13 - Queen of the Hill

“Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Maya cried out as she stood before the face of a statue.

What a statue it was, Maya breathed.

She had seen Nanaseto and knew that she represented the general shape of the aliens on the ship, but the head before her was an entirely different species.

A singular eye dominated the center of the face, massive and open. It’s red pupil reminded her of a sheep’s, wavy and horizontal, and it was surrounded by a magenta iris. The sclera was gold with silver highlights gleaming in the blue light. She could see no nose, but there was a massive mouth that almost split the face in two. Large square blocks of teeth filled the lipless mouth and a lurid green forked tongue protruded from it. Four horns grew from the creature, two on each side. One began at the jawline and the other at the cheekbone; they were short, but capped with gold and jewels.

The entire thing was taller than Maya and from it’s forty-five degree angle, she assumed that only a part of the statue had been transported to this world, as it lay on the outer edges of the trash pile she stood upon.

“Only three more massive heads to make my alien Mount Rushmore,” Maya remarked, laying a hand upon the statue. It was cool to the touch. She wondered who the alien was supposed to be, a hero, a person of wealth and fame?

She used her crowbar to knock on the statue’s face, the steel let out a ring as it tapped. It didn’t sound like stone, so it was probably some kind of metal. Her eyes fell upon the gold plated horns, or perhaps they were tusks as they were short and thick.

“Shiny,” she remarked and used her crowbar to strike at the base of the tusk. It let out a loud crack and after a few more minutes of struggle, the tusk finally broke free. Maya easily caught the falling golden horn and grinned as she looked at it closely.

The tusk was the length of her forearm and surprisingly it didn’t feel very heavy. Either it was her increased Physical stats or the material that made up the statue was fairly light. Either way, Maya scanned the jewels on the tusk. She hadn’t much cared for jewelry, after reading several articles stating that the diamond business, like the electronics business, was bullshit. Overpriced, over produced, and with low to non-existent resell value.

But free jewels? Maya could get behind that.

“I’m rich,” she laughed.

[Looter of the Dead] Level 3

Rest in Peace, unless you have valuables. You’ve taken a high value item from the dead.

(Bonus Attribute Points only given at level 1, 10, 20…)

Maya stared at the message and felt her mouth crash open.

“What?”

She looked down at the tusk in her hand and at the giant head in front of her.

“No fucking way,” she gasped. “No fucking way.”

She dropped the tusk and scrambled backward, making sure to keep her footing on steady bits of trash. She stared, still open mouthed, at the head.

It wasn’t a statue, she realized. It was a fucking head. A head from some living being.

The [Looter of the Dead] ability had only leveled from all the things she had taken from the dead aliens in the ship. She might have salvage rights, but it seemed that it only applied to the ship, not the personal items of the dead. Therefore every time she ‘stole’ something from the long dead crew, she gained a points toward the level.

She shuddered looking at the unblinking eye. She didn’t know much about aliens, but she knew that it wasn’t like Star Trek, where all aliens were humanoid with minor physical changes. Aliens were alien.

That meant they didn’t have to be flesh and blood as she knew it, they could be made of things she could never imagine. She rubbed her hands upon her makeshift skirt and felt a wave of nausea. It was one thing to take from the piles of bone, there was a sort of unrealness to that, but this…

“I’m sorry,” Maya said out loud. She moved forward and picked the tusk up. ‘I’m really sorry.” She walked to the unblinking head and set the tusk down before it. She apologized once more and then trudged off.

***

It was only a matter of time, Maya realized an hour later. It was only a matter of time before she ran into something dead. Well, something not so long ago dead.

The ship was filled with dead aliens, but she hadn’t really thought of them as real. If the dimensional instabilities kept bringing things to this place, then there would be living things and people brought along. She remembered when she had seen the black lightning striking people. They would have ended up here and most likely they weren’t as lucky as she was.

So it was only a matter of time before she ran into something freshly dead.

Maya shuddered and looked down at her hands. The looting of the ship and the dead there had seemed like an adventure. She was Indiana Jones and taking things. In reality she had desecrated the dead. Those people had been living their lives in the pursuit of science, they had left on an expedition to find out what the dimensional instabilities were, and they had died because of it. Yet, she had been rooting through their bones for valuables.

They might be aliens, but they still deserved some kind of respect, Maya thought. She would have been horrified if someone had been digging through the bones of her grandmother.

But…

Maya looked up at the cracked rainbow sky and sighed.

But, if the dead held something she needed. Then she knew she would have to take it. There was morality and there was survival. If she really needed it, then she knew she would have to take it. As her father would say: “the dead don’t need shit.”

“Bury me naked,” Pops would announce on occasion. “I won’t need anything, God’ll provide.”

Maya wiped her eyes of tears she hadn’t known she had been shedding. She stood up and looked toward the peak of the trash pile. The peak was near and she steeled her resolve.

She continued her climb.

***

“Holy shit,” Maya muttered as she pushed some trash out of the way. Sheets of what she could only call aluminum had been blocking the entrance to a small cave like structure. She stumbled across the cave as she had been looking for safe passage along the sides of the trash pile.

Age had settled most of the trash, the heavy items pressing down upon the lower items had compressed and stabilized the bottom layers of the trash pile. As Maya ascended the hill, the debris that made it up became more loosely packed and somewhat unstable.

That had forced her to pick her path along the pile, finding the most stable areas and then moving from there. She had been hiking plenty of times, even going a few times up steep slopes, and she used what skills she knew to clamor upward.

“I think it’s an apartment,” Maya muttered to herself as she peered into the cave. “Or most of one.”

With her phone as a flashlight, Maya entered the cave. There were no sharp edges she realized, instead everything was rounded. The room was slightly tilted, but it caused her no trouble as she moved across a short hall that lead into a larger rounded room.

The light illuminated a room about twenty feet in diameter, although the wall to her left had been sheared away and some trash was poking through.

“Someone loves shag carpeting,” Maya commented as she touched the flooring with her hand. It was thick and soft and it covered all the surfaces, except for a small black object installed in the ceiling, probably a light of some sort.

There was a large circular mass that sat in the center of the room, from its shape and size, it was a nest or bed or whatever. Maya approached it and touched it, resting her hand upon the soft surface. She looked around a moment more and then sat on it.

“Oh my god,” Maya groaned as she sunk into the soft cushion. She luxuriated in the bed and grinned to herself. “Worth it.”

Four nights. Four nights, not including the night she spent in the ship recovering from her injuries, Maya had been sleeping on the front seat of the truck. She had no blankets, no pillows, nothing but a pile of Sullivan Comfort Foods shirts to use. The bench seat of the truck was not what she would ever call comfortable.

Her back had begun aching and sleep was never great. She had been averaging less than six hours a night.

“I’m so taking this,” Maya stated.

Maya estimated she was about seventy five percent to the top of the trash pile. She was both glad and horrified that she could barely make out the bottom of the pile she currently climbed. The dim light of the world wasn’t great for long distance viewing.

The theory that newer things were deposited on the top of the trash pile was beginning to pan out. She had seen machinery and trash that looked ‘newer’ than the stuff she had been seeing toward the bottom. The paint on the items were still vibrant and the metal wasn’t corroding or dull yet. She hadn’t run across anything biological, but Maya kept an eye out for it.

It had taken a while to get over the fact she had desecrated a giant corpse, but as Maya began to think on it again. She needed organics once Nanaseto was brought back online. Biological lifeforms that had been brought over should be considered organic lifeforms. She didn’t mean SIL, System Identified Lifeforms, but she was sure that there would be plenty of non-sentient life brought along. Perhaps there were trees, plants, or animals that had been unlucky.

The image of the poor dog that had been struck by the black lighting had been lead Maya upon the line of thinking. Unfortunately, most things would have died arriving here, but if she could find them that made her chances of surviving better.

She groaned in protest as she got to her feet. She looked toward the bottom of the bed and saw that it wasn’t bolted down. Maya flexed her arms and then lifted the bed up.

The bed was hinged, she immediately realized as it rocketed up from her exertion. She had put a little ‘oomph’ into lifting it up, but the bed was amazingly light and the hinges on the opposite side of the bed were frictionless.

Maya staggered forward and fell into a small hole under the bed. Her bare foot landed on metallic items, with a resounding crack soon following. Thinking she’d stepped on glass, Maya immediately released the bed and fell backward.

She landed unhurt on the carpeting and the bed didn’t fall back down upon her. Instead she pulled her foot up and used her light to see if she’d cut herself. Her foot was undamaged.

Maya panned her light into the hole and discovered that it was filled with colorful electronics.

“What do we have here?”

***

An alien was displayed on the screen. It wasn’t the demonic visage of Nanaseto or the strange metallic head she had seen, instead it looked more reptilian, with large floppy ears and even larger dark eyes. A small mouth sat beneath the large eyes and it had a long neck.

The reptilian alien was speaking on the screen, looking into a camera and saying something.

Maya had looted the electronics from under the nest and spent her lunch break peering through them. The Evaluation skill came in handy, identifying what the pieces were but not telling her what was inside.

It appeared they were journals of some sort. The System identified them as:

Yeennaatsaa Recording Discs - low grade, Tier 1

The item that had caught her eye was;

Saanaaveetaa Personal Data Device - low grade, Tier 1

“That *** said they were *** *** can *** *** *** that?” the alien said. Maya watched with intensity as her language module deciphered the language of the creature. She realized she didn’t just automatically understand what the alien was saying, but after half an hour of listening to the recordings, she was beginning to understand words.

The feeling was still odd to her. Nanaseto had downloaded the knowledge of the demons into Maya’s mind, but this alien’s language was still in the process of being learned. Maya was fascinated by the whole thing.

The drama played out for another half an hour as Maya ate her lunch in the darkness of the bedroom. The alien she understood was named Vaanaak, they were pissed about something called the Command Council taking the side of the Hammer Runners in the Migration. Apparently position in the Migration was very important and Vaanaak had been placed in a lower position.

She had no idea what any of that meant, but Maya chewed upon a granola bar and watched as Vaanaak raised clawed fists in obvious frustration and finally shut off the recording.

Maya was greeted with a yellow screen filled with various icons. She knew a tablet when she saw one. She shut the device off and stored it into her Inventory.

It was the first operational device she had found and Maya wasn’t about to waste its power.

Mana batteries it seems didn’t lose charge like the batteries she knew of. They were long lasting devices that only succumb to corruption from the long term storage of mana. Yet the devices they powered still held their charge even after hundreds or thousands of years.

Nanaseto’s power supply had lasted over twenty thousand years and the tablet Maya had found was probably not as old, but still pretty old. That some thing low grade and low tier still functioned was impressive, either this world didn’t degrade things quickly or the items were built to last.

She wanted to keep watching the Vaanaak Show. She loved binge watching reality shows and this was the closest thing she had to entertainment. Even if Vaanaak was probably thousands of years dead, it still showed a glimpse into the life completely different to the one she lived in. Yet there were some things about the alien that she could commiserate with, being disgruntled with the world was one thing the two shared in common.

Maya sighed and pushed the bed she had disassembled out of the door of the bedroom. She was looting that.

***

The world lay before her in dark relief. Maya stood as close to the top of the trash pile as she could. There was a shredded mass of metal and debris that jutted from the pile that had prevented her from truly reaching the peak, but she was content with what she saw.

In a normal world, she would have probably been able to see a fair distance. She was well over five hundred feet above the surface, but due to the low light she could not see all that far.

The massive bulks of distant trash hills were still visible, especially when they were silhouetted against the sky, but everything else was lost in the darkness of distance. She could barely make out the ship she had been exploring and her truck was lost in the dark.

Maya decided she was facing west. The streaks in the sky were vertical, instead of horizontal and she had long deemed she had been driving east. The west was the direction she had come from, as she looked in that direction she saw a few trash mounds, but then nothing. West lay the wasteland.

Easing her way around the peak, Maya decided she needed to look toward the east. She had the idea that she had been driving toward the trash piles and that more lay east of her position. She clamored along the trash, carefully placing her feet and testing the strength of the surface.

“Watch your footing, could be mines,” Pops used to joke when they would jog together in the mornings.

Maya held onto a long metal pole and then managed get onto the east side of the pile. She looked out and saw more mounds of trash spreading out across the horizon.

She sighed. She didn’t want to admit it, but she had hoped to see some kind of civilization now that she had reached a high enough point. Maybe she would have seen distant sky scrapers, the gleam of lights from a distant city, flying cars or something.

Instead all there appeared to be were more trash piles and the cracked rainbow sky.

She took in the view for a moment and then saw something that sent a shiver of fear down her spine. The cracked sky belched forth a stab of ebony lighting. It was the first time she had seen the lighting since she had arrived.

The black lightning struck a pile silhouetted against the sky and she couldn’t tell if it brought anything with it. As she stared into the far horizon, she could see more lighting strikes coming from the sky, they were far apart and a long way from where she was. She hadn’t seen those strikes while she had been driving nor when she had spent hours identifying the things she had taken from the ship. But then she also hadn’t had a unobstructed view.

The lightning brought items from other universe, Maya knew. She looked at where they had struck and figured maybe she could reach those areas. It didn’t seem too far away. If they brought something, then those items would be fresh. She grimaced at her choice of wording.

She turn to look at the horizon again. It was terrifying and also beautiful.

Taking a cue from Vaanaak, Maya took out her phone and turned on the camera. She set it to record and looked into the phone.

“Hi, guys,” she said. “I’m coming to you recorded from the top of Hangy’s Trash Pile. I hereby claim it for myself and name myself Queen of this Hill. The System may not give me salvage rights to everything, but since I’m the only one here. I’m claiming it all.” Maya laughed. “Somehow, I’ll get this recording to you, Mom and Dad. I’ll get home and you’ll see the shit I had to do to get back. It’s pretty boring here, but sometimes the view is pretty damn awesome. Check it out.”

Maya flipped the camera and the screen displayed the cracked rainbow skies. She panned the camera around slowly, showing the expansive, seemingly unending, piles of trash. The lighting wasn’t great, but it still made out some of the piles.

Maya zoomed in on some of the more distant piles, to show the extent of the piles. As she fiddled with the zoom function, she spotted something in the phone screen. Light.

She paused and brought the camera back to where she had seen the light. The digital zoom of the camera was awful, but she still managed to get an image to show up. Fuzzy and out of focus, it was definitely a light.

A neon sign.

“What the heck?”