Steel Driving Man

They're all having a good laugh at your expense, Grim. He twisted his head to each side cracking his neck and making the muscles stand out like cords. You're their freak, their cheap entertainment. They put you up to these stunts so they can have something to tell the wife and kids when they get home tonight.

No matter how much he told himself he didn't have to go through with it, he knew he would anyway. He would play their game, partly out of defiance, and partly because he liked the attention. Yep Grim, that's you - one half 'fuck you', and one half 'look at me!'.

So now he was staring down a freshly drilled tunnel in the biggest blackrock mine in the world, preparing to engage in a competition of such ridiculous testosterone fueled idiocy even he was incredulous. At the far end of the tunnel, out of sight around a bend, was a hulking man-machine, a rolling, clanking, smoking, blackrock burning engine of destruction called by his friends "Pile Driver". He was a Mechified built for one purpose - plunging metal spikes through stone, a specialized job requiring plenty of force and apparently not too much in the way of brains. Hell, you're a bit of a blunt instrument yourself, Grim. Which was true. The new tunnel needed rails laid in, and the competition would be to see who could lay the most iron in the shortest span of time. They would start at opposite ends and when the rails met they would measure who had gone the farthest. Grim reached up and tucked his jack-ass ears into a loose coif with his coarse black dreadlocked hair.

Excited miners gathered around and placed bets on Pile Driver, swigged from illicit flasks when the foreman wasn't looking, and generally made asses of themselves. In a sense it was understandable why they would find the spectacle amusing. Ever since Goshi Mining Corp had made the decision to put Karian prisoners of war to forced labor, most of the forest-dwellers had been dying off at a rapid rate. Few Karians were equipped for either the strenuous work, or the noxious fumes. Grim, who had been laboring in the mines for over a year with no sign of slowing, was a complete novelty.

Among members of his tribe, however, Grim was nothing unusual. The Gogajin were known for being able to rip trees out by their roots. Gogajin children are famous for eating whole bushes of poisonous berries and getting only a mild case of gas. If there is a people anywhere on Karia made of sturdier stuff than Gogajin meat and bones no one has heard of them yet.

One of the miners who had replaced most of his face with sensor equipment got right down in front of him and said something obscene and rude. Cheldrun is a harsh, angular language, but coming from an artificial voice box it is even more jagged. Grim, wrapped his fists around the shaft of his sledgehammer and clenched his whole body, the effect was subtle, but awesome.

Fuck you. Look at me.