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clever-fox-studios · 10 months ago

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Free Runner CH 1: Alarm Bells (eyestrain warning)

Got a little carried away with splash art for the first chapter, whoops

White.

… White?

That was wrong.

Fluttering, heavy and pained, he opened his eyes to the white light overhead, his processor humming incessantly as it fired to life in his head. An alert came and went–location data unknown–but he didn’t care. Everything felt… heavy. Had he been sleeping?

No, this wasn’t sleep.

Slowly, carefully, Moon sat up, feeling something give slightly underneath him, creaking as his weight shifted on it. The hum quieted down a bit, but still sounded like it was struggling in his head–a headache, if he ever thought he could get one. Another alert as his system caught up to his waking mind–location data unknown. Yellow eyes found focus on the wall, a white but beaten block of metal that had seen better days; the spot he found appeared to be… scratch marks?

He barely had time to consider why that was strange before the flood began.

//SYSTEM ERROR//

/DEVICE TAMPERING DETECTED_

/Unauthorized user attempted to remove vital component_

/System crash detected_

/TM_moon10300.sys corruption detected_

/NF_moon00010.sys corruption detected_

/System stability corrupted_

/Tower data not accessible_

Clawing at his head, Moon doubled over, the errors ringing internally and externally like ripping metal–he felt himself rocking, the flurry of errors and feedback becoming nails against his shell. Wires twisted, diodes burned, everything was too much–too much–

Something moved.

His attention ripped itself from his inner display to his outer awareness, following the flicker of orange and gold until he recognized what–or rather, who–he was looking at, laid out on a table a few feet from him, moving slightly as if coming out of a deep sleep but not fully awake yet. Sun. Yes, Sun! But he was bare, stripped of his clothing save for a blanket of some sort draped over his groin.

That was wrong.

Looking down, he realized he also had a blanket, but nothing else.

That was wrong.

Why was that wrong–

//HOST ACCESS GRANTED/

/SYSTEM PRIORITY OVERRIDDEN_

/COMMAND: clear errors_

>Errors cleared.

/COMMAND: run diagnostics%background_

>Running diagnostics…

/COMMAND: ping nearest tower_

>Searching for nearest tower…

…

>Tower located: WARNING_

>>Third party tower detected.

>>Compatible system shields not available.

>>Secured network detected.

>>//Status: Private//

/COMMAND: Check memory_

>Checking Memory…

…

/ERROR: Memory Discrepancy Detected_

>Cause: System Crash.

>>Notes: Area of minimal activity detected; last active hour log does not match last dated memory file; flagged as potential tampering by system host.

>Diagnostics completed.

>>NO ERRORS.

A matter of seconds passed, Moon’s system settling itself forcibly as he commanded it to ignore the errors, to push through the processes and quiet his grinding components so he could think straight. This room was not familiar, but he didn’t know how he got there, or when. Everything was fuzzy, foggy and mixed up in his mind, a nagging feeling of wrongness wasn’t out of place if he had to consider everything up until that moment.

My memory was tampered with, he affirmed, giving it the credit for the unsettling wrongness in his guts.

Systems?

He could eat, so perhaps “guts” wasn’t incorrect, though his last meal was…

//REMAINING BATTERY: FULLY CHARGED/

How could that be?

Looking to Sun again, the navy robot realized his companion–his brother–was awake, sitting up and holding his head as the lights that encircled his cranium shimmered to life, organizing themselves into the elaborate radial pattern Moon knew so well. The familiarity did little to temper his unease, though.

“Oh…” Sun groaned, eyes squeezed shut. “My head…”

“Sun?” Moon finally croaked, sounding strange in his auditory sensors as if he hadn’t heard his own voice in a long time.

Sun’s eyes snapped open, teal illuminations under softly glowing lashes standing out brightly in the whiteness of the odd room. “Moon!” he said with relief and confusion. Moon pulled himself over the edge of his table, still feeling heavy, confused at the sight of grass instead of tile for the floor. He almost didn’t catch Sun yelping. “Why are you naked–” The brightly colored bot looked at himself, voice shrill with concern. “Why am I naked???”

It was a valid question. One he didn’t know how to answer.

Finally, Sun looked around himself. “Where… are we?”

Moon felt his internal system suddenly run cold. “You… don’t know?”

Faintly, Sun shook his head, one foot sliding off the table as he sat up more. “We were outside…”

Not good. Not good. Not good.

Sun’s line of sight went somewhere to his left, drawing his attention that way until he saw a small end table of sorts with neatly folded fabric and glittering wire jewelry that looked painfully familiar to him. He knew those were his clothes–the answer to the lingering question neither had spoken regarding their mutual nakedness–but hesitation froze his hands from daring to try and take them. Even Sun didn’t move to collect his things, stuck in place, gaze focused on the fabric and jewels yet also a thousand miles away.

The seeping, creeping, dreadful feeling tickled down his back and neck like the tips of unwanted fingers–Sun’s ventilation system heaved his chest in a facsimile of a human breath, even having the wherewithal to shudder slightly at the peak of his inhalation–as he stared at the familiar silks and golden threads that shimmered from the light his radials exuded. As much as he hated the idea of being skyclad–let alone without his permission–the idea of donning those things now that they were gone from him was, somehow, worse. Tensions twisted through his inner parts, shuddering and shaking his joints faintly until he was finally able to snap out of his stupor at the sound of his brother saying his name.

“Sun? What is it?”

Moon’s voice seemed hoarse, but still soft and gentle as it had always been…

No. Not always.

Closing his eyes, Sun rubbed his forehead. “I’m… sluggish, I think? My battery… It was so low before.”

Concerned, Moon pressed, “What about now?”

He turned inward.

//REMAINING BATTERY: FULLY CHARGED/

“I’m… charged.” Confusion tinged his voice as he understood his system was shaking off the fatigue and priority shuffle from what he could only assume was the first time he’d ever drained himself dry of any power.

Moon’s background systems came back to full faculty as Sun spoke, which sent a shock through his awareness, making him jump up as he finally gained some sense of situational awareness. “Sun–get up. Quickly.”

A bit startled, Sun picked himself up, holding his blanket to himself where Moon simply let his fall to the ground–he looked down as grass tickled his haptic sole sensors, baffled. “What–what’s wrong?”

Moon’s body language as he yanked the navy and night colored silk to himself, the wire jewelry falling to the ground somewhere behind the nightstand, was slightly uncertain, his yellow eyes flashing with his own intense confusion. “What do you–we don’t know where we are! Grab something, we need to go!”

“Wait, h-hold–” Sun could barely keep up as his own system was still rebooting, Moon dragging bolts of fabric off the table and shoving it in Sun’s hands, the blanket falling to the ground at Sun’s feet, until the golden robot found instead, tucked into the alcove under the silks, two rough-hewn cloaks of muddy gray.

Their cloaks.

Dropping the silk in hand, Sun knelt and pulled the knitted, itchy fabric out and offered the darker one to his brother. As if glad to have another option, Moon ditched the blue and silver wrap for the plain, woolen weave without hesitation and shrugged it onto himself, tying it closed while urging Sun to hurry. He tried, he really did, but Sun’s internal system was taking its sweet time sorting itself out after being drained to zero; wistfully he wondered if this was why others often commented about regularly shutting their companions off on occasion and if that somehow made it easier for them to restart later? Neither of them had ever been shut off since first being turned on, that he could recall.

Tying the cloak on, Moon didn’t wait for him to even fix himself to be presentable before telling him to cover his radials and grabbing his arm, pulling the gangly bot to the open doorway that had been there at his back the entire time. Barely through the threshold, hood half on his head, Sun bumped into his brother as Moon came to a sudden, dead stop, nearly toppling over. The jolt seemed to finally knock his system into place as Sun came-to fully, the weight of their situation finally coming into full focus as he found himself staring alongside his brother at a moderately sized creature the color of rust and mud that stood at attention a few lengths away.

It had gruffed at them, a deep, warning rumble, and halted Moon in his tracks; one ear and the opposite foreleg of the beast stood out in oxidized green from the rest of its body, each eye shining a different color in a way that felt incorrect. Had it not been metal, Sun would think it was mismatched like fabric–stitched together parts from different things that wouldn’t otherwise be together. Yet this was a machine.

One of them.

Four legged with pointed ears–the green one flopping at the tip–and jaws lined with small teeth, a pair of canines visible as its lip curled; threatening was definitely applicable, though aggressive didn’t readily come to mind as Sun stared at the creature. Moon’s body tensed against him, pressing Sun back as he took a half step away, though the only place they could go was back into the strange, white room.

The thing matched Moon’s pace, faintly stepping forward and gruffing again, its tail at attention.

Something inside Moon’s messy, corrupted coding urged him to be ready–to crouch–to run. Not away, but at it. A desire to fight, to use what he had at his disposal to remove the threat and make a break for it. It wasn’t fueled by fear, however, as much as he felt he should be afraid of this unknown thing, but simply a calm, decisive, simple notion that he could. That if it was blocking his exit, he should simply remove it.

He knew he could do so.

Somehow.

The chance was short-lived however, as the creature–Moon’s system finally pinged a possible match as a Sirius-class Stellaris unit–managed to draw attention from another metal thing in the area. It drifted down from the sky, golden and glittering, to roost in a tree nearby, its magenta eyes piercing over the distance and making them both feel very, very exposed. This one was also unfamiliar, though if he had to guess it was some sort of Cygnus drone, but one that had far more agency than to just look pretty and pretend to be a bird. No, this one was very much aware of them and had purpose in its gaze.

Sun’s hand squeezed his bicep worriedly, voice weak, “M-m-moon?”

“I know,” he replied, feeling in his core that these were decorations or simply pets roaming the estate.

These were guards.

“Ah.”

The sound nearly made them both jump out of their shells, heads whipping up to the left where more branches twisted well above them.

“So you’re finally awake then.”

It took only a second for the pair to register the human presence that observed them from a platform in the branches; blue eyes peered down at them, cool and unbothered, while their owner leaned their elbows on a railing crudely covered in vines and leaves by overgrown shrubbery. Their hair was a messy clump of ashen blonde, stained deep blue at the tips but partly shaved at the sides as if it had been flocked but grown in over the weeks, with a white tank top and powder-teal shorts barely visible from this angle behind the leaves–hardly the garb of someone intending harm, and yet it took less than a second more for the brothers to notice this person wasn’t simply a human passerby.

Sun’s gaze fixated on the white and blue gleam of ceramastic plating that covered–or made up–their right arm while Moon could only focus on the long shaft of white-stained metal made to lean on the rail, right within reach–he knew it was a gun before he even fully comprehended its shape. A rifle.

He’d never seen one up close before, yet he knew without a doubt it was just that.

“How’re you feeling?”

They were still speaking, their voice flat but polite; they didn’t wait for a reply as they grabbed their armament and descended a staircase the pair didn’t previously notice. As they came closer, the boys noticed they were barefoot and their attire was more appropriate for sleeping or lounging than wandering around outside. Both of them immediately felt their default program trying to register the human presence before they could consider an answer.

//HUMAN DETECTED: SCANNING/

…

/IDENTITY NOT FOUND/

>>Name: unknown_

>>Body data: Female.

>>Age: Unknown_

>>Height: pending_

>>No history of interaction detected.

Stranger.

Moon moved his body to block Sun entirely from their–her?--approach, which gave the stranger pause, seeming to acknowledge his protective intentions.

Ever the affable one, Sun finally answered, “We’re… alright, I think?”

“Good.” The stranger stopped fully next to the mismatched Sirius that hadn’t budged an inch since its warning step. “Now that you can talk…”