💥DARCY💥

So! Refuel is a horror story about alien robots, cannibalism, and suffering!! :D It was conceptualised many months ago when I was making headcanons for WPNZ's childhood, which resulted in an entire AU / Fic which has since been deleted due to a bad mental health moment, however there is this fic to show for it!

Pathological waste, the fic, was the first inkling of Refuel. This universe's WPNZ would go on to become one of Refuel's main characters, Raiden.

So to set the scene -

Refuel is a horror story inspired by things like Murder Drones, Mouthwashing, Deltarune - A lot of things, heck, inspiration has even been drawn from things like The Boys and the works of the author V.C Andrews! A very mixed bag which merged into one concept.

On a distant planet named Mirth, three robots were created with one goal in mind - To expand the empire's reach, and destroy anything that would prevent them from achieving this at all costs. Functionally, they are living weapons - One designed for flight / aerial warfare, one designed for undersea warfare, and one in the prototypal phase to handle snowier, icier climates.

A dove named Missy, a tiger shark named Raiden, and a lynx named Kit.

Their creator, Doctor Marenol, to put it simply, is a piece of shit. There is one thing you need to know about Doc, and it is that he is cruel.

He tortured the weaponry siblings for years, and Raiden received the brunt of it, being the oldest of them. (Young adult, 25 at the very most) When I say Raiden was tortured, I mean he's had other robots close to him murdered to keep him from stepping out of line, I mean he's been drowned and resuscitated repeatedly to test how long he can survive because he's supposed to be built to withstand things like that. He's suffered a lot, which is why he's the most, IDK, fucked up.

He's also kind of got a bit of a stick up his ass about being their captain / commander on missions ETC, but it's like a chain - Doc gives him an order, he relays it to his siblings. He's a dickhead but he's not a monster! (.. yet. :D)

Missy's the middle sibling, her name is actually sort of a pun? It's because of 'missile' + her color palette being based on the album Misadventures by Pierce the veil (PLEASE LISTEN TO THIS ALBUM! ONE OF MY ALL TIME FAVOURITES!!!). She likes collecting things and she's weirdly nice for a killer robot, but she's programmed to be that way - Her dove / saviour motif is a reoccuring thing within the story.. I took inspiration from how animals like pigeons and doves were historically used in combat as messengers! She can be easily modified to provide aid rather than destruction, if Mirth ever came under attack she'd be equipped for first aid and relief while her siblings would act as defense. All in all, she's like, 'the nice one', but I promise there's more to her than that! At least to me.

Kit is the youngest, in their prototypal phase, and as a result of this they're disabled (plot relevant!), they quite literally do not have a mouth and this hinders two things for them - Their ability to speak, and their ability to essentially, eat, known as 'refueling' to the robots. They communicate through sign language and occassionally through symbols / short sentences in their eyes, and the refueling process is something I shall elaborate on later! They're a bit of a bookworm, and another plot relevant point is that due to their disabilities they need frequent maintenance and repairs, so they're very familiar with the intricacies of repairing robots - This coupled with the fact that they are effectively the pilot when they go on missions (though they're being puppeteered by Raiden) means they're also very familiar with ship / pod / etc etc repairs.

SO!

Now I've introduced the main cast I should get into plot details!

I feel like, most bang for your buck narrative wise, if this were turned into a game, the player would be placed in the shoes of Missy.

The three of them are rounded up by Doc one day and sent on a mission, and their ship ends up crashing on a barren planet. There are signs that life did previously exist there, but all in all it looks like it's been uninhabited for hundreds of years.

Considering there's signs of previous civilisation + Kit's technical knowledge, their first order of business is scoping out the planet (anxiously dubbed 'planet dirt' by Kit while they were trying to find it on a physical map, only for it to be missing entirely) to find supplies in an attempt to repair their ship.

During their search, they end up coming across 'the ruins' - A building that looks like it could have been a place of worship long ago, and they come across a large mural, and text only Raiden can read.

TLDR; A prophecy seals their fates in stone, and each character is referred to by one of the names of the four horsemen - Conquest, Famine, War and Death.

Uh, there are significant ties to this prophecy and the plot, I'm not setting it up for no reason, but it's not like... traaaditional ties to the four horsemen if that makes sense? The 'interpretation key' is supposed to go like this:

Doc - Conquest, created these killer robots for the purpose of expanding their planet's empire and obliterating other lifeforms.

Raiden - Famine, you'll have to wait and see :P

Kit - Death, you'll have to wait and see :P

Missy - War

At first, the connection between Missy/War seems pretty obvious - Sure, she may be more equipped to provide aid and be programmed to be inherently more merciful than her siblings, but at the end of the day, she's still a creature created specifically for combat and destruction, but it actually means more than that - She is war due to the essence of sacrifice that goes into it! (For the era and animal she's based on anyway, I'm not doing no military / war support shit.)

But on the prophecy -

Only Raiden can read it, he's their captain and is made to follow orders, and as such is also equipped to understand code. But he lies. He tells them that they're going to live through this, and not what's prophesised: That he and his siblings will all die, with him being directly responsible.

Missy misinterprets her role in the prophecy - The idea that she's depicted as the concept of 'war' horrifies her. She's been told, her entire life, that the reason she exists is a good thing. The empire expanding as much as possible is a good thing. This, coupled with her coding and the fact she's never really considered how she looks through the eyes of the planets she was terrorising and now being forced to confront that mortifies her to the point she completely denounces fighting. That from now on, she will try to reshape her image as a bloodthirsty monster, she will only fatally attack if it's absolutely necessary for immediate survival. She's the only one who's really worked up by the prophecy? Kit does attempt to question Raiden's reading of it, they've seen the 'language' it's written in inside books before, but that's quickly shot down and Kit goes along with it.

But Missy's will to fight back unless someone is actively attempting to end her life is now shattered! Surely nothing bad will happen now.

So, circling back to before, the rest of what follows is them attempting to gather supplies to rebuild their ship. An important note is that they manage to get the call system repaired enough to send distress signals? But, as you can imagine, nobody comes looking for them.

The longer this progresses, however... They begin slowly starving. They have no fuel besides what's inside their tanks. Their refueling processes differ:

Missy and Raiden have 'stomachs' that are basically furnaces, which melt and process whatever enters it into fuel. Kit, on the other hand, does not have this - They have to be manually refueled by popping open parts of their chest and abdomen, and inserting a tube into the fuel tank. It's a procedure that requires specialised equipment - Equipment that they do not have.

Kit starts functioning slower, experiencing more pain bodily, and just generally not having a good time. Priorities begin to shift to trying to find anything that can act as a stand-in for the tools needed to refuel Kit, but their efforts are ultimately fruitless.

Kit's state eventually gets so bad that they struggle to communicate and even walk, and they beg their siblings to kill them so they don't have to be in pain anymore. Missy tries her hardest to keep them alive as long as possible, logic being 'if we can find enough things to repair parts of the ship, we can probably find makeshift equipment to refuel them', but in the end, Raiden listens to Kit's pleas and convinces Missy that it's the right thing to do, because they're going out on their own terms rather than continuing to be in pain and slowly starve to death.

They kill Kit by repeatedly smashing their head with a rock, intending it to be a one-and-done job, but the rock in question is just slightly too small, leading to a bit of a beating.

The remaining pair are left pretty rattled by the experience, Missy visibly moreso than Raiden. A little time passes, and then he suggests that they eat Kit's body. Missy doesn't think he's being serious at first, but the thought process is simple: Kit may be dead now, but if they eat their body, the two of them can process it into fuel and hold out until they're eventually rescued, or the ship is repaired.

Missy is extremely hesitant to engage in this act of robot cannibalism, and vomits at first when the act of consumption is underway. Raiden proceeds to eat most of Kit's body over several days, Missy only eating small amounts needed for survival.

What follows is Raiden slowly becoming more and more abusive and manipulative toward his sister, as he's realised that he's no longer just a mouthpiece to reiterate commands and order them around in ways Doc would want, but that he can exert complete control over someone for once in his life.

Raiden's body also begins changing - As a living weapon / shark hybrid, there's parts of him (and all three of them) built specifically with fatality in mind. Part of his design is that his face can split open, revealing rows of 'teeth' (circular sawblades), and in this new form, those faceplates are entirely missing, rendering him blind and relying on sound and scent. When I eventually have a design nailed down for him, I want to say that a big inspiration for this was the artist Drawkill and their FNAF fanart, as well as parts of Murder Drones. The only truly solid thing is the faceplates being missing, to be honest? And that he becomes more, shall we say animalistic? As well. I want him to look nightmarish. The idea of watching someone you hold dearly physically and mentally turn into a monster toward you is horrifying enough though, in my opinion.

He eventually begins to cannibalise parts of her while she's still alive, even demanding that she cut off her own arm for him at one point so 'they' (he) could eat.

The ending is probably pretty predictable, but it's that Missy dies and Raiden cannibalises her body, too, his fate left open-ended. He was either rescued or starved to death (without Kit's expertise, there's no way they would have been able to repair the ship, both of them), but I personally like to believe he starved to death X_X

Buuut yeah that's Refuel! It's special to me, I think it's the most fleshed out story I've ever made in terms of plot and worldbuilding? Some details are subject to change of course but I feel like the plot would be relatively the same regardless of things that may change further into the future.

It's not a happy story, I know that, but it is something that means a lot to me!! It's something I do want to get turned into a videogame or comic or, something, someday. I need it to exist, preferably in videogame format, One Day.