>>5462556
SEX!
NOW!

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tgc >>1049354
“Excuse me, I got lost. Nancy is one of your friends? And she's not been answering the radio?”
“Ay? Nay, saur. My friends are my lads, my troop, them's not been answering. We set up around here during the war, watched for incursions. Your kind was very insistent, lass. Almost respected it.” The bug made a gesture with his leg as if to say 'I was this close', and showed her his weird gun. “This is Nancy, see? Never seen a farshooter before?”
“Not a bug one.” She didn't dare try touching it: The 'gun' was waving it's snout/cannon in her direction aggressively. “Not outside books, anyways. How do you know there's saurians at the village if you've never been there? Are they herreras like me?”
“Because they visit me! And nah. They're… aqua, aquee…” He shrugged. “Something like that.” He said it like 'Sumetin'
“You don't just shoot them too, do you?”
“And why would I?”
“You just shot me.”
“Well look at yourself. Wearing some beastie's hide, and that on your back. Don't think I don't recognize saur army gear when I see it, aha.”

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tgc >>1049535 >>1049522
"It's complicated. When did this village drop contact?"
"Last visit was..." The old bug looked at the jars. "The week before this heat started. You heading there, lady?"
"No. I have things to do."
"Reckon it takes a good reason to keep marching on in this heat."
"It's complicated." She repeated. "Can I stay here until tomorrow?"
"You know how to play poker?"

--
The next day, Kicker woke up not overheated for the first time in weeks. At first sight she'd thought the bug's hideout was just crudely dug stone, but now she looked at the ceiling and wondered if all the little carved patterns on the ceiling somehow helped keep the place cool.
The bug was on the other side of the room; For all his acting like he was A-Okay with her he had never let her out of his sight nor the guns out of his reach. Nor had the guns themselves allowed her to be too close to them, or too far from their aim.
"Rest well?"
"Best I've had in a while." She tried stretching, but flinched when her wounded claw ached again. The inflammation was going down... but she was living rough, barely eating, and had used it to hold the bug in place. It'd take more than just a few days to heal a near-fracture.
"You're welcome. What happened?"
"Thanks. It was black scarabs." She massaged her wrist. The bug had given her wraps to bandage the gunshot wound on her hand, but it still hurt too. "They were in a panic at night."
"Saurs call them rousebugs. Frisky fuckers. Barely worth eating, too- cook them and they'll poison you."
"Ah. Can I..."
"You want more of my food and water to travel."
"I'm sorry."
"Do me a favor in return: If you run into the village tell them I can only go alone for so long."
"Sure."
And that was it. She departed with one jar each of food and water.
She trotted until the night ended, and buried herself in the sand as the rimlights relit and burned with scornful heat.

--

The next two days were uneventful: She woke up, crawled up from under the sand, and marched on. The root and mountain behind her gave her a reliable compass to guide herself, to march counterrootways deeper into bug territory. Every afternoon she drank and ate just enough to not pass out during the day, and every afternoon she woke up convinced her wounds would be infected and this'd be it.

--
On the third day, right as the rimlights lit, Kicker saw another stone outcrop. She took the detour, and it didn't take her long to find the door.
This one, like the sharpshooter's, had some symbol carved on it.
Well.
Nobody had shot her on the way here.
That was a good start, wasn't it?

>>5465533
nancy is cute wonder who will die first from old age

dont forget to archive the earlier thread

>>5469042
Archive how? It's already in moe

>>5469624
Oh, suptg, done.

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tgc >>1049692
"Hello?" She knocked the door and called. Nobody replied, so she shouted- the hideout proper was probably up a fairly long flight of stairs. "Hello! Anyone here!"
Nobody replied. A light breeze picked up, hitting her with hot air.

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tgc >>1049899
“Hello!” She called again, pressing her palm to the wood. “I'm going in!”
Nobody replied as she climbed up, or when she called out again near the top. The entrance proper was covered by a small curtain, and she steeled herself for what she'd see when she swatted it aside.
It wasn't in vain. The sharpshooter had been right.
A cicada laid dead for days or weeks, on a mattress in the corner of the room.

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tgc >>1049921 >>1050011
Kicker scanned the room just in case, and had a scare when she saw a small bug hanging from the wall. But nothing happened, and it wasn't like any bug-gun she'd ever seen.

Still, she kept it on the corner of her eye as she approached the corpse just in case. The check was quick and fruitless: It laid relaxed on the mattress, with no wound and barely any fluid around it, just some… spit? Bile? Around the mandibles. Maybe it had died on its sleep, at ease. There was a cold comfort.

Next she checked the radio. The box itself was an ancient imported model from the outer rims of the leaf, far away from bug or saur lands- she guessed it was bought during the war. But the controls were legible enough, and maybe it had a builtin speaker? She poked at the controls, noting the bug on the wall was wired to the radio.

The radio turned on. And the bug hung on the wall opened its mandibles, and began… buzzing static.

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tgc >>1050064
Kicker looked back at the corpse, had it been poisoned? She was no doctor. Everything was at question.

She sighed and turned back to the radio… alright, the bug on the wall was the speaker, was it the mic too? With that in mind she scanned through the frequencies, dronning out roger rogers to the bug.

There was another burst of static, and the sharpshooter's voice blared out of the speaker-bug deafeningly loud. “Lady! Lady. Is that you?”

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tgc >>1050119 >>1050142 >>1049354
“I think I found one of your friends.” She tried to keep a sensitive tone. “It's not good news.”
He was silent for a moment. “Guessed so. I know her radio's buzz. She dead?”
“Yes. I'm sorry.”
“She die well?”
“Looks like she was asleep. I can't tell if it was poison or the heat or age.”
“No signs of fighting?”
“No.”
He was silent again. “There's worse deaths than sleeping, for sure.”
Kicker didn't answer.
“Told that fool her lookout didn't cool too good a million times, that we'd swap with her. But she said she had the place right how she liked it…” He trailed off muttering to himself briefly. “But we always knew we'd die in this damn war. Just didn't expect it to be from age or a freak heat.”
Kicker spoke as delicately as she could. “Mister, the war's been over for over a hundred years. You beat us. We had to sign your treaties.”
“Now you may even believe that, miss, but I was there. I saw you herreras rain mortar and fight with three limbs missing, and felt your tyrs shake the earth…” He trailed off again. “Your kind's not quitters, for good or ill.”

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tgc >>1050180
Could she say he was wrong? She was infiltrating bug territory. Crazy or not, he'd been right about everything so far.
“Alright. Are you going to need her food?”
“I can kill myself trying to get it. Take all you can carry.”
“Thanks. Do you want me to do anything with the body?”
“The only thing one can do for the dead, miss.”

---

An hour later, Kicker stood over the grave. She'd found a shovel and, in doing so, the cicada's guns- another pistol and rifle, hiding behind the shovel. They'd looked up to her quietly, not aiming their snout-cannonsat her but not letting them quite relax while she towered above them.

She looked curiously, and backed off when they didn't do anything.

The sand made it easy to dig, and she wrapped the cicada in her mattress and carried her, carefully, down the stairs. Her wounds and exhaustion made digging take longer than it should have and now she stood over the grave, with her back to the root and Mountain. She'd have to rush back in to sleep off the day's heat.

“Why do I feel guilty?” She asked aloud. “I didn't do this.”

The corpse, obviously, didn't answer.

The guns stood on the hideout's stairway, looking at the grave. Their snout cannons were relaxed now. They'd starve, if she left them here.

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tgc >>1050292 >>1050326 >>1050336
Was there something touching her leg? Kicker looked down with a start, reaching for a gun she wasn't wearing, but there was nothing.
“And now I'm imagining things.” She said.
The gun bugs were still on the doorway.
“Come here.” She crouched. “I can take care of you.”
They stepped back.
“You'll die if you stay.”
The rifle hopped forward, but instead of walking to her it skirted a wide circle around and dug a little on the grave, then curled and laid in the hole.

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tgc >>1050477 >>1050485 >>1050326
“You're more clever than I thought, aren't you?” Kicker asked. “More than just animals.”
The rifle didn't answer. The pistol, still on the doorway, watched them silently.
“You don't have to lay and die here.”
A small breeze. The rimlights, burning around them. The desert with its hollow silence continued to not-happen around them.
“Would she want you to do this?”
The rifle opened a single eye and kicked sand at her with its hindleg. It then closed its eye again, and that was that.
“Very well.” She stood back up and stretched her back, hoping the rifle would take that little moment to reconsider. But it didn't, and Kicker returned inside. It wasn't as cold as the sharpshooter's, but it was enough for her to sleep through the day's heat.

---

Kicker woke up exhausted, feeling like she'd trashed too much in her sleep. While she stretched, she noticed the pistol gun bug was watching her from the doorway. She kept up the eye contact, curious as to what it expected. It just looked at her, from a safe distance.

But it was easy enough to understand when it perked up at her opening a food jar, and she threw her a chunk of some vegetable she didn't recognize. It tore it to little bits with it's legs, then vacuumed the bits up it's canon snout.

How would she fire it, if things came to that? Kicker tried having a closer look but it backed off away from her, keeping an eye on her claws. She couldn't blame it; she kept them even sharper than army regulation required.

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tgc >>1050581 >>1050599 >>1050655 >>1050667
“Alright, there's time.” Kicker took back her claw.

The next while was spent stashing as much food and water as she could in the turtle shell, as well as ammunition for the pistol- the magazines were neon green, made of something semihard that felt organic.

---

On the way out, she checked on the rifle. It was where she'd left it, it's breath labored after being spending so long under the rimlights.

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tg >>1050830 >>1050730 >>1050847
Kicker crouched and gave it a small morsel. It didn't move to eat, but the pistol bug ran up to it and tore the meat into small bits it fed to the rifle slowly.

“She must've been something for you to do this.” Kicker said softly. “I have to go. I can't stay here to take care of you.”

The rifle seemed to nod, slowly. Or maybe it was just chewing what the pistol fed it. She couldn't tell.

"I know what it's like. You just need to give yourself time to get better."

it kicked sand at her again, much more weakly than before.

The pistol bug nuzzled the rifle before they departed, and that was that.

The desert was like a crystal ball, silent and hollow, where nothingness relentlessly crushed everything. Kicker marched on, and the bug choose to stay in it.

---

At first the pistol had chosen to cling to the tip of her tail, but by the time she stopped before morning it had conceded so far as to climb up to hide from the sun under her rag tunics.

She prepared their rations, and the pistol bug sat on its haunches looking back in the direction they'd come from.

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tg >>1051002 >>1051010
“You think it'll chase after us?”

The pistol moved it's antennae in quick, complex motions, and when Kicker stared at it blankly it shook its head. Only, for it, shaking its head meant swinging it's whole body left and right.

“But you hope it does.” It didn't answer. She wanted to comfort it, but it still wasn't at ease near her claws. “You were with the cicada since the war, weren't you?” The pistol nodded. “Do bugs usually reach this age?”

The pistol shook its head again, and now she was out of pleasantries to say.

“Someone you knew for just a short while is already bad.” She bunched her claws together into a tight little knot. Should she mention her friends? Just being with a bug was stretching the leeway given by her orders. “And more time only makes it worse. But you… get used to it. The hurt doesn't go, but you wrap it in rituals so it's close at heart without tearing it apart.”

Just thinking about the mater brought memories back to surface, thoughts of her team and older things still, and for the first time in days (Weeks? She'd lost track of time.) the thought was too much: For a moment she could barely keep composure, worry and unknowing grief flooding her. Were they even alive? She had no way of knowing.

But she gathered herself, and put on a stiff upper lip.

“Come.” She turned around. “I need to know how much to ration you.”

---

The next several days were uneventful: They slept through the day and marched at night. The pistol bug didn't exactly become her buddy, but it grew to trust her enough that it climbed to her back and even her shoulder at times. Most days, the pistol would spend a while looking back to the way they'd come before eating.

On the eve of the second day, she saw another stone outcrop in the distance and headed to it. On the third the pistol bug saw something ahead that alerted it. It climbed up her head, keeping its eyes on the outcrop.

“What is it.” She asked, stopping and squinting her eyes. Figures the living gun would have better sight; The only thing she saw was the wispy, wavering image of the outcrop… even at night it was starting to be too hot. She didn't know what she'd do about that; she didn't know there was anything anyone could do. “I can't…”

The pistol jumped to her arm and made a series of gestures with its antennae, which she couldn't begin to grasp.

tgc >>1051481
“Alright.” She set it down on the floor and sat down; They were close enough to daybreak anyhow. “Is it dangerous? Or hostile?”
It didn't answer.
“You don't know.”
It nodded.
“But it's alive, isn't it? Not just rocks?” It nodded. “Is it a person? Or an animal?”
Curiously enough, it made to answer but ended up not doing so.

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tgc >>1051801
“You don't want to tell me?” She asked. The gun didn't reply. “You can't?”

It nodded.

“Fine. Keep an eye on it, and warn me if it comes our way.”

They were still much too far from the outcrop, so Kicker dug a hole in the sand as fast as she could. By the time she was done the rimlights were beginning to burn.

---

Horizons are a deceptive thing that may easily fool you. Why, the mountains looked like they were just a short ways away, yet they were several weeks behind her now even in ideal running conditions. The root, stretching up and down beyond her sight behind the mountains, looked like Kicker could just as easily grab it in her claw and twist it.

The day after the bug spotted whatever it was was uneventful, and the next day. The pistol was perched on her head the whole, obviously concerned but unable to communicate why with just yes and no.

The third day she saw it: A large black shape perched on the outcrop, so she waved her arms so anyone, black thing or not, could see her. It took her the rest of the night to reach the outcrop, and entered its shadow as day broke.

The black thing was back on top, sniffing the air and ignoring her. The pistol was shaking now, standing on her shoulder with its cannon aimed straight at the creature, a mix of clicks and slurping noises coming out of it.

New thread >>5506172