Brunning Divide

Episode 2: Freak Storm - Part 4

Brunning means brown. Literally. The place is naturally brown. So my father called it brown.

Chalk one up for my father's originality. 

We called the geographic anomaly that is Brunning a valley, but it's more like a canyon on account of it's steep walls. A canyon with a really wide base at parts. My father speculated that a massive underground aquifer might have collapsed, and in that sense Brunning could be a sinkhole. Personally, sinkhole seemed a more apt description to describe our little dry and dreary oasis on Erimia, but nobody really wants to say they colonized a sinkhole. Just doesn't sound appealing or right. 

So Brown Sinkhole or Brunning Valley. I don't need to explain why we use the name we use.

The high cliff walls surrounding Brunning protected us from the outside world in different ways. Huge storms blast across Erimia's surface, whipping dust and sand around hard enough to strip skin down to the flesh. The drastic depression that is Brunning isn't big enough for those storms to sink into. Sure we get a little wind and a lot of dust, but our crops survive.

The best protection the cliff walls offers is against the sun. The Erimian sun, Kapsímatos, was an angry red beast that wanted to kill us and everything else. If we were exposed to it throughout the whole day we would be scorched and no non-native plants, our crops, would survive. 

The steep walls provided shade. In the morning the eastern walls cast their shadows on our homes and fields, in the afternoon the western walls rescued us from the inferno we endured for those couple of midday hours when the Kapsímatos glowered down directly upon us.

The Hibernarii had technology to terraform entire planets. The could have done so to Erimia, made it a paradise, but no. They sent my father to a sinkhole on a desert planet with some seeds that had higher—if only slightly—tolerance to heat and exposure and said, "Good luck and don't fail."

Real comforting, the Hibernarii. They really knew how to motivate their experiments. 

Walls or not, there was no escaping the heat. Heat filled the shaded hours, albeit not as severe. And the non-direct light in those hours shrouded Brunning in twilight-like gloom.

That midmorning, walking with my father to the colony meeting hall so we could attempt communication with a monster... well, 'gloom' definitely fit my mood. My father wouldn't say anything really helpful. He walked quickly while I limped along behind him. My lingering headache only increased how annoyed I was that I had to wait even a second longer to find out what the hell was going on. Thank Yuan, the walk wasn't long. 

For energy and resource efficiency, we built the eight homes and barns close to each other, but with minimal distance to afford some privacy. In the middle of it all we built the meeting hall out of large rocks we gathered and whatever scraps we had left over from the other buildings. Similar to the seeds, the Hibernarii had sent us with limited supplies to start Brunning. After we used those, we had to get creative. The resulting structure was an amalgamation of a rock pile with short walls and patchwork roof that sloped into the ground. 

A few hundred feet away we heard yelling from the meeting hall. My father broke into a run and despite my protesting body, I tried to follow.

"Wait outside," he called back to me before charging through the only entrance to the building. Catching up seconds later, I dropped the small pack of food my mother sent and rested against the rock wall, breathing through a bout of dizziness. More shouting came through the walls. I wasn't enjoying the idea of seeing my face-kicking hero, but the shouting and crashes from inside made me even more hesitant to go in. The other men from Brunning were probably all working in the fields or in their barns, too far away to hear the commotion. That left me, and I wasn't going to let some freak stranger hurt anyone inside. I'd resolved to go in right as Jamus slipped out the door and stood next to me.