10 – Binge

10 – BingeAs soon as my human mind slipped into unconsciousness I could think again, with no emotion clouding my mind for a single moment of utmost clarity before energy surged through my body to revitalize it and I was fully awake again. Even though the dread was still there I was much calmer now. All this didn't mean anything yet, it was still possible for it to be a coincidence but even if it wasn't then so what? Even if I wasn't an apex predator in a galaxy as dark as the Milky Way in Warhammer I was still a predator and not the prey. I had to make sure not to be restricted by my thinking it was but make sure to be prepared if it was. That wasn't much of a stretch, even if I was in that universe I can't know of all the threats that exist just from reading a few books about it. I'd know what were some of the biggest threats but even then a random eldritch abomination could crawl out of the ghoul stars that have never been seen before and eat my ass. I frowned at the thought, I was always of the mind that aliens didn't exist unless proven otherwise but here I'd have to assume that they do and want to kill me. It was only natural to be cautious and make sure I'd have the best chances of survival. For now, I need to know more. I wouldn't entirely believe I was in the grimdark future until I saw a damned Space Marine in smurf blue paint. The central spire which would be the planetary governor's palace if this was an Imperial Hive world just became a much more important goal. There had to be much more important documents and clues there, not to speak of the fuck loads of Imperial iconography that is a must in one such palace. Still, there could be something interesting here too. I was torn between exploring a bit more and dashing for the central spire right this moment, but after taking a moment to reconsider I realised how dumb that was. I had five years to explore this place and travelling a third of the way over there only took a few days, I had more than enough time to do both. Let's go with five floors down on this building and I'm getting out after that if there isn't anything too interesting. I nodded to myself, yeah, plans, I needed to have those. I've been much too whimsical so far, maybe a bit nihilistic too, neglecting to gather all the energy I could before the hypothetical corpses rotted away. I didn't quite realize that I was prioritizing excitement above not starving to death in five years. Not that it was much too different now that I knew it was like that. I still loathed the idea of wandering through dark, mouldy and decrepit tunnels in the lowest levels of this city searching for rotting corpses. I'd have time after I reached the central spire. I nodded to myself. Five years was a long time, nearly a fourth of my previous life. It would be more than enough, there had to be other organic life on this planet too, I don't believe they managed to eradicate insects and rodents. Hive cities in the Imperium were crawling with mutated rats and ugly stuff like that. I looked around the small library and decided to read only stuff that had interesting titles, even that would take a long ass time as there were five bookcases here. I quickly dismissed the first two as those were the same yearly reports going back to CENTURIES, both boring and uninformative. I had no idea what they were making but the rest were quite easy to understand as they contained disturbingly familiar graphs and tables. I guess those were eternal. The third and fourth were similar reports, boring and repetitive but with stuff transportation, now going back only four decades. They really liked keeping records here. The fifth was somewhat more interesting. I might have cried a little when I managed to read the words 'history' and 'imperium' on it. Something like 'historico imperium' really, I'm not a language genius just the people using it aren't very creative. From what I'd managed to glean from it after about half an hour of repeated reading it wrote about this dude called 'The Emperor' who did a thing called 'The Great Crusade' and fucked up a bunch of evil aliens while helping humanity flourish. A very interesting story with so much embellishment that I was afraid I might drown in it. Yep, never heard of anything like that from anywhere else before. Most certainly. Next~ 'Something something Saint Celestine', might be fun but Skip, I can already feel the religious bullshittery even without opening it. The next few I opened turned out to be guides and stuff like that for operating tools and shit like that in the factories, recorded in entirely untucked scrolls. Boring, Skip. There were loads of other religious stories and tales but I skipped most of those, the one I started reading out of curiosity turned out to be just as I thought it would. Take a simple children's tale about a knight in shining armour killing something big and bad and turn up the bullshit to eleven while changing the knight into an Adepta Sororitas member or a Space Marine. What a coincidence that they made up those things just for stories, yeep. Next~Next~Next~Next~Next~ 'The something history of Follax IV' Now that doesn't sound like religious bullshit, this might be something interesting, maybe even informative but I dare not hope for that after hundreds of useless fairy tales. 239