Arc 19 | chaelisa & jensoo

Chapter 1. Awaken

SWEAT. Dirt. Smoke. It was the year of 2177 and Pranpriya could feel her nose flaring at the scent of the burning wood as she laid across the scorching ground, clutching a rusty dagger in between the palms of her small hands. Gazing longingly at the clear blue sky, the girl could feel her eyes growing heavier as each second passed. Waiting for her father to return from hunting was long and dreadful. Her tan skin felt as if they were melting against her bones. With a huff, she pushes herself up on her elbows and looks around watching as dull grass pieces poked out of the ground through the sand and balls of dry weeds tumbled slowly across the land, carrying itself in the soft but present wind.

As much as she hated hunting and scavenging, it was mandatory in order to survive. They lived off of scraps of metal, rats or, if they're lucky, mutated birds for dinner and thin sheets of cloths layered against each other for their beds. When it grew cold at the end of each year, they found it harder to live off their usual accommodations when any living animal would stray away from traveling or when their clothing was to light and thin to fight of the cold. Sometimes, even the cloths on their windows wouldn't be able to hold up for a while.

No one keeps track of the days anymore, either. Whether it was January, Wednesday, or a weekend, no one cared or no one even knew, unless you lived in a governed town if you were lucky. Everybody out here in the Fall only named the time periods as seasons when thee climate changes; winter, summer, spring, and autumn. But it never changed the fact that yesterday was the past and tomorrow was the future. Be that as it may, there were few that felt that it was obligatory to have a grasp of what year it was because each year marked the every 356 day period that passed since The Fall of Man; the great war that destroyed the Earth.

To thrive in this world was rare. You'd either have to be smart or strong to survive. It was survival of the fittest.

The routines of everyday life of the population of the wasteland was invariable: constant killings, a search for food and shelter, constant acid rain that comes in at least once a week. Everybody was used to it already, whether they liked or not. The world was no longer the paradise that humanity predicted it to be. To even find a shred of humanity lying in at least half of mankind was a golden singularity.

It wasn't long before Pranpriya's father came back from hunting. He walked with a large boar on his back with blood dripping from its back. Her father, tall and broad with some white strands showing past his darker hair, set the dead animal down in front of his nine year old daughter.

"That's a big one!" Pranpriya commented with awe. Boars were rare to find usually and in this case, they were lucky.

"Yeah, it is," her father replied with a grunt. "Lay out the brown cloth first, then hold him down so I can cut the tusks off."

"Okay, papa," she says with a smile.

Everyday, the two of them go hunting together in the mornings before they would head back to their home. They lived in small abandoned building down by the hills next to a stream of water, far away from any other human territories in order to avoid conflict. She's heard stories from both of her parents explaining what the world was like outside and how they had fled from this place called Thailand because of a genocide; a horrible word she has learned just recently. From there, they traded by boat along with other refugees to another place called Korea, where her parents have heard that they would find solitude at this city called Zolarius 19, one of the twenty three dome cities on Earth. What they didn't know is that no one is allowed entry into the city unless you were born there, which is why Pranpriya's family had no way of living their lives securely.

Pranpriya has always been grateful of her family; where ever they were, she felt safe. Her father always brought the fun side of things despite the difficult lives they were living and her mother was there to take care of her and her little brother, Kunpimook, or as Pranpriya called him; BamBam, solely because he liked to play with the rickety toy guns that he makes from scraps of thin metal he finds lying around. BamBam was four years younger than her. He was stubborn, troublesome and sometimes greedy, but Pranpriya loves him. He was her favorite human. He was the light in her life that made her happy and she couldn't ask for more.