Hello everyone. I've had Wastelandica on the mind a lot lately.
You might have guessed that the massive break between chapters messed with my "groove". That's correct. Coming back to Inkstone all this time later, I also discovered that the formatting (markdown) for this chapter now appears incorrect, which I suppose is something to do with an update to the editor.
I do want to continue this story. However, the original lore document containing the answers to various questions in the story, and future plans for the story, contains some plot beats I can no longer quite remember the context behind. I wrote it in shorthand and referred back to ideas I had at the time that I thought too obvious to write down; now, some parts of the grand plan are fragmented. In case I'm never able to do the story justice, I want to share that collection of notes with you. If the story continues in earnest, this link will be deleted, but here's the collection of notes about the past and future of the story. It will contain spoilers. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pJC0mfRG8UAvGMkjed_-txI7afp3I-UbcaKvftXTBTM/edit?usp=sharing
This document also contains the answer to what happened with the apocalypse. Everything in it is subject to change. Much of it has already happened. If you have any questions about the lore that might never get answered if I never come back in and complete the story the way I wanted to, I'll answer them.
This, with its now-broken formatting, is what I have so far of the next chapter, Scoville, which focuses on Reca and Rivergal unwittingly entering a spicy food eating contest and discovering how hot Hell's hottest can get. But the story doesn't quite get there.
This "update" is meant to give readers everything they want in terms of loose ends until I can come back and be passionate about finishing this chapter and the story. I apologize for being an absentee.
Scoville
Before Reca arrived at the Archive, she had never considered what sort of place an archive might be, and yet it somehow managed to defy her expectations even so.
Each morning Reca would rise with the sun as it crept through the decaying seam between the walls and the ceiling. She would spend an hour or two looking through the books that lined the walls, and she would realize with a greater urgency each day that the archive was hardly organized at all, that the journals were placed in no discernible order along the shelves. Sooner or later sleep would take her again and she would only be awoken by the clumsy, imprecise morning exercise rituals of Rivergal. Rivergal would leave for somewhere Katana called the 'night district', Katana herself would leave for who-knows-where, and then Reca would look through a few more journals and spend long moments lost in thought.
The journals yielded no answers about the apocalypse. Reca developed an odd sort of closeness to their author, who became simultaneously a bosom friend and a hated enemy. All of the journals looked the same and some of the journeys documented inside of them were nearly the same as well; there were, as Reca had earlier determined, only so many ways to write about endless sand. It became difficult to tell which books she had and hadn't already looked through.
The door to nowhere in the center of the room held a hopeless intrigue. There were so many padlocks that Reca balked at the idea of attempting to open it, especially with her inability to fully stand up, but she wondered about the consequences of doing so even still. Was it built of some kind of demon superstition? Could it actually lead somewhere? Reca took to sitting with her back to the door in order to avoid thinking about it. Her vigor had been whittled away by the events of the week. She still wanted to find answers- at least, that's what she told herself- but the spark she had felt on that first day out of Andistronica was gone. Had it vanished when her leg was crushed? Were those sorts of things stored in the legs?
On the fourth or fifth day of the arrangement- time had gotten away from Reca, and Rivergal had never really kept track of it in the first place- Katana peeked into the room just after the start of Rivergal's cacophonous regimen. It took a moment for Rivergal to stop using the wall as a punching bag and notice her presence.
"Today," said Katana, "you two want to come to my work?"
"Nah," said Rivergal in a shoddy attempt to read Reca's mind and speak for both of them. "I'm going to the night di-"
"You aren't. The owners of Sinner Corner paged me to let me know you're banned from their establishment."
Rivergal's face turned bright red and she began to sputter like a broken sprinkler, shoving her face directly into Katana's face with only a few centimeters between them.
"B-banned! And did they t-tell you what on earth I did to deserve that? Huh?"
Katana's vacant stare didn't even falter for a moment.
"No. But it must have been pretty bad given the amount of exclamation points they used."
Rivergal became immediately downcast and slumped against the wall in a definitive display of teenage angst. She had no witty retort, though she opened her mouth for a brief moment in an attempt to come up with one.
Maybe, if this incident had happened before Reca's trip to the house of the Re-Oracle, Reca would have probed Rivergal for details, but she no longer had the heart to do so. Right now she only had enough emotional sturdiness to spit out a few words:
"I want to come."
Katana glanced down at her. Had she heard Reca, or-?
"In that case," replied Katana, "meet me outside in five minutes."
She slammed the door before either of the girls could respond, leaving Reca to wearily fumble for her crutches and Rivergal to finish her wall-punching reps. Despite their earlier lack of enthusiasm for the idea, both of them found themselves trudging outside at the four-minute mark to meet Katana, who stood lazily under a nearby awning to shelter herself from the dry heat.
"So, where do you work, exactly?" asked Rivergal, wiping sweat from the workout off of her forehead.
"Scoville district."
"And how far away... um... is that?"
"You tired or something?"
"No way!" Rivergal panted. "I just- I mean, I just wanna know-"
"Why don't you two take the van?"
Reca found herself thinking, for just one moment, 'what van?' and then a realization hit her like a sack of bricks from the sky: throughout her time in the archive room, Deca had never once crossed her mind. How could she have let that happen? Had her soul really been so thoroughly wrung of all of its passion? How could Deca ever be expected to forgive her? Could she come clean?
The weight of the big question on her mind had increased tenfold since the accident, and now a million smaller questions joined it like heavy-duty titanium straws on the camel's back. She was frozen in place by the sheer mental burden until Deca's interior lights came on. 'I don't deserve it', Reca thought, 'I don't deserve her help'.
Deca continued to flash her interior lights. Four times, then a pause, then two more times. Was it meant to convey urgency? Anger? They were closer than they had been in four days and yet they were somehow still so far apart.
"I'm sorry," mumbled Reca, hoping that in her heart she meant it. Deca flashed her headlights once, then her interior lights once, then, after another short pause, her headlights three times. An "it's okay" or a "you should be"? Or something else entirely? How was Reca meant to respond with no way to know what Deca meant? Early on in the journey their back-and-forth had seemed so effortless, but now...
Reca climbed into the driver's seat with the help of a begrudging boost from Rivergal. The leather upholstery was nearly boiling to the touch, no doubt because the windshield had magnified the warmth of the desert sunlight, and so she was unable to lean against the dashboard for comfort. When Rivergal sat next to her, Reca could see the older girl flinch and shift around in an effort to avoid the burning sensation. It was rather uncomfortable to watch. Reca decided to stare out the window instead, but her view of the archive was interrupted by Katana's face appearing like a jumpscare in her line of sight.
The demon tapped twice on the window and Deca opened it.
"Follow me, okay?" said Katana.
"Ask Deca to follow you, not me."
Katana's eyebrow went up and her mouth contorted into a confused grimace, but she didn't ask for clarification. Deca found this reaction puzzling; hadn't Katana talked to her earlier that week? Hadn't she put on the morse code tape for the sole purpose of allowing Deca to communicate? Hadn't she come out to remove the boombox just last night? Why was it, then, that she now seemed unaware of Deca's sentience?
Katana didn't ask Deca to follow her, maybe out of pride. Deca had heard the command earlier and did so anyways when Katana took off at a brisk pace into town, glad to be back on the road regardless of the tense atmosphere. It was certainly better than being trapped within her own figurative head. Truthfully, Deca had considered going on night drives several times, but was dissuaded by the possibility of Reca needing her assistance in an emergency, and so she had stayed faithfully next to the archive.
The drive took Deca through a section of Pandemonia considerably more well kept-up than the boardwalk and past a tall, ominous building that she assumed must have been some sort of town hall. The buildings became increasingly tighter packed as Katana jogged onwards until a small red arch reading 'SCOVILLE' appeared, flanked on both sides by dilapidated, towering apartment complexes of peeling stucco.
"You pull into the parking lot and meet me down the road," yelled Katana, but Deca only got her windows down halfway into the sentence, leaving Reca and Rivergal with instructions to simply "meet me down the road". Before Deca could heed the request and pull into the parking lot, Reca and Rivergal dismounted and started along the center of the road in Katana's footsteps. Deca resigned herself to being left alone with her thoughts once again- unless, she thought, she were to discreetly follow the others...
The sign outside the old red-brick bar at the end of the road read "MR. REAPER'S REFUGE". Below it hung a banner, one corner waving in the wind, the other three fastened to the wall above the door-
ANNUAL 'TAKE THE HEAT' CHAMPIONSHIP HERE
WALK-INS ACCEPTED
BE THE MR. REAPER CHAMPION!
Katana stepped into the restaurant and vanished entirely from sight. Rivergal and Reca (with the latter at a significant delay) came to a stop in front of the door and stood for a moment to catch their breaths. It was then that Rivergal and Reca noticed (with the former at a significant delay) the sound of muffled chaos from inside the bar; loud, deep-voiced music played under a menagerie of voices, enthusiastic and angry alike. This was, in Reca's eyes, the entrance to the Hell she had imagined before she had known anything about the concept.
She was just about to tell Rivergal that she'd prefer to go back and perhaps get some quality time sitting with Deca when, to her horror, the older girl pushed the door open a crack and magnified the cacophony by a factor of ten, then vanished into it herself!
Reca took three long deep breaths, steeled her resolve, and decided that she would channel her old self today and be brave.