Post by Tako on Jun 26, 2015 6:23:46 GMT
It was surprising how much of the planet was still untamed, untouched by human hands. Despite all the space in the world, there were still only a handful of major cities, and though the landscape was dotted with smaller towns and villages, there were still vast tracts of wilderness where you could walk for days and never encounter another person – at least, if you kept your pace relatively sedate, which Tako did. There was no point in rushing to be anywhere; it wasn’t as though she was specifically trying to get anywhere in particular, she was just trying to enjoy the journey. The destination? Well, she’d figure that out when she next felt like stopping.
She enjoyed the Eastern Lands. The weather was more temperate than the sweltering heat of the west and the terrain less intense than the jungles to the south. The forest she was in at the moment, she wasn’t even sure if it had a name. Presumably other people had been through this way before, but she couldn’t see any evidence of them. She’d been following a road about fifty miles back, but the path had gradually broken up into nothing and then faded away entirely five miles before she came to this forest.
Now, the heat of the sun above was offset by the dense foliage, the shade creating a pleasant balance between heat and cool during the summer weather. Where there were trees, she knew there’d be water; she had enough in her capsule storage, but it was always a good idea to replenish supplies where you could when you were taking your time. It wasn’t as though Tako was in any real danger of running out; if she needed to, she could always fly up and look for the nearest source of water or settlement… but that would take all the fun out of the journey.
The teenager whistled a merry tune to herself as she wandered through the woods, the gentle upwards slope made the going a little tougher than the straight, flat road had been, and the soft ground was far harder to keep her balance on. The deeper she went into the forest, though, the more she felt that it was like a world cut off on its own, set carefully apart from the rest of the earth. There was a strange quality to the light, and even the birdsong seemed to come from further away, as though reluctant to be heard in such a still and tranquil place. It was a strange, ethereal sensation and she was curious to see how far it went; it felt as though choosing to fly and cut out the hardship of the journey would be somehow disrespectful to it.
The girl made a bright splash of colour against the muted natural backdrop. Aside from the odd bird, rabbit or deer, there were no witnesses to see her as she made her journey, but those that did could hardly miss her, with her brilliant rainbow locks and her dazzlingly bright clothing. Against the soft browns and greens of the space around her, she stood out in an almost unreal fashion – and when she finally crested the peak of the gently-sloping hill, her breath caught in her throat.
The forest lay spread out before her, but what made her heart leap in her chest were the ruins that had been reclaimed by the landscape. Even from this distance she could see that the place had once been a great city; there were dozens, hundreds, of buildings scattered amongst the thick forest landscape, she could see apartment blocks and shops, houses large and small, situated amongst trees that rose up high enough to rival them. Some of the buildings looked like they’d had trees grow up through them; the wood punching its way through walls and ceilings, branches twisting through windows.
What was going on here?
Tako let her senses flow outwards as she walked carefully down the hill. She could sense life all around her; that wasn’t too surprising, the trees themselves exerted a gentle, subtle pressure all of their own, and there were countless other, small presences around the place, but she couldn’t feel anything that felt… human. As she approached the edge of the deserted buildings she felt a thrill of fear run down her spine. Whatever had happened here, it couldn’t have been anything good – there were just too many buildings for them all to have been abandoned naturally, surely? And why – how – would the forest grow up to replace them?
The girl ran her fingers across the brickwork of an ancient office block, and the crumbling material came away against her fingertips. All at once, the quiet and peace of the forest was broken as the side of the building collapsed inwards, the whole structure lurched alarmingly to the left and there was a catastrophic cacophony of noise as lumps of old, unstable concrete crashed down all around her.
Instinctively, Tako focused her energy and – though some of the concrete did hit her, the resulting shimmering energy barrier cracked the stuff and sent it tumbling to either side of her. Thick clouds of dust and debris were thrown up, but the particulate matter couldn’t reach her through her barrier. She just stood there, mouth agape, as the structure came tumbling down all around her. When, at last, it was over… the city was silent once again, bearing mute testament to the casual, unintentional vandalism that had taken place.
She felt like a graverobber.
“Eheh, sorry, I guess…”
The silence swallowed her words, and the girl carefully picked her way around the collapsed wreckage, as though touching any more of the rock could make things worse. What was creepier was the fact that nothing but the concrete had fallen down around her; she’d feared she might find bodies, or the remnants of life, but… there was nothing in there at all but dust. If there was anything to find, it had long ago been reduced to nothing by the ravages of time.
As the rainbow-haired girl made her way through the abandoned streets, she stroked her fingers across the trunks of the trees that had taken over through the asphalt. What had once been a thoroughfare was now difficult to tell apart from the forest she’d been walking through all morning. If it weren’t for the buildings that still stubbornly stayed standing, she’d never have been able to guess it. As it was, the buildings – in her mind’s eye – made out the layout of the street, what had once been a busy and bustling city.
At first, she had felt that the pressure flowing through the dead city around her was very weak, very mild, barely existent at all. In fact, that still felt right to her, but there was more nuance to it than she had originally thought. She could feel movement – there were still creatures moving through the ruins of the city, but not many of them.
That struck her as odd. In the wilderness, she’d learned to block out the near-constant presence of far too many creatures, but here… there were the trees, silent, subtle presences notable for their solidity but, barely living in the sense of ki. The creatures, though, were mostly clustered around a few key locations, beneath ground level.
Tako pursed her lips as she pondered that. She doubted these life forms were anything like worms – they were too large for that, and they didn’t feel like moles or voles, either… it was difficult to be sure exactly what was going on, but now there was more to the ghost city than just a bunch of abandoned buildings.
With a faint grunt, she took to the air and looked down at the buildings below her, pondering how it would have looked back in the day. It was difficult, with the way the trees had grown to so completely cover the world below in leafy foliage and dark shadows. It had been a while since she had really looked at West City from the air, but the parallels were striking – she just had to try and imagine what the place would have looked like, she had to try and envisage the place as though it were teeming with people.
Tako closed her eyes, and stretched her arms out in front of her. The girl’s breathing slowed as she took control of herself and tried to use her imagination, something that she hadn’t really exercised as much as any other muscle in her body.
Getting rid of the trees, she could picture the thoroughfares that ran through the heart of the city, and as she looked down from above, it seemed that the whole place was designed to funnel into one particular … tree. A tree that seemed notably larger than the other trees, in fact. Huh. Maybe she should go check that out.
The base of the tree was set deep into the earth, and the gnarled, twisting knots that the roots formed dug drill-like into the soft, exposed soil. The scent of fresh sap wafted from the deep hole in the ground, and the girl leaned over to peer into the darkness. It was a gaping wound in the earth, one dank and musky, which was somehow even more foreboding than the largely-empty world she had thought the city represented at first.
Still, it wasn’t as though she were scared of the dark. She was a little old for that.
The space was big enough for her to slide down into, and from her backpack the girl produced an electric torch which shone into the forlorn darkness, casting a series of erratic shadows across the world ahead of her. The space seemed to go on forever, and Tako felt the roots of the tree delving deep into the earth. What was stranger, was that the light glinted off reflected metal, showing some strange possibility deeper towards the earth’s core.
As she descended, the ground beneath her feet turned from soft earth to hard metal. The facility had obviously once been very advanced, but now, whatever it had been doing had long since fallen into disrepair.
Tako passed through many identical corridors, letting her senses guide her. She could feel that there were animals down here – indeed, there was ample evidence in the filth and dirt they had tracked in over the years, but actually finding any of them was proving difficult. Every now and then she would come across an abandoned room, inside which the remnants of machines which had not been as rustproof as the walls of the facility itself remained. She couldn’t even begin to guess what this place had been used for - it sure looked complicated. Whatever it had been, it had obviously been something very important.
As she got deeper into the facility, though, things took a darker turn. Amongst the rooms there were clusters where there had been people. She could barely tell, because the piles of bones and dust had been picked so clean by scavengers that there was very little left to show what had been bodies. Something awful had happened here, she had to find out what!
Eventually, she found her way to the place the animals had gathered.
The room, unlike all the others, held a single glowing light in the centre. There, a machine gently hummed, and the warmth of that machine as it pulled on whatever ancient power sources were still functioning after all this time had drawn the animals down to it. Deer, squirrels, and other prey animals had clustered about the heat of the generator, the roots of the tree above having dug deep through the rest of the room in the quest to find water.
Hesitantly, Tako walked into the chamber. The machine didn’t look too different to computers that she’d used – every now and then – at school.. but she was far from being an expert on the subject. What on earth was she supposed to do with it, now that she’d found it? She didn’t even know what this place was for!
She reached out to touch the machine, and the animals didn’t even startle – so unused to human contact that they didn’t even know they should be worried.
The computer flickered to life, and there it was – just eleven words which painted a picture of the horror that had unfolded in this dark, cold place.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY ALL CITIZENS WILL RETREAT TO THE BUNKER
Tako felt a shiver run down her spine, and she briefly considered trying to turn off whatever functions were still being run by the ancient computer… but all that would do would be to disturb the animals. This place had been meant as a place of safety; a vault people could shut themselves in until whatever danger assailed them had passed.
Instead, they had wound up sealing themselves in a tomb from which they clearly had never escaped. She might never know what disaster had prompted such a desperate response, and she didn’t want to imagine what those poor soul’s last moments must have been like; whether they lingered or whether they died swiftly. How long had they been down here, unknown and unremembered?
The enormity of it was awful to think about, and when Tako emerged from the base of the tree, it was in a far more solemn mood. The city had been creepy enough before, but now the whole place seemed to stand as testament to a single, uncomfortable fact…
No matter if the human race continued to exist, the planet would keep turning and nature would carry on, reclaiming the land which had once been sealed off by human hands. In other circumstances, the thought of such continuity might have been heartening…
Like this, it was just disturbing.
She enjoyed the Eastern Lands. The weather was more temperate than the sweltering heat of the west and the terrain less intense than the jungles to the south. The forest she was in at the moment, she wasn’t even sure if it had a name. Presumably other people had been through this way before, but she couldn’t see any evidence of them. She’d been following a road about fifty miles back, but the path had gradually broken up into nothing and then faded away entirely five miles before she came to this forest.
Now, the heat of the sun above was offset by the dense foliage, the shade creating a pleasant balance between heat and cool during the summer weather. Where there were trees, she knew there’d be water; she had enough in her capsule storage, but it was always a good idea to replenish supplies where you could when you were taking your time. It wasn’t as though Tako was in any real danger of running out; if she needed to, she could always fly up and look for the nearest source of water or settlement… but that would take all the fun out of the journey.
The teenager whistled a merry tune to herself as she wandered through the woods, the gentle upwards slope made the going a little tougher than the straight, flat road had been, and the soft ground was far harder to keep her balance on. The deeper she went into the forest, though, the more she felt that it was like a world cut off on its own, set carefully apart from the rest of the earth. There was a strange quality to the light, and even the birdsong seemed to come from further away, as though reluctant to be heard in such a still and tranquil place. It was a strange, ethereal sensation and she was curious to see how far it went; it felt as though choosing to fly and cut out the hardship of the journey would be somehow disrespectful to it.
The girl made a bright splash of colour against the muted natural backdrop. Aside from the odd bird, rabbit or deer, there were no witnesses to see her as she made her journey, but those that did could hardly miss her, with her brilliant rainbow locks and her dazzlingly bright clothing. Against the soft browns and greens of the space around her, she stood out in an almost unreal fashion – and when she finally crested the peak of the gently-sloping hill, her breath caught in her throat.
The forest lay spread out before her, but what made her heart leap in her chest were the ruins that had been reclaimed by the landscape. Even from this distance she could see that the place had once been a great city; there were dozens, hundreds, of buildings scattered amongst the thick forest landscape, she could see apartment blocks and shops, houses large and small, situated amongst trees that rose up high enough to rival them. Some of the buildings looked like they’d had trees grow up through them; the wood punching its way through walls and ceilings, branches twisting through windows.
What was going on here?
Tako let her senses flow outwards as she walked carefully down the hill. She could sense life all around her; that wasn’t too surprising, the trees themselves exerted a gentle, subtle pressure all of their own, and there were countless other, small presences around the place, but she couldn’t feel anything that felt… human. As she approached the edge of the deserted buildings she felt a thrill of fear run down her spine. Whatever had happened here, it couldn’t have been anything good – there were just too many buildings for them all to have been abandoned naturally, surely? And why – how – would the forest grow up to replace them?
The girl ran her fingers across the brickwork of an ancient office block, and the crumbling material came away against her fingertips. All at once, the quiet and peace of the forest was broken as the side of the building collapsed inwards, the whole structure lurched alarmingly to the left and there was a catastrophic cacophony of noise as lumps of old, unstable concrete crashed down all around her.
Instinctively, Tako focused her energy and – though some of the concrete did hit her, the resulting shimmering energy barrier cracked the stuff and sent it tumbling to either side of her. Thick clouds of dust and debris were thrown up, but the particulate matter couldn’t reach her through her barrier. She just stood there, mouth agape, as the structure came tumbling down all around her. When, at last, it was over… the city was silent once again, bearing mute testament to the casual, unintentional vandalism that had taken place.
She felt like a graverobber.
“Eheh, sorry, I guess…”
The silence swallowed her words, and the girl carefully picked her way around the collapsed wreckage, as though touching any more of the rock could make things worse. What was creepier was the fact that nothing but the concrete had fallen down around her; she’d feared she might find bodies, or the remnants of life, but… there was nothing in there at all but dust. If there was anything to find, it had long ago been reduced to nothing by the ravages of time.
As the rainbow-haired girl made her way through the abandoned streets, she stroked her fingers across the trunks of the trees that had taken over through the asphalt. What had once been a thoroughfare was now difficult to tell apart from the forest she’d been walking through all morning. If it weren’t for the buildings that still stubbornly stayed standing, she’d never have been able to guess it. As it was, the buildings – in her mind’s eye – made out the layout of the street, what had once been a busy and bustling city.
At first, she had felt that the pressure flowing through the dead city around her was very weak, very mild, barely existent at all. In fact, that still felt right to her, but there was more nuance to it than she had originally thought. She could feel movement – there were still creatures moving through the ruins of the city, but not many of them.
That struck her as odd. In the wilderness, she’d learned to block out the near-constant presence of far too many creatures, but here… there were the trees, silent, subtle presences notable for their solidity but, barely living in the sense of ki. The creatures, though, were mostly clustered around a few key locations, beneath ground level.
Tako pursed her lips as she pondered that. She doubted these life forms were anything like worms – they were too large for that, and they didn’t feel like moles or voles, either… it was difficult to be sure exactly what was going on, but now there was more to the ghost city than just a bunch of abandoned buildings.
With a faint grunt, she took to the air and looked down at the buildings below her, pondering how it would have looked back in the day. It was difficult, with the way the trees had grown to so completely cover the world below in leafy foliage and dark shadows. It had been a while since she had really looked at West City from the air, but the parallels were striking – she just had to try and imagine what the place would have looked like, she had to try and envisage the place as though it were teeming with people.
Tako closed her eyes, and stretched her arms out in front of her. The girl’s breathing slowed as she took control of herself and tried to use her imagination, something that she hadn’t really exercised as much as any other muscle in her body.
Getting rid of the trees, she could picture the thoroughfares that ran through the heart of the city, and as she looked down from above, it seemed that the whole place was designed to funnel into one particular … tree. A tree that seemed notably larger than the other trees, in fact. Huh. Maybe she should go check that out.
The base of the tree was set deep into the earth, and the gnarled, twisting knots that the roots formed dug drill-like into the soft, exposed soil. The scent of fresh sap wafted from the deep hole in the ground, and the girl leaned over to peer into the darkness. It was a gaping wound in the earth, one dank and musky, which was somehow even more foreboding than the largely-empty world she had thought the city represented at first.
Still, it wasn’t as though she were scared of the dark. She was a little old for that.
The space was big enough for her to slide down into, and from her backpack the girl produced an electric torch which shone into the forlorn darkness, casting a series of erratic shadows across the world ahead of her. The space seemed to go on forever, and Tako felt the roots of the tree delving deep into the earth. What was stranger, was that the light glinted off reflected metal, showing some strange possibility deeper towards the earth’s core.
As she descended, the ground beneath her feet turned from soft earth to hard metal. The facility had obviously once been very advanced, but now, whatever it had been doing had long since fallen into disrepair.
Tako passed through many identical corridors, letting her senses guide her. She could feel that there were animals down here – indeed, there was ample evidence in the filth and dirt they had tracked in over the years, but actually finding any of them was proving difficult. Every now and then she would come across an abandoned room, inside which the remnants of machines which had not been as rustproof as the walls of the facility itself remained. She couldn’t even begin to guess what this place had been used for - it sure looked complicated. Whatever it had been, it had obviously been something very important.
As she got deeper into the facility, though, things took a darker turn. Amongst the rooms there were clusters where there had been people. She could barely tell, because the piles of bones and dust had been picked so clean by scavengers that there was very little left to show what had been bodies. Something awful had happened here, she had to find out what!
Eventually, she found her way to the place the animals had gathered.
The room, unlike all the others, held a single glowing light in the centre. There, a machine gently hummed, and the warmth of that machine as it pulled on whatever ancient power sources were still functioning after all this time had drawn the animals down to it. Deer, squirrels, and other prey animals had clustered about the heat of the generator, the roots of the tree above having dug deep through the rest of the room in the quest to find water.
Hesitantly, Tako walked into the chamber. The machine didn’t look too different to computers that she’d used – every now and then – at school.. but she was far from being an expert on the subject. What on earth was she supposed to do with it, now that she’d found it? She didn’t even know what this place was for!
She reached out to touch the machine, and the animals didn’t even startle – so unused to human contact that they didn’t even know they should be worried.
The computer flickered to life, and there it was – just eleven words which painted a picture of the horror that had unfolded in this dark, cold place.
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY ALL CITIZENS WILL RETREAT TO THE BUNKER
Tako felt a shiver run down her spine, and she briefly considered trying to turn off whatever functions were still being run by the ancient computer… but all that would do would be to disturb the animals. This place had been meant as a place of safety; a vault people could shut themselves in until whatever danger assailed them had passed.
Instead, they had wound up sealing themselves in a tomb from which they clearly had never escaped. She might never know what disaster had prompted such a desperate response, and she didn’t want to imagine what those poor soul’s last moments must have been like; whether they lingered or whether they died swiftly. How long had they been down here, unknown and unremembered?
The enormity of it was awful to think about, and when Tako emerged from the base of the tree, it was in a far more solemn mood. The city had been creepy enough before, but now the whole place seemed to stand as testament to a single, uncomfortable fact…
No matter if the human race continued to exist, the planet would keep turning and nature would carry on, reclaiming the land which had once been sealed off by human hands. In other circumstances, the thought of such continuity might have been heartening…
Like this, it was just disturbing.
