A roar belched from the puffy larynx of a tremendous thundering cloud snapped Rain-Born into consciousness.

She jerked herself awake, her eyes readjusting to the world of grey, drab, soulless metal that encased her on all sides. There were the pugs nestled at the door, and there was Jespar, sleeping by her feet, his tongue lolling comically out the right side of his mouth and his belly positioned right by her toes. She giggled gently as his hair itched the soles of her dry feet.

Outside, rain continued pouring on the panting plains of the parched earth, slowly withering away the already rotted suburb more with each passing hour.

She realized it must almost be dawn, for she could make out the Deadland's sun burning dimly behind the largest cloud that eclipsed the sky. Her thoughts wandered to the stories her tribesmen had often told her about these clouds: the great ashen giants that wept upon the earth for the sins of those who had gone before them. Those who had made the world what it now was. Those beings – the users of the wheel, and the long-beaked death-spitters, who had even made metal wings to fly above the lands. Their foul magics had corrupted the natural world and given birth to the Deadlands – where their metal giants and instruments of doom could never exist again. On days like this, even the sun hid its face in shame for what they had done to the world.

And yet, as Rain-Born looked around her at the room with its dust-caked trinkets, a strange curiosity overcame her.

She was finally here – in their dominion. Those of the Old World. She stood on the precipice of one of their forests of iron that had dominated their kingdoms when they still reigned supreme. None of the tribe had ever made it this far. None of them knew the dangers lurking in this place, where evil was supposed to be hiding at every corner.

She looked at the pugs, slumbering together, and was greatly puzzled. How could something so peaceful exist here, of all places? Maybe the tribe had been afraid. None of them had ever seen the evils that the Elders spoke of. For this place was not a realm of destruction. This was simply a home - four walls that held nothing more than a mother creature caring for her young in a place forgotten by time.

She stood and walked around the room, examining some of the oddities surrounding her. If she could bring news of what awaited the tribe here when she returned, she would be more than simply a fabled hunter that had obtained Callisto – she would be a font of knowledge. The name Rain-Born would pass into the land of legends. She would become one whom the Great Spirit personally roamed beside in the eternal hunting grounds of the afterlife.

And, harboring such notions of vanity, she sheepishly touched some of these strange things that lined the room. There was a shelf that bore home to some rotted papers bound together into one single rectangular object. She had known that the people of the Old World had passed information through the written word – hatred for their fellow beings preventing them from simply conversing as the Tribe did. She thumbed through these tomes and found most of their pages merely crumbled to dust beneath her fingers. Some contained images unrecognizable to her as time and the elements had ruined them utterly. They were a testament to the decadence of the time they had come from – where nothing truly lasted.

She put down the book and turned her attention to the large piece of glass that hung above the broken cabinet in the room's left corner. Her image looked back at her – haggard and caked in dirt. She could barely recognize her face. Only when a flash of lightning illuminated the entire room in a wave of ethereal sapphire did she see her amber eyes and tribal tattoos shining - the only light in a dark world. She understood the purpose of such mirrors. As a child, she had caught her reflection in the puddles that the rain left on the red desert sands. She had been fascinated by herself, and whenever she braided her hair during summer festivals, she would seek to find one such pool of reflection where she could admire her handiwork. She was satisfied that the people who made these devices had at least one idea she could understand and even appreciate if she acknowledged such desires.

Smashed pictures that lined the desk beside the window of the room bore images of people and places that meant nothing to her. One image displayed the form of a young girl wearing what looked like a woolen coat, holding the hand of a taller woman whose face looked like that of a plastic doll saturated in scarlet, indigos, and violets. She may have been the mother of this child, who painted her face in a much thicker coat than the Hanakh could ever use for their tribal markings. Whoever these people were, they were long gone. Rain-Born wondered if they could have survived the great collapse of their world. She knew better than to hope against the odds these two would have faced in the Deadlands.

One picture suddenly caught her eye.

She held it close to her face, the broken glass of the picture frame pricking her finger slightly before she confirmed her suspicions. There she was! The little "pug" in the arms of the girl with the woolen jumper. This picture locked the dog's form in place and time, where she was licking the girl's face in petrified happiness. Rain-Born smiled at the innocence of the image and spared a look at the sleeping dog with her children all around her.

There you are, she thought. In a happier time. I wonder if you have waited here long. I wonder if you still wait here for this girl to return to you.

She placed the picture on the little cabinet by the mirror. It was almost like a shrine to this home's old owners. She touched her palm to her chest and inclined her head before the picture, uttering a small prayer to the Great Spirit that this family might be reunited one day.

Rain-Born realized that she could never build up an accurate picture of the Old World from a single room and reasoned that consuming some morning rations might be a better use of her time. But she was struck by one object in the room that she could not comprehend. No matter how she looked at it, the thing defied explanation. She sat and stared at its form while she ravenously chewed on a tiny piece of Stalker jerky, trying to visualize this object"s possible usage.

It was a rectangular structure (why had the old ones been so obsessed with this shape?) with a hollowed-out center where its mechanical innards were draped like long locks of thin hair. A thin antenna pointed at the ceiling like a Stalker's sensory organ. Those beasts used it to communicate in the canyons of her home. Maybe this object held a similar function for the humans of the past?

"Anything good on the box?"

Jespar's voice reached her from behind as he wiped his tired eyes and joined her, staring at the metal contraption.

"This box, Jespar, what is its purpose?"

"Hah!" He giggled mischievously. "Tell you what, I'll show you."

He approached the object and picked up a small device at its feet. He dropped it from his mouth into Rain-Born's open palm, and she saw that it was a dust-caked oblong with several buttons attached to its barely stable surface.

While she pondered the strange nature of the thing, he walked off somewhere else. She jerked her head up suddenly, seeing that he had disappeared.

"Jespar?"

"Goooooood morning, ladies and gentlemen!"

Jespar's tiny head poked up from the box"s rotted cables and filled the rectangular hole.

"This is your host, the miraculous, the magnanimous, and the marvelous mistake of nature J-E-S-P-A-R. That spells Jespar, baby. It's a beaut-i-ful morning here in post-apocalyptia, and I hope I'm not comin' on too strong when I say you're looking fiiiiine today! Coming up, we got some advice from our resident weather expert on what to expect in the next few days (spoiler: it's rain. Lots and lots of rain). We got some early morning interviews with tribal warriors, mad spiders, tentacle monsters, and even a walking, talking shadow! How's that to kickstart your week? Now, I know some of you folks may be feelin' those Monday blues kicking in, but daddy-o, when you see Martha's recipe for baked arachnid leg, you're gonna be spending your whole morning in the kitchen whippin' up some of that sweet, sweet spider (disclaimer: giant mutant spider may not be suitable for consumption by children, animals, pregnant women, old people, people under 12cm, and generally anyone whose taste buds haven't given up the goat). Stay tuned, folks, because we've got the cure for what ails you right here, right now, and it's nothin' but the chill vibes this old bull terrier's putting down. On with the show!"

Jespar proceeded to introduce various characters and segments of what he called his 'show'. After a while of listening to such incomprehensible drivel, Rain-Born merely sat with one hand on her chin and smiled a defeated smile at the host of the box. She dared not interrupt his performance.

He only noticed her look after a thirty-minute cooking segment in which he mimed eating various delicacies and tried not to vomit.

"Come on, viewer, you know what this is!" he suddenly exclaimed. "This is how we dudes and dudettes in the past used to communicate! You'd have someone in this old box who would talk to you. You'd have actors playing characters that you wanted to grow up like one day. You'd have politicians come on and talk about the bullshit they were gonna do to 'help' you. This 'box' was the greatest invention of the twentieth century!"

She pondered his words and could not believe them. She stared, wide-eyed, and tried to keep herself from cringing at the concept. The idea that the people of the Old World had the power to summon one another through this simple device was too much for her mind to bear. They had done extraordinary things. They had accomplished things she could only dream of.

And they had also burned their world to cinders.

He noticed that she seemed vacant and simply had to engage. This was his great moment of performance, after all. And his first moment as a teacher. Just like Nicole had taught him, he could, at the very least, answer her burning questions.

"Well, viewer, what's shakin'?" he asked, panting under the effort of sustaining his various personas. "You pickin' up what I'm putting down?"

Rain-Born sighed with a smile. "You know I am not."

"Ah, I know what we need here," he said, leering at her with his conspirational smirk that caused his two front teeth to glint in the darkened room like a predator prospecting its dinner. "An interview segment! Today we've got the one, the only, the famous stone-cold huntress Rain-Born. Though she'd be nothing without yours truly, this bow-toting warrior's got the skills to pay the bills and then some! Come on, baby, give us the scoop. What's going on in the head of a true Tribal?"

He looked at her expectedly, his tongue lolling out further, it seemed, with every passing breath.

She laughed, but it felt vestigial. It was not something she often did and had done so in the past few days more than she ever had in her entire life. She hugged her legs and placed her chin on her arms.

"This is your world, Jespar," she said. "Everything is so strange and so old. I have nothing but stories of the evils of this place. But I have seen no evil here. The Iron Forest seems sad, where only memories can be found."

He said nothing but watched her as her eyes wandered down to her feet. Her gaze lingered on her tribal tattoos.

"Were the people who lived here really evil? Were they really people that deserved their fate? They have made wondrous things as well as things that deliver only death. The family that lived here is proof that not all of the Old World must truly be shunned. Before today, I thought you might be the only proof that the people who once lived on this earth were not the destroyers of the land that I have been told they are. That maybe they too could create something beautiful."

If she had looked up at this moment, she would have seen the blush that dominated his face. To his relief, she did not look up. She was instead focused on those tattoos that reminded her that she genuinely was from another world – and that forever would they both be separated by time, even though they both occupied the same space.

He cursed his chagrin. The dumb performer in him had meant to bring her a sense of joy, not add to her misery.

Come on, old boy, he thought, even though introspection was not his forte. If it was Nicole, what would you say?

"Can I ask you something, if it's not too personal?" he said.

Now she did look up at him.

"Personal?"

"Yeah, y'know," he fumbled, still talking to her through the tangled wires of the decrepit box. "Too personal. Intimate. Something you wouldn't tell someone else. Secrets about you."

She frowned. "I see. Amongst the Hanakh, we have no such things. We are all brothers and sisters under the sun and upon the sands. Ask, and I will answer."

"Do you really want to do this?" he asked. "Did you really want to come out here, explore the unknown, see everything you've seen – good and bad, and then go back home? Or do you feel like you have to?"

She paused, pondering the question.

"I don't understand this question, Jespar," she said. "I am told what I need to do. What I am told is what I want. For the good of the Tribe."

"See, that's where you're wrong," he said. And his sudden pounce at her through the box made her start. "It's like you say – everything you know is stuff you've been told. But there's more to the world than just what people have told you about it. You know that! You've seen and been through things no one in your Tribe has ever seen. I'm living proof of that. You're part of your Tribe, sure. But you're also a person. You've got your own desires. You've got your own thoughts. You must because you're human. I might be a scruffy-as-shit dog-brain, but I've met enough humans to know that we're not so different. We all have our own dreams. What's yours?"

She was about to laugh at his strange speech again but realized that, for the first time since they met, this was probably the only thing he said she could at least halfway understand. And she saw his uncharacteristically somber expression. He truly believed this thing that he said. This thing about dreams. About being something apart from the Tribe.

But was she truly anything but the Tribe? Could she be someone other than the person she was expected to be? The huntress who showed no fear, even in the face of the unknown?

Could she choose to be anything else?

"I will think upon this question, Jespar," she said, gently pushing him from her. "And I will give you my answer when I find it."

He seemed surprised and shook himself as though this admission meant nothing to him.

"Yeah," he said. "I mean, whatever, sure. You can do what you like."

He paused.

"I can feel you looking at me."

"You must be a shaman," she giggled.

He trotted off. "Anyway," he continued. "We'd better get ready. Looks like the rain is dying off. Time to go back to the glorious outside world."

"Jespar," she said before he left. "Can I ask you something, too?"

"Sure," he replied. "Don't mind me while I scratch this stubborn itch. Go on."

"Who is Nicole?"

She saw him freeze mid-itch and slowly lower his leg back to the floorboards. She did not see his face, so his expression was entirely kept from her as he strode out of the room downstairs. But the voice he spoke in was tinged with sadness, and again she felt the same sense of dread emanating from him within the darkness of the Changeling's tunnel.

"Sorry, Rain-Born," he said as he left the room. "That would be too personal."