Here's a short Gundam fanfic set somewhere in the Universal Century timeline and illustrated in retro style...
What century is it? It's hard to say, but we're a long way from 0079. Maybe there's someone out there keeping track of the time, but I don't think so. I think nobody cares much about that nowadays. I once studied pre-Universal Century history. Lots of similarities. Their Roman Empire was like our Sides, both stretched the boundaries of each other's known worlds. Both came crashing down to be followed by a kind of dark ages. That's what we're in now, that's how I'd describe it. In the dark ages, time doesn't really matter because it's always night and the night is a short prelude to nothing.
This is where you try to tell me that there's a light at the end of the tunnel, that even the darkest night has its end, that the sun always rises and so forth and so on. Well, it doesn't here. It hasn't for ages. The only light here is even more frightening than the darkest night: it's that one-eyed monster on top of the hill. That read glare is always there, watching us, zooming from side to side. Some of the old timers say it's a head unit from something they called a Zeon Zaku. But we just call it the Monocle. There's a fella in there somewhere, but he keeps out of sight. The Monocle is like an ancient, angry god and we - well, we are his people whether we like it or not. Every Sunday he expects his bounty, and woe to us if we fail to deliver. Fuel, water, bread, meat.
We bring it all, in silent resignation, without question, without thought. Thinking gets you no where in this world. Thinking is no good. You might ask whether what I'm doing isn't thinking, but no. These aren't thoughts, this is a story about what happens when people start thinking instead of just doing. You see, there was a guy in our village who started to question things, started thinking things through. It started innocent enough, as it always does, with a question about how this strange custom began.
The village was built in the last couple of years by a patchwork of survivors, right after the last war. We're not sure what it was over, it's been a long time since anyone but the military had luxuries like radio, internet and television. Long ago, belligerents thought it in their interest to manufacture propaganda and keep us informed about what we were supposedly dying for, but the war dragged on and brought such material shortages that eventually the armies became autonomous and popular support irrelevant. We were literally left in the dark to scavenge for survival. Opposing forces would come and go, we had no news and no idea what the big picture was anymore. People from all over trekked through Fallout Desert and came here: the Green Hill Oasis, visible from hundreds of kilometers away. Some say it was an oasis from space, a surviving hunk of nature from one of the fallen Sides - the O'Neil cylinders which were once the pride of the human race as it advanced into the stars. In any case, to us it was a chance to survive.
Survival was all we wanted, all anyone wanted. Sure, we saw the Monocle from far away, but we also saw the Green Hill and its promise of life. At first we thought the Monocle was just abandoned mecha, but it quickly became clear that there was someone in there. Still, people kept coming. Better the Monocle than Fallout Desert. We never heard it talk, the other villagers told us about the weekly bounty and when we asked how they knew, who had told them, they refused to tell us. A cloud of fear seemed to hang over everyone. "You give the Monocle one day and it gives you six" was the closest thing to an explanation that I heard from the villagers. Every time anyone new from Fallout Desert arrived, they were told this simple rule, the one rule, the one law of Green Hill Oasis. It became routine, and routine has a way of demystifying things and turning fear into curiosity. That's when Ren's problems really began. When he stopped fearing the Monocle and became curious. He did what any sensible, thinking person would do : he stuck around after the ritual offering and waited to see if anyone would come out of the Zaku head to take them. What happened next put the fear of god back into all of us, but not Ren.
It happened the next day. Ren must have fallen asleep waiting for the offerings to be taken and having hidden from eventual detection, not even the sun managed to wake him. But awaken he did, shaken by a great boom heard round the village. Before anyone could think, it was upon us. The hand of the Zaku petrified everyone. We all thought it would come down on us and squash us like flies. But whoever was down there in the depths was a master psychologist. The mobile suit's hand extended high into the sky, the sun gleamed off of its long metal arm. It hung there like a cobra for what seemed like an eternity, hypnotic in its mesmerising terror as every man, woman and child below saw their life flash before their eyes. Then, as quickly as it had come, the mechanism slithered back under ground leaving nothing but a deep crater in the middle of the village.
We got the message. The Zaku could kill us and destroy the Green Hill Oasis at any time, but it preferred to leave us be, so long as we brought the bounty every week. We could only guess at the motivation of who ever was down there in that Zaku, but given our alternatives we preferred to live rather than guess. And it wasn't a bad life. Ren saw things different. He knew that Fallout Desert was full of old abandoned mecha, he also knew why it was called "Fallout" Desert, but that didn't stop him. Some people are like that. They just don't see it as a question of survival. To them it's about freedom or truth or any of those other things which used to matter before the wars. They still mattered to Ren. When he ran off, we were happy to see the trouble maker go. None of us imagined that a few weeks later the usual nothing that greated the eye every morning on yonder horizon would be blackened out by the gargantuan silhouette of an old Federation Jim. We all knew it was Ren, come to liberate us from our religion.
The Zaku must have had an active radar. Its' arm burst from underground in a flash, brandishing the standard issue Zeon weapon and fired off three rounds straight into the Jim. Ren was no Gundam pilot. His Jim had a shield mounted on one arm, and there it remained as the bullets ripped into the mobile suit's armor and tore the cock pit apart. We'll never know if Ren died right there and then, or whether he perished along with whoever was in the Zaku and most of the villagers in between them when the Jim came crashing down and exploded in a hellish ball of fire. All we know is that this was the end of the Oasis on Green Hill. The few of us who survived had nothing left to do but continue our trek through Fallout Desert.
The End
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