Relationship Drabble - Big City

Dotty and Beck had both come from Empire City; after the war, the city was segregated into sections; the slums on the outside of giant domes which kept out the radiation, the disease, and the smells, and the domes themselves, with their ultra-modern high tech interiors; the promise of a man made Eden. The domes; filled with trees, grass, wildlife, even farms, built into sweeping towers surrounded by fields; perfectly climate controlled and self-sufficient.

It was a myth that the rich lived in the domes; in reality it was the corrupt; politicians and corporate elites. Dotty’s grandfather had been rich, and lived inside a penthouse in a skyscraper in the outer city; nobody knew when she was born; but she had gotten very sick, or perhaps injured at some point, and couldn’t be saved, at least not and maintain her quality of life.

Her grandfather had used his money and power to get her an android body; a biological body, a clone, grown limb by limb, organ by organ, and assembled with cybernetics; her Fluctlight was transferred from her dying body to the android; this kind of transfer was highly illegal, but that hardly mattered if you were rich; she wasn’t a copy of Dotty; she was the actual dotty moved into a new body.

Beck meanwhile lived in the slums and dreamed of the domes, building mechs and using them in robberies to pay his way in; he never spent long in jail because of how ridiculous the crimes were.

Eventually both were ran out of the city, and ended up north, in Rachel; together, by American Prussia. They both found homes with the same people. Dotty would pretend to be stiff and robotic; to prove to herself that she wasn’t just some android with a perfectly warm and welcoming artificial personality, and Beck would spend days awake working on his babies.

They both would spend a lot of time together, though it was purely platonic; Dotty actually kept trying to set Beck up with men to appease her inner yaoi fangirl, all while trying to get Dean, her actual obsession, laid. Meanwhile, Beck would literally service her mechanical parts.

Character Building Drabble - Beck’s Past

Beck had come from the big city; the biggest in the country, at one point – Empire, along the gulf of Mexico, near Spain. The city had been hit by a nuclear blast in the third world war. It was among the oldest colonies in western America; over the Caspian Mountains from Germany and Spain. He saw little change in it from the start to the end of the second American civil war; all communism really was in practice was the government imitating capitalism poorly, wasting everything, along with endless corruption in the political and corporate world preventing any upward mobility. 

Like those things didn’t already define the American way of life; for at least two or three decades prior to his own birth; the American dream wasn’t a lie, but political and corporate corruption had grown leaps and bounds after the 50s and 60s as America's cultural identity found itself under attack by the pseudo-intellectual educated.

Beck had dropped out in ninth grade, he wanted money; he wanted the safety the people inside the city’s luxury domes, had found; they were essentially microcosms of the colonies, he’d found he had a knack for refurbishing robots, and ended up committing more and more crimes with them; he rarely saw much jail time because of how ridiculous the crimes themselves were. He passed all over the country until he got mixed up with the Skulls in Rachel, a small town up north.

Mitsuo, their boss, had given him the opportunity to stay, and he took it; becoming part of their cute little color gang; a gang not about screwing over people, shooting up the opposition, and making money through drugs and prostitution. He took up shop in the town's junkyard, and started building mechas to sell.