littlekreen
Edgepeasant
Original poster
ALWAYS THE WINDOW SHOPPER, NEVER THE PRODUCT.
DONATING MEMBER
FOLKLORE MEMBER
- Posting Speed
- 1-3 posts per day
- One post per day
- Multiple posts per week
- Writing Levels
- Intermediate
- Adept
- Advanced
- Adaptable
- Preferred Character Gender
- No Preferences
EMBRACE DEMOCRACY
ANCHORAGE ALASKA
STR: 10 | END: 10 | LUK: 8
Deep in the lowest levels of Vault 120 lie a darkened labyrinth of tiny, twisty tunnels that such a gigantic vault required. These first shafts were drilled straight down into limestone so construction could expand. Later the rough-hewn carbonate stone turned to concrete and steel though some of the shaft's original igneous walls were left once passing down into the bedrock that formed the Florida platform. A sump serving as a reserve source of water that inevitably leaks in through the porous upper layers and as an emergency source to cool the reactor. Eight hundred people in a design for luxury that needed power, air circulation, sewage, and most important, electricity. The reactor had multiple fail-safes and redundancies that vastly expanded the tangled web of access and maintenance tunnels far below where creatures would dig. Occasionally maintenance workers would have to come, servicing this or that, though bathing in the faintly musty and clammy cold air with the massive shaft's old heavy steel and support for a cargo elevator used in surface construction long since removed and filled in. It was an infinitely sturdy place given the now superfluous reinforcement though vault dwellers were used to more compact spaces and brighter lighting. The ever-so-faint creaks and echoing thumps of pumps against the stone from deep in the void below gave even the engineers that regularly go there the heebie-jeebies. As if something in the dark was watching them. Surface cities once had their ghost stories; even the vaults had theirs. Houses long abandoned are rumored to harbor horrible demons. Sewer grates with monsters behind.
A crisp beam of light punctuating the stillness sways from the far wall to race downward as a man in a hard hat with his reflective vault maintenance suit looks over the edge and then so far down. A snack in his hand baiting a growl as starvation tries to overpower the white knuckles of his grip on the causeway railing. His helmet light not penetrating the least at such depths as there were no lights in the far wall, let alone the deeper parts of the sump just where the vault tunnels intersected. That void that went on in faintly glistening eternity. A monster with gleaming wet eyes looked toward him with a toothy maw and a smile.
"ARGLEBARGL!", screamed one of his workmates and punctuated his fear with a girlish scream that dropped a snack cake to thump against the grate and then careen into the hungry dark instead.
His partner started dying of laughter as the man had to catch his breath. As the mixture of emotions of anger finally gave his stomach a momentary grip in looking at his snack falling down and down, "You bastard! It's creepy in here aright! I heard stories!"
Forlornly looking at the snack cake dropping past the last railing before it slipped into the infinite dark just for fear that smashed his mind into the guardrail for attention. The snack cake bounced off of mid-air just above an empty causeway, stopped, headed sideways into the light, and darted down the causeway out of view. The laughter stopped as they heard loud bombast from below in a cheerful proclamation, "ARIAL INCURSION BY THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. GLORY IS THE REWARD OF VALOR."
Both men stared into the void as the snack cake escaped mid-air down causeway lights toward the reactor area, and wide-eyed, the other said, "Okay, Fuck me. I thought the little patriot was all bullshit."
"Hic sunt dracones, asshole." Said the hungry man.
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