Day 2 - "Journey"

The smell was horrible.

I could barely even think with the scent of what was outside of the base. There were dozens of rotting corpses right outside of the entrance to the lab, and it made the preparations all the worse.

I had some yayo, a good breakfast, and about all of my mechanoids ready to fill up all of the necessary materials for the final expedition.

I knew that I never went out of my way to get all of the legendary relics of my ideoligion, but there wasn't that much point anyways. In the end, they're going to be forgotten, or used by some lucky bastard that's out and about in this RimWorld.

The hatred that I felt for the factions that lived here amongst the wastes was slowly dissipating, all thanks to the psychic emanator that I kept in my throne room.

(It's time.)

I spoke to nobody in particular. I grabbed all of the necessary things that I intended to bring along with me. Enough food to last me the entire journey, and back, if need be. I know I'll never see this place again.

I had all of the mechanoids that weren't named slowly but surely lose their connection to me, as I felt the bandwidth usage slowly but surely lessening it's burden on me.

The role of a mechanitor is to continue the creation of mechs, allowing them to have the necessary guide and leadership to continue their "hive", with the mechanitor themselves as the "queen".

There were about thirty or so wastepack atomizers that I keep to ensure that I wouldn't be polluting my base to high heaven. It's not that I care for the environment, I just think that it would be a waste for me to have to consistently send my cleansweepers to remove all of the pollution from the region.

Hell, I never even touched the genetics lab that I made past the neurocharger room. I wanted some good germline or xenogenes to make myself the perfect type of being, by my standards, but in the end I never got the necessary possibilities given to me.

I looked at everything, and knew that this was it. I watched all of the lifters, which I disconnected last, haul over the last the necessary resources, and proceeded to climb into my own pod launcher.

I set the coordinates down to a specific site on the world, pushing the fuel of the launcher to it's absolute maximum, knowing that that rest of this journey needs to be done on foot instead.

I didn't have any good saddle-worthy livestock, but the thought coutns, at the very least. One last glance at all that I've done, and I had all of the pods begin their launch.

I heard the fuel burn outside of the pod as I felt the G's set it faster than I'd like it to have been.

This was the first step in a long travel to the Archonexus. The first step to ascension.

{And the first step to me finally finding the peace that I've so desperately yearned for, all of this time.)

First, minutes passed, then half-hours, and then around after five hours of flight, I felt the effects of gravity finally come back over. The fuel was gone, and the glide time was about to run out.

The pods were always safe whenever they landed, since they had a natural protective feature to ensure the safety of the cargo over the actual integrity of the pod.

It was an odd concept, but it took a minute for regular people to finally understand what that meant. I felt the impact a bit as the pod rattled and subsequently broke apart.

I looked around and saw that all of the other named mechanoids were with me, walking around and past since I left their respective groups into work mode. I decided to make them part of my personal group, so I slotted them all into group 5.

I never used that group yet, intending to use it to make sure that all of my mechs weren't going to be painfully cluttered, but it was still a pain.

I gave them the order to guard me as I picked up whatever materials me and Sunkiss could keep with us. I had a couple muffalos as well, slinging all of the necessities on their backs as I knew that they were the perfect type of creatures to handle that sort of stress.

Looking at my personal map connected to my new prestige cataphract helmet, I had the entire journey all plotted out even before I left.

Anybody and everybody needed that sort of thought process when it comes to actual life-changing experiences. I made sure to keep that for myself, as I begun the trek.

The actual trek was slower than expected, but thanks to all of the high quality materials that I had my fabricors make into my current clothing and armor, things were going smoothly. Little to no problems left for me to handle.

Thrumbofur was one of the best materials for clothing, and possibly the best possible sandbag that you could make. Unfortunately it did burn, but it still had astounding heat resistance, something about leaving the fur out into the elements causing the protective oils on it to rub away faster, leading to higher deterioration.

I don't really know about that, but whenever I tried to light a sandbag made out of it, it never really burnt. Well, it did burn, so I would say it's a good second in comparison to devilstrand.

I looked out into the temperate forest, seeing that there wasn't anything particularly dangerous around here, and decided that this would be the first stop for the day.

There would be eight more days of nigh endless travel in front of us, and I intended to make the most of it before I stood before the archotechs.

I looked up at the night sky, taking in the beauty of what was once the greatest comfort that I could have gotten in my youth, and remembered that all of the threats back in my homeworld made the exact sight the most harrowing thing to notice.

The very sky that was filled with stars, twinkling and burning as chemistry intended, made me feel a hatred that I never knew that I could feel.

I never knew that I'd be forced to return to those times.