be safe, and then he’d have to suffer through the strangling humidity while the excess moisture evaporated back into the clouds.
>Admitting that you have a problem is the first step to recovery.
Guude clenched his teeth. The rest of this day was going to be very, very long.
~||~
(Author's Note)
Ol' Lioness didn't write much of this chapter this week.
...
=====
Author's Box (FAQ):
"What is the Severance Universe?" -- The Severance Universe is the setting for the 'UHC: Foundation' serial. Read all the previous chaptersodes here or here and read more info and lore click here.
Severance Universe One Shots:
SUOS 001 - Hat
SUOS 002 - Descent and Denial
SUOS 003 - Into This World
SUOS 004 - Hostility
We do more than just the SevU. Here are other stories for you happy lot to check out!
Saladcrack :: Kiddycrack Ficsnips(TBA)

no subject
Date: Tuesday, March 11th, 2014 08:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Tuesday, March 11th, 2014 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 01:17 am (UTC)Great chapter! I really thought Pakratt had it done for - phew! Lucky man indeed! :D (If you make Pakratt die first hrrrrgh. *Unhappy face*)
... Apparently I went off and did something never posted this comment. Oookay. Post!
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Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 01:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 01:59 am (UTC)This only the first season of this epic, indeed, and there -two- more episodes left in this one season after this episode :3 You're right in saying we still have a lot of ground to cover... Oh mercy, do we have so much to cover, and this is the tip of iceberg.
Stay tuned! <3
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Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 02:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 05:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: Wednesday, March 12th, 2014 03:04 am (UTC)