Background: Assandra and Bandit, her capybara friend, live in the ruins of a city in a post-apocalyptic world. Assandra is a strong and independent woman. Survival is tough, but they hope to someday rebuild the city.

Chapter 6: A Long Night

Assandra and Bandit came out of the subway onto a deserted street. The wind from the surrounding mountains blew through the shattered windows of a car. Assandra reached over to a nearby statue of a man and gripped at the stone. He looked down at her. A long, sad look.

I should have asked something, thought Assandra. What would she have told me?

She pulled herself together with a new, strong focus. She needed to think. She was running out of air in the tightness of the city. They were trapped in a warren of rooms. The wind rose up and slapped them.

The sun hadn’t yet started to come out, but a small, pale flame danced along the horizon. Assandra remembered when she had first arrived here. She remembered that night.

“What is it like in this world?” Assandra had asked her mom. How could people be afraid every second?

Her mom was silent for a moment. She looked at Assandra. Something passed between them. She stared at her reflection in the car mirror. A long, straight scar ran from her right shoulder down her right side. It was longer than the length of her arm. She felt, for a second, a wave of guilt.

“We are not real. We are not real,” she said.

Assandra sighed.

I should have asked something else. What would she have told me if I really listened.

Assandra looked back at Bandit who had been quietly following her, while she was buried in thought. She gave him a tentative smile. “I’m glad I have you with me”.

Bandit made a little grunt of approval, and they continued through the city as the night gave way to another day in the ruins.


More Assandra & Capybara stories


Background & comments

This entry was generated by GPT-NEO since I ran out of free tokens to use on GPT-3. I think the result is ok, so I might just keep using it going forward.

The cover image was generated with one of the Stable Diffusion WebUI’s. It runs on my own machine which is quite impressive and a big leap from VQGAN+CLIP that I have previously used. I think image is cool!