#apocalyptia

[impgarden]

You don't understand, my life depends on making it work with what I got.

[idiotdrawsbaddrawingsblog]

tried drawing marian from apocalyptia

[impgarden]

this post inspired me a while back

BWAAAAHHHHH wake the fuck up everyone on earth

[diamondnokouzai]

we as a society need to start making post apocalyptia interesting again by reminding the world of 'post apocalyptic scenarios taking place before 1950'

[mayhamster]

Presenting a fan character for @newapocalyptia 's New Apocalyptia world-building, writing, theoretical TV show, thing. (Go check it out, it's really good). All images made in https://www.heroforge.com/

This is Jane "Giant Slayer" King, also known as Giant Jane, a joke about her short height. She/Her, Transfem, Bisexual. The apocalypse trope she stems from is Godzilla/Pacific Rim - basically giant monster apocalypse. She was very young, roughly 4 years old, when the apocalypses hit. Her parents were rich paranoid doomsday preppers, and when the apocalypses arrived the three of them trooped into the bunker they'd had built. They stayed there for the next 12 years, with no idea what the surface was like. Slowly, the isolation began taking a toll on them all. Eventually, her parents grew violent with each other, and she took the bag she'd packed with food and bottled and left into the wasteland. A few years later, she gained a small modicum of fame after using an anti-aircraft gun at an old beat-up military base to shoot down a gigantic floating jellyfish monster that turned everything it touched to stone. She took the barbs and fashioned them into a sword, which retained their petrification properties. Since then, she went on to become a full blown monster hunter. Alongside her trusty sword, which she mostly uses against human/humanoid opponents, and a dart gun with darts coated in toxic blood from a mutated monster, she has a vast inventory of more specialize weaponry (wanting to avoid turning monsters into stone because then she couldn't salvage them) mostly made out of the parts of the various monsters she kills. She also kept a small journal on the different weaknesses and abilities of the monsters she encountered. With the help of the Den of Snakes she made photocopies and began selling them, alongside her signature hair dye. She claims the dye is made from the blood of slain monsters, but this has never been verified and is generally regarded with mild skepticism. She lives and sells out of the military base where she first brought down the jellyfish (The corpse is still there, alongside statues of the idiots who wanted to see if it still petrified things), but she has extensively renovated it.

Jane is a hardcore thrillseeker/ drenaline junkie. She fights the monsters because she enjoys it, and will sometimes begin to complain or grow despondent when she goes too long without word of a monster. She's fairly humble, rarely using her reputation for anything other than marketing her book and her hair dye (The latter bearing her winking face on each bottle). The isolation of her formative years has made her very socially awkward. Additionally, she hates being alone for more than a day or so, and whenever she goes for too long without human contact she travels to the nearest village and just spends time, drinking, carousing, flirting, and such. She has had quite a few lovers, but none ever amounted to anything more than one night stands.

Relationships with the rest of the cast! (Unofficial, of course)

Marian - Normal, healthy respect. Totally normal. No crushes here. 0%, none, not at all, you-can't-prove-it levels of attraction felt on Jane's part.

Sal - Knows him by reputation. She sent him packing when he came by asking for some "samples" of some monsters she killed.

The Owl - Not very familiar. Spoke to him in passing at the Den of Snakes.

Sunrise - Jane helps her whenever asked. Has more than once shown up on Sunrise's doorstep with injuries from fighting a creature.

Cannibal Jack - Friendly but extremely cautious.

Glipix - Jane brought down an alien spacecraft under the impression that it was a monster and she and Glipix got into an argument that escalated into a standoff, before Sunrise intervened.

Percy Adder - On fairly good terms. She convinced him to hook her home base up to their power supply by saying she was helping protect people, and by photocopying and selling her book, she'd help people protect themselves.

Bunny and Tucker - They've spoken on occasion, comparing Bunny and Tuckers descriptions of demons to the monsters and samples Jane had hunted/collected. Jane doesn't necessarily believe in demons, but she also doesn't disbelieve. She maintains an attitude of "Who can tell?"

Killjoy and Nashville - On good terms. She's helped Killjoy with various things, usually either attempting to kill Sal or killing monsters that wandered near the Shark Mutants home.

LOTUS - She sometimes seeks out and participates in it's deranged competitions. She never really takes it seriously, and usually manages to make it out relatively unscathed.

(Any unmentioned characters are those she doesn't know) (Sorry for the long post, but thank you for reading to the end :D)

[dagna]

how you kids handlin' post-apocalyptia today?

[strangelittlestories]

The angel has a secondary function. Every time a universe ends, the whole mess of spirit, starlight, matter and miscellaneous is ground down like the souls are. The divine demolitioner then strains the materials through its own wings, separating all of existence into helpful vats of primordial essence via striation. Some souls are reformed for new life, others used as raw materials for the next existence. Thus does soul become spiritual cement; holy bonds to marry the new laws of reality together.

The demon - thanks to its previous occupation - knows this is coming. But it is largely busy with its vocation as chronicler to the masses.

It has refined its artform. In order to make a compelling narrative, the demon decided to leave many details out of the main body of its tablets. But, for completeness’ sake, they include exhaustive footnotes scrawled in their own lifeblood. Thanks to the properties of this special ink, they are invisible unless you happen to examine the life in question and find you have further questions (as is true of demons generally).

Unfortunately for the demon, when the next reality is ready to be created, the heavenly host return to the storage units in the shadow of existence.

The demon is carted away - it too will be recycled.

The tablets however, whether due to angelic error or divine ineffability, are taken wholesale and used as building blocks. They are the foundation of a new creation; a blueprint written in long-ended tales. Extinction and genesis intertwined.

And, because these bricks are coated still in the demon’s bloody annotations, they also contain the seed for a new diablerie. (The devil truly was in the details.)

Barring some minor alterations and iterations, this process will repeat for this existence and the next and the next and the next. And buried in the DNA of each new universe, the story of every one that came before it.

This tells us several things:

That existence is written in recursive cursive.

That every soul is a chimaera (and thus: all those people who claimed to be Cleopatra or Alexander the Great in a previous life are maybe not so far off the mark after all).

The universe is a library, but how you get your library card remains unclear.

Let me tell you how the world ends.

Let me tell you about souls and stories.

Let me tell you about a sad seraph and a smiling devil.

There is an angel in the firmament with a very sad job.

It is thought that souls are eternal. However, as spirit is a form of energy and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it is the job of one angel to grind the souls of the departed down to raw spirit slurry so they may be used again. This being knows the job is necessary. This being is an extension of divine will and *cannot* - by definition - hate its job. It knows this. And the fact that it *actively* knows it does not hate its job should tell you something.

This is the angel of history. It is a boot obliterating human souls forever.

Meanwhile. There is a demon in reality’s sub-basement who is very fulfilled.

This demon once had an emotion and an opinion and these two things combined are what catalysed and metastasised it into infernality. It felt grief. It thought that what happened to souls was sad. To deal with this sadness, it hid itself away in an old storage cellar nestled just this side of unreality. In this cellar it found leftover raw materials - scraps of cosmic clay. And on this clay, it carved the story of each life as its soul left its body, so that something at least would remain. 

These tablets are gorgeous - they are decorated with acid etchings made from a caustic non-substance designed to carve negative space between electrons. It is carved in a beautiful flowing script - the demon took calligraphy classes to get the curved font just right.

It decorated its hideout with these tablets and thus was the first hell constructed.

(Truly, the road to hell is paved with good indentations.)

[impgarden]

[chadfallout76podcast]

Niche and very specific seasonal Bluesky Starter Pack for those of us who just want to have a quiet day in post apocalyptia but are more likely to celebrate Thanksgiving with a house fire, front yard fist fight and someone drunk crying missing a shoe and sock.

[saturnsbabyboii]

💚Astro Observations my friend and I came up with while high💚 (Also Cause it’s 420)

💚I find that Moon signs don’t necessarily fit into their “descriptions” because it’s not who they are per se but rather what they desire when they’re feeling vulnerable and emotional. 

💚 For example, Capricorn Moons aren’t cold, distant and always practical, however, they do desire a more action based kind of support. Rumination and “talking about it” won’t cut it if they don’t have an action plan or something solid (or someone that they considered to be as such) to guide them. 

💚 Another example, Leo Moons aren’t attention seeking but rather they desire to feel seen and heard. They want someone that can understand what they have a hard time expressing, something very troubling for a Leo. They also find themselves able to be more open with people that are authentic about how they feel and their expression, be it verbal or artistic. 

💚 Despite people calling them flighty, Air placements are usually logical and based in reality. They may exaggerate or get too excited but they never pull shit out of vapor or believe it “just because”. Debating them is not for the weak. Not because they’re strongheaded (not always) but because they know what they’re talking about.

💚Earth placements are great liars, cause no one ever suspects them. A good liar is never known as such, hell they make a good living out of it. (Not calling people snakes or fake just that they don’t do something half assed, including the art of deception)

💚 Why couldn’t Cancers be called Lunarians or Lunars? No offense but who in the f thought it was a good idea to call the crab constellation Cancer? The amount of embarrassing cross over that happen means that we require to take action.

❣️Side bar but shout out to everyone that is going through or went through any form of cancer, whether it was you or a loved or anyone that you know. We love and support you, and your resilience is an inspiration and a testament to what’s important in life.❣️ ⠀

💚 The obsession that Aquarius placements have with cyberpunk/cyber core/Dystopian/Apocalyptia/Futuristic aesthetic is wild. They can’t wait until the world end so they can rock that fashion on the dumpster runway.

💚 I honestly associate cats with Virgos not Leos.

💚What’s with Mars in Fire signs/Fire houses (1st/5th/9th) and throwing things. It doesn’t matter if they’re excited, happy, angry or sad they just go ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) then (┛ಠ_���)┛彡┻━┻

💚 Although Scorpios go hard to defend themselves, Taurus would cut a bitch for their love ones. They don’t give a damn what you say about them but you’ll be getting more than what you bargained for when they start swinging out of nowhere after you bring up anyone they love. Especially when it comes to their animals and babies. 

💚 Out of all the Venus signs, I never heard someone talk about liking a Libra Venus. 

💚 Air Mars natives waiting for you to finish talking before they slaughter your ass is amazing to me

💚 Water signs are true foodies. Foodier than Earth signs even. Water in the 6th house especially can eat a whole cow, or tree if you’re vegan.   

💚 The power of the eyebrow raise that Fire Mercuries make when they know that you got the right one. 

💚 Because time is subjective I believe the 12th house can give us insight on our relationship with it. As a finite part of life, in the house final endings the sign over the house (and the placements as well) can help navigate it. 

💚 For example, Virgo in the 12th may catastrophize and worry about things that are out of their control, such as time, and spend so much of their energy trying to do so. Their growth and ascension into a higher state of mind comes in finding power in learning to separate what we can control and what we can’t, and letting life go as intended without much intervention.

💚 For me, the whole point of learning about astrology is to break your own cycle and to grow out of your birth chart rather than conform to it.

💚Libra placements get so tenacious with age. As they get older, they realize that being in the better graces of others is futile work.

That’s all. I think I might’ve had more but I can’t remember everything we talked about 😅. 

Byeee!

[terephin]

I like the idea that everyone calls Adder ’Snake Guy’ at least once. Except everyone has a different meaning for it.

Marian : Really just because of his assistant. Thinks the constant companionship would be nice.

Sal : Mocking, thinks his name is stupid.

Kent : ”Whatever you want it to mean babe~”, also thinks his name is stupid but flirting is more important.

Killjoy : He gave her a snake once, as payment to get Nashville to stop using Owl as a yo-yo. Don’t ask.

The Mad Hen : Fond annoyance, also because of his assistant. Becomes decidedly less fond if it comes within a kilometer of her chicks.

Owl : Sal refused to understand who he was talking about until he did.

Connor and Dee : Whiskey was lost in thought once, they said ”What, daydreaming about the snake guy?” at the exact same time.

Could go on, probably, but I don’t feel like it right now.

Shit, I think Whiskey and Adder need to actually get together because their dynamic becomes ‘ridiculous over the top supervillain and his long-suffering henchman’ except Adder doesn’t have an evil bone in his body and Whiskey just really wants him to sleep more than twice a week

[fiddles-ifs]

〔 DEMO (COMING SOON!) 〕 〔 CHARACTERS 〕〔 PLAYLIST 〕

Rated 18+ for violence and sexual content. Trigger warnings will be provided at the beginning of each chapter.

Twenty-seven years ago, the Giants woke up. Behemoth machines powered by AI machine learning, they destroyed much of the infrastructure of the world in a period known as The Fall. Humanity retreated to walled Cities -- first Kowloon, then others. And then Rider happened. A shining star in a half-formed mech, Rider beat back the Giants and became humanity's first and greatest hope. Then they died. And now there's you -- a carbon copy ten years later, built from a smattering of cells to kill the Giants and set the Cities free, an exact replica of the Rider the world knew and loved. You are one link in a chain of fallen soldiers. Cannon fodder, in smooth, pretty, porcelain white mechs. The white knights of the globe. They named you Fury. You're about to prove them right.

〔 FEATURES 〕

Customizable MC. Play as male, female, or non-binary; trans or cisgender; customizable pronouns.* Customize your appearance.

An angry clone. The anger keeps you alive, sure -- but what about the rest of you? Is your anger calm or explosive? Do you prefer to solve problems with violence or words? Do you meet problems head on, or work around them?

Who was Rider to you? Someone to look up to? A rival? A messiah?

Romance!! Or not!!!! Two romance options. Play as gay, straight, bisexual, or asexual; aro or alloromantic.

Get in the robot, Fury. Pilot your mech, DANIEL, and fight giant robots on the post-apocalyptic Great Plains. Exploit their weaknesses as rogue AI -- or just beat them into paste.

〔 ROMANCE OPTIONS 〕

Lane Black Kettle. [They/them] An Off-Gridder raised in surprisingly pleasant post-apocalyptia, Lane is in City 17 possibly illegally -- and definitely has a warrant out for their arrest. They can show you the nitty gritty underbelly of City 17, and a unique perspective on life outside the Walls. You just have to let each other in. Flavor of romance: The Outsider, enemies to lovers, snark as a love language.

Matthew "Mattie" Sorenson. [He/him] A computer genius whose obsession with the Giants tends to put people off, bug his overwhelming charisma and jovial nature reel them in again. Mattie wants to fix humanity's mistakes -- and you will help him. Flavor of romance: The Insider, competing egos, saving the world (and each other)

〔 OTHER DRAMATIS PERSONAE 〕

Luka Marik. [He/him] Your creator, the Alpha and Omega -- and a sad little man. Originally the creator of the mechs used to fight the Giants, Rider's death has left him with one purpose -- to bring them back to life.

Rider. [He/him or she/her] Begone, foul spirit, and let me not mourn you! Your genetic template, messianic savior of humanity, tragically killed in action ten years ago. Haunter of your narrative, very much against your will.

*Although many characters assume Fury is cis, the player will have several opportunities as the story progresses to transition -- including changing Fury's pronouns and aspects of their gender expression. Fury's transition will be a major plot point, if the player so chooses.

〔 TAGS + LINKS 〕

[FITM ASKS] [LANE] | [MATTIE] | [MARIK] [DISCORD]

[newapocalyptia]

How do you name your characters? All your names ooz character and charm and perfectly fit the vibe of both the character and the setting and I have to know how you do it

oh, fun question! my general naming philosophy for apocalyptia character is "make everyone sound like the kind of alias a 14 year old trying to come up with a cool name would end up with", but it depends on the character!

Misery Marian is a Mad Max parody. The Mad Hen's central character concept is "vaccines can be incubated in chicken eggs, what would someone who is using that to make medicine after the apocalypse be called". Whiskey Sour sounds edgy but a little silly, and "Rye" is a pun. I thought a chef with Cannibal in their name was funny, so I picked a common name that sounded punchy for Cannibal Jack. Mutiny, Riot, and Cricket are all things kids would think are cool to pick as names. "Nashville" sounds like "gnashing" but it's also a stupid thing to name somebody so she's the goofier sister, while "Killjoy" just sounded badass.

[honourablejester]

Some of my favourite ghoul NPCs in Fallout:

My sister and I are replaying New Vegas lately, and we recently did the Come Fly With Me sidequest again, and since I’m talking about Fallout recently and this quest reminded me how much I fucking love Jason Bright and his merry band of lunatics, I figured I’d talk about some of my favourite ghoul characters in the games I’ve played (3, 4, New Vegas). Specifically non-companion characters, no offense to Raoul. I just like some of the ghouls you just run into.

First off, since we’ve already mentioned him, Jason Bright is such a nutjob, and he is the focal point for such a fantastic, batshit quest that you have to adore him. Yes, he’s a cult leader, and yes, he’s leading the ghouls under him possibly to their deaths based on ‘visions’, and yes, he is using Chris’ delusions to help get them there (and also sends us, the player, into a very annoying set of negotiations), but. How can you not adore the idea of a non-feral glowing one cult leader who is leading his flock into space, and manages to find actual functioning rocket ships to manage it? (Well, functional if you help out and don’t sabotage them, anyway). Also, given that Atom may genuinely be an actual god in this universe, I’m not going to fully rule out the visions, especially since he had a sane enough grasp of them to realise that he was seeing somewhere so irradiated that Chris wouldn’t have survived it. But just for the quest alone, just for the sight of those rocket ships taking off and presumably baffling and/or scaring the pants off half the Mojave, I just love this guy.

Second, one of the best characters in any of the games full stop, and also in one of the best and most batshit sidequests full stop, we have Desmond Lockhart from Fallout 3: Point Lookout. Because he’s a ghoulified James Bond fighting a maniacal brain in a jar supervillain in a rivalry that has been going on since the Great War. That’s just. You cannot beat that. He’s foulmouthed and bitchy and ungrateful and an arse, and he’s fantastic. I love that the mansion you find him in is his enemy’s ancestral home, the cheek on this bitchy ghoul man. I love him. He’s just spectacular.

Third, to round out our ‘best batshit sidequests focused around ghouls’, we have Kent Connolly from Fallout 4, because who wants to play a hammy 40s-style pulpy comic book hero in post-apocalyptia today? You? Excellent! The Silver Shroud is such a fun and fantastic questline, and I also just deeply adore and wish to protect Kent. He’s so sweet and sad and gently pathetic, and he’s not remotely able for the wasteland, and he’s trying to help. A pre-war ghoul clinging to the old radio shows he used to love when the world was less overtly hellish to try and help him cope, and not doing so well, and wanting to bring that hope to other people by resurrecting an old-world hero. He’s very sad and badly adapted, but he’s very sweet, and we always wait to take his quest until we have the rifle skill levelled enough to get him out of his little situation at the end of the quest alive. Because Kent is not allowed to die.

Fourth, on a continued theme of ghouls too nice for this world and who I will cheerfully murder people to protect, we have Gob from Fallout 3. Because everybody’s fucking mean to him, including the game itself, and somebody needs to fix it. GIVE ME A QUEST TO FREE THIS POOR MAN, YOU STUPID GAME. I mean, yes, we always murder Moriarty to help him anyway, which does solve the problem, but I HATE the fact that the game lets you tell his mother he’s a slave, and then doesn’t let you fix it. You just crushed her hopes for nothing, and even if you do get him free anyway later, with no quest to do so, you can’t tell her that. I want to stab FO3 so much for that. Why do you put a poor abused, incredibly nice slave man in front of me and then not let me free him? THERE SHOULD BE A GOB QUEST. If only so I don’t accidently crush poor Carol’s spirits with no hope of then telling her better news later. Because I am murdering Moriarty for the man, I’m not going to leave him enslaved. I don’t do game mods, but if there is one mod I want for 3, it’s that one. Let me free him officially and then tell Carol about it.

Ahem. Anyway. Sorry about that. Moving on (never, I will never move on, I will hold a grudge on this forever, but howandever).

Fifth, and still on the theme of the saddest goddamn ghouls in the wasteland, there is Arlen Glass from Fallout 4. Because he broke my fucking heart and I will never get over it. Giving him that tape from his family had me sobbing. A sweet gentle toymaker and family man who was never home because of work, who talked to his wife and daughter primarily over the phone, and who was still at work when the bombs dropped and never made it home to see them at the end. Who ghoulified, and was left with that grief and regret for the next 200 years. He ripped my heart fully out of my chest. Letting him hear his family’s voices again by retrieving that holotape was one of the most impactful things I’ve ever done in these games, and it was the one moment where I desperately wanted to refuse the quest reward. We fortified the Slog to hell and back to make sure Arlen was safe. Again, would die and kill for this man without a thought.

And then, in slightly less obsessive fashion, some honourable mentions:

Captain Zao, Fallout 4. Because there is something so quietly sad about his whole situation, trapped in a tiny vessel while his crew goes feral around him, keeping watch over the ruined country he helped destroy, wanting only to go home, and relying on enemies with extremely justified grudges to help him. No one won the Great War, and Zao is proof of it. We help him, every time. All he wants is to go home, after spending more than 200 years trapped wondering how much of it is left for him to find when he gets there. What the fuck would shooting him do, in the face of that? No one won the war. Let’s just let those it destroyed find what peace they can.

The Vault Tec Representative, Fallout 4. Because I just feel so sorry for the man. You never even learn his name. He was left out to die by his company, and he knows it, and after 200 years ghoulifying and rotting, out you pop, fresh as a fucking daisy from the vault he put you in, just to rub it fucking home. It’s not the Sole Survivor’s fault, but you definitely can’t blame him for being sore.

And finally, Daisy, from Fallout 4. I want to mention her because I do love her, that of all the quests you pick up from people in Goodneighbour, hers is to try and clear out the Library, because she remembers it from when she was a girl and she’d like to see it at least not overrun, if not quite restored. I love a nice bookworm, tough enough to survive Goodneighbour, and to put her caps into trying to bring a little civilisation back to the wasteland.

But Daisy also highlights a bit … There aren’t too many important female ghouls? Ones with cool quests around them. There are quite a few scattered around the various games, sure, but not too many you can really interact with like the boys above. There are a few memorable ladies around, like Keely from New Vegas, the tough as nails scientist who survives Vault 22 in New Vegas, Carol and her partner in Fallout 3, and then Beatrix Russell, also in Vegas, who has a tiny but extremely memorable part in the ‘find hookers for the casino in Freeside’ quest, just for being a (potential) ghoul cowboy dominatrix who likes to have a good time and believes that ‘good times’ are a full-contact sport. Like. She’s pretty damn memorable.

But there is, at least in the three games I’ve played, a bit of a dearth of full-questline-attached, batshit-shenanigans-ahead lady ghouls, and that’s another thing I could wish changed. Heh.

But yeah. Ghouls are some of the best characters in these games, and they definitely have some of the best quests attached to them too. And a lot of them will break your heart as well. Heh.

I do love this universe. A lot.

[absolutely-esme]

This is beautiful.

I think it was before I started posting story concepts on tumblr but I had an old concept called ‘apocalyptia’ which was a dark comedy about a world where every apocalypse movie premise happened simultaneously

[nerdypuddincup]

He wiped the blood from his face as he rose up from his knees. His eyes sunken into his scarred and radiated skull. But they burned with a fire that only the combined trauma of 200 plus years could amass. As he rose, his bones audibly cracked and snapped into place. His mutation did have several draw backs, but he was a hard bastard to kill. So, there was that at the very least.

With a flick of his wrist, his specialty rounds shot out from his modified revolver/shotgun hybrid. The bullet tore through the ar and the machine that had previously put him down was sent crashing down as a bunch of scrap metal.

A collection of blood had pooled in his mouth, which he promptly spat out. The sound of his spurs clinked on the metal floor of the Vault as he repositioned himself. His gun held up at eye level.

“What is this? Who the hell are you?!” A voice asked the Ghoul. A voice that he knew all too well.It was a voice that he had longed to hear. A voice that would whisper sweet nothings as they made love the first time, a voice so tired and yet so sweet when it cooed to their newborn daughter, and a voice that cut like a dagger when he heard it say America would nuke itself.

The sound of her voice rang in his ears, almost made him stumble more than the Mr. Handy ever could. She was older now, a few more deep lines, and hair gray. But compared to himself, she was quite well put together. And out here, in post-apocalyptia one was so much changed than they once were.

“Answer me goddamnit!” Demanded the woman in the Vault Suit demanded. The woman who at one point, had been his wife. Lifetimes ago. An entirely different world, not this strange alien dssert that they had come to know. There were trees, there was drinking water, there was laughter. Now, it was a shriveled caricature of what it once was. Much like the Ghoul who held the woman he knew but did not know him at gunpoint. There were so many things that he wanted to say. He wanted to shout, to scream, to cuss, he also wanted to embrace her, kiss her, and kick her and kill her. He gritted his teeth, focusing. He had been dreaming for a very long time. And he would not squander the opportunity now. He was a professional after all. He had rehearsed the line time and time again. Finally, the bounty hunter spoke. It was a voice etched with indignation that ran deeper than the lines on the woman’s face.

“I am the righteous hand of God.” He said, pulling back the hammer of his gun. “And I am the Devil that you forgot.” His eyes narrowed. “I told you one day that I’d be back, and Hell’d be comin’ with me.”

And with that, his finger pulled the trigger and a bullet ripped through the air.