Information

Rust has a minion!

Cross the Masq

Rust
Legacy Name: Schematic

The

Steamwork Feli
Owner:

vixen

Age: 5 years, 2 months, 4 weeks

Born: January 21st, 2019

Adopted: 5 years, 2 months, 4 weeks ago

Adopted: January 21st, 2019

Statistics

Level: 1
Strength: 10
Defense: 10
Speed: 10
Health: 10
HP: 10/10
Intelligence: 0
Books Read: 0
Food Eaten: 0
Job: Unemployed

SCHEMATIC
She clamps a hand down on the bleeding wound in her side, feeling remotely that this is not her hand but the hand of the machine which she pilots, and that she is a small, vulnerable presence within the machine's skull. The machine rises to its feet over many long, laborious moments, after many long labored breaths, and begins walking forward, its legs expanding and contracting, flashfire signals of electricity thrown down from her throne in the skull to tell the knees when to bend and when to open, but the machine is not operating at full capacity, it is dragging itself forward, crippled and broken, and it has no destination and so it has no reason to operate at full speed.

She could approach one of these dark houses, pound on its walls or kick through with her great mechanical strength, but there is some part of her that knows to do so would mean a slow, ignominious death on the couch of some reticent stranger. She could keep walking up the street, but she doesn't know what lays around the curve, what new landscape of shadow-dashing knife-throwers she might find beyond the nearest fire hydrant or streetlight or corner house or cul-de-sac.

She looks back, or rather turns the head of her machine to look back, in search of the knife she plucked from her side and threw away. Already it is gone, dissolved into a smoke-serpent impression in the sidewalk behind her, and thus it has betrayed her. It sank into her flesh and tasted her blood- one would think at the very least it would grant her a favor in return.

The machine opens its mouth to the sky and emits a grating, rusted sound, a howling of metal, a laugh and a scream, and it lets its hand down from its wound, and the blood that pours out is not red but black and thick like mud, and the operator in the machine's head takes her hand from the controls, because control is futile now and the machine is not a vehicle now, it is a prison within a prison, its own entity, its own creature locked inside a maze it is powerless to negotiate, and she can neither help it nor be helped by it, the howl it lets out hangs against the sky, echoing back at her, shaking the motionless trees and grating against the skin of her spine until the follicles of her hairs stand erect and she clamps her hands to her ears and lets out a scream of her own.

"STOP," she screams,
"STOP," she screams again, because the first scream was not enough.
"STOP"
- Excerpt from KittyHorrorShow's Haunted Cities Volume 3