August, 2265 Day 4

The Villa is a virtual deathtrap. I came in with almost nothing, getting here through the canyon I took I had to stash all my stuff. The Cloud has destroyed pretty much everything else. Luckily I'm not the first to come here and there's stuff left over from before the bombs fell. I've got an automatic rifle and some of the armor the security wore, but I prefer to use a cosmic knife here. The locals get drawn to sound, ran out of ammunition for my rifle in the first five minutes after I found it when they started coming back, only managed to get more when I found a code for these vending machines in the police station. The treasure had better damn well be worth it.

There was almost no difference between day and night in the Villa. The sky was perpetually covered with the cloud and equally dark all day round. No sign of the sun was ever seen. It would become easy to loose track of the days. There was no way to mark the passage of time for no time passed in the Villa. The cloud preserved everything as it was. Even time. This place was a place removed from all the world by the cloud. A hell that one could choose to visit. But still one few escaped. The skeletons were few and far between but Serenity had come to suspect that the locals, or Ghost People as those that had come before had named them, dragged mos remains back with them as the only corpses she found were hidden in hard to reach places such as up on roofs or other places that the quick but not particularly agile ghost people could not reach. Strangely they seemed in the cases of some to have been there for years but their bodies seemed to decay very slowly. Serenity's knowledge of medicine and science was limited at best but she did know of bacteria and had wondered if the cloud above the Sierra Madre killed even the bacteria that decomposed a body. That was not to say they did not slowly decompose but what should have taken days seemed to take months or years instead. Infact so much so that some corpses showed signs of what could only have been cannibalism. A thought that had made Serenity physically sick. But regardless she knew it was a way for the desperate to survive, and food and water were in the end only one of the things one needed to survive in the Villa. To survive the ghost people was to avoid them. And this meant to find places where one could sleep safely.

Serenity awoke for her fourth day in silence. Green eyes opened to the world looking up at the ceiling of the Villa house on the square that she was living in. Even though it was only her third sleep there she already knew the ceiling well just as she knew how the cracks of the tile of the house felt under bare feet. Her bed had changed slightly. Instead of simply the metal and wire frame of the bed now there was a dirty mattress on there with blankets that she had wrapped herself up in. Her body was naked as the blankets fell from her youthful body as she rose up, though she was not totally naked. Her left hand rose up and gently touched her side and she restrained a hiss of pain. Her fingers pulled away from where her they had touched not naked flesh but blood stained bandages wrapped around her waist. Still naked she reached beneath her bed and pulled up a doctor's bag and first aid kit that she had scavenged from the Clinic the previous morning. And a good thing she had too. Opening up the bag she pulled out a fresh roll of gauze that was only slightly used by a previous scavenger. Unwinding the bandage revealed a blood soaked bandage covering her side and after grabbing her belt and biting into the thick leather with her teeth, hard, she removed the bandage pulling away some dead flesh.

She whimpered from the pain tears in her eyes and biting furiously on the belt as she checked the visible wound. Even the lightest of brushes was painful to say the least and she was doing more than brushing the wound with her fingers as she checked it. The wound itself looked like it was a very nasty second degree burn, raw angry bloody flesh was oozing pus at her. With trembling fingers she grabbed a bottle of whiskey and first taking a swig from the bottle she swallowed the welcom burning sensation in her throat as it went down before biting back down on the belt and poured the alcohol over her wound. Her scream of pain was muffled by the leather belt thankfully though her eyes were squeezed shut tight for the moment a few tears from the pain having escaped to run down her face.

Her naked body twitched violently as she wrapped a fresh bandage over the entirety of the large burn on the left side of her torso her teeth clenched tight into the leather of the belt as she held it in place with one hand while her other wrapped the fresh roll of bandages around her torso to hold the bandage tight in place to her side. Once the bandages were fully in place she finally reached up with a shaking hand to pull the belt from her mouth. Teeth marks were marked deep into the thick leather from the force with which she had bitten down. Taking a deep breath and another swig of booze she began getting ready for the day ahead. First came a suit of armor that she'd gotten from the police station. Originally intentioned for the security forces in the Pre-War days it now protected her though there was a noticeably large hole on her left side where the burn was located. The fabric was blackened from the evidence of fire around the edges. She couldn't resist a hiss as she accidently poked herself there as she dressed. Still hole not withstanding it was armor, the kind that would protect her from the weapons of the Ghost People. There was a matching helmet as well but she didn't pull that on yet instead fastening her gun belt around her waist. The same leather she had been biting into had a holster for a Police Revolver. She eyed the huge rifle leaning against the wall for several long moments as she eyed the Browning Automatic Rifle but she knew just how many rounds of ammunition she had left for it. Better to just leave it given its heavy weight would only slow her down. She did though slip a pair of cosmic knives into the jury rigged sheaths she'd worked into her armor one on the outside of each arm where she could easily grab a handle and pull it free. The blade would cut the jury rigged sheaths to shreds instantly and be free and ready though she would need to work up another jury rigged adaptation afterwards. Finally pulling on her helmet she grabbed a cosmic knife from beneath the bed and scratched a tally mark into the wall marking a fourth tally before she stepped out of her home into the Villa beyond taking care to avoid stepping on the bear trap just inside the door and the three more outside as well.

She proceeded to systematically search through an area of the Villa for the rest of the day. It was slow work given how slowly she moved since remaining unnoticed by the Ghost People was far more important than being quick. So far as she had noticed there were no other living outsiders in the Villa. She had time. While she needed to get the treasure that was almost certainly in the casino up on the hill she had time. It was when the next outsider came that she would finally need to worry. So she spent all the day working through one abandoned room to another, never staying out in the streets of the villa for long. She scrounged for everything she could possibly find of value, from the precious chips that fueled the Villa's vending machines as well as food, meds, water, weapons, and ammunition, all the way down to innocuous items such as pre-war clothing. It was not that the item in and of itself had value, but rather that she would allow none others but her to have it. Everything here was a precious resource whether it seemed it or not. If she did not claim it then another might in her stead.

She was slow but diligent in her efforts as she pushed herself, still she knew when to take a break and so she took a few minutes around 'noon' as she gauged such things in the central square eating a cold can of beans for her meal. She was careful not to let the metal spoon scrape against the insides of the can too loudly lest it draw the locals. But between bites as she chewed on her food her eyes lingered on the ever present hologram of the woman in the center of the square. Even after the can was cleaned out with her fingers of every last bean she sat there her eyes fixed on the hologram with only the occasional blink to disturb the stillness that possessed her. At long last though a far off clatter, perhaps from a local knocking something over on the far side of the villa disturbed her from her solitude. Collecting herself up.

It was towards evening that her searching finally took her into the Villa Clinic. The ground floor was quickly scoured of useful items that were left hidden in a collected pile in the corner of a downstairs room out of sight of the eyes but near the door. She could hear the garbled fading music from a radio somewhere in the building as she crept upstairs and peaked to see a hologram much like the one in the square though this one was the form of a security guard dressed much like her. She swallowed visibly as she eyed it watching its patrol. Her eyes flicked to its source that strange machine responsible for the unholy guard and she eyed it in long silent thought before her gaze drifted down to a computer. Waiting until the guard was walking away she slipped forward and activated the computer. As quick as she could she sorted through the menus getting to the one that controlled the hologram and changed its program to patrol the ground floor. Then as she was not sure by which set of stairs it would descend down she slipped into a doctor's office to wait for it to pass by. Closing the door almost all the way plunged the room into near darkness though with that she noticed a blinking green light illuminating the room faintly coming from the computer. She taped a key and watched the request for a password coming up. Glancing at the door the hologram hadn't yet passed by so she very carefully and very quietly opened the drawers searching. In the bottom left drawer she found what she was looking for slipped into a clinical folder all by its lonesome self. A small piece of paper with at the top writen password, and at the bottom a string of letters and numbers. Typing in the password she began reading the doctor's reports. After two minutes she quietly whispered a word half in question to the silence of the building.

"Vera?"

By then the hologram had long since descended to the floor below and she searched the remaining rooms, in the process finding an Autodoc and after some experimentation she stepped into one and after some ten minutes emerged physically healthier and with the burn on her side a long faded scar that did not bother her in the slightest. She swept through the remaining rooms gathering what she could before using the same computer as before to program the hologram to proceed back upstairs. She went down the opposite stairs just as it came up safely avoiding it and reunited with her supplies that were swiftly whisked back to her home at the Villa Square.

It was near 'Night' that she finally stopped having checked over a few more buildings in the medical district before calling it quits for the day. In truth she hadn't gotten far, the thick pockets of Cloud made exploration difficult and hazardous as she well knew from the first time she had foolishly stepped into a Cloud pocket. She ate a dinner of Instamash cooked on a hotplate powered by a power cell to treat herself to her first hot meal since arriving. A bag of chips and small amount of vodka were the rest of her meal though she didn't eat more since she knew she needed to conserve her food. Still trusting that the Ghost People wouldn't come near she ate out at the fountain eating and drinking while she looked up at the hologram of Vera Keyes. Still she didn't stay out where she was visible for long and soon retreated to the safety of her home. Lingering in the doorway she looked back at the hologram and whispered.

"Goodnight..."

Then proceeding to her bed she began the ritual of stripping off her clothes and weapons for sleep. A rolled up blanket had been added that day now served as a pillow that she slipped her pistol underneath of. The rest of her armor was carefully laid out. She did take twenty or so minutes to try and work with some scavenged items to try and repair the hole in the side of her armor but didn't find anything that would work to her satisfaction. Finally giving up she laid down on the bed. The villa was as quiet as always and its silence kept her awake though not as long as the other nights. Slowly she was getting used to it. Fifteen minutes later her eyes finally closed for the night for good and she drifted off to sleep.