Dododex

ARK: Survival Evolved & Ascended Companion

Ultimus Chapter Twelve: The Scrapper

Andrew and Reuben walked for miles, seeing the sulfur field and seeing in the distance a strange, very alien structure that he didn’t comprehend. He had investigated it before, but it just seemed to be an extremely secure data archive that he had no way of breaking. But he wasn’t going there. He continued following a path that led him between the strange place and Sanctuary. He heard a screech coming from ahead and both Reuben and him ducked into some bushes. Coming up the path was a raptor, however it was running away from what Andrew was trying to hide from. Several other raptors were chasing it, these were different, however. A strange vine-like material covered them, it glowed an ominous purple color. They hunted and killed everything, no matter if it was their own kind. They were monsters, no longer animals with natural instincts. Their instinct was only to kill and destroy. Andrew watched as four of these raptors chased the one and continued chasing it out of his sight. Andrew sighed in relief, then heard a whine from Reuben. He looked over to see Reuben investigating a strange hole in the ground, deeper in the brush. Andrew crawled over and investigated more of it himself. It was dug by something long ago. He wasn’t quite sure though. But whatever it was made Reuben very antsy and excitable. Andrew whistled Reuben who perked up at Andrew and Andrew signaled to move out of the brush. He didn’t want to investigate the borrow. At least not right now.

Andrew and Reuben slowly walked out of the bushes, Reuben started shaking off branches and thorns that got stuck in his fur and hide.

“Come on boy, let’s get to where we need to go.” Andrew said as he walked down the path.

~

Andrew and Reuben only had to walk a little while further were. He could see what he was looking for just ahead of them. The back of a large building on the side of part of the mountain range, halfway buried under the dust and element that surrounded this place. The exterior building was like that of the other buildings in Sanctuary. Made with craftsmanship and of Element, but still dilapidated and continuing to break down more. With several small openings on the outer layer of the roof and walls. Andrew walked around and then into the building. The building was gargantuan. Being filled partly with dust and Element, but seeing remnants of military vehicles and even planes made him understand where this was. This was the URE’s old army barracks. Though it held more than that now. But on the further end of the facility was a door that led him to where he wanted to go. Andrew walked towards it and began trying to open it. The doors were heavy and difficult to move from the years of corrosion and damage from time. Once he did get the door open, darkness welcomed them, something quite rare for this place. Andrew looked through his gear that he brought, but something was missing. He lost his flashlight. He groaned in irritation as he pieced together that he probably lost it when he ducked for cover from those monsters. He looked back into the darkness thinking about what he should do next. Then he looked at Reuben, his tail wagged hard as he knew what they were doing. Leaving Andrew to sigh.

“Well, we’ve done this before. It doesn’t hurt to do it again.” Andrew said, and with hesitation, Andrew and Reuben walked inside.

Andrew stumbled his way through the huge corridor, feeling the right wall of the hall. He had done this several times when he had forgotten or lost his flashlight. But most of the time he would just go back to grab a new light to guide his way through. But he was desperate and needed to search this place. He continued feeling the wall to guide himself through the corridor, until it fell away to a new wall that connected to the old wall. Andrew turned and started searching the wall for something until he felt a large, industrial switch. Andrew grabbed it and flipped it. Light started to fill the light-absent room, revealing an extremely large storage facility. With rows after rows of tarp-covered crates, Andrew guessed it was to make sure Element and dust didn’t contaminate what was inside. And there were thousands of them and there was even a few cargo containers. Further in the back was a large elevator for transporting crates and containers to lower levels of the facility. This place was truly massive, and Andrew was barely scratching the surface for the past month.

‘Was it only a month? Has it been longer, or even possibly shorter?’ Andrew thought, it was getting harder to keep track of days as he got older and the longer and longer he awoken from the pod. He looked for Reuben for a second and saw that he began wandering the rows of crates. Andrew grabbed an old crowbar off the floor.

“Alright, time to get to work.”

~

Less than an hour passed as Andrew opened crates finding very little to practically nothing useful. He was getting discouraged from the nonsense he found in just this one crate. It was all a bunch of magazines on properties, places like Pandora’s Paradise Resort of the Caesar Estate and The Moonflight Building. Why was this stuff even stored? Wasn’t this a military base at one point? Was this stuff really that important to the URE military? Andrew didn’t think so, most of these places didn’t even exist anymore. Most of these crates had random stuff, and very little of it has been useful for survival. Some mapping equipment and useful books like survival guides and encyclopedias all except for an elusive dinosaur encyclopedia that he kept looking out for. But he needed other things to survive. Ammunition was getting tighter for him, and Element was too. He needed to find these things to keep his chances of surviving high. Without them, his chances drop significantly dropped. Which meant that would die sooner than he hoped.

So he continued searching and after several more crates of junk and ‘Library Archives’, he quit and went over to one of the locked cargo containers instead. The container had old, washed-away paint on it from where it was at, Andrew couldn’t read it all but he could see it was URE. Other letters were scattered across the side with Ms, an H, a W, and a couple of As with one next to the W. He broke the lock and opened the container, inside were several more crates, smaller containers, and stacks of cases.

Andrew walked inside, opened one of the cases, and saw an old-fashioned rifle made of metal and wood. Something Andrew had never seen before, with a weird switch by where you normally loaded the ammunition, it was so weird to him. Andrew closed it took the case off and opened it at the next one. The gun in this case was also wood and metal, but instead of a switch where you loaded it, there was a looped lever by the trigger and an angled hole to the side of the gun. Andrew closed up the case and broke open a crate, inside was ammunition for all sorts of weapons. Then finally Andrew looked at the side of the crate and read what it said.

“URE War and Military History Museum.” Andrew said out loud. At first, this didn’t make sense to Andrew. Why would the military museum pieces be held in the URE’s main Barracks? If anywhere this belonged at the museum it was from or a historical society. But then he thought about the other things in this facility that he kept coming across. Then he let out a hysterical laugh as it finally made sense what this place was. The Barracks had become a physical historical archive. Not just for the military, but for all of The URE’s history. The URE must’ve started storing historical artifacts and physical documents after the war and chose one of the larger buildings that became obsolete to serve for this project.

Andrew quickly got out of the container, ran to the back of the storage facility where the elevator was, and looked for levels. The sign for the levels was made of metal and was engraved with the levels of the building. There were about twenty, the first eight being human history and one being an old computer/news archive. Several others being sciences and other things. Andrew turned around with a big smile on his face. Reuben was sitting behind him, tail wagging. Andrew knelt and started rubbing him with excitement.

“Reuben, they have a news archive!! Maybe we can find out what happened since we were asleep. It has been… many years-” Andrew said cutting himself off as he noticed a couple of sticky spots on Reuben. Andrew lifted his hand off of him and noticed there was a little bit of blood on his hands. He was cut in several places. Andrew could only assume that he was cut up from the thorns and branches. Which were on a used game trail by dinosaurs. Andrew realized he forgot to close the doo-

A terrifying, echoing call came from outside the storage room and somewhere beyond the hall.