Atlas Abandoned

Aegeus' Gift (13 months since the crash)

How long had it been now? A few hours? A day? A few days? Time was so hard to keep track of on Planet Demeter when there were no obvious day cycles. Atlas hardly realized when it was slightly brighter or slightly dimmer in the sky, so he had come to rely on AGS-9's internal clock to get him used to roughly how long 24 hours felt. It wasn't perfect.

Atlas had been essentially grounded for nearly 4 months now. He had only recently convinced AGS-9 to let him remove the itchy, uncomfortable cast they had fashioned to help his leg bone heal, but the android still scolded him if he ever caught Atlas walking around on the injured leg. He had been following a strict exercise plan the whole time, and was a lot stronger now than before, but his leg was still his weakness. AGS-9 still wouldn't let him come out to help hunt or gather wood even though Atlas had insisted that his leg was strong enough to move around now. Atlas was getting stir crazy spending all of his time inside of Camp Wellspring. He sighed, staring at the ceiling in bed, and rolled over to look at the far wall. AGS-9 had etched a crude recreation of the scene in the sky from a month ago into the rock wall using metal scraps. Atlas liked looking at it and remembering everything he saw. He knew it meant something; it was significant, but for all he knew Atlas would never see anything like it again. He hoped he was wrong.

It seemed like AGS-9 had been gone for longer than usual, now that Atlas was thinking about it. The android had never mentioned trouble, so he shrugged it off.

'Aegeus will be back soon,' he tried to convince himself. Atlas fell back asleep as he thought about everything and woke up again a few hours later.

AGS-9 was still not there. Atlas moved from the bed to the edge of the cave, dangling his legs off the edge and looking out around the surrounding valley below. There was no sign of the android.

Atlas decided to kill some more time by doing a workout circuit. He ended up doing two circuits before he got too hungry. Atlas ate a feast of rhino meat and drank two buckets' worth of water. He even took a nap after that, but there was still no sign of AGS-9.

"He'll be back. He'll be back," Atlas would say out loud over and over as he started worrying more and more. To distract himself, Atlas took on a project he'd been planning on for a while. There was a messy stack of rat and rhino hides in the corner- stripped of meat, but still smelly- that Atlas wanted to fashion into a full set of armor like the rat hide helmet he had worn before. It was a huge undertaking, but now he was glad it would take a long time because it meant less time he had to deal with the idea of AGS-9 not coming back. Surely, certainly AGS-9 would be back by the time Atlas finished. If it wasn't, he figured his only option would be to test the armor out by going out to look for his android.

Atlas dug through the mound of creature hides and sorted out the best ones as far as he could tell. The biggest, thickets hides with the most metal mixed in were saved for the body armor, then the leg armor, gloves, boots, and helmet. When Atlas set all of those hides aside he still had a big leftover supply. He decided to practice his stitching with these so that he'd get it right the first time on the actual set. One of the things Atlas did with the plethora of downtime he'd had lately was create a big spool of thread from the fibers of the tree leaves AGS-9 had foraged for him. This crude leaf- thread was actually pretty durable since the fibers had metal in them, too.

The first practice stitch was awful. Atlas was using the metal tool to poke holes too close to the edge of the hide and when he tightened the thread it ripped out the side. On his next attempt the thread held strong, but there was too much excess material outside the stitching- he had made the opposite mistake.

Atlas spent another few hours practicing before he decided he was ready. He used his sharpest knife to cut the nice hides into the right shapes, like AGS-9 had described to him before. He carefully used the metal spike to cut holes in every single piece before he started stitching. First up was the body armor. It was like a long-sleeve shirt and the sleeves were extra tricky to stitch together, but Atlas pulled it off. The pants came next. That went well too, especially since Atlas fashioned a belt for them. The gloves were proving too difficult for Atlas to figure out, so he instead made some forearm guards that extended to his knuckles. The boots and the helmet were easy after all of that, and after an exhausting non-stop session of cutting and stitching, Atlas was done! He tried everything on. It fit well enough.