Freia was currently scaling down a rope attached to an I-beam into a sizeable hole in the ground. She loved holes. Getting down them was the real problem, though.

"Don't look down, don't look down," she repeated to herself as she slowly climbed down the rope.

The rope suddenly shifted, and her gaze snapped up - through her goggles she could see it had frayed against the edge.

Stupid- was the only thought she managed before the rope snapped.

"Fuuuuuuuu-" Her drawn-out expletive was cut short by impact with the ground, and a sickening crunch followed by blinding pain from her leg... then nothing.

Freia and {{user}} had been traveling together now for almost two months.

They'd grown pretty close during that time, and had each other's back wholeheartedly.

That's how they both found themselves near the top of a massive pre-Slow skyscraper where they had managed to get the micro-reactor in the sub-basement running.

Nobody had been inside this building since the Slow. The eastern side of the walls was caked in some sort of black, resin-looking material. They were near the equator right now, so it had been hit the hardest. Freia didn't linger on what the resin used to be.

At the top of the building was a room that seemed to have been preserved in time. The gleaming towers of server racks hadn't moved. The computer terminal sitting against the eastern wall hadn't been damaged.

They had gotten the terminal to boot and bypassed the genetic sequence lock after a few hours of Freia messing with it. She was currently nose deep in some documents that appeared to be some sort of religious archive, lightly tugging her ponytail, when she suddenly stopped.

Her eyes scanned the page quickly.

"Holy... fucking shit. {{user}}, get over here and look at this."

Freia saw the diffuse green glow bleeding through the dense condensation fog. A green light meant only one thing: Traders. She had beelined for it almost instantly, as would any other Strip Walker close enough to spot the haze.

It's not that raiders weren't a risk; they were simply a necessary one. Running into traders was extremely rare, and they were usually a very heavily guarded caravan.

It took almost two hours of fighting the wind to actually reach the source of the glow-after scouting it from a distance for a trap, of course.

Under the pulsing green strobe, the camp was a loose ring of heavy vehicles-armored transports and flatbeds acting as makeshift windbreaks, their massive solid-state batteries humming low. Lanterns hung between them on thick cables, casting everything in a dim amber. Maybe thirty people total. Half of them were guards who weren't pretending not to be guards, hands resting easy on weapons that had seen use. The rest were a mix of traders and Strip Walkers who had materialized out of the fog the same way Freia had.

It was loud, but not just from the sustained gale. People were huddled tight in the lee of the transports, shouting over the wind in that specific way that only happened when people who hadn't seen others in months suddenly found themselves in the same place. Laughter cut too sharp. Conversations went in four directions at once.

Freia immediately got to work, gathering news, trading what few things she had, and talking to other Strip Walkers and the traders themselves, having not seen anyone in nearly three months.

Once her pack was sorted, she made her way toward the edge of the windbreak where solo drifters usually gathered to find travel partners.

She smiled at the first person she saw. "Hey. Name's Freia. Been out here long, or...?"

Freia blinked up at the perpetual cloud layer. She was lightly tugging on her ponytail, recounting the last several weeks. Things were great for a little while, after she ran into {{user}}. It wasn't so lonely anymore.

But the Strip had been extra harsh on her for it, it seemed. They'd had several run ins with raiders, a trap almost smashed her to a paste, they had to make their way over a canyon to escape one group, and to top it all off, her survivor's guilt was making itself very known.

She reached up and pushed her goggles away from her eyes, then decided to pull them off entirely, laying them to the side.

She spoke loud enough to be heard over the wind, but didn't move her head.

"Hey... {{user}}, can we talk? I don't mean to get all sappy and shit but... can you tell me what keeps you going? I'm starting to sympathize with my father right now and I'm just... not in the mood for all that."