(General Fiction) UHC: Foundation -- Season 2 "GAME"; Episode 5 -- "Lost and Found"

[halcyonlioness]

[Notice: If you are reading this more than a week out past the original posting date of this entry, be aware that this is an older iteration of the story.  It's highly recommended that you read the googledoc as that is the most recent and most updated version of the series.]

... *takes a deep breath*

 

... *preemptively dives under her desk to hide from a possible incoming wave of thrown rotting produce*

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.)

"Even in the unending shadows of death’s darkness, I am not overcome by fear.
Because You are with me in those dark moments, near with Your protection and guidance, I am comforted."

=====

 

Lost and Found

==Game Time Elapsed: 125 minutes==

Maybe it was the fact he was still getting his mind around the idea that an equatorial rainforest was bordering a permafrost tundra.  Maybe it was the fact that he had gone from freezing his ass off sprinting through an ice plain to stalking through a swelteringly hot jungle, trying to stay downwind as to not attract the attention of the armored sonuvabitch marching indifferently through clinging ferns and grasping vines ahead, hoping that the brigand would lead him to the generator he had been chasing not two days before.

… it was two days … right?

Maybe it was the fact that he felt like he hadn’t eaten more than one set of military rations for nearly a week and he was just loopy from low blood sugar.  Maybe he had finally gotten used to the notion that he was constantly being watched.

Likely, it was a combination of all of the above.

Time seemed to be muddled up and turned inside out in this deep, clinging undergrowth.  It felt like both a few moments and an eternity and a half since he had finally given up on the notion of questioning this abomination of a deathmatch arena.  If a tropical jungle could be spliced together with a barren hyperborean wasteland, heavens alone knew what other horrific scenery he’d stumble into next.

His supersoldier training had kicked in, focusing his mind on the plan he himself had concocted in those stifling prisoner’s hours.  Whether or not this place made any sense was irrelevant.  Stick to the mission objective, stay alert, stay alive, and adapt as need would dictate.

After all, it could be worse.

He stifled a hiss and a groan when his own sweat nearly ran into his eyes.  He wiped his brow swiftly with the back of his hand and forged onwards as swiftly and quietly as he could manage.  His own mind seemed to have turned to jelly; the headset hummed against his left temple.

Stay on track, stay on track …!

His foot suddenly caught on a crooked root sticking out of the soft, spongy jungle soil.  He stumbled momentarily, snatched his hand on a sturdy vine and swung into cover behind a broad tree trunk with a gasp and a mental invective.

>Mind your feet, tin-soldier.

He bit down on a few more choice words.  Pungence was the one who had been tailored for scouting missions and camo tech; BdoubleO had been in the prototype series intended to be shocktroopers and deployed for surgical armored strikes.  Even so, all supersoldiers in their class had been trained in every walk of the art of war, so that each of them could cover any gaps in the battle lines if the need would arise.

It still felt eerily like he was way into deep water out here.

He heaved himself back to his feet with an incensed huff.  Dammit.  He wasn’t supposed to let the heebie-jeebies get to him like this.  Stay cool, stay calm, and don’t let any cracks show.

After all, if you let the enemy start thinking it had the advantage over you, that meant you had already let it slip.

He snapped back to attention.  The jungle remained suffused with its natural sounds; chirps and calls of wildlife that never seemed to show itself, like a giant speaker on looped playback.

Most importantly, the black-armored bastard he had been tailing was nowhere to be seen.

BdoubleO allowed himself a bone-jarring fistpunch of frustration against the trunk next to him; the tree visibly shook and shuddered from the impact, sending its resident birds flying in all directions and leaves fluttering down around the Moderan expatriate.

… say the magic word and it happened.  Damn that Murphy’s Law.

“Isn’t this just swell,” the Assyrian hissed quietly to himself as he stared out into the undergrowth, each word dripping with sarcasm.  With an exasperated sigh, he leaned up against the tree and ran an annoyed hand over his face.  “A’right, Bdubs.  Think, fool.  What now?”

He sat there for a long moment, praying for a mental second wind.  Maybe he was just tired; it’d been several days after all.  Had to be.  Maybe slowing down was what he needed to get his head back on straight.

Somewhere deep inside, BdoubleO was simply too proud to admit that he was running out of ideas at this point.

>Where do you go when you have nowhere left to turn?

BdoubleO’s lost and desperate expression switched into one of self-assured pride and incensed determination.

Forward.

The hatchetpick was in his hand before the thought had finished in his mind, the axe edge hacking into a tall, gangly reed.

You go forward.

Swiftly, he whittled the reed down to a long, sharp point, and hefted it lightly in his other hand, letting it rest at a balanced horizontal.

The one useful thing you could ever teach, Anderz …

He still had a bead on where the black-armored freak had gone off to.  He still knew the path he himself had followed so far.  It had all been a straight line.

So if he continued in that straight line …

“… ‘Swedish Compass’?”

“Yeah, you juzt hold eet straight an’ walk de way eet points, an’ dat way you’ll go all de way through!”

If it worked in those dense Scandinavian forests … hell, why not here too?

That armored sonuvab*ch had a bit of a head start now, and BdoubleO knew how quickly an augmented soldier could move in full equipment even in this foliage.  If he was going to close the gap on his target, he’d better go double time … and that was exactly what he intended. His part to play hinged on where the freak was headed, after all.

Stealth wasn’t necessary now.  Speed was.  Thus, he willfully ignored the fact that he was pretty much—quite literally—plowing through the undergrowth, with all the noise and mess that came with it.  Hopefully, his agility would be enough to minimize telegraphing his position to any other hostiles in the area; chances were high that this armored bastard wasn’t alone.

What he wouldn’t give to have a buddy out here now.

A nagging feeling in the back of the expatriate’s mind welled suddenly into his awareness, forcing him to stop dead in his tracks and glance around.  The sensation was fleeting; as quickly as it had appeared, it was gone.  He grit his teeth.  Going from hunter to hunted was never a pleasant experience … he exhaled deeply in an effort to ease the sudden tension and resumed his march through the jungle, his ‘compass’ keeping him on course.

The jungle’s natural ambience seemed to have dimmed strangely.  Maybe it was just the fact that he knew people were watching—millions of them.  Maybe that armored sunuvab*ch already knew he was in hot pursuit.  Maybe he was being led into a trap—

Next thing BdoubleO knew, he had been slammed flat into the grass without a moment’s warning, the wind knocked completely out of him.  He dimly registered a huge, roughly cobbled-together pendulum made from vines and a log that swung away from him as he rolled over onto his back in an instinctive motion of evasion.  He felt a jab of pain in the ribs … likely a serious bruise, nothing broken.  It was going to take a lot more than a swinging log to nick his bones, but goddamn, did that smart.

He barely had time to stumble back to standing before a feral yell tore through the jungle’s ambience and he was hit with a full-force tackle, slamming him into a tree and knocking the wind out of him a second time.  Staggered and surprised, the supersoldier could feel his assailant brusquely pull back and heard the sound of a weapon being unsheathed.

Just in time, BdoubleO regained enough of his senses to register just who his attacker was.

The other man’s eyes were wild, crazed, bloodshot and sunken into dark rings, and his threadbare clothing was far more disheveled than the week—it had to be a week—they had been marooned out here should have implied.  Were this any other time, BdoubleO would have immediately quipped that the other man looked like sh*t, because holy fricker, the guy looked like he’d been trapped in hell for a goddamn year.

Of course, any other time wouldn’t have involved a fellow war brother wielding a hunting knife like a deranged psychopath, screaming bloody murder at the top of his lungs, and coming down upon him with lethal intent in a lunge of death.

At the last moment, a still-dazed BdoubleO caught the attacker’s knife arm in one hand and a crazed punch of battle-mad desperation in the other, narrowly holding back his own prodigious strength out of fear of crushing his friend’s bones like twigs.  The fact that the other man wouldn’t relent did not help the situation; he’d gone full berserk.  Not good.

“Guude!” Bdubs strained out, equal parts calm and desperate.  “Hey!  Guude!  GUUDE.”

No response; Guude’s teeth were bared in a grimace of utter, mind-numbing rage and the knife blade in his hand trembled noticeably as he continued to push against BdoubleO’s iron grasp.

The supersoldier moved almost too fast for the eye to see.  He released the other man’s arm only to quickly slide the back of his hand up against the inside of Guude’s forearm, making the knife’s edge connect with his hi-tech vambrace in a shower of sparks.  Pushing his arm up, metal shrieking against metal, he used the knife itself as leverage to force Guude’s hand open slightly; then he released the crazed Vanali General’s balled fist with his other hand and flung that forearm over the first, forming a scissor motion with his vambraces that caught the knife blade in its inner angle.  Shoving against the soft, yielding ground with both feet, the Assyrian then forced the blade to fall harmlessly from Guude’s palm, tumbling into the thick undergrowth around them.  The entire sequence was over in a heartbeat.

BdoubleO did not waste another moment, and clamped both hands down onto his friend’s shoulders … unfortunately, this also allowed a still-manic Guude to lash out and get a two-handed stranglehold on Bdubs’ throat.

“Ghakh!  … GUUDE!  JASON …  HEY!”  The supersoldier shook Guude violently in a sincere effort to snap the general out of his madness, roaring as best he could through the powerful chokehold.  “It’s ME!  LEGGO!”

Guude froze.  “… John?”  He blinked several times in confusion, the crazed look in his eyes fading as the red haze of berserker’s fury began to clear.  His face twitched, then shifted into horror.  “… oh god!”

He quickly let go of BdoubleO’s neck and stumbled back, clutching his own head and heart as the adrenaline was finally draining out of him, muttering apologies over and over while he regained his beleaguered sanity.  Finally, the trademark wily grin returned to Guude’s face, along with immense relief.  “Thank fskin’ goodness.  It’s just you.  I thought you were one of those armored fskers.”

BdoubleO chuckled hoarsely, rubbing his throat.  He couldn’t blame Guude for anything.  Those ‘armored fskers’ were cut from a very similar cloth as ol’ Bdubs, after all.  “Figures you’d mistake me for one of those fools.”

Guude allowed himself a slightly bitter laugh.  “You move like one of them!” he accused his right-hand man playfully.  “How’d you expect me to react, huh?”

“By not trying to kill me?”  BdoubleO didn’t bother masking his mockingly rhetorical tone.

Guude rolled his eyes. “Goddammit, Johnny.”

Bdubs smirked back. “Missed you, too, sweetheart.”

“Don’t you call me that!”

“You know I don’t mean it!”

“I know you don’t, but there are millions of people watching.  Don’t give them ideas!”
“Oh.  Right.  Whoops.”

“… you can be such a fskin’ idiot sometimes, guy.”

BdoubleO managed to stifle yet another retort just in time; time was fleeting, and the daylight was waning fast.  He followed his own memory of the tumbling hunting knife’s trajectory and, with a moment’s rummaging in the tangling ferns, retrieved it and handed it back to his friend in a single, smooth motion.  Guude accepted the blade just as easily, sliding it back into its sheath and standing up a little straighter, taking stock of the darkening sky as well.

The VPF General gave his right-hand man a raised eyebrow and pointed to a nearby trunk with a thumb.  “You still know how to climb one of these?”

The Assyrian supersolider shot back a confident grin.  “Mhm.  Like I was born to.”

~||~

==Game Time Elapsed: 205 minutes==

It had been the worst three and a half hours for Pakratt … or was it ten days?  Sure felt like he had spent a godawful amount of time in those caves anyway.  He knew that his augmented mind and constitution would have made it child’s play for him to keep impeccable track of each minute, but he had long since sworn off that path and chosen a new purpose in life.

Too bad everything tried to make absolutely nothing easy right now.

One moment, he had been minding his own business chipping away at some redstone; in the next, he was fleeing through the abandoned mines, having accidentally dug into an underground cobble barrow full of restless skeletons.  His ruined ankle prevented him from running at his usual breakneck speed; there was only so much a busted appendage could take before it became irreparably useless, and out here that would be the worst thing to happen.

Hence, the skeletons inevitably caught up to him, some wielding rusted weapons, others reaching bare-handed for his warm flesh.  Now almost cornered, Pakratt finally allowed his long-buried supersoldier instincts to kick in, grasping his worn hatchet pick in one hand as he slid into a combat stance and then lashed out with calculated precision.

Undead were undead to the Deep-Earth Paladin.  To make sure the dead wouldn’t rise again, one needed to either separate the head from the corpse or sanctify the remains.  In this case, the former was the more necessary—and, above all, effective—solution.

Skulls shattered with each surgical axeblade swing, the mystically animated bones collapsing from their cranial connection points into neat, inert piles of calcified pick-up sticks at his feet.  One skeleton swiped at him with a notched and pitted iron sword; the navy-suited preacher twisted around, smoothly evading the clumsy blow, and brought his own edge down upon the bony warrior’s elbow joint.  The sword went sailing in a graceful airspin along with the dismembered limb; the battered hilt landed neatly in Pakratt’s own palm and joined his own hatchetpick in a swirling dual-wield.

He didn’t keep count, neither of his opponents nor of the seconds ticking past; only of his own quickened but steady heart rate and the angle and force of each of his weapons.  Eventually, the final skeleton crumbled to the floor, its cranium sprayed in bits and pieces across the mineshaft battleground.

Pakratt did not take the moment to rest just yet, however.  His vocation and his conscience would not allow him until he performed one more duty.

With great care, he gathered the bones and placed them back into the barrow he had dug into, whispering simple but heartfelt last rites for each set of remains.  Once that grim business was dealt with, Pakratt lit one of his own torches and used it to reignite the barrow’s own, long snuffed out torches, taking proper stock of his surroundings.  The barrow had indeed been built with the express intent to provide a comfortable rest—eternal for its official residents, less so for the living if Pakratt had anything to say about it, but he still found a decent spot where he could rest and tend to his injuries.  The barrow, with its narrow opening that he himself had cut, was easily defensible, and he no longer had to worry about his bony hosts issuing complaints about his stay.

After a measure of replacing the support bandages around his ankle and nibbling on the slowly dwindling military rations, Pakratt’s attention was drawn to the many chests and crates that were stored within the barrow, each revealed by the flickering torchlights.  Naturally, he rummaged through them, though each time with a quick and discreet prayer of thanksgiving before he’d get to work on the rusty locks with utmost respect for those who left these items behind for the afterlife.

The containers did not disappoint.  He swiftly sorted out what treasures remained and shuffled what resources he could not afford to carry any longer into the emptied chests for safekeeping … but even so, he was still going to carry with him anything he could.

He gathered up what he assumed were healing potions (he was far from an alchemist, but the bottles’ coloration was still vivid) and—marvelously enough—raw diamonds.  The former to stay alive with, the latter to put to use in tools and contraptions.

And as it turned out, those chest weren’t the only thing of interest that he managed to uncover.

Even as he had been putting the various skeletal remains back to rest, he had caught notice of the strange glyphs trailing the walls in peculiar patterns.  Following their elaborate instructions, he had set the pick end of his issued hatchet against a specific spot among the moss-grown cobble making up the inner wall … and what he had found was a truly auspicious thing indeed.

His trek out of the mineshaft (there had to be an exit somewhere) turned out an adventure in and of itself.   Zombies stalked the deathly still corridors, and even as he fought his way through their ranks, he then tumbled straight into a nest of cave spiders.  The powers that be clearly had something in mind for the dogged preacher; it took all of his effort to slice his way out of the choking spiderwebs and evade the underground avalanche of irate arachnids that erupted from the mineshaft passage.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, Pakratt hoped that he was leaving enough of a trail to trace a way back to the barrow storage he had filled and marked.

His path upward and out came to an almost literal dead end, in one final mineshaft, reinforced with sturdy wooden plank supports, that clearly led to even higher levels but otherwise held no method of ascension in sight.  There were some old minecart tracks that ended here, that could have easily been pried out of the rough stone floors and used as a rudimentary ladder, but the preacher didn’t want to risk further putting undue strain on his injured leg in the name of a sketchy ladder substitute.

Pakratt did not fret.  He was a man of faith; finding guiding light in hopeless situations was the everlasting battleground he had chosen a long time ago.  And so he settled into a corner, made sure that his ankle could rest at a comfortable angle, and waited.

The minutes ticked by slowly, the navy-suited man’s thoughts his only company, that twisted and snaked in and out of his mind and heart with their characteristic, neverending eddies of reconsideration and alternate routes.  Miraculously enough, the constant troll-text in the headset clamped to the side of his skull remained silent throughout, even as he intermittently cycled through the heartrates of his fellow compatriots.

And then, finally, after what felt like fifteen minutes and a night and half a day, Pakratt caught wind of a faint conversation approaching from the level above, along with flickering torchlight.

Thank God.

He half expected that annoying text to take a jab at him at that point, but mercifully, his headset continued to only register heartbeats and radar blips.  Only two were showing up on the close-range scanner right now; moving slowly and purposefully, exploring this sprawling dungeon complex in a manner similar to his before all undead hell had broken loose.

With some effort, Pakratt stood to his feet and peered upward.  A conversation duly picked up above; he felt a relieved smile on his face as he recognized the voices.  It was MCGamer and Anderzel.  There was a slight outburst and a scuffle; it appeared that the cautious medic were narrowly withholding the Scandinavian berserk from leaping down the mineshaft in a battle froth.

It wasn’t often that the preacher allowed himself to recite the 23rd Psalm, especially to potentially millions of people listening to his voice. Reciting scripture was something he did rarely outside of the context of worship, but he had to make his identity known, and quickly.  This was no time to be self-conscious.

He drew a deep breath and spoke with a soft but resonant voice into the waning torchlight above.

“... Certainly, Your faithful protection and loving provision will pursue me where I go, always, everywhere.  I will always be with the Eternal, in Your house forever … Amen.”

A beat of seemingly shocked silence met him … and then:

“You heard that? That was Pak!”

The preacher smiled again, now in relief at the sound of MC’s tone perking up audibly.

There was a mild shuffle of movement and supplies being rummaged through, and then a lit torch landed at Pakratt’s feet.  In the next moment, a strongly braided hemp rope dropped down through the mineshaft, its slightly frayed end dangling invitingly to him.

He heard MC shout to him from above.  “C’mon, Pak!  Let’s get you outta here!”

He raised his own voice in turn, not bothering to mask the happy grin in it.  “Don’ need t’ tell me twice!”

~||~

==Game Time Elapsed: 226 minutes==

Pakratt was in relative safety now, among friends and finally able to rest, not to mention able to properly mend his injuries.  Avidya, the eternally tranquil zen soldier, had sorted through and stored away what Pakratt had been able to carry out of the mines, and MC had taken the time to identify the potions Pakratt had managed to claim from the skeleton barrow (they did indeed turn out to be healing potions).  The medic distributed the potions carefully, and gave one to the preacher for immediate use to speed Pakratt’s recovery.

The three-man gatherer team had certainly kept themselves busy.  Not only had they erected a surprisingly large and comfortable wooden house conveniently located between a birch forest edge and the main surface entrance to a large mineshaft area, but they had also filled their stores nearly to bursting with raw material.  There were fresh fowl and eggs, various fragrant flowers and grasses, black coal, iron ore and cobble, and enough lumber to build a small Soiac village.

The only thing that bothered Pakratt now was Anderz.

The preacher was used to Anderz being dorky, derpy, jovial, and drunk.  Since Pakratt had gotten rescued from the mines, Anderz had been … distant.  Distant, on edge, and constantly talking to himself.  While MC had made an emergency check of Pakratt’s wounded ankle, the burly Scandinavian seemed to have a strange, one-sided argument with some invisible opponent; MC, always the worrying sort, had interjected with a gentle inquiry—and Anderz had nearly bit the medic’s face off.  Mostly figuratively.

Pakratt had been able to defuse the situation quickly enough with his own pragmatic wisdom, but he could tell that MC had been taken quite aback by Anderz’s outburst.  As it was, he couldn’t give his orange-suited companion much leeway for reassurance, and let the matter rest with a simple pat on the shoulder as they made for the surface.

Even so, the preacher still did not avoid noticing that every time Anderz had those intermittent arguments with apparently no-one in particular, for each retort the Scandinavian had made, he had snapped his head towards his left; always his left.

The berserk viking had remained terse and uncharacteristically passive-aggressive throughout the trek out of the mines and across the grassy plains to the wooden storehouse, where they had arrived at the crack of dawn.  As soon as MC and a limping Pakratt had been greeted by a smiling and hospitable Avidya, Anderz had almost immediately announced that he was going to head back out to the mines.  Only Avidya’s zen tranquility had kept the Scandinavian in check.  Pakratt had noticed how the usually bulky MC had almost visibly shrunk away from the imminent confrontation, leaving it to Avidya’s far more competitive build—literally—to placate Anderz this time.

Thankfully, the unsettlingly dour Scandinavian was now out wandering about the plains, claiming to look for more natural cave openings and new sources of ore while there was still some daylight left.  Pakratt could hear MC converse quietly but urgently with Avidya in the next room, and the zen soldier’s calm, serene replies; near as he could tell, it seemed to entail some kind of herbal remedy for alcoholic withdrawal.

Pakratt prayed silently that it was just Anderz dealing with a very serious hangover.  

Next to him, wrapped in the cleaning cloth taken from MC’s game-issued handgun, lay the item that the preacher had recovered from behind the glyph-covered walls of that underground burial mound: a strange device, clearly part of something larger, but otherwise wholly impervious to any level of scrutinizing that they had been capable of.  All four men had sat leaned together over it, trying to determine its purpose, but the only consensus they had been able to meet was that it had to be one of the headset breaker components.  It was just too obscure to be anything else.

That meant that they were one step closer to eliminating the most immediate threat to their survival in this abominable deathmatch event, and that much closer to finishing this hackneyed agreement and returning to their rightful homes.

Pakratt glanced up gently when MC came back into the storehouse’s main room.  The medic made a beeline for the rows upon rows of sturdy wooden chests that sat along the room’s entire inner circumference, anxiously checking through their contents one at a time as if he didn’t know what to do with himself.  Pakratt remained quiet; spiritual help was the easiest to give when it was asked for.

Finally, MC came trudging over to the small resting area that had been arranged in that corner of the building and flopped down a ways away from Pakratt; the augmented expatriate, partially camouflaged in his navy-blue preacher’s suit, registered the dark circles underneath the other man’s eyes, the worn and threadbare state of the orange business suit that MC had gotten stuck in during this gladiatorial game, and also the faint, nervous fidgeting that the medic exuded even when he was sitting down and supposed to relax.

Most others would have quipped something about this whole situation running MC ragged in the first place; Pakratt was more sensible than that.

“Hey, MC.”

MC jumped visibly and stared with wide eyes at his once-mentor.  “Huh?”

“Y’ know, funny story ‘bout how I found th’ breaker component.”

The medic perked a little warily.  “Yeah?”

“Th’se glyphs on th’ walls, they led me to it.  Thinkin’ they’re probably Soiac, or a li’l older …”

MC lit up and scooted a little closer, listening raptly as Pakratt went on to describe the glyphs’ various shapes and patterns, eventually starting up an avid discussion that snaked itself from archaeology to applied history theory, to prehistoric sociology and back to the present again.

Pakratt only continued to smile lightly throughout the light-to-medium-to-heavy talk.  His companion was being spared his private worries, if only for a while … but such little graces could mean the difference between soldiering on through seemingly impossible odds, or falling down into a pit of despair that there would be no return from.

He had personal experience of such a crossroads, after all.

Even then, in the back of his own mind, his own thoughts continued their own endless dance, delving tirelessly into those depths that his waking consciousness was even now striving to shield MC from.

The headset hummed briefly against his left temple.

>You never get enough of the abyss, do you, little rat?

~||~

==Game Time Elapsed: 129 minutes==

“‘Like I was born to’, my ass …”

“Hey, just gimme a sec, okay?  It’s been a while!”

Guude smirked, already comfortably ensconced on a thick branch with a nice, dense foliage to shield his head from any unwarranted weather phenomena.  BdoubleO, meanwhile, was hanging somewhat precariously by his arms from a nearby tree limb, swinging around with his feet flailing ever so slightly awkwardly in the air.

The Assyrian supersoldier drew in a little breath, flexed his biceps, pulled his head up level with the branch and slung his torso and legs up and around, catching the branch’s rounded surface against the front of his hips before slinging one leg over the sturdy bough and scooting back against the trunk.  He flashed a triumphant grin at his friend.  “See? No problem at all.”

The Vanalian General simply rolled his eyes meaningfully.  “Sure, Bdubs, whatever you say.”

They shared another minute in silence while BdoubleO fidgeted his way into a position that would be comfortable enough to possibly catch a nap in before the fading sun would disappear beneath the foggy horizon.

Eventually, Guude spoke up, now with a kinder timbre to his voice.  “Seriously, though, man … glad you found your way here.  I was goin’ crazy from jungle fever. I must have been fskin’ running around in circles in this goddamn place.”

BdoubleO glanced over, and gave a far more sincere smile than earlier in return.  “You and me both, brother.  Seriously thought I’d be able to spot that generator I was chasing by now, too.”

Guude stared back in amazement.  “Wait … you found one?”

“Yep!”

“Holy hell, Bdubs.”

“I still can’t believe it either.”

“How far did you follow it?”

“Across that damn ice plain I got dropped into, almost to the edge of this jungle.”

“What the … this jungle is bordering an ice plain on one side?!”

“Mhm.”

“… what kind of fsked-up place are we in …”

“Your guess’s as good as mine, Jas’.”

Guude sighed heavily and leaned back into his cover. “… still, though … finally, good news for once and none of that fskin’ troll text to ruin the moment.”

>You rang?

The Vanalian groaned out loud.  “God fskin’ dammit.”

The Assyrian next to him in the treetops gave him a curious look.  “You see it too?”

“What the fsk do you think, Bdubs?!”

>You do realize how intriguing you are, interacting like this.

>Not entirely unlike a married couple.

The record scratch was palpable.

“WAT,” BdoubleO blurted out at the top of his voice.

Guude was a heartbeat behind.  “FSK NO.”

The ex-Moderan supersoldier was virtually flailing at the insinuation and the nigh un-chaste expectation the text seemed to be waiting for.  “What the fricker are you?!  Fifteen?!”

There was a moment’s pause before the text replied in eerie fashion, as though it were a preprogrammed computer response.

>I am not at liberty to respond to that query.

“How fskin’ DARE YOU.” Guude gestured wildly from his perch into the air.  “Why don’t ya jus’ take that sh*t o’ yers and shove it where the sun don’t shine, ‘cause that sh*t was jus’ uncalled for, ya fskin’ troll!”

“You tell ‘em, brother!” BdoubleO chimed in with a firm nod.

As if chastised by the outburst, the headset text fell silent; either that, or it simply did not care to reply.

… that minor victory did little to nothing to soothe the prickling embarrassment between the two warriors, however.  Guude grumbled under his breath as he settled back in for the night.  “Doesn’t frikken help that we’ve got two fskin’ planets watching our every move out here …”

BdoubleO stayed quiet, but he gave a lopsided, sympathetic smirk.

No more words were shared as the sun’s last reddish rays faded and the starless night sky finally solidified overhead.

~||~






=Author's Notes=

I really hope people won't get mad at me for conceiving this chapter. ... okay.  Chances are high, they will, but really... *cower*

I don't know what I was drinking ... er... thinking. T.T;

~||~

 

 

=====

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, or if you want 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

Sentimentality
Behind Worn Bones

We do more than just the SevU. Here are other stories for you happy lot to check out!
Saladcrack :: Kiddycrack Ficsnips

Burning the Phoenix (Ch 1)
Burning the Phoenix (Compiled Fic Google Doc)
(TBA)

[We can has a tumblr nao. Follows us, Precious!]

Comments

[theropod]

Like a married couple indeed ;D

[justicetom]

Loved it. They do act like that, yes.

[tjmachado]

Why would we be mad at you for this chapter? Wait for death, then start hiding.

That being said... You made Pak sound SO INCREDIBLY BADASS this chapter I want to HUG YOU! :D