A short little character voice/motivation study, trying to pin down a new PMDU character.
If you've been following my story closely, you might be able to guess who it will be as well as some other things. I'll be revealing more in my upcoming submission for the Cactus Fields tasks.
I didn't choose to live here in this dry, dusty town. Sometimes life picks you up and throws you around until you get stuck somewhere, like a tumbleweed in a dust devil. But if thereās anything the desert taught me, it's how to be tough. How to use everything I have to survive and overcome.
At first I had my mother and father. My last memories of my dad seem to be fever dreams. I was too sick then to stay awake for long and he ran off after rumors of a cure. But the desert itself must have cured me. Eventually, I got better and my memories were clearer after that, even if my eyesight wasn't.
My mom was by my side for a long while. She helped while I got used to my new way to see the world. It wasn't easy to lose the color or light and at first I cried, but Mom kept me happy and taught me how to be tougher than sadness.
At the time, I didn't know she held deeper pains and sorrows than my own inside her. They slowly dragged her down. Worry for the son she left behind and dadās disappearance meant she could never rest easy and made her old before her time. Soon she developed a dry cough that wouldn't go away.
I missed them both, too, but she felt it more than I did. Soon I was making friends of my own and growing up fast. My mom seemed to get quieter that year, thinner too, always deep in thought. I could tell she was tired and sick, but she never wanted to talk about it.
Mom tried to keep me out of trouble, but I seemed to like to get into it. The sand buzzards were the gang on our side of town and they welcomed me in, filling the place of my missing brother and father. It wasn't long before the leader himself became my boyfriend.
I felt happy in our little desert town, but my mom suddenly took a turn for the worse. As a long dust storm blew by and kept us indoors, she finally decided to speak up even as she coughed until she had to wipe blood from her mouth.
We talked about family and where the rest of ours might have gone and made me promise to go look for them if anything ever turned up. Ā Of course I said yes. Nothingās more important than family, but by then, my new friends were beginning to feel like family.
Soon after, Mom died. It was a dark time, but my friends took care of me as best they could until I had beaten the sadness. After that, I pushed myself harder than ever before, picking fights with our rival gang, the Gabite out in the desert, or anyone that looked tough and ready to battle.
I thought those days would last forever. Just me, my boyfriend, our little gang, and most of Cactus Fields as our turf. But all that changed when the caravan from Andalusst showed up. After that, nothing would be the same again.
