Apocalypse: A Gundam Story

by Flareclaw

Jiran Thomas, a mercenary and Gundam pilot, looks for his mysterious past in a futuristic underground world created due to an apocalyptic war. As Jiran searches he meets up with young Ric Dontra, a boy looking for the same thing.

"Ring around the rosie,

Pockets full of posies,

Ashes, ashes

We all fall down!"

-A children's song describing the European plague, the Black Death

Apocalypse: A Gundam Story

Prologue

Such horror it was.

One sometimes wonders what it feels like, when everyone around suddenly begins to turn over dead. Slowly, but surely, the grasp of death touches you, scrapes you, and a small tingle goes through your body. Then something cold creeps up through your sleeves, into your skin, and finally into your soul, where it nibbles at it, destroying it.

Now, there is nothing at all at this place. No trees, no plants, no animals, the planet is a barren wasteland, dying slowly to the hands of humans. It was here, where it had all begun, the life, the death, and the war. No one did expect the war. It was so sudden, and yet so slow. Battles would last for what seemed like eternity, as men suffered and died while their comrades watched in horror. The men cried, suffocated, and pleaded for mercy, but no one could help them, for the enemy they were fighting could not be seen.

People have always wondered about the Apocalypse. How it will begin and how it will end. Of course, one would never think that man himself would fulfill the prophecy. It's not surprising really, for the fact that man came up with the foretelling. It's only logical that man would fulfil it and not some higher power such as a god or a saint.

And yet, people in the cities below still believe that it was all a god's doing of some sort. Stories are told to the children of "The Underground", and those children tell it to their children. It is an endless cycle, of the story of the rise and fall of humanity. How humanity, at the peak of their civilization, fell to the hands of its own creation, where finally they were forced out of their own homes, their own land, and were made to suffer and die miserably as the they fled below the surface. About the Great War and how the surface used to be. The children listen; some horrified, of the events that had happened long before their existence.

There are some that argue that there is still life on the surface. Many call it nonsense, a fairy tale, yet others do not. Still, people do not venture out into the darkness, fearing not only the diseases that still linger above, but also the horrid sight that they would meet. Of a battlefield where people have died and have been sacrificed. A battlefield, where humanity had lost, to its own…