Chapter 6: A Long Night

Assandra and Bandit came out of the subway onto a deserted street. The wind from the surrounding mountains blew through the shattered windows of a car. Assandra reached over to a nearby statue of a man and gripped at the stone. He looked down at her. A long, sad look.

I should have asked something, thought Assandra. What would she have told me?

She pulled herself together with a new, strong focus. She needed to think. She was running out of air in the tightness of the city. They were trapped in a warren of rooms. The wind rose up and slapped them.

The sun hadn’t yet started to come out, but a small, pale flame danced along the horizon. Assandra remembered when she had first arrived here. She remembered that night.

…

“What is it like in this world?” Assandra had asked her mom. How could people be afraid every second?

Her mom was silent for a moment. She looked at Assandra. Something passed between them. She stared at her reflection in the car mirror. A long, straight scar ran from her right shoulder down her right side. It was longer than the length of her arm. She felt, for a second, a wave of guilt.

“We are not real. We are not real,” she said.

Assandra sighed.

…

I should have asked something else. What would she have told me if I really listened.

Assandra looked back at Bandit who had been quietly following her, while she was buried in thought. She gave him a tentative smile. “I’m glad I have you with me”.

Bandit made a little grunt of approval, and they continued through the city as the night gave way to another day in the ruins.

More Assandra & Capybara stories

Background & comments

This entry was generated by GPT-NEO since I ran out of free tokens to use on GPT-3. I think the result is ok, so I might just keep using it going forward.

The cover image was generated with one of the Stable Diffusion WebUI’s. It runs on my own machine which is quite impressive and a big leap from VQGAN+CLIP that I have previously used. I think image is cool!