*bites lip* Fanfic, anyone?

[Maturin]

To get the confession over with, I've gone and written twenty or so pages of an ongoing, directionless, slightly episodic survival story about two refugees in City 17.

I understand that Half-Life isn't like the big RPG titles, whose customization, open-ended gameplay and D&D lineage lend themselves well to fiction using their universes. All Half-Life has is (the horror, the horror, the horror!) the 800 or so stories on fanfiction.net.

But I'm sort of a good writer. The other times I overcame my shame and wrote fan fiction, the community and two of the very talented (okay, one very talented and one average) original writers were quite impressed. So with that tenuous reassurance that it won't make your eyes bleed, would anyone be interested in reading some Half-Life fan fiction?


It's not entirely derivative, as I avoid the game's characters and events to expand on the universe a little, exploring how people would live their lives in such a changed world, how they would deal with the past and their old identities, and what it is like to try to survive in the ghost of a city where all the comforts and technologies of the past are available, but hard to reach. Half-Life's is an interesting sort of apocalypse, less depressing and destructive than a nuclear war, so I try to make the results matter more on a human level. A big part of this is making the social environment of City 17 more complex. How would people under the Combine regime communicate and relate to each other? Many of them don't even speak the same language, but what does nationality mean at this point anyways?

An interesting tidbit, HL writer Mark Laidlaw confirmed my image of a diverse, multinational City 17 with people from all over the continent grouped together. You can read about it in the Laidlaw Vault on the Steam forums.


TL;DR: I have fan-fic. Here is an excerpt:
"Miljan paused, kicked a headcrab into a pile of hubcaps, then kept on talking..."

 

[Acepilotf14]

What a short excerpt.

 

[Maturin]

Well, that part wasn't entirely serious. Mostly because my OP sounded rather gassy.

Edit: Mised some profanity and the forum doesn't support Yugoslav accent signs. That's Meel-yawn Neditch, case you were wondering.

*****

From his perch on the third floor fire escape, Miljan Nedic could just pick out the sound of the second-past-noon siren. It wafted through the thick summer air that lolled about above City 17's rooftops, a moody wail pilfered from an old world police car. It was humid even at this height, where the sound carried clearest. It was so oppressively muggy, in fact, that Miljan was surprised it did not rain where the sky was punctured by the gabled turrets, ornate dormers and tilting television antennae. The siren's message (that it was now two soundings, or 288 minutes, past noon, as per base-ten Combine timekeeping) drifted off eastwards, to reverberate from the rank of towering apartment blocks that stood near the port facilities, crumbling. As usual, the gigantic speaker nestled somewhere in the gleaming ribs of the citadel let out a metallic squeal as it was retracted.

Miljan pulled the concealing trash bag tighter about himself and peered through the metal grating into the dusty street below. Like clockwork (and it was clockwork), his prey emerged from the an alleyway just as the siren died away. The scanner let out a faint noise like an electronic pigeon and began to float up from street-level towards Miljan's platform. The changing of the guard had sounded, and its patrol for that 144 minute hour was over.

Just as it had on three previous occasions, the whirring drone passed above the fire escape and headed west over the red tile roof, just skimming the surface of the terracotta. Miljan threw off his plastic cloak and followed the instant the camera was pointed away, clambering up by the drainpipe with practiced ease. He had thirteen paces to catch up and make the kill, or else the unwitting chase would dive down into the tree-choked avenue on the far side of the building and make it back to its home power station. Miljan's sandals made soft rustling sounds on the treacherous surface as he closed the gap. Two more meters, and he would pick the right moment and to his broken socket wrench into the scanner's sparkling turbine, slam its lens into the clay, and cover it with the trash bag. Then Iskander would come up through the studio skylight and deliver the coup de grâce with the ice pick.

Wait, where the hell was Iskander? He should be watching from the—

—a crow swooped overhead, pursued by a trio of harrying sparrows. Their raucous calls mingled to create an unpleasant, novel sound, and a curious circuit flickered to life in the scanner's metal cranium. Brand new off the line and unused to the ways of the world, it pirouetted on its axis to identify this intriguing, possibly subversive sound, only to discover a large, ill-fed man wearing an automechanic's jumpsuit crouching in its line of sight. Miljan dropped, or rather flung, the wrench.

"Idi u picku mat—"

Click.

The LED flashbulb left him perfectly blind for a number of seconds, in which he lost his footing and the wrench clattered into the gutter. When the specks and shadows cleared from his vision, the scanner was gone.

"Iskander? Iskander! Get up here, kurac!"

Fiberglass shrieked in protest and moments later an olive-skinned man in a linen shirt appeared on the roof, blinking in the afternoon sun.

"There you are, Miljan. And kurac yourself. You missed it."

"Missed it? So what if I did, you Turk fairy? You didn't even bring the spike to do for it with."

The pair spoke in uneasy English, running roughshod over consonants to communicate at a greater pace.

"I'm not a Turk—anyhow, I heard you botch the capture from down below. Not surprised."

"You are a Turk. I know Turks, and you're damn well one today. 'Not surprised,' my kurac..."

Iskander squatted by the edge of the roof and retrieved the wrench from the compost-filled gutter.

"Ey... let's get off his roof. What if the picture it snapped of you looks aggressive, and they review it?"

"Then," Miljan rose stiffly, "we're dead. But I don't I think I scared the shiny bugger."

"Good. Because I'd probably be worse than dead. They'd stalker me in a moment. I'm not so old as you, and I don't smoke those awful fags."

"Feh! Five whole years younger. And yet you drink plenty. More than me, by God."

"So you admit I outdrank you yesterday?" Iskander swung the wrench onto his shoulder and laughed. "Under the damned table! Hang your head before your Serb forefathers, my friend."

"Kurac. I hadn't seen anything hard for months before that syrup from Sheeny's still. Not surprised it laid me out." Miljan dropped down onto the concrete roof of the adjacent building and followed his friend through a shattered skylight. The room below was black as pitch to his sun-dazzled eyes.

"And I'm not surprised you missed the scanner," Iskander said from somewhere in the darkness. "They're tricky bastards. What are we up to now, eight?"

"Just seven. Seven times getting flashed and ending up with nothing but a souvenir photo. That's a lot of documentation. I feel like a goddamn... a goddamn..."

"Lingerie model. Not to worry, though. We'll catch one tomorrow."

"They don't patrol here tomorrow. We should go over to the cafe on the Prospekt; they poke around inside the deck there sometimes. Only problem, God-Damn-Darina Lechkova won't let us in without we bring her those nails we owe her. I wouldn't mind exposing that bitch's hideout to Civil Protection and tunneling in after they've sealed it up. Nice water main connection there."

The apartment about them was becoming visible. Four windows were boarded up, admitting thin rays of light that shone on the mixed glass shards and samizdat pamphlets decorating the floor. Iskander stooped and hefted his belongings—a Red Army satchel and a Civil Protection stun baton.

"Nah, the patrol schedules by the train station get all wonky in the afternoon, and I swear I smelled bullsquid eggs in the basement last time we were over there. I've got things to do with the garden, and you could get on Sheeny's good side by helping him seal those fermenting jars."

Miljan licked his lips.

"How much water is left in the jug, though?"

"A liter? Two liters?"

"Then I don't know about you, Isky, but I've had a thirst hangover for two days. We need to run that pump and get the rest of the water from the fire station cistern, or I'm going to give up and drink Dr. Breen's drugged piss. And then I'll really forget you aren't a Turk. We need that—"

"—scanner battery to power the pump and the filtration, yes, I know." Iskander walked towards the stairs, gesturing his friend to follow. Miljan didn't move.

"Iskander. Give me the water."

"...Just drink half a liter."

"Who's measuring? Give me the jug."

Iskander paused for a moment, then tensely placed the plastic carton on the third step and continued on down the murky staircase. The second floor was stacked waist-high with boxes of rotting books, and at ground level the exits were blocked in with brick. He halted at the edge of a jagged hole cut into the tile floor and peered down. The roof of a van was just visible nine meters below in a subterranean parking garage. Miljan emerged from the dark shaft that was the staircase a moment later, wiping precious water from his beard.

"Much obliged, Isky. Listen though, we need to power up that rig, even if we don't catch a scanner today." He lowered his voice. "I think you should sap the juice from your baton, there."

Iskander turned.

"Be damned if I'll... I'm not going to go back to trusting a damn knife if we get nabbed by the CPs." For a moment the two stared at each other, faces studiously blank.

"Anyways," he continued, "we can run the generator for power. There's other fuel besides petrol and I think the patch you put on the gasket will hold."

"Where is there other fuel?"

They both knelt by the opening and began to creep downwards, using rebars as footholds.

"The plant. ...Maybe."

"The plant?" Miljan dropped onto the roof of the van with a reverberating crash and shouted back up at the hole, "We picked that place over pretty clean, no?"

His companion's satchel came hurtling out of the darkness and landed on his fingers.

"U picku—"

"There's—"

"...materinu!"

"...another couple of factory annexes we didn't check across the street... Miljan, get off the damn car so I can get down. There should be some charcoal down in the furnaces, and we can run that through the gasifier."

"Christ, that's a lot of work for some generator fuel..."

Iskander emerged from the ceiling, hung for a moment, then slid awkwardly down the windshield of the van.

"If you want to drink Combine water, that's your business. Just remember that Serbs don't have too many brain cells to begin with."

"Go bugger a eunuch, Mustafa. I'll meet you at the steam junction head tomorrow, since you need my wheelbarrow anyway."

"How early can you be there?"

"Three o'clock, I mean three sirens after midnight."

"Good enough. If we can get a few gallons of fuel, we'll have clean water for months. No sewage, no rat shit, no poison rain..."

"No radiation. Did Roman ever get his hair back?"

"Roman's dead."

"Jesus." Miljan ran his hands across his scalp and wiped them on his jumpsuit. "What a way to go."

"Not from the radiation."

"Not the radi—did the CPs bust up his place? That gramophone was always whining."

"He choked on a potato spud."

"You're fu—you're kidding me."

Iskander shook his head.

"This where you get off," he said, pointing at a manhole cover spray-painted with a yellow lambda. "I'm taking the west drains to the garden. Remember, meet you tomorrow, two before noon."

"Two before noon."

They parted ways, creeping along through the network of sewer pipes and broken-into cellars that was the City 17 underground. There, water and sunlight trickled down from ruined places where Combine perimeter walls had penetrated the pavement, the toes of black metal feet that sometimes went walking. Swarms of rats hunted after the headcrabs, while the citizens who drank municipal water lived listlessly above, subject to amnesiac drugs and the scanners' constant photography. Iskander ran his tongue over his lips as he walked, thinking of the streams that emptied into the Black Sea where the mountains came close. In his cousin's photos, at least, the water ran clean.

 

[Krynn72]

Theres actually a fan-fiction forum here, in the off-topic section. Don't know why it would be in the off-topic section though, and you'll probably get more views here since the off-topic section is hidden to anybody not registered and logged in. The point is, this site is no stranger to fan-fiction.

That said, I usually avoid fan-fic like the plague, but mostly because all of the ones I've tried to read were awful. Yours here seems to be an exception. I was able to read the entire thing even! I'd certainly like to see more when you've got it.

 

[Acepilotf14]

Compared to some of the others we get, yes, this is a rather good one.

 

[Frits]

But I'm sort of a good writer. The other times I overcame my shame and wrote fan fiction, the community and two of the very talented (okay, one very talented and one average) original writers were quite impressed. So with that tenuous reassurance that it won't make your eyes bleed, would anyone be interested in reading some Half-Life fan fiction?

Overcoming shame is the most important thing when writing! So thumbs up for what you've done. Especially since your writing is indeed quite good.

That said, I'd like to be a bit critical, since 1) your writing is good enough to criticize and 2) in a way, you ask for it...

No, I'm not interested in reading fan fiction. But that's mostly due to the fact that I've read enough SF/Fantasy, and most fan fiction (of any game/movie/whatever) amounts to SF and/or Fantasy. When I read something, I'd like to read about some kind of plot (not a trivial one, because plenty of those plots exist already), and also to read some kind of character development. These are very hard to get right, and that's why I limit what I read to a very select genre. Mostly, SF/Fantasy doesn't score very high on the plot/character development scale, to me.

I think you can get a lot of people quite interested in your stories by focusing on plot and character development, though.

It's not entirely derivative, as I avoid the game's characters and events to expand on the universe a little, exploring how people would live their lives in such a changed world, how they would deal with the past and their old identities, and what it is like to try to survive in the ghost of a city where all the comforts and technologies of the past are available, but hard to reach.

However, your story's excerpt features a lot of character interaction about trivial subjects (such as drinking etc.), which frankly doesn't leave the impression we're dealing with a ghost city here. Also, the drinking game story doesn't help the idea that comforts are hard to reach.

Half-Life's is an interesting sort of apocalypse, less depressing and destructive than a nuclear war, so I try to make the results matter more on a human level. A big part of this is making the social environment of City 17 more complex. How would people under the Combine regime communicate and relate to each other? Many of them don't even speak the same language, but what does nationality mean at this point anyways?

Is that so? Would a post-nuclear apocalyptic world truly be more depressing and destructive? From playing Fallout, I remember some very depressing stuff, yes, but I also remember people living in relative freedom (and with shiny weather all day long ).

However, from our history books and from the accounts of people still living under such regimes, we KNOW the depressing nature of living a life in communism. It's all amply documented, including photographs of the monotonous type of houses of the 'regular' people. What would your life be like when you'd live in constant fear of being arrested - an event which could happen without ANY reason in the Combine universe, as pictured very well in HL2? I think this would lead to extreme anxiety, thus making a large scale revolution a very plausible thing to happen (unimaginable in a country like China, for example, where there is freedom - at least that's what the people think).

The HL2 universe is extremely depressing, if you ask me. The only light points (unrealistically so, IMHO) are Alyx, Barney, and the scientists. Ultimately, they and the protagonist cause the revolution. Would Gordon Freeman not have stepped in, people would be living in far worse conditions than they did in the former USSR.

An interesting tidbit, HL writer Mark Laidlaw confirmed my image of a diverse, multinational City 17 with people from all over the continent grouped together. You can read about it in the Laidlaw Vault on the Steam forums.

Interesting, though I must say I think you could make this matter more urgent in your story. For example, from HL2 I get the impression nationalities are not quite like what they are in our 'reality'. Think division of the world in Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia in '1984'.

Plus, I'm not a Turk myself, nor am I a Serb. What's bad about being called a Turk? I say: make this more explicit in your story. :bounce:

 

[Maturin]

Mostly, SF/Fantasy doesn't score very high on the plot/character development scale, to me.

I certainly won't argue with that. I'll admit, I've been pretty self-indulgent so far, playing around with the setting instead of thinking about progression.

However, your story's excerpt features a lot of character interaction about trivial subjects (such as drinking etc.), which frankly doesn't leave the impression we're dealing with a ghost city here. Also, the drinking game story doesn't help the idea that comforts are hard to reach.

About the alcohol, I may agree with you. The dialog around it seems rather clumsy, and an excuse for exposition.

But when they're talking about the drinking water situation, it's the new trivial, where the everyday necessity of drinking water requires scrabbling together fuel through hazardous means in order to leech a little water out of an abandoned pipe. That's why I called it a survival story, because I'm focusing on how the characters are able to live relatively normal lives by being illegal vagrants. And the city, it should appear later on, is half crumbling and half maintained by the Combine.

Is that so? Would a post-nuclear apocalyptic world truly be more depressing and destructive? From playing Fallout, I remember some very depressing stuff, yes, but I also remember people living in relative freedom (and with shiny weather all day long ).

I suppose depressing was the wrong word. It's less grim to me because so much of the old world remains, and not just as scorched ruins. I try to write about the funny ways the pre-invasion Earth still matters or doesn't.

However, from our history books and from the accounts of people still living under such regimes, we KNOW the depressing nature of living a life in communism. It's all amply documented, including photographs of the monotonous type of houses of the 'regular' people. What would your life be like when you'd live in constant fear of being arrested - an event which could happen without ANY reason in the Combine universe, as pictured very well in HL2? I think this would lead to extreme anxiety, thus making a large scale revolution a very plausible thing to happen (unimaginable in a country like China, for example, where there is freedom - at least that's what the people think).

Of course, people often don't mention the fact that an awful lot of very ordinary life went on under such regimes. Several hundred million people did not spend so many decades in grinding misery, otherwise there would have been a revolution.

City 17, however, is indeed like Moscow at the height of Stalin's blood purges. The difference is that the citizens don't have any hopes, aspirations or even jobs. Their lives, unlike Soviet people, are pointless. Since there are no children and hence few families, they don't have anything to lose. In my mind, that's why the revolt was possible, although I don't touch on it in this fanfic. I portray the Resistance from the more jaundiced perspective of outlaws who want nothing to do with them.

The HL2 universe is extremely depressing, if you ask me. The only light points (unrealistically so, IMHO) are Alyx, Barney, and the scientists. Ultimately, they and the protagonist cause the revolution. Would Gordon Freeman not have stepped in, people would be living in far worse conditions than they did in the former USSR.

The universe is depressing, but the games are not. Likewise, my characters don't lead depressing lives. They have traumatic pasts, but the general rule is that the war never happened and should not be discussed. The human race may be on the extinction train, but these two will be ready to break in and take their furniture when they go.

Interesting, though I must say I think you could make this matter more urgent in your story. For example, from HL2 I get the impression nationalities are not quite like what they are in our 'reality'. Think division of the world in Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia in '1984'.

I definitely disagree. Continents are mostly imaginary. In 1984 those factions were entirely political, rather than natural divisions of culture. Language is the only thing that really matters because it enables or impedes communication, and that cleavage allows for all sorts of tribal identities to remain. Iskander and Miljan are both multilingual, and I identify the latter as a Serb just because I think some people would cling to irrelevant things like that precisely because everything became suddenly so irrelevant. A counter-current to 'Citizens of Earth' thing Breen and Kleiner talked about.

Plus, I'm not a Turk myself, nor am I a Serb. What's bad about being called a Turk? I say: make this more explicit in your story. :bounce:

Oh, simple. He's not Turkish. Iskander is a Persian name, although his nationality is unestablished.
Additionally, 'Turk' has traditionally been used as a word for Muslim in many parts of Europe. Miljan is being impolite in an old-fashioned sort of way.

Thanks for the comments.

 

[Maturin]

Miljan was watching Drinkers. Sitting on a bench in a barricaded courtyard, he could see the street reflected in the large mirror nailed to a nearby tree. The summer rains, which were acidic and contaminated because the wind carried them in from east, had stripped its branches of leaves. The brittle few that remained dropped one of their number onto the mossy pavement every few minutes. Miljan crushed a few of them with his sandal and continued to stare at the passersby. A faded cosmetics magazine lay in his lap, but he had given up trying to record the frequency of scanner patrols and the CPs on their rounds. There was hardly any space to write between the advertisements, anyway.

The Drinkers had easy lives. Short-term memory loss, it turned out, resulted in considerable docility when it affected the entire (documented) population. Citizens of Breen's city could look to their Benefactors for all their basic needs, take a sip of drugged water, and let the days slip by in idleness. There was a lot to be said for a pastless and futureless existence. It allowed only the barest threads of a life, but when you couldn't remember the normal length of a day, each sunset had its own special novelty.

More ambitious citizens who wanted the finer things in life—new bedding, books, household items—had to scrounge up what they could, always taking pains to conceal their surplus possessions from confiscatory CPs and their stun batons. They would write the locations of stashes on the inside collars of their standard-issue denim shirts, lest they get thirsty and forget. Rations were sufficient, but only just, so that one had always to be on the hunt for more food in order to keep weight on. That was all the activity a Drinker was allowed, unless they were tapped as informers or menial workers by Civil Protection, which happened only occasionally.

Iskander and Miljan were refugees, non-citizens that had crept into the city at one point or another by crossing the polluted, Xen-haunted hinterlands and the expanding and retracting Apron wall. They could not live among the citizens, lest there be a Miscount, and they were not issued rations. Instead they traveled by the underground, charting and tunneling to reclaim living spaces and storage in structures far from Combine patrols. Now that they had adopted some sort of settled life in the margins, they were called fugees, drainrunners and other less savory things in a dozen languages. Iskander preferred the term creeps. They were distrusted and shunned by legal residents, but were valuable contacts for those who sought rare goods to trade for food and electricity.

A scanner slid lazily overhead. Their orange eyes read faces more easily than clothes, and nothing about Miljan's appearance was suspect. It was possible to move about the city mostly unmolested, so long as one did not draw the attention of the chronically bored CPs. Checkpoints were the main problem, with their ID cameras and alarm klaxons.

Miljan patted his grumbling stomach and envisioned the juvenile tomatoes in Iskander's rooftop garden. How nice it must be to have guaranteed meals everyday. It was easy, in fact, to shed fugee status and register as a full citizen. All one had to do was inform on another outlaw—or perhaps report a particularly heinous civil violation among the Drinkers—and take a pill. He and Iskander preferred the underground life, however. Death by bad luck was only slightly more probable, and their illegal existence granted them a certain élan. Every now and then Resistance couriers would take shots at him for using their tunnels, so as far as Miljan was concerned, he was a thoroughgoing City 17 hajduk.

"Hey! You over there! Moleman!"

Miljan almost fell off the bench. He spun around to see a white-haired man beckoning from a ground level window in the nearest building.

"Christ! How did you get—what the hell did you call me, you filthy Drinker?"

The newcomer didn't bat an eyelash; he was already agitated enough.

"Could you come give us a hand? It's urgent and—"

"What did you call me?"

"Mole! Moleman, you dig in the ground like a mole. Okay?"

"Odjebi, kurac."

"Now listen, pal, we've caught a scanner!"

Miljan bolted to his feet. The magazine fell from the bench and opened to a page showcasing spray-on tan lotion for men. He covered it with his foot.

"No joke? Where is it?"

"My neighbors found it behind the apartments across the street. We don't know how to disable it and its noisier than—Hurry the hell up, or it'll fly away!"

Miljan swore again and began to climb in through the windowsill.

"Lead on, then. How did a bunch of sorry Yanks like you catch one, anyway?"

There were there too many damned Americans being shipped into the city these days.

"It caught itself, mostly."

They reached the end of a drafty hallway and turned a corner. There was a gaping hole in the wall where, judging by the tire tracks, an APC had smashed into the building. Civil Protection's monthly alcohol ration always made for a number of unpleasant, perilous, days.

"Huh. So much for this block, anyway. You Drinkers can just walk right in."

"They'll make us brick it back up, don't worry," the American said bitterly, and walked into the street. Miljan hung back out of habit and checked both ways along the road. Nothing but downed power lines and heat haze to the left, the Citadel framed between two houses to the right.

Hajduk and citizen darted down a trash-choked alleyway and through an empty lot filled with broken-down Ladas. They heard the sounds first, a cacaphony of metallic wailing punctuated by urgent chirps. The American turned the corner into a bare cul-de-sac of concrete and blankly staring windows.

"There it is. We can't figure out what to do with it."

Miljan scratched his head. The noisy distress calls were all coming from the scanner—as emotive as all Combine machines—that was careening around the confined space in irregular circles. It seemed to lack altitude control entirely, was listing to the right and could not stay on course for more than a few seconds. Two gypsy women were watching furtively from a doorway while another man chased the malfunctioning drone to and fro, ludicrously trying to snare it with a dogcatcher's net.

"Sranje! What the hell happened?"

"It zapped itself on an extra power line we rigged on the fourth floor," the old man answered, pointing towards the small rectangle of sky that was visible. "Then it fell down here and bounced around for a while. Do you know how to disable it?"

"That's the easy part. You have to catch it first."

The seemingly panicked automaton was snapping pictures wildly, and it appeared to have smashed its headlight. Taking care to conceal himself behind the wall, Miljan turned towards the women, who were watching impassively.

"Joj! Pi?ke! Do something useful. Throw some rocks at it or something!"

They looked at him momentarily and then vanished into the building's interior. He realized with consternation that they probably understood Serbo-Croatian, and flung a few more epithets after them for good measure.

"Oh, give up!" Miljan growled at the man with the net. "Or else go find a bigger stick." The Drinker obeyed as if used to it and sprinted away, ducking to avoid the scanner's crazed trajectory. He returned moments later with a tire iron and offered it to Miljan.

"Nuh-uh, you do it."

To his surprise, the scrawny fellow ran nimbly up to the flying camera and fetched it a blow that made the whole yard resound. With an echoing crack, the chase staggered out of the air and bounced into the well of a casement window, It was still doggedly trying to move ahead, but trapped. Massaging the index finger that had once gotten caught in the gears of a scanner in a very similar situation, Miljan approached.

"Nice work. Now hand me that."

Pinning it down by the front panel, he jammed the metal bar into the workings of the turbine and sprang back. Sparks and grease vapor filled the air, followed by the sound of a large firecracker and a rain of shattered components. The aluminum window well was now hot to the touch, and Miljan used the tire iron to sift around inside.

"About time!"

He reached down and lifted out his prize—a large cylindric battery with translucent sides that gave off a faint blue glow. Grinning, he thought of Iskander's water pump. There was probably a hundred hours' worth of voltage in his hands, and no need to shovel charcoal.

"There! This here is the good stuff."

Both citizens were watching him closely; even the women had returned.

"That's our battery," the American said, jaw clenched.

"The hell it is! You ask me my help and then—what would you do with it anyway? You get free power for being good little roblje."

The second man spoke for the first time.

"I brought it down. It's ours..."

Miljan spat by way of response.

"Fine then, you fugee greaseball. Show him, Tsura."

From the doorway, one of the women rooted around in the pouch of her tartan shirt and pulled a pistol out by the barrel. Miljan froze. Where could that ?iganski witch gotten herself a Makarov?

"Hokay, hokay, okay, Amerikanci, hold on a moment." He stood slowly, holding the battery as if it were a shield. "You don't need this so very much, and truth be told neither do I, but we should have a trade, yes?"

"You don't have anything to give, Ivan."

'Ivan?' Damn Americans.

"That's where you're wrong! Look here." He turned his back, keeping his hands visible, and pulled a thin plastic pouch from the rear pocket of his boiler suit. Tossing it to the citizens, he grinned affably, or tried to.

"That's rare stuff there. UNICEF nutrient and vitamin gruel. You mix a teaspoon or so up with water and it'll keep you alive and kicking for a week. You could walk clear back to... Chicago, with it."

Their faces registered little interest, although at least the American was reading the label. His scanner-killing friend made an exasperated sound.

"You've got to be joking—"

"I swear it by your dead mother! I'm no Armenian; when have you ever known a Serb who could swindle worth a damn? Hey?"

"God, this must taste awful. We don't need any more food than what they give us for nothing."

Miljan's face suddenly brightened.

"Oh, but you will soon."

"What?"

"That scanner snapped pictures of all four of you, didn't it?"

"Tsura, just shoot him if he talks too much longer."

"You don't get what this means, do you? You sorry Drinker bastards, the only thing the Combine see right now is the four of you running around trying to destroy one of their scouts. I don't have to tell you what's going to happen to you."

The American blanched.

"You've all blown it. You can do whatever you want but I would be hitting the sewers right now. And that little miracle bag could probably feed all four of you clear to the Apron and through the badlands to the nearest Resistance outpost. Really, you're lucky you found me."

He sensed victory, but the gypsy with the gun appeared unmoved. That was, to say the least, the deciding factor. Then the thrice-blessed, darling institution that was Civil Protection saw fit to sound a noisy alarm at one of their checkpoints. All four citizens looked towards the alleyway in alarm.

"Okay! We'll do the trade, but please, show us how to get to the Underground Railroad."

"The what?"

"Station 15 is the closest, but there's half a dozen checkpoints on the way."

Miljan wrapped the battery in a handkerchief and looked up to see if the handgun was lowered yet.

"Sorry, narodni, but that's not my area of expertise. I stay far away from those goons. You'll have to squirrel away somewhere and find out where to go from someone else. This Yankee here found my naptime spot in the courtyard, so maybe you can all hide in there."

Now the two men looked ready to bolt, and the women vanished from the doorway again. Suddenly, there was no gun in the equation. Miljan cradled his newest possession lovingly, and gave the American a pat on the shoulder as he walked towards the sunny street.

 

[Maturin]

Iskander looked at the curtains of sagging canvas and groaned. Two meters of iron ladder had rusted loose from the factory wall and torn a long gash in the camouflage covering of the passageway connecting the main structure to the annex where his garden was. One of City 17's Stalinist industrial complexes, the surrounding area was choked with fences and rubble at ground level, with high walls separating it from the highways and rail arteries outside. Civil Protection never took the trouble to look in on the cluster of hulking, vine-covered buildings, which meant that scanners flew over instead, several times a day. It was incredibly dangerous to dart from depot to depot when a drone hanging noiselessly in the sun could identify a trespasser (and being spotted in unpoliced areas could result in anything from a beating to summary execution) from hundreds of meters away. Iskander had spent weeks rigging a series of covered routes between buildings, mostly trenches and catwalks covered in cloth, plastic and plywood. It was worth it for the storage and seclusion, not to mention the imitation greenhouse where he and Miljan grew the bulk of their food. The scanners saw nothing amiss in his work, once it was completed. They could pick out minute details in a person's face or dress, but appeared incapable of noticing the discrepancy between a ramshackle construction held together with dead telephone wires and the cinderblocks of a foundry.

Iskander had heard that hard copies of scanner snapshots were sometimes presented to prisoners under interrogation in order to encourage cooperation, but he had never seen any evidence of humans controlling or monitoring the flying cameras remotely. (Otherwise several appallingly rude graffiti messages of his would have been removed, instead of ignored.) Miljan believed that Breen was the only human to inhabit the entire Citadel, and maybe he was right.

This particular tunnel consisted of canvas supported by a frame of lead pipes, but now there was a hole right in the northern side of it. Built on top of a slanted chute that was plugged by a mass of slag too thick to dig through, the concealing pavilion had taken an especially great effort to build. Worse, the canvas was coated in dust that made him sneeze uncontrollably, and scanners had audio feeds.. Miljan would have to come back and sew up the damage sometime.

Iskander sighed and scrambled up the roof of the chute, ridges in the corrugated tin providing good handholds. This building was old and squat, and his bridge led into the attic. The ceiling was mostly warped timber, so the interior was shot through with rays of light that tilted in from a dozen angles. His garden was only a few months old, but it was already his largest and most successful by far. He and Miljan maintained a collection of small plots on rooftops and balconies, but the yields were too small because hiding the cultivation from CPs, scanners and citizens limited their options. After bludgeoning its den of houndeyes to death, the factory loft had provided the perfect alternative. The key ingredient was the opening in the flat portion of the ceiling, fifteen meters square, that had once been entirely framed over by panels of glass. Iskander had almost broken a leg replacing the missing panes with white plastic trash bags while dangling on two lengths of chain. He trusted the dirty glass that remained to admit sunlight and not surveillance, and it had worked. After hauling several hundred pounds of bone-scattered compost from the neighboring slaughterhouse using a handcrank-powered dumbwaiter, they had plenty of soil. Now beans and tomatoes grew on steel trellises, with carrots below. Rainwater ran into the garden from redirected gutters, each of which had a precious filter (originally destined for some third world country) in it. Iskander didn't think that the toxins from the more noxious weather patterns would be passed on to the produce, but it was best not to risk it. Contamination through careless foraging was probably one of the easiest ways to die, although Miljan kept adding new possibilities to the list.

There was weeding to do, but the dangerous hike from the garage beneath their failed scanner ambush had left him fatigued. That quarter-kilometer stretch of open drainage canal took years off his life every time he traversed it, but it was the only open route ever since the clan of Austrians living in the apartments alongside had gotten crabbed two weeks earlier. Such was life on the outskirts. Iskander slid his back down the length of a timber post that had been trucked in from the Carpathians sixty years ago. Reaching the floor, he closed his eyes. It was incredibly tranquil up here, even though he knew that his attic was considerably less safe than a closet in the city center. He ought to read about peas, really. There was the gardening handbook on the stool, printed in Russian with little diagrams peopled by smiling Soviet children and babushkas.

Books had saved his sanity. In the early days, when the hunting and killing was still in full swing and the horizon always burned, he had fled Trabzon with with his grown-up cousin and young nieces. The Seven Hours War concluded just after his fifth birthday, but he remembered nothing of his life before that point except a small, dark room that smelled of cloves and mulberries. Picking their way west through the ruin that was Anatolia, Iskander could never recall speaking. Some of his nieces would cry at night, but only softly, for the human race had encountered the one force capable of awing infants into silence. They all grew up in a mine shaft on one side (or maybe the other) of the Dardanelles, of which Iskander recalled only grinding torment under florescent lights. His salvation came when he wormed his way into the owner's library and set about decoding. Turkish first (there were no books in his native language, which no one here had heard of in any case), then the painful siege of Russian under his cousin's uncertain tutelage and a war of attrition with English. Most of the books he came across dealt the irrelevancies of a world long vanished, but others provided hints of where he came from, his family, his people and his species. That knowledge carried him through the crisis of his teenage years and stayed with him after the predictable fate of his relatives, leaving him equipped with tools of incalculable value. His prowess gave him a certain advantage over Miljan, who was older and otherwise intimidating in his experience of the old world. Miljan could speak, but not read, languages beside his own, and from time to time relied on Iskander to take him back to the past he so painfully remembered. The Serb had not let him rest until he had succeeded in deciphering a Ukrainian language guide to Yugoslavia.

Because of the haze that was his early childhood, Iskander belonged more to the last generation, the children of the apocalypse. He had a few more years than the youngest human beings living, a generation compressed into a few bare years by the remaking of the world at the hands of dark matter. These final specimens of the human race were now well past their adolescence, and were at times an entirely differential organism from the survivors who remembered an independent Earth. Most the antebellum population had only limited memories, like Miljan. It was difficult to find anyone who had fully matured in the days before portals rolled back the sky, for the elderly did not fare well under the Combine. The range of the human race had been narrowed along with the scope of its future.

There was still variation to be found in the subject organism, however. Many citizens clung to old national and ethnic labels, often to the bewilderment of their younger counterparts. There were Drinkers and fugees, rebels sometimes, with their technocrat rulers, and stories of feral people living far from the cities. Miljan had also relayed rumors of migrating bands of paramilitaries; ex-Spetsnaz and the like who knew how to fight better than how to live. Years had passed since the world had last been a battlefield. On the day the Scourging was finished, the face of a man with a kindly white beard flickered onto television screens fried by electromagnetism. Breen's voice echoed from car radios and loudspeakers; his face was projected onto the surface of the moon. Then the relief and consolidation of the survivors commenced, and those cities that had inexplicably survived were renamed. They welcomed the flagging refugees that trudged towards them highways and toll roads, bicycle spokes of humanity converging through a sea of ash. The Suppression Field went up, snuffing out tomorrow with an epidemic of miscarriages. Citizenship in Earth was offered, and populations were relocated wholesale. Entire countries went walking, usually in different directions, and now City 17 was as diverse as any old world metropolis, home to people from all over Europe, the Mediterranean and lately the Americas.

Most of them were citizens. There were thousands of them, all living useless, drug-addled lives with the Combine's tentative permission. He saw them daily, walking around with their spines wound up in a perpetual cringe, as if the sparkling baton was always inches away. Perhaps one in three would immediately report a stranger and cash in the proffered ration coupon. Another third spent their days vainly pining after the Resistance (and some of these tried at one point or another to flee). The rest did not do much of anything at all. Miljan had more sympathy for them than Iskander, for he knew what it was to be comfortable and safe. He remembered how seductive it was to fall back into certainty and be coddled.

Miljan came from the Serbian Krajina in Croatia, whose second destruction he had survived through the grit and stubbornness of his grandmother. It had been her mission to ensure that her ten-year-old charge never forgot where he came from, and Iskander envied him the inheritance. Miljan had been part of a society, a nation. His understanding of the world as it had been and should be stemmed from a precious decade of normal, easy life. Iskander thought it well worth the pain of remembrance, for in his experience, ignorance was rarely bliss.

Ignorance was what the Drinkers had. Groups of them were parceled out to various apartment buildings, usually with no apparent rationale behind the assignments. Housing allotment was, however, mandatory and permanent. 'Censuses' were taken at mostly random times each week, and punishment for absences could be collective. So they were stuck, going nowhere and knowing little. There was regular contact between the artificial communities on different city blocks, but no news of the wider world and few local topics worth talking about. On trade visits, Miljan was frequently incredulous at the lack of social patterns that constituted so much of daily life. Born in the Balkans, the continent he knew was one where old men sat on benches and young men lounged on the rails of bridges, retiring to a well-lit room with a table and drinks at night. When loitering outside was prohibited and the smallest gathering was suspect, the human race was almost unrecognizable to him.

Perhaps it was much easier after all to have never lived a normal life. Iskander was free of that burden, free to carelessly pick over the written remnants of his species. He was like the young people in the residence blocks, the ones who didn't understand the purpose of a common room, who had strange new ideas on how to organize living space in their native environment. 'Honestly,' Miljan said once, eyes wide, 'all these young people are exactly like gypsies. Pale little Belgian gypsies.' Such generational differences sometimes caused domestic power struggles, as did tribal disputes, yet such things alone rarely got out of hand. There were almost no families anymore, by attrition and by design, so there was little impetus to keep conflicts going, and all national claims were moot, except among the most reticent. What really lay behind the unrest of apartment life, in Iskander's opinion, was incessant sexual frustration. He had never read Freud, only a highly critical response to his work by a British columnist with a penchant for folksy language. He was certain, however that the dead German's (Was Austria a German province?) flawed theories were much more useful when applied to this simple world, where, as Miljan put it, CPs made you stand at attention but nothing else ever could. The sexual politics of Combine society were insane, the Serb often asserted, albeit in other words.

Iskander realized that he had been dozing. Shadows cast by an iron window grating had kept one eye in sun and one in shade, alternating as the afternoon gave way to evening. So much for gardening, anyway. Worse, his semi-lucid mind had been wandering for quite some time. The very worst ideas came from that sort of state, for all manner of harebrained schemes were eminently possible in the forgiving world of a dreamscape. An entire morning had once passed before he realized that his cousin was not, in fact, alive and could not be smuggled into the city using the nonexistent Combine postal system.

Iskander stood and pressed his palms into hollow of his stiff back. That roof support had been a terrible place to fall asleep. Walking over to where the moldy ceiling planks slanted inwards, he removed a canvas cover and stuck his head outside. Judging by the sun, the second-to-last siren would be sounding soon, equivalent to 19:12 human time, and Miljan would signal if he wanted to meet up that night. Hopefully he would, meaning that there was something productive to, some gain to be made. Getting out of the factory complex wouldn't be so hard, either. After such a hot day, walking on a metal or tarmac surface was enough to be invisible to the scanners' rudimentary infared detectors.

The Combine rang their bell a few minutes later. Iskander always seemed to wake up right before a sounding, as if the schedule was etched into his brain.

There, there it was. A building on the horizon was winking at him. Using a polished piece of brass and the last rays of the sun, Miljan was standing inside the dome of an observatory two kilometers distant, flashing Morse code to the southwest.

"F...ound one, ba—battery! Hell, yes!"

Scooping up his satchel, Iskander ran out of the room and slid down the roof of the chute. Dust trailed out behind him like exhaust, but he did not sneeze.

 

[lord_raken]

I've only skimmed things so far but I plan on coming back to finish. I will say this: The seeming trivial aspects of their conversation don't seem out of place. It makes sense that when everything around you abysmally depressing you find small things to talk about in order to stay sane. So I don't mind the small talk, it actually reveals quite a lot about the characters and establishes their relationships. This is also a nice counterbalance to the HL2 series' story as it is filled with action and epic battles. In your story we see what the less epic but no less resilient people do under the combine rule.

Good job. I'll be back latter to give this a good going over.

 

[Tunnelsnake]

I like this a lot actually. Great detail. Well done and keep it up. I'd enjoy reading more. Is there a website where people share original stories they created similar to fanfiction.net?

 

[Maturin]

There are actually one more "chapter" (as long as all this put together) already online here:
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6530590/1/bUncivil_b_bSouls_b
In which shit impacts a fan. I have a couple more pages of the next section written and polished, but am in the unenviable position of not knowing what to make happen next. What's the most entertaining thing that could follow amateur electrical engineering (you know, besides the obvious)?

 

[atomic-led]

I like this a lot. Normally I just gloss over fan fics becuase its always marine A shooting stuff with marine B and nothing real ever happening. This is good, please don't stop Also what if Iskander made a discovery? Something that at first glance he did not know what it was or what to use it for but was an everyday item that we instantly recognise? This would convey even more so his non-exisent pre war life? Just an idea.

 

[Maturin]

Check the link again, as I have completed a new chapter, which adds a new character. It also sets up the plot point that will begin the remainder of the story arc and fan fic (aka, the actual plot).

But the last chapter may have some typos or awkward phrasing since I haven't edited it much.