Chapter Text
I am royally fucked. Like, so…totally…screwed.
But, before I panic, let’s back up a little and figure out how I got here. Queue flashback. Or something.
She was born in Highwind as Katarina Michelle Dupont, but the only people who ever called her that were her parents, and only when they were thoroughly pissed at her. Which, as a child, was admittedly quite a lot. Everyone usually just called her Kat. Or, more recently, Builder. Because she was a builder.
In case you just crawled out from under a rock and don’t know what that means, it means I make things. Big things, small things, wood things, metal things. I take junk and turn it into other junk that people pay me for. Crazy, right?
Kat graduated from builder school a grand total of two weeks before seeing the ad begging for new builders to help save Sandrock from ruin. She just couldn’t resist packing her bags and sprinting headlong towards the challenge. Of course, it meant leaving behind everything she had ever known and loved, which was heartbreaking, but that was a small sacrifice for potential fame and fortune, right? And helping the needy and all that, of course. She just hoped everyone back home would forgive her for being so impulsive.
Nia, mostly. I hope Nia forgives me.
Also, past me was an idiot for thinking I could handle this.
The first thing she noticed when she stepped off the train in Sandrock was the smell. It wasn’t a bad smell, just unlike anything she’d ever experienced. Highwind had a thick, salty scent in her memory, which was mostly tied to time spent soaring above the city and surrounding hills on a glider. The Sandrock air was hot and dry, and it tasted like the ever-present rock dust and sand the town was named for.
I’m not sure what I was expecting, given Sandrock is a tiny town in the middle of the Eufala Desert.
A plucky voice called her from her sniffing, and she noticed a girl roughly her own age bounce up from a bench on the train platform. She was wearing overalls, and a pair of welding goggles was shoved back on her head, making her long black hair stick up in places. She was waving at Kat and holding a sign with her name on it.
My name. Not her own name. Either way, it was ridiculous. I was one of two people who disembarked that day. The other was the conductor.
Kat knew she shouldn’t complain; it was really sweet that they sent a welcoming party. However, she had spent hours cooped up, and her magnanimity was wearing perilously thin. She pulled herself together, warning herself against being bitchy to the first person she met in her new home.
The girl quickly introduced herself as Mi-an and explained that she was the other builder hired to replace Mason. Kat forced a weak smile and told Mi-an a little about herself. Mi-an offered to let her take her things to her workshop before showing her around, but she declined. The only thing she had brought was a backpack. Mi-an darted off toward a building across an empty lot, and Kat followed along, albeit with much less gusto.
My legs were stiff from the ride, and the last thing I was going to do at that moment was sprint anywhere.
Mi-an introduced her to the two men standing in front of what she learned was the Commerce Guild. Yan, the self-proclaimed Commerce Guild President…
definitely not a thing
…instantly made her want to puncture her eardrums so she never had to hear his voice again.
I sometimes still regret not following through on that.
Mason, the retiring builder, reeked of despondency and apathy. They were off to a fantastic start.
After Kat got the rundown on tools, machines, and registering her workshop…
Silver Spoon. You know, Kat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon? Never mind.
…rules of the desert…
No chopping trees, no touching the Oasis, conserve water!
…and a general idea of where everything in town was located, Mi-an followed her back to Mason’s old shack and yard. What would now be her shack and yard. Kat instantly understood why Mason made a beeline for the saloon as soon as their backs were turned. If the state of the place said anything, it was that he spent more time knocking them back over there than anywhere else during his employment in Sandrock.
Mi-an put up a good front, but Kat could tell her new friend was just as disappointed as she was. After Kat had agreed to some sort of builder pact to turn Sandrock around, Mi-an turned and dashed off toward town. Kat seriously considered getting right back on the train for the ten seconds it took for her to realize the train was already pulling out of the station on its way back to Highwind. Well, it was done, and she was stuck for now. She supposed she should figure out what to do next and just get on with it.
As it turns out, Sandrock is cursed. At least, that’s my current operating theory.
After getting her shack to barely-habitable-hovel status and ensuring she had the basic tools and machines (which should have been provided by the Guild), all hell broke loose.
Their first day on the job, Mi-an and Kat were urgently summoned to the Commerce Guild, where Rocky, the muscle-bound salvage yard owner, was threatening to pummel Yan into dust for not completing the lifts that were promised months ago. Lifts that were necessary to access the abandoned ruins below the salvage yard where the copper and tin ore were. The ore that was needed to build…basically everything. Including the lifts.
I totally would have let Rocky mop the floor with that dipstick, but Yan managed to rope Mi-an and me into completing the commission for him. Douche.
Then there was the sandstorm. Kat knew they happened in Sandrock every so often and knew they were nasty, but she was not prepared for exactly how much sand could pile up. It got everywhere. In her machines, in her house, in her bra…
Like, seriously, even with a plethora of protective clothing and the stupid sand hat Wonderboy brought by, I was cleaning sand out of cracks for days. I swear it feels like there’s still some lurking about if I twist just right...
The wind trashed the outdoor stage of the Blue Moon saloon and carried off Owen’s precious sign, leaving the enormous teddy bear beside himself. He and Kat hit it off immediately so finding his sign for him was a no-brainer. But apparently, Mason was forbidden to leave town before his going away party, which could NOT be held anywhere else except the outdoor stage. Like inside the Blue Moon, where there’s another stage. And guess who got to fix it all? Builder, builder, no sleep for you.
Mi-an and I actually make a pretty kick-ass team, and we managed to get everything shiny again so Mason could finally leave. Come to think of it, I have no idea where he slept during this time since I had taken over his place and he was already supposed to be gone. Oh well, don’t care. Good riddance. He can fuck right off for leaving Sandrock and MY workshop in the state he did.
Do you want to tell this story, or should I continue?
I mean, you kind of are me…
Enter the self-anointed Bandit King. Logan, Sandrock native and monster hunter turned hooligan, decided it would be a brilliant idea to pull a train heist with his brother Haru and steal exactly nothing. What did they do instead? Bust a window. Who did Yan decide had nothing better to do than to fix said window? Yeah. Glasswork in the desert in summer is beyond brutal. And the prize for all this headache? 200 gols.
I sometimes have to remind myself that I chose this life.
Let’s fast forward a bit.
The lizard-man Geeglers trashed the moisture farm that provides almost all the food for the town, which led to Kat and Mi-an building an entire tram system to cross the canyon and go after the Geeglers because Justice, the sheriff of the civil corps, wouldn’t let them cross the Shonash Bridge.
For…reasons.
The tram Kat and Justice were riding plummeted into the canyon, and they were forced to fight their way through Geegle-hoards just to have the Geegle-boss throw Kat off the Geegle-train right before that train took out the aforementioned bridge.
Okay, Justice may have had a point about not using it now that I think about it…I should apologize. But, did you catch that? The train took out the bridge. The whole fucking bridge. The bridge that leads to Atara, where our extra water comes from. At least it took the Supreme Geegle Assbutt with it.
Rebuilding the bridge required a solo trip, which Kat probably should not have been allowed to take into the Paradise Lost hazardous ruins to retrieve a part from an enormous cat killbot so that Sandrock’s antisocial genius researcher, Director Qi, could fulfill his dream of creating a working piloted robot.
If it sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. Why did we need a robot to rebuild a bridge? Again, reasons.
The robot helped put the heavy stuff on the bridge (that Kat and Mi-an had to source in the first place), Qi’s narcoleptic buddy Mint came from Atara to inspect the new bridge (sans his inspecting gear, which Kat had to rebuild for him), and water was able to arrive again.
Go build team! Water crisis averted!
Ha ha. Just kidding.
Logan, apparently not content to not rob trains anymore, decided it’d be fun to blow up the tower that holds all of the town’s filtered water.
For kicks, I guess? Fucking bandits.
Mi-an and Kat had barely finished building a bandit-proof replacement water tower before Mayor Trudy returned from her sabbatical in the desert and proceeded to drag them out to a poison-gas-filled hazardous ruin to scrape goo off a giant squid killbot…
Sensing a trend here?
…in the hopes that it would let trees planted in the desert thrive.
As insane as that sounds, it totally worked! We used the algae to create a biocrust to stabilize the sandy soil, planted some trees in it, and they grew! Nia would be so proud.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, now that I’ve been here a while, I can honestly say I love Sandrock. I love the people, and I don’t regret coming here. Despite the hurdles, I really believe we are making a difference, and I’ve forged almost as many friendships as I have bronze ingots. Just kidding, I have made So. Many. Bronze. Ingots.
Then, the Bandit King struck again, kidnapping the church minister, Matilda.
Now, I’m not a churchgoer (shocking, I know), and Matilda’s sticky-sweet manner tends to rub me the wrong way, but she’s an old lady, and Logan manhandled her onto that damn goat he rides like she was nothing more than a sack of potatoes. Not cool, bandit. Very not cool.
I thought we were trying to fast forward…
Sorry.
Hijinx ensued, and the local Civil Corps, comprising Justice, Unsuur, and a kick-ass cat named Captain, along with a badass Builder-cum-Warrior…
Me, obviously.
…tracked Logan to a cave in the outback. Fighting happened and…
I totally would have nabbed that ne’er-do-well if Wonderboy hadn’t busted in at the last minute, causing Logan to pull a fast one and disappear into a cloud of smoke. And rocks. Lots of rocks. Because he blew them up to block us from following him. Dick.
Speaking of dick…
Focus, Kat.
Matilda was saved, but the town was riled up enough by her kidnapping to be talked into hiring a bounty hunter. The bandit child Andy tried impersonating said bounty hunter before getting caught…
By me, obviously.
…and…
was co-opted into the town cult.
…I was going to say became a ward of the church, but sure. Billionaire investor Musa visited and saw the town at their best/worst/best/middling-good and eventually decided to give them a lot of money to build a tunnel to Portia through a mountain range and the Southern Eufala. People turned green thanks to toxic shampoo leakage in the Valley of Whispers, and Kat had to beat up a bunch of mutated plier-wielding fiends to vacuum up the greenifying ooze. Then, on the advice of Bronco the Bounty Hunter (the real-ish one) she and the civil corps met up with some talking moles and a rat princess, fought the rat princess’s evil stepmother the rat queen, and finally battled an AI mirror killbot.
I swear we are not making any of this up; it’s in the newspapers.
All this to get some intel that led Kat to make a metric ton of rutabaga-something-or-other and mount up for a mad dash through the canyons.
And that, in a long-winded nutshell, is how I wound up being thrown off a cliff, kidnapped by a psychotic goat in goggles, and unceremoniously dumped in the carnival from hell. If I survive this and manage to get my hands on that fucking bounty hunter, so help me, Peach. Of all the harebrained, ridiculous schemes…
Alright, breathe, Kat. Where were we?
Oh, right. I am royally fucked.