Shifting Sands

The city.

It's eerie to hear silence in the city; silence in a city is only reserved for disasters and yet, I stand within a silent city as empty as the people that now inhabit it.

I used to belong to a small town out in the city called Redville. It wasn't a five star resort, mind you, but it was home to me. I had friends, family, everything that makes living out in a dusty hellhole tolerable. I even had my wits about me, which meant that I could entertain myself with some occasional experiments that I had drawn up. Unfortunately, they saw disagreements with the little 'science-y' experiments that I undertook, so I left Redville on uneasy terms to perhaps find somewhere where my genius could be well-nurtured. 

It must've been a year or so before I went back, it really is hard to tell with the lack of clocks or calendars. The lot of us just used to rely on going day in and day out with our work. Anyway, it wasn't exactly a pleasant return to find a lot of my old friends and family littered among the streets like the trash we threw out from time to time. It was..  not a very pretty sight, especially considering the state of the town before I had left. I didn't even...  I didn't even get the chance to tell them goodbye. I'll always wish I had, though. 

Mortars had torn through many of the once-nice buildings like paper, leaving a few craters here and there that a lot of the sand started to pack into. The place looked like a war zone, like someone had declared war on my town.. until I found out that someone did. The first glimpse I caught of any people was of the old shopkeeper of the town, before he was shot point blank in the head. The stare he gave me before that shot still haunts me; the fear in his eyes that struck me almost as hard as the bullet that struck him. The last thing I remember was rushing at the attacker; I was ready to split him open against the cinder-block building I got socked in the head by someone else, someone that I later find to be an accomplice of the shooter. 

I awoke in the building of the former shopkeeper, tied to a chair and staring up at a man and a woman looming over me. The man knelt down to my level and introduced himself to me as Richard and that the woman's name was Scarlet. With a gun aimed at me, Richard calmly explained the little debacle that he had pushed against my former town, claiming that Redville was his town now and that everyone needed to leave. No surprise here, but everyone put their foot down against the pirates, which in turn 'forced' him to deploy bombs against the town. I was seething in anger, nearly ready to lash out and rip his throat out myself before the click-back of the hammer on the pistol snapped me out of my hate.

I was offered a choice that day by Richard. I could vacate the premises immediately, meaning of course that he'd put a bullet in my brain and leave the vultures to pick it out, little by little; or that I stay and be put to work as a slave. Looking back on that day, it really wasn't much of a choice, but I agreed to stay. The last thing I wanted to do is help the people who took my life away, but part of me realized that I could finally have my genius utilized. As morbid as it was, there wasn't any time to mourn the dead or I would quickly join them, so I told him that I would stay on the condition that I choose the work that I be put into.

To this day, I still work as the psuedo-mechanic for the Redville pirates; doing my best to maintain their weapons and vehicles while also performing routine upgrades to their stuff. I didn't have to, but I couldn't deny the fun in upgrading something as interesting as a weapon or an all-terrain vehicle. I believe that this also helped to temper Alpha and Beta, because they considerably cut back on the amount of abuse dealt to me on a daily basis. It only happens when I say something that Richard doesn't like or approve of, but I do my best to make sure I don't give "His Majesty" a reason to sic his soldiers on me. It takes a lot out of me to even draft up this little data journal, but I feel like if I don't vent my frustration and thoughts somewhere, I'll make more mistakes... and I do not wish to be a punching bag for any longer than I have to.