Sorry this is so late, whole family was sick and I'm just about ready to maim someone at work. Ever found it hard to write when you're pissed off to high heavens?
Robin peered down, down, down through the dense, cottony clouds, mesmerized by the darkness of the sky beneath the white fluff hugging the cliff face. It was so compelling...
A cool, implacable hand held her back. She looked up, startled, but not visibly ruffled.
"Hey Nico, you don't wanna be doing that, sis."
Franky raised his eye shades to reveal his unnaturally blue ocular processing units. They swept over her in a somewhat clinical manner, swiftly assessing her health status. She shivered nonetheless, and pulled her hand away. He let her do so, his metallic fingers trailing against her bark with a steely hiss.
"Android-san, would you be able to gauge the height of this precipice?" the dryad inquired coolly. Truthfully, Franky was the only gang member besides Luffy who really scared her - he always seemed to be able to see through her schemes. It was as if he understood how she worked better than even she might know.
The android shrugged noncommittally, hesitantly - one might even say that the shrug spoke louder than words that she really didn't want to know how far down the escarpment went. Robin shivered again for a moment, but quickly suppressed it.
"Ohohohoho, looks like we're going to need to make like birds to get to the next side," Brook Bones interjected, strumming his guitarro as he reclined on the arid ground. The others were back in the truck, sleeping while the 'oldsters' took the night shift. It was a job that the three currently took very seriously - all the younger gang members were still suffering from a number of severe wounds that they had from Ghoul City. The shift would give them enough time to come up with a plan for the gang's most pressing problem; how to get across the massive canyon below without abandoning their new mother truck, the Thousand Suns.
Franky had made it abundantly clear that he was not leaving the truck. No. No way, baby-bro-sis. No. After the last disastrous attempt to abandon a truck, the rest of the gang quickly relented - Franky was an android, so if he decided to rupture his nuclear power core, not one soul alive today could fix him. They would not be able to count on an abnormally solid skull as a safety device.
Plus, the Thousand Suns was truly home, even more so than their former small-line truck. The fifty-foot container and the four-seater cab allowed each gang member to claim a private spot for themselves outside of the sleeping quarters. Many of the everyday brawls and quarrels between the younger men had instantly vanished once everyone had somewhere to retreat, be it roof-top or galley, cab-top or infirmary or workshop. Speaking of workshop...
"Has Sogeking still not gone to bed?" Robin asked, narrowing her eyes very slightly in disapproval. The priest and gunner had really been lacking in sleep lately - at one point during their march, he did not even respond when they called his name. Brook, one of the fastest on the ship, was forced to grab the long nose with his mummified hands and yank him into the cave they had used for shelter from a small dust devil.
"I'm feeling especially untactiful this week. Maybe it's best for you to go check on him, Nico-sis," Franky suggested as he sat down with his empty toolbox and a disorderly heap of tools, gadgets and gizmos. The android was usually very close to the gunner - both of them loved to take apart old machines and rebuild them even better (and occasionally, working). However, when it came to human emotions - to say that Franky was out of his depth was an understatement.
Nodding absently, the dryad sent one of her branches out to peek through the window. Brook continued to strum his guitarro while giving Franky a speculative glance.
[~~~]
"Is it really that bad where you are right now?"
"What? You've never seen the ocean?"
"No way! I could never do that! I have can't-stand-20-foot-scorpions disease!"
"...You gotta let me go sometime..."
Robin watched, intrigued and vaguely disturbed by the quiet conversation that Sogeking seemed to be having with himself. The ocean was something that had not been seen in a number of decades, so how the young long nose could have known anything about the mythical expanses of salt water that once covered most of the world was a mystery...
"You really think it's easy where I am?"
"Yeah, but you haven't fought Admirals yet."
"Tactical retreat my ass. Over a cliff?"
The dryad felt her apprehension increase as she realized that the room was indeed empty except for the sniper and his current fashion accessory obsession, the cracked rad mask. The gruesomely broken visage was propped up on the workshop table in front of Sogeking, who seemed to be alternately caressing the mask and working on one of the gang's radios.
"I didn't want to be brave, I just wanted to be stronger for my friends!"
"I know I asked you for help, but you have to go back!"
"I'm not that weak! I c-can too help them!"
"Let me out!"
Robin watched in amazement as the rad mask jumped and fell off of the table with a loud clatter. A very morbid and horrifying thought came to her mind instinctively, but she shoved it away as nonsensical. Closing her cone and withdrawing her branch, Robin decided that she would observe the sniper further before drawing conclusions.
And then everything was fucked ass over backwards as the last she saw of Sogeking was a pair of broken wings tumbling down the escarpment with a loud, despairing wail that broke the searingly blue sky.
[~~~]
A dryad. How do you explain a dryad to some bumpkin who ain't ever seen one? I'mma give it ma best shot, but I ain't much of an expert.
Dryads are the plant people. Seems like some of the people who managed to survive the bombs shitting radioactive bricks on them began to taken on the characteristics of the plants nearest by. How? Whaddya mean how? "What characteristics?" Well, lemme see - the need to photosynthesize every so often, for one. Leaves, bark, ability to regenerate like a plant - yeah, pretty much all that stuff.
Right, just so you know, plant people are as diverse as they come and they're basically a whole new species with about 7 million new races. The dryads can be male or female, asexual to hermaphrodite and no-one knows for sure if they can make babies with humans, or even if they make babies at all. Most of the dryads alive came from the End of All. If there are new ones, they sure as hell didn't tell anyone.
Oh, right. They're morbid as all fuck. Probably because they eat from dirt most of the time and we all know dirt is just a short way of saying "dead, inert, rotted turds."
[~~~]
Anyhow, Robin's a coastal redwood dryad. She used to live somewhere west of the Rockies in the former state of Cali-for-ni-a; a community of hippies in redwood trees communing together. She was only a girl when the shit hit the fan - her parents were long dead by the End of All. She lived in the blown-out house of her aunt until she could stop screaming as her skin hardened, her hair became a rustling mass and her toes began to seek well-composted soil. About the only thought that went through her head during those times was "Why?" Why did she change? Why did the world governments encourage these wars? Why weren't her parents here?
Then, her groping hands found The Book.
If ya ain't noticed by now, Robin's a real smart girl. She'd done taught herself to read before shit flew south, so she used The Book to help her through the pain a bit. Soon, she was all wrapped up in the intrigues and assassinations and trades of lives that was the wreckage of hustory.
So, after a decade where she mastered her new form and re-learned how to walk with roots for toenails, hold things, speak, and eat with her mouth, Robin went in search of hustory with the ruthlessness of a Steel and the morals of a raider. The more she uncovered, the more she needed to know - unfortunately, she wasn't the only one learning. Somehow the Brotherhood of Steel learned that she could read the old language.
That made her dangerous. Her curiosity needed to be reined in before she stumbled onto the Truth.
The Brotherhood managed to follow her home after one of her hustory raids, then they flash-fried that enclave like ants under glass in the sun. Robin only lived because a huge ass redwood tree fell down on her in such a way that she was sheltered from the horror.
But she still hears her dryad, ex-hippie friends screaming and burning some nights; she smells the charring of her precious hustory notes.
When she finally crawled out and saw the destruction the Steel had wreaked, the tree that had fallen on her, one of her favorites, was white with cold ash. She screamed and cried to the heartless sky for almost a week, then she made her way out of the seared grove and into the desert of Chihuahua looking for an answer in a long-lost monument to the past - well before the End of All.
After running with a group of raiders that made the Vault-suits look normal and a near-death experience at the hands of the raiding captain, all she learned was the towering disappointment of finding out that the monument meant fuck-diddly to her.
Only by chance, as a stowaway on their truck, did she finally find her answer; Luffy and the others, who she came to love more than hustory.
[~~~]
Franky was a real android - he wasn't born, he was made by the greatest engineer/mechanic team since the End of All, Tom the Don and his woman, Heart.
Tom the Don was one of the few half-muties around in those days - not too sure if he was turned by radiation or if his mother had a black hole for a pussy, cuz Tom was a big man. Anyway, he and Heart, a full mutie, had trouble getting kids after their first and only one, so they decided to make their own kids - Iceburg and Franky.
Iceburg was first. He's a'ight, but the man's got no emotions - see how they figured out what ta name him? He runs the mech city of Last Vegas. Franky, on the other hand, has too many emotions and the guy ain't shy about showing them - he'll cry one sec and punch you in the gut the next. Mood swings like a bitch.
He also has a disturbing obsession with adding explosive weapons to any and everything - himself included.
Now Tom was special - he scavenged and rebuilt the Oro Jackson, the mother truck of the most kick-ass raider ever, simultaneously proving that he knew how to read old plans and had a ton of them squirreled away somewhere. So, of course, the Brotherhood of Steel couldn't leave him well alone. After bringing Franky and Iceburg in on some trumped up story, they told Tom that the only way he could stop them from melting his sons down as scrap metal was to build a railroad and a train that could cross the Waste between Last Vegas and Steel headquarters. They even managed to sound convincing, but only after he'd been stopped just short of tearing the Last Vegas base off its foundation.
For the record, casualties were not minimal.
So the whole family gets together and creates the longest ass railroad line since probably the 1800's. Then, in typical fashion, as soon as the line is done and proven to work, those bastards in steel double-cross the Don and execute him for building the Oro Jackson. The half-breed's death seemed to have fried a couple of Franky's synapses, cuz the idiot went and tried to stop the train during its first run. He stood there, body open, ready to catch the huge electric engine full in the stomach. He screamed and raved and vowed to disband the Brotherhood with his teeth if he needed to, just as the train slammed...
...The next thing he knows, he's in the back of a busted small-liner truck with a long-nosed kid crying in the dark. As he sits listening to the kid, he slowly realizes that it was the sort of crying he did the day Tom died.
Franky figured the first step to revenge might be to help this kid. Now, in return, Luffy's gang helps him.
[~~~]
Brook Bones is indisputably a ghoul - the man was already old when the End of All came, and he just kept getting older.
Ok, technically speaking he didn't live eternally. He was a first lieutenant in New Mexico's rogue army and his whole company, save his captain, died one by one from radiation poisoning shortly after the nukes ended everything - but that didn't actually keep him in the ground. See, unlike his captain, who was shipped home when he came down with the most fucking obscure and lethal case of ebola on the planet, or his company, of which he'd buried each and every last man, Brook died with his eyes to the sky. Just keeled over in the middle of strumming his faithful guitarro after he sank his ceremonial sword in his belly. He'd heard of some of the stories out of the east coast - he wanted to make damned certain that when he died, he stayed dead. Vampirism just did not appeal to him. Something about glowing while shitting at night pissed him off.
As you can imagine, when he opened his eyes to the same, grim tableau a year later, it took him a long while to stop screaming.
About 50 years later, when he'd had a lot of practice at being completely batshit insane, bored and unfailingly undead despite salt water, starvation, stakes in the sternum, garlic, scorpion stings - you know, all the shit that can normally kill ya - he decided to try rationality for a while and headed out further west. After about a year wandering on the road, he came to Ghoul City - the dwelling place of nearly every single ghoul on the West Coast. No sooner had he gotten used to the smell...
[~~~]
Look, really, I don't know nor do I give a flying fuck about how a skeleton can smell or hear or scream or anything. I tell all that shit to sod off when fucking dead people start moving, period. Honestly...
[~~~]
Anyway, Brook basically just got to the city and he made the big mistake of offending one of the Four Horsemen - Moria the Gecko, the zombie who lorded over the city. The guy pretty much hounded him all day and night for five years, riding his coattails like a dick in a chick until Brook skipped town for a bit to let the freak cool down.
Only to get mowed down by Nami, Sogeking, and Doc Chop, who were cruisin' on Franky's latest invention, the Automo-tricycle - please, don't ask me.
Well, the accident obviously doesn't kill Brook, so he gets dragged back to the mother truck for introductions and 'observation,' if you can trust Doc Chop's version of it. Luffy almost immediately asks him to join the gang and, shock of shocks, Brook disses him. Says thanks, but no thanks, amigo, unless you can get rid of Moria.
No, my friend, you ain't hearin' it wrong. That ghoul, who obviously retained the balls of a frigging water buffalo, challenged D. Luffy to make him join the gang.
And Moria? You've seen what little's left of Ghoul City, and you know who Brook rolls with. 'Nuff said.
[~~~]