Rodentia Adventures

EPILOGUE 2: FOR REAL THIS TIME!

Within a distant shrine, completely unknown to the mice of the walled city, a fairly ordinary human sat down on his tattered sofa, opened his newspaper, and idly skimmed through it, whistling a random tune which he couldn't quite place, and seeking more to kill time than to legitimately inform himself. He stopped abruptly, cringing at the awful snapping sound, which he had long since grown to recognize. He really hated having to do this, but mice had become a growing nuisance around his home. It wouldn't have been so bad if there was just one of them, but there was never just one. Well, now, there would be one less, anyways. The man sighed, rose to his feet and moved to dispose of the body. 

Much to his surprise, there was indeed a body, but it was still moving, and not simply moving with those awful pained twitches where the only humane option was to end the suffering of the poor creature. it appeared to completely fine, even if rather unhappy, simply pinned beneath the metal bar which was meant to snap the neck of the creature, a bar which was now visibly warped. Its unusual level of endurance wasn't the only strange thing about the mouse, which he saw as he lifted the rodent up by the tail. 

The small creature appeared to be made out of metal. Not entirely, he realized, looking closer, but all four limbs were some sort of metallic clockwork devices, none of which quite matching one another, along with the hips and wire-like tail. The bulk of its torso and head were covered in pale, translucent fur, but every little while there would be a tube running from a limb to some sort of unnatural socket set within the body, a piece armor plating, or, most notably, one of the eyes which were covered over with a strange parallelogram shaped red screen and framed by metal and wiring which looked to have been bored straight into the skull. 

As he stared, stunned at the bizarre wriggling creature, it let out a digitized squeak, it's unnatural eye glowing bright, firing a narrow beam of red light straight into the human's fingers, forcing him to drop the strange mechanical mouse. 

The fall didn't seem to harm the creature, and while it did flee, it didn't exactly run away, at least not with its legs. A pair of metal cylinders emerged from the rodents hips, and it instead rocketed away to shelter, leaving twin plumes of smoke in its wake. 

The human suckled at his burnt finger, which wasn't badly hurt, but still stung a great deal and thought to himself, "Huh, that was weird", before shrugging, returning to his seat, going back to reading to his morning newspaper once more and resuming his happy whistling. 

<3~ <3~

Three months had passed. 

Jerin looked about, the gates of the city behind her, as she stepped towards the entrance to the Maker's tunnels. Everything wasn't quite dark, but distinctly shaded. Even though it was still the middle of the day, the sun wasn't really shining, as it hadn't for a long while now, leaving many to wonder if it ever truly would again. The air was cooler these days, but not problematically so, at least not yet. Still, it was readily apparent to all but the most optimistic that both colder and darker days were still to come. The city behind her looked rather tattered, as mice had less need for such fortifications. Everything was unpleasantly quiet, the land not quite abandoned, but growing closer to it with each passing day. A world with fewer and fewer active dangers to her kind, which should have been a paradise, but instead felt emptier and colder than the permanently chilled air. 

Her battles against the dark lords had denoted an end to what historians deemed 'the age of adventures', a time when mice spread out across the land in search of treasure, artifacts and new lands to discover. The subsequent defeat of the first dark lords set off the so-called 'age of heroes', a rather poor name, many felt, as things had turned decidedly unheroic in a hurry.