wip tau thing

You haven't lived a poor life, per se.

It's easy to draw focus to such frivolous things in the center of a sandstorm. Overhead, thick braids of golden silk crackle with electricity, intricately woven between giant wooden pegs staked into the dirt some yards away from you. In the distance, you hear the sound of drumming and dancing, of plucked strings and screeching violins. The apparatus you find yourself at the center of is a device for summoning sandstorms, using electric charge generated by the fluttering of Raijin's Silk pitched into motion by dancing. It's all so uncomfortably familiar to the talks your mentors gave you- it had felt so quaint to learn about the notion of trying to kill a Thunderbug with, what, a ceramic meathook? On paper, there had been simple lines and circles and dots that pointed out so very obviously what you had to do to put the things down.

You're getting distracted.

If you died here, which is to say, with your hand bitten off by a furious electrostatic insect from below the black sand--

Right.

How had you gotten here?

It had started a few months ago. A rare lunar event would pass overhead, they said. A simultaneous eclipse of the binary star system that your humble ball of black dust and monsters orbited. You had gone outside that night to watch the eclipse after another frustrating evening of arguing with your parents. You refused to be a parasite, like they so frequently seemed to be. Where they stole rations, you hunted more. When they wasted water, you withheld. You had been so excited for the lunar event, and as it passed overhead...

Well, the next day you had woken up with slate gray skin, flecked with fragments of silver- a... mutation? You couldn't have been sure. But nobody seemed to remember your parents anymore- in fact, there was just you. And suddenly you had a higher calling. A natural born Kelleku, they had said. A mutant of destiny. A fated hero, a thing of importance. Well, *fine.* You'd do that for the rest of your life, you guessed. Whatever.

And then you had been told one day that it was time for your initiation, and that you would have to go out into the desert and hunt one of the many massive-jawed insect creatures that skated along the sand on the back of static.