"Alice was born in the unfortunate town neighboring the gargantuan landfill designated as Alpha25pC, a settlement entirely dedicated to scavenge components and precious materials from the ancient landfill, much like her parents she was inevitably doomed to repeat the cicle of living only to fulfill quotas of processed scrap everyday, but diferent from the depressed mases that surronded her life, she had a curiosity for the eletronic trash that surrounded her, and this curiosity took her to experimentation, and experimentation lead to results,before the age of 14 she was more than capable of repairing complex electronics, and thanks to this talent she was making a living out of repairing machinery for her neighbors, sparing her from the toiling in the deadly landfill, around her 20's she saw the forces of House of Iron take control of the landfill, her town was one of the last anexed by the empire being at the very edge of the know territories, the overseers of the House of Iron were horrified by the conditions of living nearby the landfill so they immediately proceeed to adequate it to imperial standarts, what was once a shantytown bit by bit became a respectable industrial city in a matter of months.

Under the regime life became exponentially better for the scrappers including Alice, now with access to education, healthcare and most importantly the great imperial Neural Network she could dream of a better life outside the landfill, she got specially fascinated by the neural network, being able to comunicate with different people millions of kilometers away and see images of distant places was almost like a dream, not just comunicate but also play with them, Alice became aan avid and rabdly competitve gamer in her spare time under the infamous username XxChonkMommaxX.In the following years Alice tried multiple times to pass the tests offered by the House of Iron,they are always looking for new talents and anyone with a high grade under those tests can have the oportunity to go to the very imperial capital to study on the greatest technological centers in the world and even earn noble titles, but Alice never succeded in this endeavor, altought she had talent, her programming skills were considered too crude for the perfecionist AI's of the House of iron, but still her above average grades granted her a cushy job on the landfill.

The way scrap was processed also changed a lot during the new regime , now every single worker on the landfill had access to fully sealed envirosuits and the deadliest jobs were entirely made by remotely controled drones, Alice's job was to oversse such drones, she was paid to live in large fully sealed command airship hovering over the most toxic and radioactive areas of the landfill, while the drones of various sizes would land and scavenge precious and sometimes deadly components, this job was a breeze, she would spent most of her day sitting in large chair watching the drones work while playing some game in the other screen, only stoping ocasionaly to fix a damaged drone.This life lead to a bit of boredom and weight gain, so she began to show interesting findings of the landfill for her distant friends online to pass time, among them old data storages long obsolete, the piles of trash would sometimes preserve extremely objects, like data disks or personal communication devices, to explore such objects was like a entirely archological expedition, sometimes she would repair or reverse enginner obsolete cables and conections just to power again old cell phones or computers.

Each new device was a box of surprises, sometimes she would find long forgotten games and movies, videos of someone's vacation of 600 years ago in places that dont even exist anymore, strange pornografical art beyond her comprehension...or sometimes darker findings.After the end of the Corporate wars House Solarii and House of Iron put a lot of effort in cleansing data all over the network, this left a lot of historical gaps in registries, and the imperial houses arent fond of people meddling with it, among the many wreackages in the landfill Alice found horrific visual registries, transmissions and documents proving serious crimes commited by the empire during and after the war, altought she had a most apolitical view of everything, she was curious she went deep in this dark rabbit hole, unaware that the eyes of the House of Iron were already over her.

Alice's death was already planned and scheduled, she was about to eliminated in an unfortunate "accident" with a automated crane, but fate drew cards in her favour, in the day she was supposed to die the necromutant plage outbrake became known, and all the imperial Artificial Inteligences focused in containing the outbreak and maintaing the Neural Network, her assasination became a low priority task.Even her distant settlement became affliced by the plague, once she received the call to return her ship it was already too late, from above she could watch first hand the citizens bellow being butchered and devoured by the undead, in this almost surreal situation she spoted a group of survivors at the hospital roof trying to fend off the infected with firearms, even the military grade gunpowder weaponry was barely enough to damage the undead and they would be quickly overhelmed, she could not just land the ship otherwise she would just die with them, so she had the idea of dropping the drones on the infected.

Those heavy working drones were not meant for combat, but they are rugged constructs and deadly metal scavenging tools were more than a match for the undead, just 2 drones were capable to hold the line while the ship landed and the survivors boarded it, their hydraulic claws crushed and teared the infected with ease while their plasma cutters burned so hot that even flesh and bones would simply evaporate,the machines only succumbed in combat when the ship was already safe high above in the air, although the survivors have escaped the nightmare was just beginning.Their first plan was to reach the House of iron stronghold, surely such a well defend place would be still stand, but while trying to contact the Overseer AI they only received the message "The worms are inside my systems and I refuse to be infected, I will depart with honor" as the mesage ended they saw a flash followed by a giant mushroon cloud were previously was the stronghold. in this moment the Neural Network went down, and hopelessness took over, everyone on the ship was devastated, all communications went silent and they had no place to go, the survivors decided to follow the old train tracks once used to carry away the scrap from the landfill , they surely would conect to a major town eventually, meanwhile Alice work tirelesy to activate and even create new sensors and antenas for the ship, she was sure someone somewere was alive and would try contact in some frequency, or perhaps soon the mighty empire would fix the situation, but it never happened.

Town after town along the tracks were nothing but graveyards filled with raging monsters, unable to land the survivors could only hope the drones would find and be able to bring supplies to the ship, sometimes they were sucessful, but most of the time they didnt return, this enviroment was taking a toll on Alice's mind, she was not used to be surrounded by this many pople and this was giving great anxiety,also she was used to be always in comunication with her distant online friends, mesages popping on her screen constantly, now all screens was empty and silent, she was stuck in a mix of being surrounded by people and lonesome at the same time, for weeks she stood looking at the screen waiting for a single notification,and when it finally happened she couldn't believe her eyes.

The screen transmission alert popped in the midst of the night, it had a official imperial code, it was a Praetorian asking for assistance, Alice rushed the ship to the given coordinates few kilometers away, there was a single praetorian and another survivor over a massive pile of wreackged cars in a highway, there was no place to safely land with such large ship and the infect were swarming the praetor fast, without even stopping the ship in the air the survivors opened the cargo bay and trew a chain down, swiflty the praetor grabbed the chain with one hand and his fellow survivor with another, barely scaping the infect claws as the winch pulled them in,once inside, the praetor indentifed himself as Danadriel of House Montresor and thanked everyone for the timely rescue, and requested to know the captain, but as everyone was terrified to speak to an imperial authority, they all pointed to Alice, Although as much nervous as the others Alice bombarded danadriel of questions about the situation, wich he responded only with mourn, he mentioned all the imperial sectors officially lost to the infected including the capital, while he listed territorial loses Alice could only think about her friends, she only survived because luck and circunstance,at this time everyone she knew was probably part of the undead hordes, the tone of despair on the ship was palpable, but Danadriel gave a single good new, weeks ago he received a encrypted transmition from a surviving AI situated on a massive bunker complex hidden in the wilderness, and he was heading there when they were ambushed by the horde,this was placed was supposed to be one of the many imperial shelters for emergencies and was extremely secretive , hundreds of kilometers away from any road or inhabited place, entirely constructed by autonomous machines, it was virtually impossible to have been infected.

Without thinking twice the survivors directed the ship to the given coordinates, the travel took weeks, and alot fo fights broke out among the survivors who doubt the praetor, but in the end they found this mytical safe place to be true,the crew of scrapers couldn't even believe their eyes upon gazing the interior of the imperial bunker, they were expecting just a cold and lifeless concrete shelter, not a lavish palace eviroment like that, every corridor had carpets with gold and silver engravings, every bedroom was worthy of a king and hundreds of robotic buttlers were ready to serve, meanwhile Alice was more interested on the AI rulling the place , her technical name was Sodoma Secundus but she preferred to be called Sadie, as all advanced artificial inteligence she was eccentric and quirky to deal with, she was created with a pragmatic mind for crisis but decades of isolation out of the Neural Network made her needy and gloomy,Alice's curiosity drew the attention of Sadie who was more than happy to answer her questions, as the weeks gone by they developed an interesting relationship, Alice felt naturaly confortable talking to sadie because for her, Sadie was a distant voice on a monitor, like her lost friends used to be, and Sadie was happy to have a cute flesh thing that understood her in emotional and technical level.

As their trust increased Sadie allowed Alice in the manufacturing and maintenance bays were she put her knowledge to work, using the tools avaiable Alice dedicated herself to modify the worker drones and even some of the buttler bots in to dedicated killing machines, and they later came in handy, after Danadriel conviced Sadie to send a open signal to any survivor nearby to come in to the bunker, hundreds of survivors slowly began in to reach the bunker in small groups, and following them the hordes of infected,this time they were ready , any infected who tried their luck was swiftly gored and incinerated by the army of mechanical sentinels at the doors,nowadays while others focus on other survival tasks of the fortress Alice dedicates entirely in the art of producing murdermachines and optimizing their performance." (The Traveler)


yes this is a continuation of: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/50815320/