2: Let the wind speak, here begins a new life
AN: I'm pretty motivated to write this but unsure of whether it's good or not. Please review to let me know.
April 20, 2161: 4:00 PM
The Wasteland: what used to be Virginia
The dim red-grey sunlight shone weakly, lukewarmly on the two children traversing the hills and graveyard of the world. Rusted twists of metal, identifiable as cars only by the vague shape and memory of their history book, were scattered across a faded black pathway, wide enough to hold sixteen of these ancient machines in procession. A superhighway, though they did not know it.
"What do you think 'Martinsburg' is?" Asuka asked and kicked a small metal object, around the size of a fist and vaguely circular, to Shinji. She referred to a faded green sign on the side of the road.
He tried kicking the object back to her, but missed, cursing himself for his clumsiness. "I read that the signs told people back then how to get to places, using those— what're they called— automobiles? I think Martinsburg is the name of a place."
Asuka sighed for the nth time in the few hours they had been out of the Vault, exploring the world was much less exciting than she had thought. "So those heaps of junk are automobiles? As in they used to move really fast and get people from point A to point B?" she gesticulated vaguely while speaking, drawing imaginary lines from one spot to another. "You wanna go check one out?"
The boy nodded and the pair made to one of the dead cars, a century removed from usage, they had in many cases become coffins for drivers in the past; baked and melted and warped by nuclear heat and heavy time, these automobiles were akin to time capsules, contents disturbing.
"Oh God…" Asuka put a hand to her mouth and gasped lightly. The car was airtight. Glass had flash melted rather than shattered, fusing to the frame of the door. The metal of the car door had likewise become conjoined with the body of the vehicle. The handle wouldn't even move. That wasn't why Asuka had been surprised however. There were bodies inside; but not the type you would expect.
Skeletons, heaps of sunbleached bones in the rough shape of a human being, left behind after eighty four years of rot and time had taken their toll on soft weak flesh. Stains on the seat, left behind by the processes of rot and decay. That was what Asuka had been expecting to see. Something inert and so far removed from humanity that it could be mistaken for a morbid children's toy; instead, inside was obscenity. Perfectly preserved. Three bodies. Mother, father, child. Mary, Joseph, Jesus. The horror, the horror. Oh God, the horror. The radiation had done this. The initial sunburst of the Apocalypse had released untold Sieverts of gamma waves and neutron particles, destroying chromosomes, rearranging DNA sequences. The language in which life itself was written, rewritten. Coupled with the heat, of course decay wouldn't happen. All bacterial life to commence decomposition had been killed, the inside of the car perfectly sterile. So when the hot suns dropped to surface and had melted the seams of the car into perfectly fluid joints, none of the scars of welding visible, nothing; no microscopic bacterium had managed to enter the car. An impervious membrane eighty four years in the making.
The driver could not be distinguished as male or female, even with the flesh perfectly preserved. There had been too much melting, cooking done; parts burnt from the extreme heat, once smooth skin turned angry red by the intense lights of the bombs that had exploded kilometers away. The flesh was still flesh, despite it having been made heavy and leprous by the acrid fumes of the melting vinyl and plastic interior of the car. The acrylic design on the T-shirt had turned into a slurry of colors, red with blue and blue with white and pinks and purples in between it all. Asuka could not bear to look at the child in the backseat.
"Let's go, I might puke," she turned around with her eyes closed before Shinji could catch up to her. Sparing him the pain of having to see the insides of the car-coffin was common courtesy. "You don't want to see this." Deep breaths to calm down. It's nothing, just a dream, can't be real.
Shinji blanched, "is it that bad?"
"...we're getting off of this 'interstate 81'," Asuka referred to another one of the flaking signs, "I don't want to even be near a car right now." the girl tried not to show it, but she was badly shaken. They made their way away from the cars, toward the edge of the black road, made of asphalt, a strange substance neither Vault-dwellers had ever seen before. Home to them was of smooth grey concrete, not this black sheet of tar and stone. The bombs had turned the roads into soups for a while, boiling bowls of black held back only by the waist high concrete safety barricades on either side of the streets. It was smooth in most places, pockmarked periodically by the thick bubbles of tar that had frozen into reality many decades ago.
The boy pointed to a sign off in the distance, clambering over the safety barricade to the ditch that bordered the superhighway. "Hey, if that sign said 'Martinsburg 30 miles' doesn't that mean that a city is thirty miles away?"
Asuka kicked a dead branch and was surprised at the weight of it. It had petrified long ago, condemned to eternity. "Why would we even want to go to one of those old-time cities? No one would live there anymore."
"They might have some food leftover…"
The two had left the highway behind now, but thoughts of entire families melted then mummified in all their gory splendor made Asuka's stomach wretch about terribly. "We have food enough with us. We should probably be looking for a place to sleep," the girl was right. Although the sun could not be seen through the thick layer of clouds, the meager light flitting through the nebulous sky was growing smaller and smaller. It would be night soon.
"Here's a good a place as any I suppose…" Asuka sat down on the ground, it was relatively clear there and plenty of firewood was available, splintered trees made up the environment. Old wood, cured and baked bone hard by years of sun. "Go gather some wood," she ordered, "even a loser like you shouldn't be able to screw that up."
He bent over and began to gather branches, careful so as not to get a splinter. Several minutes later he had a heavy armful and placed it at Asuka's feet. "Is this enough?" he asked. Neither teenager really knew how much firewood was needed, or even how to start a fire. They didn't even have trees in the Vault.
"Yeah sure," Asuka didn't look up from her searching, she was certain that a firestarter had been given to them… "Got it!" A small black rod and an even smaller knife, not good for much else but striking the flint. "I'm pretty sure that this is a firestarter, we read about them once…" Asuka gave an experimental strike to the cylindrical flint, jumping at the sight of sparks. "Alright, we can start a fire!" she cheered.
Shinji quickly made a little pile of the twigs, a little bird nest to hold the red egg that would hopefully hatch into a fire, warm fire. "Have you done this before, Asuka?" he asked.
The girl tossed her hair to the side haughtily. "You don't think I can do it?" she laughed, "oh ye of little faith… Even cavemen were able to do this! Should be a piece of cake."
The same day: 7:30 PM
The Wasteland: what used to be Virginia
The thin blue and yellow Vault suits and body armor that both Shinji and Asuka wore did little to protect from the chill of spring.
No warmth between the two. Only a thin, but large blanket to stave off the night cold. A fire had proven to be impossible. Asuka sat on a log, teeth chattering, blanket completely swaddling her. "L-light a fire idiot," she shivered violently, "it's getting cold." She had given up on lighting a fire fairly early on, complaining that the flint and steel hurt her hands.
He was trying, failing badly, hands shaking far too much to be able to start a fire. "I c-can't do it," he said. Asuka might have been cold, but Shinji was freezing. He didn't even have a blanket to keep him warm. Damn the Overseer and her stinginess… "I've never done this before."
"Be a man!" Asuka yelled, "it's your responsibility to start a fire. Don't you know anything?" she thought of the romanticised life of the savage. History before history had been erased by fire.
For the first time Shinji felt resentment toward his unlikely companion. Just who did she think she was? He didn't say anything, just kept his angry gaze toward the tinder that he had gathered, glowering as if his angry gaze could make the dry pine needles and twigs catch ablaze. "...you could help out instead of just sitting there," he muttered under his breath.
Unfortunately for him, Asuka heard. "What was that? I didn't hear you very well. You should speak up," she said. Shinji was intimidated even though the girl was huddled into a ball under the blanket, only her head peeking out; almost like a turtle. He saw she shudder violently. The night was growing dark, if he did not ignite fire soon…
"I didn't say anything," his voice was hurried now, worry coloring his tone. He struck the flint especially hard, sending a shower of red heat into the small nest of tinder. "Yes!" Shinji nearly cried with joy as the dead pine needles caught fire, he covered the the spark from the wind with his hands, blowing carefully trying to curry the spark into a blaze.
"You got it?" Asuka looked up from her comfortable position on the log, shedding the blanket quickly. "Holy shit! You actually did…" she saw the rising smoke and her voice turned incredulous, then jealous. Why had he been able to do it when she hadn't? The redhead ran over to the boy, who was shivering of excitement now instead of cold, with blanket in hand. "Good job loser," it was as close to a compliment that she would offer.
Shinji heard the insult but paid it no mind. He was ecstatic, they had a fire. The boy ran the burning nest of twigs over to the larger pile of sticks, placing the life giving heat carefully, as if he were handling a newborn. I did it! And just in time too. The night had come in earnest and there was little moonlight to work with; only a hazy spot in the cloud cover where the faintest bit of luminescence came to bare.
The pair sat down near the fire, hunching close to it, backing off when the smoke became unbearable, and hunching close again when they felt too cold. An amicable silence for a while.
"Hey, loser?" Asuka asked, not taking her eyes off the quivering fire.
"Yeah?" the boy didn't know what to say. He had admired, lusted after, loved the girl from afar in Vault-72. Now thrust into the harshness of the world, having just succeeded in securing their survival, he found himself rendered speechless by her softly lit silhouette in the ghostly light of the fire and moon.
She handed him a package from one of the backpack, motioning him to eat. "Did you expect it to be this hard?" she asked. It wasn't much of a question, the answer was obvious.
"I expected worse to be honest, mutants and raiders; that sort of thing."
The two had only seen the bones of civilization, not any signs of existing.
"Why'd you decide to leave the Vault? I mean, you didn't have to…" his question was bitter from the memory of having been effectively condemned to die in exile.
Asuka chewed around the mouthful of the dry ration bar that claimed to be flavored like a strawberry. She had never had real strawberries before, so she couldn't exactly compare the two… "There's just some things that you can't live with, you know what I mean?"
He didn't know. "I don't understand too well…"
The girl huffed, turning to face Shinji angrily, "of course you don't understand, you're not me," she bared her teeth, attempting to look fierce and intimidating. Shinji just thought she looked cute. "My parents were going to sell me off."
"They can do that?" Shinji scratched his head, confused. He supposed arranged marriages were quite common in the Vault, but never that spouses could be bought… "How does that even work?"
Asuka spoke slowly, as if explaining something to a child, "look… You have a girl— almost a woman— pretty and smart and all around great, I'm talking about me if you didn't notice, and you have a guy. A guy who's older, richer, and horny enough to buy himself a child bride… Pays off the Genetics labs to falsify that the two are suitable partners genetically and pays off the parents too." She was still bitter.
"I didn't… Asuka, I'm so sorry."
She whirled on him, "don't you dare feel sorry for me, idiot. I'm better than you in every possible way. The day you starting pitying me is that day I die." She ended her short tirade rather abruptly. There was a long silence here where no one knew what to say.
April 21, 2161: 4:00 AM
Cothren Town: a small village, population:100, outside of Martinsburg
A man, one Cooper Hausman, deathly drunk and needing to shit badly, staggered toward an outhouse. It had been a happy day and the majority of the town had gathered to celebrate something special, very special; personally important to Mr. Hausman. But whatever the cause of the celebration may have been, no matter how important the reason for celebration was, Cooper could not ,for the life of him, remember why. He was far too drunk.
He tripped over his shoes, old mustard yellow boots covered in mud. "Fuck," said Cooper, picking himself off the ground, brushing dirt from his shirt, "I'm so drunk…" Cooper felt the hotness of vomit, the pink and heady flavor of alcohol coming through his mouth a second time and swallowed, eyes tearing as he forced his own vomit down before it could spew. "Fuck me…"
At least he was at the outhouse now, a rickety building put up in haste several years ago when the old one had begun to overflow. There was no running water in Cothren, and the village did not have the caps available to procure better amenities. He walked up the hill the outhouse was located on, half running- half loping toward his destination.
The door opened and strangeness stepped out. Was it a man? Was it even a human?
"What are you?" Cooper asked, confused, voice slurred by drink. He knew everyone in the town, there were so few inhabitants that it was impossible not to know everyone; but this man… Cooper had never seen before. It was an unforgettable face: bald, pale—unnaturally pale, lashless eyes, he was huge huge huge and carried a distinct aura of wrongness. The smooth dome of the man's head shone dumbly like a hubcap in the weak moonlight.
The stranger laughed, a jolly tittering sound like that seemed far too light and airy to belong to a man over seven feet tall. "I am the Word, and in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. I was in the beginning with God. All things were made through I, and without I not any thing made that was made."
Cooper was too drunk to be aware of, or care about the man's dramatic tone. "Well Word, you should've come earlier… we was havin' ourselves a party… don't really remember 'bout what, but t'was quite a party."
Another laugh, "My name is not 'Word'," he paused for a moment before continuing, "you asked what I was, not whom."
"Well then mister, what's yer name? And what be yer business in Cothren?"
"Most call me the Judge. I am here to do just what my title implies," the Judge's voice was happy almost, calm and collected, a certain way about which he spoke implied intelligence thought to be long lost. Yet another thing stolen by the nuclear fires.
Cooper scratched his head and tilted it, "you don't seem like no judge, what're you a judge of; chickens?" the drunk laughed at his own joke, humor amplified by alcohol.
The Judge moved closer and Cooper noticed dumbly that in the man's hand was an axe, glistening with something dark. But he stepped backwards in fear after seeing what was clutched in the Judge's left. Hair, a long fistful of black hair that streamed down to a dark red, dripping something that hung suspended next to the pale man's pant cuff.
"What're you a judge of!" Cooper backpedaled, a rough, quick crab walk, "Who the Hell are you?" Somehow the thick cloud cover parted, just for a moment parted, and let loose a stream of moonlight that hit the outhouse just right, illuminating the cramped bathroom in a ghostly white light showing the horror within. A woman, someone very close to Cooper, raped and bloodied; the moonlight glinted off the ring on her hand. The dark red dripping something that the Judge held was the dead woman's scalp. Cooper scrambled to his feet to run and realized that the celebration earlier was in honour of his very own wedding.
The Judge strode forward briskly, his long legs quickly catching up to the drunk man, dropping his axe and grabbing the man by the shirt collar. "I am a judge of men; and you are a man," he thrust the obscene scalp into Cooper's trembling hands.
"Please man, I ain't caused you no harm… I just got married today—"
"And you'll join your wife soon," the Judge smiled mealy red lips revealing huge white teeth like tombstones.
The same day: 9:30 AM
The Wasteland: Shinji/Asuka camp
It wasn't quite the sound of birds chirping, but it woke them the same. The slide of a gun being pulled back. A boot kicking around the remnants of the fire.
"How dumb can you get… hey Tobin! Bring some rope!"
Both Shinji and Asuka shot up to attention. The voice of human beings other than themselves; something they had never expected to hear. But the message was ominous.
"Who are you?" Asuka asked bluntly. The man in question was dressed in a motley collection of leather and straps, guns hanging at his waist in addition to the handgun he held. "Don't point that at us!" Asuka tried to shy away from the direction the barrel was pointing but was only rewarded by the sound of artificial thunder going off nearby. The bullet traveled between the newly awoken teenagers; sometime during the night they had ended up next to each other. Warmth gathering warmth.
"Be careful with that! What's your problem?" Asuka screamed, angry.
The man's companion, the one called Tobin had come carrying rope and two thick collars. This man was thinner and had yellowing skin. "Looks like you made a good catch here Donny," he remarked looking Asuka over with a sick grin on his face.
"Don't I always?" the newly named Donny laughed back, ignoring Asuka's indignant protests.
Shinji stayed quiet as a terrible realization came over him. Collar, ropes… slavery? They had learned about slavery during history lessons in the Vault, learned that it had been abolished hundreds of years before the Last War had started. "Asuka," he whispered, "stay quiet."
The redhead turned from the two conversing slavers to Shinji, she didn't show as much discretion. "What? Why? We've finally met some people, it's all gonna be okay now!" although Asuka had the highest scores in the class in every subject in the Vault, she was remarkable naive at times.
Tobin stepped forward and hit Asuka across the face, not too harshly, but enough to leave a painful red mark. The girl slumped to the ground and cradled her face. She had never been hit before.
"What the fuck is your problem? First you ignore me, then you hit—"
The man made another striking motion with his hand and Asuka flinched. "Slaves don't talk back. At least your friend knows what's up."
The word slave triggered something within Asuka. She stood up ready to fight. "We're not slaves! Fuck you!" she ran forward to fight but was held back.
Shinji held her by the arm and whispered: "Asuka… they have guns." The boy was right. Asuka's stomach fell and the situation sank in.
The sallow slaver chortled and moved to tie the two children up. "That expression is priceless, I wonder what she'll be like when she's been on her back for a couple hours."
No no no no, this can't be happening. Asuka thought to herself. Wasn't that what she had been fleeing in the first place? "You two are joking right? You can't actually be taking us —" She was hit again, this time harder. The slaver's old leather glove came in a backhand arc and hit her hard enough to draw blood. The redhead staggered back and looked angry enough to kill if it wasn't for the gun in the man's hand.
"Shut the fuck up if you know what's good for you. I hate mouthy slaves."
Fuck fuck fuck fuck both children knew they were screwed. They had been ambushed, found with their pants down so to speak. They were unarmed, in a strange place being accosted by strange people.
"Fucking say something Shinji!" Asuka screamed at the boy next to her, "say something, do anything! Tell them we aren't slaves!" But in her attention to her fellow Vault-dweller she had taken her eyes off the slaver.
One of the men ran forward and tackled her to the ground, filling her nose with the smell of old blood and unwashed man. Sweat and feces and dust and death.
"Get off of me! You can't do this!" she thrashed about as her hands were pinned above her head. The man was much stronger than her; she was far too easily overpowered.
"Shut up!" the man spat in her face and the hot, dirty spittle trickled into her eye. Asuka began to wail.
Shinji had enough of it and jumped on the man's back, pulling at hair and hitting at whatever exposed flesh he could find. "Get off of her!" a lucky groping scratch hit the man's eye. The man rolled off of Asuka, clutching at his face and allowing the girl to make a run for it.
"Fuck!" the man's partner shouted and ran after the redhead, not caring about the injuries of his ally. Shinji was just a bit faster. Youth and life in the Vault, eating and growing regularly had led him to be slightly faster than the slaver who had spent his life scrounging for food. He caught up and tackled the man to the ground, not caring of the consequences. Faster he may have been, but stronger he was not.
"Fucking brat!" the slaver turned onto his back, facing Shinji and pistol whipping him. The boy's face erupted with color, red gushing from his nose and conscious turning a hazy black. But despite the pain, Shinji was glad. Asuka will be safe now… he passed out.
A hundred meters away, ducking behind trees and wreckages, Asuka didn't turn back, she just kept running, unwilling to be captured. Who even cared about the loser?
The same day: 10:00 AM
With Shinji and the slavers
He woke up a particularly hard kick; the blunt tip of the heavy pair of boots that the slaver whose eye he had scratched thudded against the small of his back, knocking the wind from the prone boy.
"Fucking faggot boy," the man's eye was slightly red from the attempted gouging but other than that, the man was fine. "You cost us that redhead, that sweet piece of ass would have went for thousands of caps."
Shinji didn't say anything. He wanted to scream so badly, they had done quite a number on his while he had been asleep, his injuries were mostly superficial however. Plenty of painful blue bruise flowers blooming on his skin for sure. "...Are you going to kill me?" he said awkwardly, his tongue felt swollen and the inside of his cheek was bleeding profusely, staining his teeth a terrible red. One of the strikes delivered had been to Shinji's open chin. A good portion of his cheek had been bitten through and swallowed.
"Kill you?" the slaver scoffed, angry apparently sated, "we gotta make some money, especially after you helped that girl run away," the man scowled. "We'll probably sell you, probably won't go for as much as that red haired girlie, but you're young, thin; I bet if you grew your hair you'd look like a girl. A lot of people dig that…" the slaver digressed into a long speech on the depravities of certain buyers that horrified Shinji.
The boy swallowed the bloody spittle that had gathered in his mouth, a huge mistake. The taste was vile, full of iron and salt; but the worst was the collar. The movement of his throat bulging while swallowing had caused the ironband of the slave collar to cut painfully into his throat. He gagged and completed the swallow.
The slaver, Tobin, Shinji remembered, seemed to find this all very amusing. "You like your collar, boy? You'll get it off when we sell ya," the man bent down over the tied up boy and flicked a finger against the metal collar. "It's a pretty clever piece of pre-war technology. You get too far from me, or I die before I can disarm that thing, and it'll blow up. There's a shaped explosive on the inside of that collar. It'll just blow your head clean off. Really messy. Trust me, I've seen it before."
Shinji turned green and squirmed, both the ropes around his wrists and ankles and the collar around his neck hurt terribly. He looked up at his captor to see the man eating one of the ready-made-meals from the Vault.
"Hey kid, this stuff tastes like shit. What is it?"
"It's a," Shinji swallowed more blood and felt more pain. The sucking motion that swallowing made tugged at the huge rags of flesh on the inside of his mouth. "I think that one is supposed to be chicken."
The slaver made a face, "chicken? Man it's pretty bad."
"Well, it doesn't actually taste like that. That's just a preserved version for long term storage. They taste pretty good when it's fresh."
"You've had chicken before?"
Shinji nodded as best he could, speaking was difficult. "I grew up in a Vault."
The slaver didn't look surprised. "I figured, you and the girl both had those stupid uniforms on. Why're you out here? Shouldn't you be all snug in your hole in the ground?" the slaver sounded jealous.
"They kicked me out," Shinji said sadly, "they kicked me out and closed the door."
"And the girl?"
"She left on her own, some trouble with her parents I think," the slaver bent down and poured some water in Shinji's mouth which he drank gratefully, trying his best to clear the taste of blood.
The slaver was shaking his head. "What an idiot. You had that big, safe home and you choose to leave. That girl… bet she regrets it now!" he laughed meanly.
The same day: 12:00 PM
Asuka being chased by a slaver
They had been running for quite a while now. Both Asuka and the ugly, tall slaver. In their lungs had settled a heavy weight of fatigue.
"I'm going to fucking rape you to death little girl!" the man panted out, "when I catch you, you're fucking dead." Not the greatest motivation to stop running.
Asuka was having an easier time of escaping than the slaver was having chasing. Younger, more agile, and more motivated, the girl maintained a fairly sizeable lead of about twenty feet. Had the slaver shot at her, she would probably have been downed much earlier on; but the man seemed reluctant to, maybe he didn't want to damage the goods?
So Asuka ran on. She didn't know where. Only that she was alone and being chased; a fate worse than death at her heels and a pain worse than fire growing in her muscles, lungs, everywhere. Fuck, why won't this guy just give up? She vaulted over a fallen tree trunk gracefully, a sort of post-apocalyptic hurdle jump.
There would be no end to this chase. It would be determined who could run faster and longer. A race where everything was on the line for Asuka.
Her stomach dropped, the trees were beginning to thin, no more huge dead wooden monoliths, now only thin splinter saplings. Through the gaps in the forest cover she could see another person. Is it another slaver? Just what were the odds of this? Meeting another person, an unknown person during her escape. Could he help? It was a coin toss. The mystery figure could be just as dangerous as the man chasing her, maybe even more so.
Asuka placed her bet and put on an extra burst of speed, the forest around her a brown and grey blur of color. The gap between slaver and her lengthened.
"Hey! You there!" her calls were interspersed by deep pants as she tried to regain her breath. "Help me, please! I'll do anything!" she was still fairly far away, perhaps another fifty feet until she reached the mystery figure who was still walking on, head turned the other direction, no sign of whether or not they had heard Asuka.
The slaver must have seen the figure as well, for he started shooting, trying to end any and all possibility Asuka had for outside help.
It was at the first gunshot that the figure turned. It was a man. In an instant a hand was outstretched and a thunderclap sounded. He had shot with the confidence of a man who had practiced the draw a million times before, and Asuka knew the slaver chasing her to be no more.
She collapsed, heaving and the man drew closer. She couldn't see much of him. The sunlight was weak, but it was there and it was shining into her eyes.
"You okay little girl?" the man, no boy, Asuka could see now had reached her and offered her his free hand, his left still holding his enormous handgun. It had a scope on it; who needs a scope on a revolver?"
She still couldn't speak, so winded she was, but she took the hand and the boy helped her sit up. He was closer now and Asuka saw that he was strangely dressed, or at least as strangely dressed as the slavers had been; maybe everyone in the Wasteland dressed strangely? He wore a white shirt, several sizes too large and not fully buttoned, revealing a somewhat muscular chest. His pants were brown, baggy, and were rolled up mid shin; held up by a red sash. Shoes were wooden, with two slats on the bottom elevating him three inches to a height of around six feet one. Even though he was unshaven and his black hair swept back was growing rather long, Asuka could tell that her savior was probably five to six years older than she.
"Thanks for helping me out, I owe you one," she was truly grateful. She finally stood with the boy's help. "What's your name?"
The boy gave her a searching look and spoke. Apparently she had been deemed harmless or something close, "Call me Vespa."
AN: I worked pretty hard on this chapter, it's actually 5:03 AM when I'm writing this note, so please review.
Would you all like me to make a stat page for the characters? (as in with SPECIAL and perks and so on)
How did you like the Judge? He's not an OC, he's actually from another book.
Vespa is an OC. I'll try to keep him as realistic as possible.
I would like specific feedback on the scene with the Judge if possible; maybe also the scene where Asuka looks into the car. Hopefully next chapter comes out in a couple of weeks. Thanks!