Chapter Text
It seems that time has taken a much greater toll on this area of the slums than it did on the second quadrant.
The change wasn"t drastic, just little things here and there that seemed out of place.
The first you notice are the companion robots. There seems to be at least one body abandoned in every street you pass through. It makes you sad to think that they had all been left behind, whether the humans meant to leave them or not.
You had always been incredibly fond of the companion robots, to the point your floormates would tease you about it.
You were friends with two of them in your area of the slums. Well, ‘friends’ might be a bit generous. Whenever you saw one of them you would ask them how they’d been, and they would tell you what tasks they had finished already and which task they were assigned to now. You would then tell them your plans for the day, and they would wish you well.
So not exactly friends, but recently one of them, 958, had asked you if you had “succeeded” in your game of wall ball the previous day without being prompted. You still haven’t quite come down from that high.
B-12 and the cat don’t seem to pay the bodies any mind, and if they notice you checking each one for a very specific dent in its front casing, then they kindly don’t draw attention to it.
The second you notice are the small clusters of glowing, orange spheres. They seem to be growing, attached to the street or sometimes to the wall of a building.
The cat gives them a wide berth, and you follow their lead. Nothing seems to come of it, until by chance you glance down into a courtyard below and see movement.
Scurrying around is a pack of seven or eight little flesh-colored creatures. They don’t seem to have much shape to them. They"re just one glowing, orange eye on top of a mound of flesh, skittering around on short legs.
“B-12,” you call to them, as loudly as you dare without alerting the creatures below you. The drone spins immediately and flies over to you. They peer into the courtyard and then shake their body a bit.
“Zurks,” they say, whirring quieter than usual. “Horrible, little monsters. They don’t look like much, but a swarm of them will overwhelm you in an instant.”
“Overwhelm… what’s uh, what does “overwhelm” mean in this situation, exactly?”
“They’ll eat you alive.”
“Oh. Great.”
“Yes, so let’s try not to draw their attention, if we can.”
You nod and sneak away from the ledge.
The cat is waiting for the two of you a few paces away. Their ears are twitching every which way, and you’d swear that their fur is puffier. They continue to lead the group of three once you catch up to them, but they don’t walk as quickly as they had before. They‘re actually staying quite close to you, ears constantly swiveling.
It ignites a small flash of protective anger within you. Your little friend is noticeably agitated by the Zurks, but if any Zurk wants to get a bite in at them, they’ll have to go through you. And if the Zurks think you’ll be an easy meal, then they’ve got another thing coming.
“What’s wrong?” B-12 asks suddenly, pulling you out of your thoughts. Your determination must have shown on your face.
“Nothing, just… Zurks.”
“Zurks,” B-12 agrees, and the three of you continue on.
Your street comes to an end at a bucket-station overlooking another courtyard. Mounted on a nearby fence post are a few different signs. Two of them have the new text on them, so you leave those to B-12 and focus on the other one. It’s just an image, a silhouette of a companion robot with a… human child? A child-sized robot? You’re pretty sure the robots were only ever made in one size. Maybe it was a metaphor or something.
“Safezone,” B-12 translates, looking over the other two signs.
“Sounds nice,” you mumble.
You survey the courtyard below you. The drop is farther than one street down, but it isn’t terrible. There’s one pack of Zurks down there, closer to you than not. Mounted on the far wall is a single cool, white light, like a beacon. If you squint, you think you see a small hole in the wall just barely big enough for you to crawl through.
The bucket should take B-12 and the cat most of the way across. You’d be stuck with plain old running, but against your better judgment you want to know if the Zurks are faster than you. You’re counting on that not being the case, because if they are, then you’re in for a bad time.
“We’re going?” You ask, but it’s more of a statement than a question.
B-12 nods. “It sure seems like it.”
“Okay, you two hop in, and I’ll drop down after you start moving.”
B-12 looks startled. “You don’t want to try to hold onto the line? I’m sure it will carry your weight without any problem.”
“I’d rather be on my own two feet, to be quite honest.”
“But the drop…” They look over the edge. “It’s high. It’s probably too high to make without injuring yourself, and then you won’t be able to run. You do remember what I said about-“
“Hey, hey, buddy.” You interrupt them as gently as you can. “Trust me on this, okay?”
They don’t answer for a moment, watching your face. They unhappily shake their body from side to side.
“If you really think that’s the best way, then fine. Okay. You do what you think is best.”
They don’t seem convinced in the slightest though, and they keep making a short noise that they don’t bother to translate for you.
The cat rubs their flank against your leg and you kneel down. You scritch their cheeks and neck as they wind around you.
“You’re gonna run fast too, aren’t you? You’re gonna hop out the bucket and meet me at the wall. Okay, little friend?” You ask, holding their soft face with both of your hands.
They bop their forehead against your knee and you smile.
You hear B-12 whir and you look up.
“Please be careful,” is written on their screen. They drop to be at your eye-line and hover a little closer to your face.
“It’ll be okay,” you tell them both. “Off you go.”
B-12 makes one last whir and retreats into the backpack, and the cat jumps into the bucket. There’s a small lurch before the cable starts moving, the slack rattling in the machine. The noise alerts the pack of Zurks, and they all begin to squeak and scuttle around faster. It makes your skin itch for some reason. You quickly drop down while they’re distracted and then take off.
You sprint for the wall of the Safezone. A few of the Zurks notice you passing them and they chase after you, much faster than you thought they would be.
One of them leaps at you and latches onto your thigh, making you stumble, but you do manage to outrun the others.
The cat jumps from the bucket and lands just ahead of you. They run for the dumpster pushed against the wall, and you follow. You launch yourselves on top of it and the cat jumps from the dumpster to a pipe just above you.
You grab it and begin pulling yourself up before the sound of tearing fabric cuts through the noise of the creatures angrily swarming below you. The sound is followed by sharp pain shooting through your leg, so intense you almost lose your grip.
You grab the Zurk still clinging to your thigh and cringe at the feeling of holding a squishy flesh-sack filled with liquid. You manage to wrench it off of you. This close to it, you can see its horrible pincers are dripping red with your blood. It’s waving its claws around desperately trying to latch back onto you, so you hurl it down into the swarm still on ground level. The thing explodes on impact and you grimace at the sight of its insides splashed across the ground. You pull yourself up onto the pipe where B-12 and the cat are waiting for you.
“Are you alright!?” B-12 asks you, frantically flying around you and examining your bleeding leg.
It really does hurt, and looking over the wound reveals that the creature hadn’t simply cut through your skin, but rather had scooped a shallow chunk of your flesh out like a jagged spoon would have.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” you say, trying to calm the panicking drone. “It’s actually really shallow. I’ll be completely fine.”
They look at you and make a slow whirring sound, their pitch dropping in a way that’s unmistakably sad.
“B-12, I promise you, it’s okay,” you say. You look over the wound again.
“I should definitely do something about it though,” you mutter. You pull out your first aid wallet and ready a disinfectant wipe.
“You two can check out the Safezone if you want. I’ll be right behind you.”
The cat nuzzles your hand and turns, apparently not having any trouble believing you as they walk along the pipe. B-12 hesitates a moment before following them. They disappear through the opening in the wall that you were sure to have an interesting time crawling through a few minutes from now.
Not entirely sure what to do, you press the wipe into the open wound and immediately gasp. You hiss at the pain, because somehow the disinfecting hurt worse than the initial bite had. You soak up some of the blood on your skin and the tights of your cryo-suit with the wipe before folding it up and dropping it into an open garbage bag below you. The wound is a bit too wide for any of the bandages you have left, so you sigh and pull out the roll of gauze.
As much as you dislike the feeling of the synthetic fabric, you are very thankful for it. The Zurk would have torn through your normal clothes in an instant, and you would have needed much more than a simple gauze wrap to fix you up afterwards.
Without warning, a deafening siren goes off inside the Safezone. You flinch so hard you almost fall off the pipe. You quickly cover your ears and squint to see through the opening. A few red lights are flashing in the alleyway on the other side, but you can"t see much else.
What the fuck kind of ancient security system did those two just set off?
You quickly tie off the ends of the wrap and begin crawling along the pipe. You hesitate a moment when you catch sight of a makeshift spear mounted on the wall. You dislodge it and take it with you. You wiggle your way into the Safezone in time to see an orange tail disappear around a corner.
You drop from the pipe straight to the ground and wince as your landing jostles your leg.
“B-12, wait!” You try to call over the sound of the siren. You jog after them.
The color is different in the Safezone. There are browns and oranges and yellows here. Warm light shines in the narrow streets, and in the distance you can just barely hear doors slamming.
Your breath catches in your throat and you take off running, checking around every corner for your little friends. There only seems to be one way to go, seeing as every offshoot is blocked by metal fencing. Before you know it, you come out into a wide, open space, almost like a town square. You skid to a halt.
The cat is standing in the center of the square with B-12 hovering nearby. Kneeling in front of them is a companion robot. You almost think they’re a human, what with the clothes they’re wearing, but the glowing, green monitor gives them away.
You’re stuck between two emotions. You’re excited that you"ve finally found a working robot, but with the race to the Safezone still fresh in your mind, you can’t help but be on edge. Nothing seems to be wrong, but even while crouching, the robot looms over your little friends.
“Hey!” You call out and jog over to them. “Careful with my cat!”
The companion robot looks up at you and they blink. They blink at you and when they whir, their mouth changes. It spreads to reach the sides of their monitor and the height keeps changing, like they"re opening their mouth to talk to you.
You are so mesmerized by the way this robot is mimicking human behavior, that you almost miss B-12’s translation.
“You are an Ancestor,” the robot, Guardian, had said. They stand, faster and much smoother than you have ever seen a robot move before.
“Uh, an ancestor of what?” You ask, still quite distracted with deciding whether the Guardian looks intimidating or regal in their red robes and wide, golden hat.
“You are an Ancestor of the Companions, our Ancestor,” they say, looking you over like you’re a very interesting and intricate picture. To be fair, you’re probably looking at them the same way.
Their Ancestor though…
“I guess that’s kind of true, in a way. But that… that means there aren’t any other humans running around here, are there?”
“No,” the Guardian replies simply. “According to legend, the humans disappeared a long, long time ago.”
“Right.” You say stiffly. It"s not like you"d thought all the humans were just hiding out in the Safezone, but... you don"t know. You don"t know what you were thinking.
The blaring siren is starting to really make your ears hurt, and you wince.
“Is the siren ever going to turn off?”
“Does it bother you?” A few more blinks.
“It hurts a bit, yeah.”
The Guardian takes a step back and brings the butt of their staff down hard against the ground, the impact echoing around the square. Then they hold their hand up to their speaker and whir much louder than you thought was possible. That sound definitely echoes around the Safezone, and soon the lights and the siren go off.
The garage door behind the Guardian opens, and cautiously stepping out of it are several more Companions, all wearing different clothes. You watch them, fascinated, as they slowly drop their defensive postures and filter back into the streets. A couple of them do a double take when they see you, but outside of that everyone seems to go back to their activities.
“Apologies,” the Guardian says, recapturing your attention, but you wave it off.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s actually really impressive. Everyone was inside in seconds. I didn"t see a single person when I came through.”
“It’s an old system," they say, dodging the compliment. "I don’t actually know if it’s ever been used before.”
“Well, that’s good, right? It means the Safezone has been pretty safe.”
“Indeed. Although, it’s apparently not safe from a small creature like you, is it, little one?” they ask, looking down at the cat sitting beside you.
The cat chirps back at them, and their monitor turns cyan. It takes you a second to realize that the Guardian is smiling.
Their default expression returns soon after, but you can’t stop thinking about it.
B-12 is clearly capable of complex emotions, but they’re limited to using their voice and drone body to convey those emotions. But the Companions can wear clothes and change their monitors and use their voices and bodies to express themselves in all the ways humans can.
It’s incredible.
And it’s surprisingly comforting.
The heavy feeling of potentially (probably) being the only human left is starting to lighten, and you smile despite yourself.
The cat begins playing with the laces on your boots, probably out of boredom, but the Guardian seems to be waffling on something. They keep passing their staff between their hands. You want to wait until they come to some kind of decision.
It actually reminds you of the makeshift spear you"re still holding. You"re so used to carrying your wall ball stick around that you"d almost forgotten you"d picked the thing up. It seems to be just a sturdy pipe with a screwdriver tied to one end. You might try to remove the screwdriver at some point later. You"re much better at whacking than you are at piercing.
The Guardian shifts their stance a bit more significantly, and you start paying attention again.
“Can I ask for your name?” They finally whir at you.
That’s it?
They were deciding whether or not to ask for your name? Maybe it had some amount of cultural significance or something. They seem kind of embarrassed about asking, fidgeting with their hold on the staff. And isn’t that wonderful of them? They’re fidgeting because they’re embarrassed.
“I cannot read the name of someone like you.” They quickly elaborate, as if they need to elaborate at all. This Companion is so endeared to you that, at this moment, you would probably do anything they asked you to. You don’t tell them that, though.
“My name?” You ask, instead, and they nod.
At this point it really looks like the topic is making them uncomfortable, so you try to be at least a little culturally sensitive.
You think on it. The Companions you’d known had only ever been called Helper. This Companion, it seems, had chosen their own name. “Guardian”, the name of their role. What was your role?
Your cat winds around your legs, mrrping for attention, and you smile at them.
“My name is Stray,” you tell the Guardian.
“Stray,” they repeat, seeming very relieved, and you nod.
“Well then, Stray, you are most welcome to stay in our village.”