Chapter Text
The end of the world comes not with a bang or whimper but with the fall of a single city. Granted, the city of Insomnia was an entire beast of a nation, the beating heart of an empire that had lasted for generations. You feel like a vulture, circling the city in its last gasps and waiting for it to die so that you can have your fill.
That’s the nature of scavenging: you have to scavenge.
You shouldn’t be watching the city with binoculars, waiting for the sea of fire and smoke to dissipate. You should be out there, offering what aid you can to the survivors. That would be the morally correct thing to do.
Morals, you’ve found, don’t keep your business afloat.
On the other end of the spectrum, you’re not about to accept gil to ferry the super-rich denizens of Insomnia to safer pastures. You’re a scavenger, not a smuggler-for-hire. You have standards. Not great ones, but standards nonetheless. Besides, your little camper van isn’t exactly made for passengers.
You have enough room for you and all the random bits and bobs you’ll end up trading for more bits and bobs with a side chance of gil. There’s nowhere to really fit more than one passenger and you only have one bed in the back, half-covered with boxes as it is. Therefore… you don’t take passengers.
What you will do is sneak into Insomnia and begin the process of picking what’s left of it clean of anything remotely useful. You’ve heard the stories about daemons fighting the Kings of Lucis, giant monsters battling magical statues, and you’re aware that much of the city is probably rubble. But the fighting couldn’t have consumed the entire city.
Something, probably on the outskirts, has to remain.
Who knows, you might manage to stumble on a pharmacy. You could never go wrong trading medicine and other such supplies. Or, even better, a grocery store chock full of canned vegetables you could raid once you dug your gas mask out of the back of your van. You didn’t think you’d manage to get there before the produce, meat, and frozen foods begin to spoil.
Never mind the dairy section. All that milk and cheese would be rancid. No, you’d rather breathe in the slightly stale air from your mask than smell that unholy combination.
You hunker over your steering wheel to peer through your binoculars. The Empire’s soldiers don’t seem to be winning. Not if the exploding drop ships are any indication of success. It’s almost like watching karmic retribution in action. Even better, the more of the Niff soldiers explode in midair or die to daemons means the less of them you’ll need to avoid.
It’s morbid, but that’s the life of a scavenger.
You’re more than willing to wait until the next day if you have to. Unfortunately for you, the bright lights of Insomnia won’t be there to keep you safe from daemons overnight. You have no choice but to return to a sanctuary and come back to Insomnia tomorrow.
You’ve even less inclination to do that than you do the desire to pick up tap-dancing. You have one shot at making a path for yourself, hidden by the chaos, that will become your back door to all of Insomnia’s wealth. Well, whatever’s left of it after the Kings of Lucis decided to have a grudge match with daemons.
You sigh as you toss your binoculars onto your passenger seat. There’s no way that you’ll be able to make a back door through the same paths that the refugees are using. Not only will someone probably notice, but they’ll tell all their friends about it. Those friends will tell their friends, so on and so forth, until another scavenger figures out your secret path.
That ruins the entire point of a secret, doesn’t it?
You throw your van into gear with an even heavier sigh.
There’s no real road where you’re going. Your camper van bounces along on overworked shocks, your pots and pans rattling away in their cupboard, and you make your own road. This is as adventurous as you get. A regular trailblazer in the strangest possible circumstances.
It’s almost hilarious how easy it is to avoid detection when you stop using common sense to govern your actions. You drive along the looming edifice that is the physical bulk of Insomnia’s Old Wall, searching for any entrances that no normal person would use. Abandoned sewers, cracks, a maintenance door. You’ll take what you can get.
You’re burning daylight and fuel at an alarming rate. The first you can do nothing about and the second you can fix at the first gas station you find inside the walls. Sanctuary? There’s probably a haven buzzing away that you can set yourself up at if you can’t find a building where all the lights work and daemons shy away. You are nothing if not self-sufficient.
It comes with the job description.
So, here you are, trundling along on a path that doesn’t exist, looking for an entrance that may or may not exist. That, too, comes with the job description. Yours is an occupation based in uncertainty. This is your version of normal, and this is as exciting as you want it to be.
You keep your eyes peeled on boring grey concrete for any sign. Hours pass with no results and you’re almost ready to call it a day. You can try again on a different stretch of wall in the morning. But, just when you have given up all hope, there it is.
A door.
But not just any door. This door has a little plaque next to it, copperplate faded from the elements, that says ‘Drainage and Flood Maintenance’ when you squint at it through your binoculars. Bingo. That’s your ticket in. Drainage and flood means stairs, ladders, and lots of water. An infrastructure you can use to your advantage. And, this is the best part, you won’t be crawling through a sewer.
Even better, this door isn’t just a simple open-and-shut affair. Oh, no. This door is one of those rolling affairs, like those on freezer doors and barns, that you can fit your camper van quite neatly through. Better still, the door looks like it will be relatively easy to hide with the surrounding bits of rubble. Insomnia’s fall has given you all the tools you need.
There’s no sign of daemons or Niffs and you’re not going to say a damn word about it. Astrals only know that you need all the luck you can get and jinxing it will ruin everything. You roll up to the door at a snail’s pace, fingers tight as death on your steering wheel.
You park your van and grab your trusty crowbar from beneath your seat, leaving the engine running, and skip your way across the way. It’s dusty and dry, little puffs kicked up by your boots, stray bits of rubble crunching beneath your feet. Sweet Astrals, you are the worst kind of vulture.
You even look the part. Battered old combat boots, dark grey pea coat, a hood to cover your face, and a rusty crowbar dangling from driving glove-covered hands. You stick to cargo pants for the pockets. Pockets you fully intend to stuff full of dubiously gotten gains.
The door squeaks as you pull on it, but it opens after a few minutes of struggling. The sound it makes is loud enough to attract any number of things that will want you dead but nothing rears its ugly head. All of the sound and fury of Insomnia’s fall seems to have scared off all the local wildlife at least.
Today is a great day for you.
You skip your way back to your van with a jaunty whistled tune and hop back behind the wheel. Your van trundles along, bouncing over the door track, and you turn on your headlights to navigate the dark tunnel. The flood maintenance door is the luckiest find of the day, an entrance tailor-made for someone like you.
You will not jinx this by thinking of how it could all go wrong.
Nope, you’re just going to focus on what kind of things were left behind in Insomnia. Your luck holds for a good few hours as you drive along the flood tunnel. It’s a very, very long tunnel. Boring and featureless, save for the drain spouts from dozens of storm drains, it’s a fabulously boring drive. You love a boring trip.
This tunnel has to lead somewhere. There has to be a point where the uphill tunnel meets open air. And that’s how you’ll get in and out of Insomnia. You bow over the steering wheel, peering out into the dark. Eventually, the tunnel levels out and is dimly lit by emergency lights.
And there, off to the side, is another sliding door. This one has a handy printed sign that says ‘Insomnia’ and something else written too small for you to read. You do not, unfortunately, have the time to read the sign. Once again, you hop out of your van, drag the door open, hop back in, and trundle on. This time, you get back out to close the door behind you.
Nobody would ever know that you were here.
Surprisingly, you’ve managed to find what appears to be a maintenance building. There are tools, manual and power, left behind by maintenance workers. Someone left their lunch, what smelled like a tuna fish sandwich, on one of the workbenches. You’ll have to remember to throw that somewhere before it makes the whole building reek.
The shutters on the massive bay doors where trucks would normally enter and exit from in pursuit of proper, civilized maintenance are shut up tight. It looks like everyone fled through the office and that will be the first place you’ll check for keys. But first, there’s a couple of gas cans you need to steal to fill up your camper van.
You’re very good at your job. Quick, quiet, and thorough. You leave no trace that the gas cans were ever there in the first place. Red for gas, yellow for diesel, and you just so happened to find gas on your first try. Both cans are emptied into your van’s gas tank and you slide open the back door to set the cans behind your passenger seat.
Nothing is useless to you, not really.
You grab the tuna sandwich with the plastic bag it had come with and toss it into a trash bag. Quickly, you head to the maintenance office with the bag in hand, tossing in whatever food you find along the way. This is going to be your base for as long as possible and you refuse to share it with insects and disease.
The office is neat, organized, and full of paperwork that is useless to you until someone specifically asks for any of it. You find a keyring hanging from a nail on the wall, helpfully labeled ‘spare’ and ‘garage’. There’s a third label obscured by oil and dirt but you’ll figure out what that key’s for later.
What’s important is that you now have the means to open the doors. Fling wide the gates and let opportunity rain on you in a shower of bounty. Insomnia is yours to plunder. Triumphantly, you unlock the bay door and shove it up with a clatter. And there, before your eyes, is a city full of untapped potential.
That untapped potential was on fire.
It would, eventually, stop burning. For now, you’ll stick to raiding the parts of Insomnia that weren’t on fire that you can reasonably get to in the remaining hours of the day. Once the sun set and the daemons came out? You’d be safely behind solid walls and the Oracle’s blessing, sipping on a can of Ebony, and plotting your next move.
You hop in your van, drive down the driveway, hop back out, and lock the bay door behind you. Then you pull out your phone and open your secret weapon: the map app. You slap a pin down for ‘parked here,’ and then it’s off into the city you go.
According to the app, there’s a pharmacy down the road. How very convenient for you. You snicker to yourself, throw your van into four-wheel-drive, and hit the gas. Rocks? Broken curbs? Potholes? Your van can handle it.
You bounce along, careful not to bite your tongue, as you floor it through the shattered remnants of the most powerful nation in the world. Your van careens around obstacles as you rapidly shift through gears. At one point, only two of your van’s wheels are on the road.
The rubble gets worse and worse until you can’t possibly take your van any further. “Well, shit,” you mutter under your breath as you hit the brakes. You hunker over the steering wheel, sighing as you peer over your dash at the veritable canyon of rubble in front of you and glorious success. “I don’t want to walk, damn it.”
All the complaining under the stars won’t change the facts. You are going to have to pull over and find an alternate route on foot. The pharmacy is just past this slag heap of concrete and rebar. It will be faster if you just get your collapsible wagon out and hoof it.
You park your van haphazardly, as if you were a refugee who had decided to abandon everything. Well, a refugee who had the sense to lock up behind you. You sling the canvas bag containing your wagon over your shoulder, grab your crowbar and shotgun (just in case), and begin the arduous task of navigating the rubble. There’s a path, wide enough for a single person, that bisects the entire pile.
You don’t want to think about why it is what it appears to be: a massive line from some unfathomable impact. Nope, that wasn’t what you were here for. Get in, find something worth something to someone, and get out. Let the Crownsguard figure out what happened when they took the city back.
Your boots crunch on gravel and glass. And there, in the middle of the rubble, are two lonely figures. Behind them is a crumbled statue that you assume used to be a very fancy statue of some king of yore. The ground is scorched and shattered, splattered with dried blood, and very clearly was the site of some epic battle.
Well, shit.
What are you supposed to do now?