Heroes aren't the only ones recalled in song and story. Quixote had his faithful Rocinante. Perseus had Pegasus. Shinji had his... difficult relationship with the enigmatic Unit 01. When Arthur went to his rest, Excalibur was returned to the lake... but where do the other fantastic weapons of war, with personalities and mythologies of their own, go when their softer companions have returned to the cycle of rust and spark?
Description
A deep hyperbolic crater, hundreds of meters across, lies beneath a gaping hole through which natural light and drippings from shattered sewer lines and water mains fall. At its center, part of a gargantuan iron sphere, its surface distorted by tremendous heat, protrudes from the collected dust of millenia. Aranged around it, shoulder to shoulder and rank upon rank, all the way up to the crater's eroded edges, are robots. Giant robots, of every conceivable design and configuration, from stern-faced upright bipeds, to low-riding, insectile things that sprout numerous piston legs from each of their segments. There's even a gazebo on chicken legs squatting next to a leonine device.
Sound carries poorly in this chamber and even light has a certain... granular quality, amplifying a sense of antiquity that the accidental amphitheater's attendees seem to exude. There is ancient majesty here, faint scents of propellant and incinerated exotic particles; all are damaged to one degree or another, torsos gashed as if by titanic can openers, limbs torn to ragged stumps, sensor pods melted to slag. Nothing moves; gun ports drip stalactites of once-liquid propellant like frozen yellow tears, and the carbon bloom of rocket exhaust paints a patina of neglect upon the yawning mouths of launch tubes.
The place is a sepulcher, a final resting place for the most grandiose, but still understandable, machines of war, left to contemplate the ages even after their pilots have returned to dust. Some show signs of repair, or at least of being cared for, and in the dust and echoes the bootprints of human-sized feet can be seen here and there.
Things Known, but Unspied by the Naked Eye
- The sphere that lies at the center of the crater radiates a noticeable amount of heat, roughly as much as a stone that's been baking over a long summer's day.
- The sphere is made of two parts, with an axle and a structure that arches over it from between the axle's ends. That seam and those structures are buried deep beneath the accumulated dirt and dust.
- Many of the robots are at least residually radioactive. None bear marks warning of contamination.
Rumors and Possibilities
- That which is not dead may eternal lie... Deep within their sundered frames, sparkplugs flicker and fusion jars still fitfully roil. Like Arthurian knights, they merely wait for the Universe's hour of greatest need.
- The bomb lives only as it's falling: Taken as a truism, the ammunition and power cores still nestled deep within storage compartments are sheltered from Down's ever-gnawing entropy. That which hasn't yet lived can never truly die, after all. Though pea-shooters in a place like the Mess, such things if properly salvaged could make for fine demolitions tools... or nifty pyro effects for a concert.
- A certain nymph has taken it upon herself to care for these ancient and forgotten veterans, cleaning and soothing old wounds and easing their slow descent into undifferentiated junk. To what end, who can say?
Author's Notes
I came up with this idea after reading about
DarkUnder being a graveyard for giant robots, but only finding the two that compose The Forge. The idea of a veteran's hospital or secret resting place for science fiction's answers to Excalibur and Durandal took possession of me and... here we are.
The Graveyard is neither linked nor @dug yet, though ideally it'd get fit in somewhere in the DarkUnder neighborhood. Right now I'm looking for suggestions on tweaking the @desc, and whatnot, before pestering the Functions about getting it installed.
- I love it! Yeah, I had cool stuff in mind for DarkUnder, but I never really did much with it. It was going to be a bigger general sub-area of Down. Heck, the robot graveyard is the logical extension of the main cavern. But I got lazy, moved on to other ideas and stuff. DarkUnder was the first place I built there. So...yeah! I'd love to link this with the general underground caverns and stuff. Future development was going to include a Subway cavern, and so forth. I've already linked the necropolis with it, more recently. I'm all for more. :-}
- (And you wouldn't really have to pester Functions, if you wanted to install it somewheres along DarkUnder. Just dig it and I'll give you a link from any room that I already own. Only need to involve those higher-ups, really, if it links to one of the public function-owned rooms. )
- ~Coalesce
- People have apparently begun to reference the Graveyard in RP, so I made the time to @dig it and link it to DarkUnder on my end. I'll make it WA aware once the reciprocal link's active. And thanks, Coalesce. Glad you like it. :) -Heath
- <3. And... are they the answers to Excalibur and Durandal, or to Arthur and Roland? Hero and sword. -Twin
- Also, I've sort of meditated upon the meanings of that little line from the epigraph of "Use of Weapons", considering who it's supposed to be written about... really, including it here almost feels like a threat. Who's going to launch these on what missions? To be used for what you were made for is to live. How much of their nature as Weapon is impossible to shake? "Not gun. Superman," as the Iron Giant crooned.
- All of it. Weapon systems can be dismantled and their charges defused for fun or expended in large-scale performance art, frames can be refitted for more pacifistic uses like construction and experimentation or artistic purposes. The whole area could also be used as an engineer's playground, poking through systems and learning how they work just for the heck of it. Regarding the quote in-context, to me it reads off as just potential. The bomb doesn't care where or why it's falling, so long as it's fufilling it's desire to fall.
- What Kayle said, essentially, hence the suggestion of pyro effects and the like. They could be an apocalyptic stockpile. They could be a monument to the cultures that created them. Heath, if asked, would liken the place to a veteran's hospital: they've been abandoned, filled with stories, nightmares and scars, intentionally forgotten by creators that dream of more peaceful futures; they've been left for those that might try to learn from the past and perhaps even rehabilitate the old warriors. It started out as an attempt to wrap my head around the gridshamanic cycle. I must say, I'm surprised and pleased that it's sparked discussion like this :). Finally, just to note, everything under 'rumors and possibilities' is pure conjecture and philosophising... at least until the forces of consensual reality push things in one direction or another. -- Heath