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Post by Insano-Man on Aug 1, 2022 8:42:45 GMT -5
DAMPTOWN
Northwest across the Longnuts River is one of the nicest places in the Bendybowl - because it's about as far from Bendybrow as it gets before exiting the region entirely. That place is Damptown - much as it's right in the middle of the arid stretch leading up to Kalatan territory. Much as the land doesn't provide much, Damptown is everything other settlements on Set want to be; running water, electric power, and long sightlines. It's a place of open arms, honest success, and political inambition. It's a nexus of trade, salvage, and even Looney intel-gathering. It's the warmest welcome this side of Bendybrow's flamethrowers.
Damptown is a maze of polished and painted steel, all proudly salvaged from the superfactory in the east. The settlement is more than just a run-of-the-mill junktown; a thriving economy and a backbone of skilled metalworkers means that everything fits together. No stapled sheet metal, no sloppy welds - all clean lines with only a dusting of rust. That's about where the coordination in its appearance ends. Most of the town is packed together and only fit for foot traffic. Tight alleys connect a jumbled mess of houses and businesses - and it only gets worse every time the town has to grow past its walls. Only down the middle of town is there a major road, up through its commerce sector and out the other end - and that's big enough for a full caravan to ride side-by-side.
The people of Damptown know they have it good. They know they've got ex-spacers keeping them out of the Dark Ages, Loonies advising them on local threats, and well-ordered business keeping the food flowing. They know they've got a deep well, thick walls, and a geothermal plant that practically runs itself. They know 1,700 people is a lot - a lot - for something remotely near to Bendybrow. That means that nobody wants to rock the boat, from top to bottom. The town's governing council runs a tight ship, and never reaches further than its grasp. Some reckon that the local Loonies know they could make a shot at nationhood, and have been brow-beating them away from the idea. Meanwhile, the townsfolk are friendly, easy-going, and simple as they can be. Everyone knows that they can get further with a kind word and a trained militia than just the militia alone.
Damptown has the awkward imposition that it's got nearly nothing of value in the land itself. It's got clean groundwater and that handy source of geothermal energy, but not a whole lot else. Between that, and being an ideal landmark, Damptown is a trader haven. It buys salvage from Bendybrow scavs, whips it into something useful with its local expertise, and barters that to traders from smaller villages for food and other resources. It's built up a strong watch to patrol the desert around it, and all the open dust makes it tricky for raiders to get to a merchant before the militia can ride to the rescue. Anything less - and maybe somewhere else - would've faded into mediocrity in favor of a port town. Instead, the appeal of electricity and experts - and the poisoned water in Longnuts - makes it hard for traders to find any better.
Damptown is one of those few places that Bendybrow didn't name. It was founded in 1244 OSC as Norton's Gamble, by settlers cast out of the Orbyshur Desert in the west. It wasn't much to think of then. It was a sad clump of mudbrick buildings, owned by a sadder sixteen dirt farmers just glad they had a well. It started changing when Bendybrow came into the picture in 1261. It was around then that the rise of the superfactory started displacing settlements in its area of influence. The rise of the super-crustaceans pushed even more people out of their homes. When Bendybrow's orbital defense network came online in 1279, spacers started joining the refugees. By then, the Gamble had rebranded itself Damptown for the extra wells it'd developed - and that was enough to draw in the crowds. When the base across the river started falling apart in the 1290s, salvagers started bringing bits and pieces back to Damptown. Before long, it started looking like it does today.
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Post by Insano-Man on Aug 1, 2022 8:44:07 GMT -5
OTHER LANDMARKSOne of the odd things about Bendybrow's obsessive reconnaissance is that, thanks to all the circuit-seers and Looney cyberintelligence efforts, most of that information has disseminated out to the locals. People have an idea of what's what, where, and what to call it - even if the names are a little less presentable than they'd like. That means that most maps are flooded with points of interest, well beyond what any amount of scouting people could handle elsewhere. The following is a list of those terrain features not worth their own full section, but still notable enough to be noted down. This list is not comprehensive - and given how most were named by the two chuckleheads in Bendybrow, that's for the best. - The Longnuts River is Bendybrow's western water source, flowing down from the north, outside the Bendybowl, and right on to the opposite end in the south. It serves as the primary passage for most riverboats travelling the region. It's also Bendybrow's third-favorite waste dump, which means anyone downstream of the superfactory knows better than to go for a swim. From the north, the water's a healthy blue. Right after Bendybrow, it's every color of the runoff rainbow for about fifty miles downstream.
- Chump's Checkpoint is an odd spot in the Longnuts River where an underground passage and a stiff stretch of stone conspired to make a river crossing longer than it has any right to be. Running over it is part of the rail line that connects Gunky and Pain-Popper on the west side to Bendybrow far off in the northeast. Over the years, Longnuts has been asserting itself over the Checkpoint through water erosion - which Bendybrow's waste discharge has only sped up by a factor of five. Estimates are that, in twenty years, the Checkpoint'll be gone - and sooner, if another fuel car explodes over it. Bendybrow's rails, meanwhile, were built onto a low-lying bridge. Whenever something knocks it down, the drones put it right back up - and it was built to survive without the Checkpoint to support it. Riverboat captains don't have so many nice things to say about it.
- The Smug River is the river on Bendybrow's eastern side, starting from Mount Skinripper inside the Bendybowl and blooming out as it snakes south. It lives up to its title as the only major river that starts in the Bendybowl; right as soon as it passes the Megadeath Drilling Post, it stops being its watery brown and gunks up into an orange-streaked, black-flecked, red-bubbling mess. Megadeath and Hawkins-Louie both take in all the waste that can't be safely discharged into the Bloodspa Lake, and vent it into the Smug without a care for the thousands of people downstream. For that reason, everything living in it is either dying, hideously deformed, or some mix of both - including the poor sods on Banana Bob Island.
- The Little Men, Mighty Midgets, and the Mutant Midgets are the crabs Bendybrow couldn't crack. All three are tangles of crab holes inching closer to the westernmost walls, near to the Fry Me a River subterranean power facilities. The Little Men and Mighty Midgets are empty these days, but the Mutant Midgets are still active whenever the west gate's guns aren't awake to chase the super-crustaceans back into their hole. Even then, the lobsters learned their lesson; most don't go any further into Bendybrow than they need to catch a meal - and given that most people know better than to give them one, that means they spend most of their time underground.
- That Place We Scream From is the dumbest name for a riverside bluff anyone's ever come up with. Nobody even screams from it - mostly because nobody's stupid enough to go there. Right next door are the active crab holes, labelled Those Bugs We Scream At, still surging with jumbo-sized super-crabs. On the opposite side is Bendybrow's westernmost wall, running right up to Longnuts' east bank. Supposedly, some tech-cults deem it an honorable death - usually for blasphemers and tall-order criminals - to make a last stand against the lobsters up on that hill. People don't get that far up to make good on it.
- Sneering Stanley is a small mountain west of the Grunge Mining Post, famous for the face carved into its southeast cliff. It's just how it sounds; it's a vaguely-male visage, mildly displeased, with empty eye sockets, and one heck of a honker for a nose. Much as it'd be easy to paint it as Bendybrow cracking another joke, that's not the case. Loonies and locals alike have reports as far back as 1183 OSC of seeing Stanley there - and most say it was empty space before then. Who carved it, why, what its actual name is - all lost and likely never to be found. That all meant Bendybrow got to name it.
- The Refinery of Souls and the Crucible of the Heart are two major cult complexes joined together down south of Glorpy, just out of range of its auto-guns. Remember, that's "cult" without the capital C - and it's not just one, either. Both are all-faiths houses of worship and hospitality, dedicated to providing pilgrims and prophets somewhere to lay their heads before they stick their necks out to the north. They're both shaped out of scrap from Bendybrow, in homage of Hawkins-Louie and Florpumungus respectively. The two would be more prominent on the local stage, if they could get through a week without one of the death-wish cults trying to boot out all the others. Usually, they return to neutral after a while, but never for good - which means the only thing reliable about them is the shelter.
- The Lunchlifter Corridor is a stretch of dusty rails running south from Bendybrow's main gate, connecting to Florpumungus and the Glorpy Mining Post. It gets its name from the Lunchlifter Badlands that used to occupy the area, and the walls of the outposts around it. Bendybreeze and Florpumungus together make something of an artificial valley, with high-rising concrete walls locking in anyone dense enough to walk the rails. When the power's on, the place is a killing grounds just like Bendybreeze; there's no cover from either outpost's defense guns for a mile in any direction - and being in the middle puts you right in front of Glorpy's rolling stock.
- Splattergulf Canyons are an expanse of valleys, ravines, and - you guessed it! - canyons, all sprawling out in front of Bendybrow's eastern wall, closer to its southern corner. They're a nest for hundreds of hungry horrors, and make for at least a few dozen key chokepoints leading up to the superfactory's defenses. Even still, all that hard cover is hard to beat. Looters and scavengers run it like a gauntlet to sneak into Bendybrow whenever the turrets on that side are down. Only the quick and the deadly can make good on that. The rest end up as a pile of bones in something's nest - or dead by the wall as bait for the rest.
- THE DOT - yes, in all capital letters - is an arbitrary point on the map that has no apparent significance. It's somewhere between Grunge and Bendybreeze, in the so-named Dotkin Pass valley. Nobody has a clue as to why Bendybrow marked it down. Anyone with a scrap of reason would figure it was just some stupid joke by the jokers who ran the superfactory, or maybe a glitch in their topographical scans. The religious types, though - they all see it as some kind of holy site. For some jaw-hanging reason, there's no shortage of scripture that's come out of this moronic map marker. Some local cults are even dedicated exclusively to it. Don't think about it for too long. Please.
- Upland Apetown was a war camp of demi-sentient monster mutants - or aliens, nobody's exactly sure - that occupied a vast swath of the deserts north of Damptown. The only thing anyone knew about them for sure was that they hated mainstream humanity, and ate anyone they found. They were responsible for clearing out at least a dozen smaller villages on the northern banks of Longnuts, and laid siege to Damptown a couple times. That was up until Bendybrow intervened in 1279 OSC, probably to be sure they couldn't get big enough to threaten the main base. Legend has it that, in broad daylight, Looney scouts saw a barrage of train cars launch across the river, and burst in the air over the camp like artillery shells. Nobody's got any helmet logs to prove it, but, knowing how silly Bendybrow is just existing, nobody's ever argued. All that's left these days are a few scrap-strewn craters.
- The Greaselands are a mystical place - that nobody's ever found, and nobody knows anything about. They're hinted at in Bendybrow's records, but not marked on any of its maps. Opinions on what they are count in the hundreds. Rational minds figure they're an oil deposit, or maybe a storage site. Historians guess they were an older name for the Glorplands. Cults like to claim them as some kind of superfactory in the sky; an industro-Heaven for all the busted robots and fallen scavs who died doing what they loved. The minds in the middle whisper that it might be a codename for wherever the Happy-Maker goes between repair seasons. Given people have heard about the Greaselands since looters first hit up Bendybrow, odds are that nobody'll ever find out.
- The lost outposts are Bendybrow startups that didn't start up. They're scattered all over the Bendybowl, never the same twice, but generally the same in concept; a box of walls, with a few token turrets, around some important resource or position of strategic significance. Some even have little rail-islands of isolated tracks, or a tiny garage for drone trucks. Unlike Bendybrow's big stars, none of them ever get any maintenance - and only a handful even have repair schematics logged in the central database. It makes them all like little samplers for the big base. Most are so drained for power, ammo, or repairs that none of the guns work. Even when they do, they're so rusted over that they can hardly turn to meet a threat. Given how few were noted down - and how many of that number were deleted when the superfactory decided against it - people end up finding new outposts every day.
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Post by Insano-Man on Aug 1, 2022 8:47:39 GMT -5
POPULATION
For a place as bleak as the Bendybowl, population figures are always a shocker. Loonies estimate there are at least 300,000 human beings living under the smog cover, mostly in a big ring surrounding Bendybrow. An estimated 250,000 of those live in permanent residences, and the rest are part of a permanent nomad population comprised of Bendybrow scavengers, on-the-road bandit clans, and mercenaries bouncing between contracts. People just passing through the region are guessed to be about 20,000 on a single day, but just 120,000 annually; visits from pilgrims and beyond-the-Bowl looters usually last up to months at a time.
Non-human sentients in the Bendybowl are about as limited as the surrounding environs. Industry and technology, so it seems, are not the easy answers to the Erf's lack of terrestrial genetic diversity. Nobody has a census or a spitball estimate on their total population, but it's guessed most are on the move to greyer pastures, in Orbyshur to the west. There's at least one redworlder town on Mount Skinripper - that nobody knows the name of - but that's about it. The only integrated aliens are a few tolerated greys and a single unionite in Damptown, who all came as part of a package deal with a clan of crashed spacers. Most people in town figure they're mutants with a robot. The only real exception to all this are the apemen from Apetown. A few still hold out in tiny, angry hamlets, ready to roast anyone they can get their hands on. Population decline has put them on a date with extinction inside the decade.
The Looney population, meanwhile, is a tiny fraction of that number; 1,316 across 10 bunkers, with Mosbey Supply Station at the lead of the pack with 168 personnel. Transfers inside the region are commonplace owing to the Loonies' public role in local politics. The Space Loonies only touch down once or twice a year - and only ever on the edge of the Bendybowl, where the orbital defense grid won't swat them away. None of them ever stay for good. The Cult of Meat is rumored to have a few footholds in some of the larger towns, like Damptown, but, even as close to the Southern Veinlands as Bendybrow is, they're not common. Between tech-cults chasing them out, Loonies giving them the boot, and the mere sight of Bendybrow turning their six stomachs, the meat's not soon for the Bowl.
Wildlife on the outskirts of the region is mostly desert fauna that'd have been at home on Earth's deserts; dusty hares, leggy birds, and so many bugs and lizards that some towns have dedicated to farming them. The nicer side of Longnuts hosts a small population of Set-native freshwater whales and porpoises, fighting every day for their share of unmutated fish. Closer to the center of the Bendybowl, variety drops off - right along with lifespans and genetic legibility. In the heart of the superfactory itself, there's nothing natural but rats and naskatters - and, really, that's just another flavor of rat. The waters are full of wretched things that are living on borrowed time. The ones that aren't - those are the stuff of nightmares.
The real horrors - the monsters - almost look right at home in Bendybrow. The outskirts are home to the usual desert mix; hoprocks in the badlands, Jefferson worms in the open dust, and caravan dogs out near the trails. It's near Bendybrow where it starts getting interesting. It'd be easy to think all the guns and industrial accidents would keep the monsters at bay, but that's always been the thing about monsters; they just pop up when and where they feel like it. Black horrors stalk the quieter parts of the base. Meatmen from down south hold tight to Grunge and some of the frequented parts of the underground. Trunkfingers have learned to disguise as fallen power poles, ready to grab every rat and man not minding his step.
Bendybrow's winners of the home-grown ugly contest are the mutant super-crabs from underground. They're officially termed "Kentsacanda crawdads" by local Loonies, and "Bendybugs" by Damptown, but that doesn't do them justice. They're eyeless monsters built like centipedes with only six legs. They're sunk deep into a bulging, segmented exoskeleton like a biological bomb suit. Their pincers are massive things like hydraulic claws - and they've got enough torque in their pinch to cleave clear through a Looney in full body armor. The worst of it is that they've never grown any smaller than a lion - and those are just the runts. Most meet the sun at the size of a small elephant, loaded down with two tons of carapace and hate.
The mega-lobsters of the Bendybowl are its most notable creature feature, but the merciful truth of that is that they're not all that common. The reason why is simple; Bendybrow killed most of the bold ones. They're still coming up from underground in ones or twos, but the superfactory is something like the lid on the jar. If there's some big hell-swarm brewing down below, the base's guns and concrete are keeping it from reaching the surface. Scavs always grin to themselves whenever they think of the day that the turrets go offline for good. Townsfolk are hopeful they might see the smog-chugging factories shut down in their lifetime. The Loonies, meanwhile, know better - and they're horrified at the idea that all that purpose-made crab-killing technology might run out of steam.
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Post by Insano-Man on Oct 13, 2022 18:32:22 GMT -5
HISTORY
Probably one of the most perverse things about Bendybrow is that its history is all in one piece. People hardly remember anything about the blackworlders, the Big Split, and how to start a fire without killing themselves, but Bendybrow remembers. It might be young, at only around a half-century, but it's got a better grasp on its past than most Looney bunkers. That reliability is thanks to its decentralized database - which is called something like "Susshusshsuhuh" in the files, for some reason. One or two factories might explode, server banks and all, but Bendybrow has got a billion backups all over. It's going to take decades - centuries? - to get those names off the map. God help us all.
- i can't brake it's already broken
= oh my god we're gonna crash
The story starts with two weirdos, a garbage hauler full of harvester drones, and a Faustian bargain. As always, the beginning of any story is always short on real details. Neither of those two ever wrote their names down. They never noted who they were, where they came from, or how in the Hell they were able to negotiate with trashbots. Nobody even knows if the hauler was up in space, flying overland, or bouncing around underground. All anyone can be sure of was that, somehow, against all better judgement - just like Bendybrow - these two nameless nutjobs sealed a deal nobody on or off this planet has ever done before.
And then they slammed that ship right into the middle of nowhere.
Before it was the Bendybowl, it had about a dozen names. The Dubbers Dustbowl, the Twinwater Badlands, Buffer Zone SQR-02 - most people don't remember them anymore. Being honest, they weren't important, either. Before Bendybrow, the area was just a big rocky desert on the border of the Veinlands. Only enough people lived there for it to be called inhabited - and the steady creep of the meat was gradually wearing away at their nerve to stay. It wasn't overrun with scything horrors just yet, but families were starting to look north to safer pastures, in Kalatan and the deeper north of the continent. Loonies were already drafting plans for defensive coordination. Some were even sweating over the idea of asking the heretics of the Southern Desperation Line for help.
- you know what sand tastes like?
= shut up
When a garbage hauler crashed around 1260 OSC, nobody thought it strange. Robots fell out of the sky. Spaceships crashed. Bad things happened that close to the meat. No big deal, right? That was the way it all seemed to be playing out - until scouts from the Norman Greegs Supply Center came back, ready to bite their own tongues off. They'd finally gotten around to scouting the wreck about a month after it landed. They'd found little auto-drillers digging into the dust of what was eventually going to be the Old Hole. They'd seen little spiders scuttling around the soon-to-be Splattergulf Canyons, probing for surface deposits of valuable minerals.
They saw Christmas lights already strung up on the wreck of the Whoopsie.
Probably one of the most egregious coincidences in those early years was the fact that Loonies never made contact with the two self-appointed supervisors of the operation. They knew enough about harvesters to know they rode in on haulers - and had a certain eccentric flair - but Looney protocol made it absolutely clear; if they'd found human agents in charge of it, that was enough to say it wasn't a harvester operation - and enough grounds to wipe it out. They noted down the occasional biped wandering around the growing mining operation, but always figured they were just lost locals - and soon to be smeared all over the sands by the spiderbots.
- TODO: figure out why guys with guns are staring at us
- ALSO: don't get shot by guys with guns staring at us
= ALSO 2: make guns in case guys with guns shoot us (with guns)
Part of why the Loonies never put the two together with the drones was that Bendybrow hit the ground sprinting. It was inside the same year they crashed that the first factories came together. Now, they weren't the big, steel-and-concrete manufacturing centers of the present day. They were little stapled-together "fixy-boxes", doing nothing but basic metalworking and machining. Most could hardly produce more than spare parts for the drones - who were all so overworked that they were burning through every last scrap of scrap their boxes could pump out. Even still, that was enough to get them growing fast. First, it was fixy-boxes. Then it was diggy-boxes. Then it was thinky-boxes, when they finally scrounged enough from the surface to stitch together circuitry.
Then, finally, it was Fat Fred. Before Fred, they'd been pulling power from what was left of the hauler's reactor. Drones had to recharge off a grid that was either browning out, overheating, or shutting down spontaneously from a catastrophic system crash. A bunch of half-scrap, coal-fired steam turbines wasn't much an improvement in quality, but it was one major step up in reliability. They could hook it into bigger boxes, stronger boxes, and newer kinds of boxes. They could expand operations - which could expand their ability to expand Fat Fred. They could even start building new drones.
Which they would've done - if the two screwballs didn't have other ideas. Bendybrow's human overlords were crafty; they knew they needed leverage over the harvesters to stay relevant, and power was just that leverage. At the time, they were the ones who were running Fat Fred. That meant they were able to amend the deal with the drones. In exchange for juice, brains, and puppet shows - exact words in the digital contract - the harvesters were going to stick to their original numbers. They'd still be able to make robots, and they'd still be able to make them play basketball, but they weren't going to have the same spunky software that made a harvester a harvester.
= TODO: need new fixybox for floaty bots
- lemme do it
= no I want to do it
- LET ME DO IT
= you don't know how to do it
- FINE then DO IT
= tomorrow
- it needs to be done NOW
= TODO: it
- that's it I'm gettin me mallet
Nobody can say how they managed to muster the hypercharisma needed to pull off not one, but two unprecedented feats of diplomacy with the trashbots. Between all the silly names and to-do lists pulled straight from an online chat room, most reckon they were so harvester-adjacent already that the little scrappers saw them as peers. What matters in the end was that - against every aspect of harvester behavior - they honored the deal. A few runs of labor drones were put together piecemeal, and not a one came out yodelling or beatboxing. The initial supply of squealers took up places like the goofballs' lieutenants, and started administrating individual aspects of the operation. Meanwhile, the two above them handled the higher decision-making, expansion planning, and cartographical vandalization.
As totally incorrect as the whole arrangement was, it worked. Bendybrow earned its name as the page turned on its first year of operation. Crumbly Grove came into operation. The Old Hole started digging deeper. Boxes started clustering together to streamline manufacturing and assembly. The nearby town of Klembast saw the writing on the wall, and attempted a siege - and ran right into that wall. It turned out that some of the boxes were shooty-boxes, all linked together by sheet metal barricades. The survivors knew better than to try again - and knew those scrappy gun turrets were going to creep closer as the years went by. Klembast's people pulled out, and gave Bendybrow its first military victory.
The years to come were full of tension, violence, and burgeoning industry. Bendybrow's growth was exponential from there; its boxes started to grow into full-on factory buildings, and its mining operations had to expand to keep pace. The Old Hole started dropping down below sea level, and Bloodspa Lake was just about drained dry of its water. Fat Fred exploded in size - and blew up a couple times in the process - and laid the foundation for the permanent smog layer over the soon-to-be superfactory. Nearby settlements started shivering at the idea of their newest industrial infestation getting any bigger. They started banding together. They started drafting plans to make up for Klembast's bad first impression.
- thEEreE ARE pEOPLE hEREEEE
- THERE ARE People HEEREEEEEE
= they're ugly
- TODO: make ugly people go away
= ALSO: need more shooty boxes in case ugly people don't go away
Around the middle of 1261 OSC, there was an alliance of middling villages at the forefront of it; the Mulsa Mutual Defense Committee. They made the first diplomatic contact with Bendybrow anyone had ever attempted - with an unconditional eviction notice. The superfactory's official response was to set up a sound system on its new concrete walls, and blast Christmas tunes - in the middle of summer - all night and day. The townies might've been a little surprised that their diplomats came back alive and unpunctured, but they'd expected war. A peasant army of junky trucks, mixed cavalry, and hired bandits came together, all backed up by handmade siege engines. It was a showing of unity unprecedented in the region's history.
Not five minutes after they came in sight of Bendybrow's walls, the whole thing fell apart.
As the story usually goes on Set, it takes an impossible hero to pull off that kind of impossible victory - and the townies didn't have one. They had spears, shotguns, and spunk - not anything that could tackle Bendybrow's new line of twin-linked grenade launcher turrets. A few turrets were knocked offline on the nearest wall, but at such a massive cost in men and materiel that at least one of the towns on the committee had to disband entirely the next week. Contracted mercs and marauders took their rage out on their employers when they realized how bad things had gone - and how many had lost their town militias in the process. Chaos took over. Mulsa started shaking apart trying to keep it together.
And Bendybrow had switched to game show theme songs.
There was something wickedly positive about the impact Bendybrow had in those years. As the smog grew thicker, and the land grew sicker, more and more towns saw how big a problem it was and tried the same. More and more failures mounted as the superfactory's technology and defensive planning leaped ahead by bounds. People fled their homes as bandits and wildlife seized on weakened settlements, and filled up outliers - like the up-and-coming Damptown - well out of Bendybrow's way. Loonies on the sidelines saw how big a deal it was - and how bad an idea attacking it was - and started forming networks together, in case the factory started launching its own attacks. Instead, Bendybrow was content to grow in peace. It was a burgeoning blight on the area, but it never evolved from navigational hazard to armed antagonist.
- TODO: eat glorp!
= ew gross
- ALSO: make the other guy do it
= REVISION.01: don't make the other guy do it
- REVISION.02: make the other guy do it
= REVISION.03: I'm not hungry
- REVISION.04: you WILL eat the glorp
= REVISION.05: not if I make you do it first
Of course, Bendybrow wasn't going to be just some iceberg in the middle of nowhere. As the Old Hole started running dry, and the needs of the production lines - for ammo, for spare parts, for new turrets, for new sectors - cranked up, expansion became a necessity. Not just by cordoning off a new stretch of desert with a new bulge of autoguns and concrete, but by reaching further out - with outposts well beyond the walls. Survey drones rolled out, or took flight. Exploratory digs started in areas that'd once been town mines or raider dens. Heavy machinery rumbled through arid woodlands, dragging off trees and setting up shop. Slippery Valley set up shop inside the walls, and started pumping out petrol products to keep all the new mobile machines running.
First came Backsby, in 1265, to keep the superfactory's need for steel chugging along. Then came Glorpy, in 1266, to keep the coal and concrete coming. When they first started, they came with a new development for Bendybrow; drone trucks. Like mechanical cattle, the superfactory started pumping out movers for the material going back and forth between these far-flung mining facilities. The Bendybus came into the picture right along with Backsby, to shift the burden from the original aerial drones - which were smaller, pricier, and more prone to breakdowns in the worsening atmosphere. In tandem with all that was the expansion of the Bendybrow underground. New service tunnels, pipework, and delivery docks all made the Bendybus more and more potent and impressive. Transportation crises seemed like they were a thing of the past.
For Bendybrow, maybe, but not for its outposts. The Bendybus was a superb replacement to the old transportation method, but the outposts only used it for startup supplies. Caravans of supplies and mined materials were juicy targets for raiders and cantankerous wildlife. Even sending gun trucks and tankettes along didn't help with the real problem; efficiency. Navigating rough terrain slowed the whole thing down so much that the outposts spent weeks waiting for their stores to be unloaded - leaving the mining operations stalled and stagnant. Paving a big highway between the outposts was too expensive, and too time-consuming.
Laying down a railway, though - that was the ticket.
It was determined by the head jokers that trains were the answer. They could move faster, pull more freight at once, and splatter anything stupid enough to get in their way. They were cheaper to build, cheaper to replace, and simpler to keep running. So, without one doubt, the trucks hauling goods back and forth were repurposed into construction vehicles to lay tracks, bridge gaps, and carve out tunnels. The first rolling stock left its station around the same time the Glorpy Mining Post came into operation. Whatever trucks hadn't been refitted for railway service were pulled back to handle deliveries inside Bendybrow itself - or put into storage for when another outpost needed its jumpstart.
- TODO: CRABS
= ALSO: CRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAABS
- ALSO 2: CRABS CRABS CRABS
= REVISION.01: CCCCCRRRRrarbabrABABBABBSSSSSSSSSS
- ALSO 3: WHY ARE THERE SO MANY CRABS
- ALSO 4: maybe we need more guns
As anyone could've guessed, all that digging didn't go unnoticed. Not long after the rails started rumbling, something started stirring up around Backsby - and right under Bendybrow's own roots. Late 1266 OSC brought a new threat to the surface; the subterranean super-crustaceans. Bendybrow's Bendybugs came crawling out of darkness, attacking mining drones, power infrastructure, and automated pillboxes alike. They tunnelled up from below and made a mockery of the fortifications no townie could ever get through. They crashed down walls in factories, bashed their way into service tunnels, and crushed everything they could find. For months, the chaos had finally come back home.
For months - until Bendybrow's brains got together to fix the problem. Like everything else, the harvesters and hooligans running the show treated it as a simple problem none too different from a bottleneck in their supply chain. They evaluated turret coverage, emergence patterns, and the threat profile of individual mega-lobsters. They trialled new chitin-busting ammunition and turret types. They considered existing defensive positions, and how they could be remodelled to better channel targets into the right ordnance. They applied steady, focused research to the problem - much as it was coated copiously in uproars of "haha YES" whenever someone thought of a new way to kill a crab.
As anyone who's fought a war will tell you, finding a solution to a problem doesn't mean it'll get there straight away. The question of crushing the crabs was one that had to be answered over years of careful observation. First came patrols of bomb and gun drones, marauding the superfactory and its outskirts in case trouble ever popped up somewhere unexpected. Then came deeper defenses, with new gun turrets spread out through blind spots inside the walls. As time dragged on and the attacks started coming in massed waves outside the walls - where the crabs could swarm weak points with ten times as much biomass - automated artillery turrets came into the picture. Right along with the heavy guns came heavier basic turret designs; rotary autocannons, long-range flamethrowers, rocket turrets - if it could crack a lobster in record time, Bendybrow found a place for it.
- TODO: get red rocks for robots
= DONE: gonna name it "Grunge"
(...)
- TODO: we need fart gas!!!
= ALSO: we need BIG FART ENGINE to handle STORM-FORCE WINDS of fart gas
= ALSO 2: we need SUPER PUMP MAN at home to handle THINGS TANGENTIALLY RELATED TO FART GAS
- ALSO 3: this is getting kinda nasty so I'm just gonna go back to building shooty-boxes
= ALSO 4: need shooty-boxes at fart engine so crabs don't eat fart engine
- ALSO 5: GOD DAMN IT
(...)
- TODO: make crabs go somewhere else
= ALSO: get green rocks for crackly balls
- ALSO 2: ooh I know just the spot
- ALSO 3: spot needs second spot for increased greenput
(...)
- TODO: mutoid men across river; should explode
= REVISION.01: make train mass driver, shoot trains at mutoid men
- ALSO: YES YES THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN
"Lobster Stomping Day" was the "official" name for the crab war - and as it dragged on to months and years, the running gag evolved into the catch-phrase "every day is Lobster Stomping Day". Prudently, Bendybrow's bosses knew they couldn't just sit around and shoot them until they stopped coming up. They knew they needed more resources to keep the fight up. They knew they needed more industry to process those resources. They knew they needed more outposts to get those resources - that needed their own resources to lock down their sectors. Almost as if there'd never been a lobster army at all, the superfactory kept growing.
Not only did Bendybrow keep growing out, it kept getting thicker inside, too. The new layers of internal defenses and security walls meant that open sightlines inside weren't so vital to keeping the crabs away from important buildings. As the economy for shooty-boxes scaled up, so did the ease of laying down new turrets to cover the space where a new factory building might've gotten in the way. Where it'd once been more of a sprawling industrial park, Bendybrow started building up into the genuine wall-to-wall superfactory people know today.
The major outposts that surround Bendybrow all saw their rise in these times. The enormous Hawkins-Louie Hydrocarbon Complex took shape in 1271, all piled on in record time by new swarms of construction drones. The Megadeath Drilling Post came online in 1272, and set Hawkins-Louie ablaze with activity the moment the trains started running. Bendybreeze was drafted and constructed around the same time the hydrocarbon complex went up. Grunge formed up another nearby post, small, but nippy - and very, very necessary with so many robots keeping the lights on. It was later into the decade that Gunky and Pain-Popper popped up further out, across the Longnuts River - as the toughest nuts to bust short of Bendybrow itself.
It was during that same decade that hundreds of smaller outposts were considered - even trialled - across the yet-to-be-named Bendybowl. Minor deposits of important, scarce materials, deep and dense deposits of common, essential resources - usually not anything that needed a major feature, but some kind of surface presence, at least. There were so many prospective candidates that Bendybrow's ruling minds left the task to sub-sentient automated systems - that could add on to that list with new surveys as time went on. Even the big primary database lost track of how many of the micro-forts were slapped together - which was probably why that idea was canned by 1280.
All that activity put an incredible strain on the environment - as much for Bendybrow's developing dumping procedures as for the raw productivity. Bloodspa was filled back up with runoff and recyclable sludge - that contaminated groundwater all across the superfactory grounds. Hawkins-Louie started dumping its useless byproducts into Chunky Bay - which soon started sucking down every piece of broken equipment that was too expensive to repair or repurpose. Wastewater was dumped into whichever river was more convenient for its source - and new minor mining operations on the west side meant Longnuts got it as bad as Smug. Toxic smog blanketed everything from new power plants, from the hydrocarbon complex, and from the moving machines all over the Bendybus. What'd once just been a little on the ugly side started looking more like Cloneston's Cornerstone.
- TODO: SPACE INVAAAAAAAAADEEEEEERS
- ALSO: should probably make big-silly-huge guns to shoot down SPACE INVADERS
= ALSO 2: need big-silly-huge radar dish to find SPACE INVADERS before they land again
- REVISION.01: or maybe just like 400 normal ones
= REVISION.02: why not both?
When the decade started turning over, Bendybrow had new problems. The eyes in the sky hadn't been blind to its rise. Spacers had seen the little stain on the ground grow from a wrecked hauler to a massive pile of free loot. They'd spent time studying it in depth; noting down chokepoints, fields of fire, and the transmission towers that kept turrets turning. They clued themselves in on what frequencies to jam to keep the drones off their backs, and what kind of firepower they'd need to lock down a beachhead inside the superfactory.
There'd always been the occasional question inside Bendybrow on what would've happened if a near-peer belligerent came knocking. Mostly, it just devolved into jokes filling chat logs full of "WE'RE DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!!!!!!!!!!!! !! ! ! . . ." When scrapper-mercs from the Chastwick & Nimble fleet hit the superfactory in 1281 - with an orbital artillery barrage that knocked out the main trainyard - well, not a whole lot changed. Whether it was a coping mechanism or long-since-clinical insanity, the chuckleheads started quoting themselves. It seemed like Bendybrow had finally met its match.
Fighting an intelligent and prepared opponent wasn't as simple as shooting crabs that just came up from wherever. Half the superfactory's power had gone dark from the initial orbital bombardment, and most of its drones were running blind. Cyberwarfare was stealing control of the simplistic systems that governed most of Bendybrow - its gun turrets included. In the opening weeks as mercenaries came down to lock down their landing zone, it was a situation beyond reckoning. Even the mega-lobsters were seizing on the chaos to stir up more. It all had an air like the end times.
For a month, maybe. Behind all that "WE'RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIEEEEEEE" in their digital boardroom, the lead nuts were treating it like just another service interruption. Armored landers dropping off an invasion force? Looting mercs causing pile-ups on the Bendybus? It was just another bottleneck in their lead pipeline. Even when they ran up against the first genuine armor Bendybrow had ever seen - much as it was only three boarding walkers - they came at the issue with a steady hand. It was just another problem to be solved - with superior firepower.
Hardier drones with better automated systems came into play. Central control was dropped in favor of advanced adaptive systems. These all went to work patching turrets, substations, and critical infrastructure with the more of the same. All the while, the action stayed under the radar. Bendybrow played dead and helpless for weeks as repair crews worked in the background. All the guns and gates that'd had their hacked software flushed sat quiet as C&N salvage crews prowled past them. The mercs all took it for granted. They figured it was just some helpless garbage hauler plant, ripe for the taking. It took until a patrol finally spotted a drone swapping disks on an artillery turret before they realized something was wrong.
And the moment they called it in, everything went wrong.
All it took was an "uh" from that squad of spacers to signal the superfactory. An encryption key went live on freshly-made frequency-hopping communications. The new software switched on en masse. Power plants kicked into gear, turrets spun up, and heavy guns sighted in on the three landers lying still in the trainyard ruins. The scene from orbit was chilling; what'd once been nothing but a few specks of light in the superfactory grounds suddenly swarmed with the orange glow of autoguns blasting away. Estimates in the primary database suggest it took only a little over five minutes to wipe out - to a man - every last merc on the ground.
The fleet watching above had no idea what'd happened. They'd seen the flashes, but not with much clarity; they'd figured it was a massive grid overload, or some kind of sensor interference. The speed and violence of the situation kept anyone from getting a distress call up - and the people on the ground that'd tried realized all too late that they were being jammed. A search-and-rescue effort was launched. Teams went down in the remaining landers to put down in the surrounding deserts, to start a cautious advance into the superfactory. They were sure it was just a radiation storm, or a technical problem.
Three fell out of the sky under fire from anti-aircraft artillery. The last one blew apart in a massed barrage.
The years to come were brutal for both sides. C&N knew well enough to back off - and were so short on resources after that even firing a parting barrage from orbit was too expensive. Even then, to say they were miffed with the whole situation didn't cover the half of it. They called it out on spacer webs and mercenary networks; Bendybrow was a big, juicy honey pot, that just needed a few thumps to get at the sweet stuff. C&N quietly folded in the background, but others came cruising in to take their place. It was a gold rush in miniature like some awful parody of the Chopping Blocks. Spacers came flying in, bombed the place, and figured they could just walk right in.
Bendybrow didn't oblige. Every single time, it was a slaughter. Only two fleets, in late 1282 and early 1283, were able to get ships back into orbit with any kind of salvage - and only by abandoning their ground crews. The massacres reached such a point of ferocity that, by mid-1283, Bendybrow had finally had enough. A mixed junker fleet came into position over the superfactory, flying the flag of the Nas'Katoza pirates. Not a minute after taking a tally of all their ships, they reported an unidentified contact rising up from the superfactory. Without wasting time, they shot it down. They didn't spend a thought more on what it was.
It was only a few minutes later that they reported eighteen additional contacts rising up from Bendybrow. This was the first encounter anyone had with Bendybrow's orbital defense grid. It only took one more minute before the spread of surface-to-orbit cluster missiles found their marks on scattering pirate ships. Of the twenty mixed-tonnage craft there, only five escaped the explosions - with two so badly battered that they had to be scrapped as soon as they made port. That was the final statement on the matter; from there on, every spacer ship that loitered too long over Bendybrow - or dared a re-entry vector too close - was set to meet a missile before it could come down to Erf.
The different strokes in each space invasion meant it wasn't always a wholesale slaughter like C&N saw. Some spacers played it cautious, and were driven off before they could be wiped out. Most lost their landing craft - or realized too late that their ships couldn't get back into orbit. Just as Bendybrow had driven out the nearby villages, the stranded spacers had to seek safety elsewhere. Most went north, some went west, and others made for larger settlements in the region out of desperation. Not a one ever prospered from picking a fight with the superfactory.
- theERE ARE PEoLPELE HEeeeREEEEEEE
= OOOH OOH I SEE ONE
= nevermind he's gibs now
- pEEEOPLEEEPLE HEREEEEEE
(...)
- ThERE AREeE more PEOEOPELE heeeEEEERRRRRRRRREEEE
- WAIT STOP NO MEAT
= meat?
- IT'S BIG MEAT
- BIG
- OH MAN THAT'S A LOT OF MEAT
= but I'm not hungry
- YOU ARE NOW
The intermittent space invasions drew more and more attention to the Bendybowl. Locals and Loonies alike knew better than to poke the big gun-pile, but foreigners didn't know that. When they saw ships coming down to land - and sometimes explode - they figured it was a big party going on. They saw the smog, the smoke stacks, and the swarms of drones, and decided it was civilization. People came from the north, the west, and even the south. They came snooping. They came for salvage.
They came for salvation.
It was in the middle of the on-again off-again war on orbit that tech cults started taking notice of Bendybrow. Word had travelled up the Knobbled Cutters to machine churches and digital religions that there was a sudden holy land down past Kalatan. It was in 1284 OSC that the first pilgrims laid eyes on Bendybrow's walls - probably gagging on the smell of smoke and sulfur. They were the most pious of the Spirit of the Sum family, seeking validation of their faith in seeing the superfactory working as one. They left their arms at camp. They made for the gates. They swung their arms wide in a gesture of peace.
Two autoguns hosed them down with frag rounds the instant they entered trespassing distance.
The sick and sad thing about that massacre of some ten unarmed civilians was that it only inspired more and more to come creeping down from the Cutters. They all thought the same thing the spacers were told; that Bendybrow was a great new place of wonders - it was just a bit prickly to strangers. Little bands of the faithful - from just about every micro-religion in the mountains - came down to Bendybrow, tried for a gate or the walls, and splattered as soon as the automated defenses deemed them trespassers. Supposedly, a few got inside, but only for minutes at a time. None ever came back from the experience - except for the ones that wised up before they made a run at the guns.
The people coming up from the south, though - let's say they were a little more conscious of reality. It wasn't just littler cults that wanted a piece of Bendybrow. It was the Cult with a capital C that wanted in; the Bazzam'Bornas warband of the Southern Veinlands - incensed at the idea of some giant pile of machines sitting in the way of the meat's glorious advance. In 1285, after much planning and preparation, after countless months pulling together a horde of horrors that could lay siege to all Ventannen, they rode for Bendybrow. They arrived on April 3rd, and attacked only a week later on the 10th. The event went down in history as "The Gibbening".
Looney scouts reported the biggest wave of meat monsters they'd ever seen, charging the walls - all turning to bits at exactly 400 meters out like they'd run headlong into an invisible wood chipper.
With a creed as big as the Cult of Meat, it's hard to say what the most crushing defeat in their history has been. What can be said for sure is that nearly 30,000 men and monsters - including 52 transformed, some on the road to Living Truths - died inside the span of a day. Some estimates even suggest that three quarters of them were dead in under half an hour. Absolutely nothing else came of it; no meaty tendrils left in the earth, no sabotage campaigns, or subsequent siege attempts - nothing. The sheer intensity of death outside the Gunky outpost's walls prevented any news from reaching the rest of the Cult for months.
Even when that finally came back to them, they kept trying. The Veinlands were reaching past Bendybrow, but drone patrols and artillery strikes kept it from laying its roots down in the Bendybowl. It was a chunk missing from their advance into northern Ventannen, that infuriated them on a religious level as much as the strategic level. Every year, another assault came screaming at the gates - at Gunky, at Grunge, at Backsby, at Bendybrow proper. Every year, it all turned to a big red smear in the dirt - and a series of fresh juicy craters wherever something too big for a Gatling cannon tried its luck.
The same kept up for everyone else. Year-round, people would come to see what all the fuss was about. Machine cultists came down to see if they could slip in this time, spacers snuck landings in on the outskirts for a salvage run, and looters started lining up for their own shot at the gates. Even Space Loonies tried getting in touch with their cousins on the ground to see where all the noise was coming from. With all its thorns, the Bendybowl didn't end up as a big-name travel destination like the Big Toe, but its name got around - as much as a curse as a curiosity.
- hooooweee it STINKS in here
= TODO: light a match
- uh I don't think that's a good idea
= DONE: lighting a match
- wait stop it's gonna blow up
- don't don't no bad stop stop stop do not
(...)
- uh
- you, uh
- you okay, buddy?
= I'm over here now!
The coming decades got weird for Bendybrow. The space invasion had taken a toll on the superfactory - as much for how it ran as for how it looked. The increased production needed to secure it against a possible, plausible military opponent added to the waste output. Bloodspa Lake and Chunky Bay saw Hell from it - and the Smug went from bad to terrible. Even with Fry Me a River long since operational, the coal and gas power plants still had to keep running to handle unexpected grid disturbances - like super-crabs snipping the cables from the nuclear plant.
The runaway pollution wasn't just because the superfactory had to step up. It was that it couldn't shut down anymore - not of its own free will. A flaw in the adaptive systems that'd been implemented throughout Bendybrow meant that they couldn't be centrally-managed anymore. It set the scene for the future; everything had a product, and it made that product - even if it had to choke itself on the overflow when that product couldn't go anywhere. Florpumungus ran hot every day and night, processing ore from mining posts that were drilling just because they could.
This was all perfect for defense, when an attacker could fragment the base into isolated sectors, or take over the control center. It was an awful idea for most everything else. It was nearly impossible to bring anything down for maintenance. That meant it all beat itself to a pulp still building, digging, and transporting. It meant throwing some of those ugly overflows to waste when a factory finally fell over, or a drone tanker split open on the road. That the turrets were shooting anything that moved was par for the course, but that the rest of the superfactory couldn't stop?
Some people reckon that was the end for Bendybrow's human involvement. It was around 1292 OSC that Loonies reported a missile launch - with nothing the Green Angel Array could see that would've constituted an orbital threat. It was around the same time that sarcastic to-do lists stopped up entirely. The hand-entered work tickets dried up, the overenthusiastic chat-room brainstorming died out, and all that was left was the digital hum of the superfactory's daily affairs. Bendybrow became the robotic beast of today. It only needed to lose a few more marbles to look the part.
Nobody can say for certain whether the two giggling champions of industry left the planet on that missile - or maybe rocket. Nobody can say for sure whether they just fell into a steel press, or wandered off into the desert. Nobody can actually say for sure whether they even left at all - especially with the Happy-Maker out there. The leading theories in Looney bunkers mostly revolve around the idea that they got bored, and decided to go ruffle a few spacer feathers. The only thing for sure is that they stopped posting, after 32 long years of grooming the worst ecological disaster in the region.
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot successful!
- Collecting work tickets...
- [47562 tickets found]
- Tickets collected!
- Assessing maintenance requests...
- [32007/47562 tickets request maintenance]
- Assessment complete!
- Activating HPYMKR units...
- [1/3 HPYMKR units detected]
- HPYMKR_00 requesting service.
- No HPYMKR units available!
- Shutting down...
Of course, something as big as Bendybrow didn't just die. It was the proverbial hydra. Everything ran itself, from repair drone hubs, to drone trucks, to power plants, to communications centers. Everything worked together by keeping the drills going, the trains on time, and their neighbors supplied - even if that sometimes meant a 30,000% surplus. Sentry guns kept watch, missile siloes stood at the ready, and all the threats from below and above were kept at bay. To the outside world, business as usual kept on at Bendybrow.
On the inside, it was anything but. When it started running itself, the superfactory still needed help. The ruling weirdos could still force parts of it offline for maintenance and reprogramming. They could push the shaky mega-machine back into balance for another few months, or even a year. Without that mindful oversight, Bendybrow was breaking down on the inside. Factories were working themselves to the bone. The power grid was running at brownout capacity for weeks straight. Florpumungus was starting to catch fire every weekend - and it was getting hotter and hotter with every incident.
It was to Bendybrow's good fortune that the crab attacks slowed down around the same time its chuckleheads-in-chief had gone missing. Theories say the crabs just wanted to kill them in specific, but nobody's been able to prove that, and it wasn't so important either way. What that meant was that, rather than spiralling into a total collapse during a major subterranean siege, the superfactory only had to deal with minor interference. Mega-lobsters burrowed holes through walls, and into factories. They carved up pieces of the underground, and set sinkholes into motion under major roadways. What they never did was threaten the superfactory's future - which was finally to everyone else's benefit.
Bendybrow had always been a target for scavengers. There'd always been little gaps under its fences; dynamite on train tracks, infiltrators across the Longnuts River, and raids running in whenever a stretch of turrets went dark during a crab attack. It'd never been accessible for longer than a day in a stretch, but the '90s changed that. It was in the middle of that decade that turrets started running out of ammo longer. Lobster holes started opening up more holes in the defenses. Gates that'd opened for drone traffic were stuck whenever the power went out at the wrong time. It was the salvaging industry's time to shine.
With how big Bendybrow was to the Bendybowl, people caught on to the weakness quick. Scouts from Damptown, from Looney bunkers, and from anywhere else worth their salt started coming back with the reports; the lights were blinking longer than usual. People started the ongoing learning process of today. They felt around for the blind spots - as much by provoking autoguns as by using their brains - and jumped on them wherever they found them. It took years to get the methodology down, but the idea stuck. Bendybrow had gone from being a big iceberg, to a juicy scrap pile - even if it was still full of unexploded ordnance.
Around the same time, the Loonies learned that they could just walk in the front door. They'd had the sense to stay at a distance before; Looney combat armor could only take so many 20mm shells before it was just a bucket of blood. When locals started slipping in - without any kind of reactive response to the infiltration - they couldn't ignore it anymore. There were too many guns and too many computers for the savages to pilfer. Rather than open war, they settled on the PR-friendly approach of beating the scavs at their own game. The moment that word got out that the guns only shot at them when their software was on the fritz, every last bunker set up a dedicated Bendybrow recovery team. More to it, the bigger towns in the Bendybowl got wind of the inexplicable hospitality - and started sweating bullets over the idea that Bendybrow had been Looney turf the whole time.
The one thing Bendybrow never lost was its music. The idea of stringing everything up with a sound system never left the goofballs that'd dreamed it up. Even as it was all starting to break down, every factory kept up its part in the show. People heard it at Banana Bob Island, at Bimbleback's Landing, and sometimes even as far as the ruins of Upland Apetown; peppy, catchy, snappy tunes - irritating as they were upbeat - echoing through all the bleak smog and warehouse fires. It was a circus, a cartoon, and one sick joke all at once. It was one awful place to be - and always happy to be it.
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot sequence initiated...
(...)
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot successful!
- Collecting work tickets...
- Boot sequence initiated...
(...)
- Boot successful!
- Collecting work tickets...
- [6749456849033759 tickets found]
- Tickets collected!
- Assessing maintenance requests...
- Boot sequence initiated...
(...)
- Tickets collected!
- [4869037648003894/6749456849033759 tickets request maintenance]
- Assessment complete!
- Activating HPYMKR units...
- [2/486 HPYMKR units detected]
- HPYMKR_00 reporting boot successful!
- HPYMKR_01 requesting service.
- Shutting down...
The passage towards the present day was a slow grind - as much literally as figuratively. People died trying to get into Bendybrow's grounds - and the ones that made it in spent hours just trying to get out. The superfactory slumped worse and worse every week - and looked like it was headed to a final blackout before it could even stand a decade on its own. People all saw the writing on the walls - by looking up at the streetlights; Bendybrow wasn't built to last. A few more catastrophic failures, a few more Florpumungus meltdowns, and it was set to shut down one last time.
Then, all at once, it shrugged it off, and went back to its prime.
It was 1298 OSC that scavengers first laid eyes on the Happy-Maker - or, at least, what it left in its wake. It was the 12th of September that year that a sweeping service interruption shut the whole grid down across the superfactory. Nobody was sure if it was going to come back to life. Most expected a few dying flickers as a back-up power plant came online, and then overloaded under the stress. Instead, on the 13th, scheming salvagers walked in to find the whole place humming and singing once again - which they found out the hard way when a sentry gun's spotlight swept over them and splattered half their party.
Bendybrow was alive again, better than it'd ever been in years. The whole place was still falling apart, bursting into flames, and making an awful racket in the process, but, for once, it was all running together. The scavs who'd found a way in, past turrets that'd yet to see service - they saw what people see nowadays. Drone swarms like hungry smoke, swallowing up rubble and spitting out processor plants. Construction convoys like stampeding crabs, pulling up power poles and laying down new train tracks. A great revival, with great parades of machines, and great black clouds - and one great big band playing in the distance.
People didn't realize it was one single super-machine doing the work out of sight until the smog season of 1301. Before then, everyone thought every Great Harvest was going to be the last - except maybe the Loonies, but, then, classified is as classified does with them. When a Damptown survey team finally came back with word of tank drones cordoning off the source of the music - and a monstrous silhouette spitting out swarms of repair drones - the word didn't stay quiet a day. People came wise to the idea that Bendybrow was there to stay - and they'd already seen enough between the years to know it was going to stay the way it was, too.
It was in those times that the cultists from the north started formalizing their rites and routes in reaching the promised land. They'd gotten word from scavengers foreign and domestic about the new holes in Bendybrow's lines - and the new embodiment of the Greaselands' will roaming the roads once a year. They set up permanent posts in the Bendybowl - or bought up little pieces of land in places like Damptown - to keep their pilgrims pouring in and out. The Refinery of Souls and the Crucible of the Heart started stitching together, and finished around 1304. Right along with the scavengers - and, sometimes, paying their way into a salvage party - the pious started feeling the factories out properly.
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot sequence initiated...
(...)
- Boot sequence initiated...
- Boot successful!
- Collecting work tickets...
- Override ticket found with authorization code "BIGBOX".
- !!!
- !!!
- !!!
- Pushing ticket contents to global update handler with authorization code "BIGBOX"...
- Boot sequence initiated...
(...)
- Contents uploaded!
- HPYMKR_00 requesting activation.
- Shutting down for updates at request of HPYMKR_00...
The years to come didn't change much. For everyone involved, it was nothing more than smoothing out the kinks. Tech cults worked out their ways of worship, scavs worked out their ways in, and the Cult worked out the best way to kill itself whenever it came running. The Happy-Maker was cemented into the yearly rhythm of the region, and the idea of Bendybrow as a renewable resource - for as long as its mines are still running, anyways - came to be the general consensus. The poison in the water, the acid in the skies, the showtunes in the air - much as people could've gotten on without them, they were all still there.
The future, meanwhile, is looking feisty for the Bendybowl. Meat sieges are picking up in frequency. Looney activities are turning more towards fending off the smarter salvagers. Spacers are looking to make landfall again - well out of range of Bendybrow's orbital defenses. Even the tribal communities of Kalatan in the northwest have started looking for ways to sack the superfactory for all its advanced hardware. Damptown is struggling to keep its ambition in check. The Southern Desperation Line is starting to look at the locale more and more like a defensive hardpoint.
It might all sound like the world is getting ready to carve up another titan to keep it from getting too big. What doesn't jive with that is what went on at the crack of 1314 OSC. Around that time, harvesters all over the planet went wild in the Weeks of Shrieking Silence; around three weeks where harvester communications spiked so high that not a single person on or off the planet could get a radio signal in edgewise. For all listeners in the know, it seemed like the little monsters were getting ready for something big. It seemed like the end times for all orbit. It seemed like the harvesters were hatching some kind of doomsday plan.
And, all the while, they were bouncing signals off of Bendybrow like it was just another one of their colonies in the meat.
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