#scifiwestern

Rem Saverem: Steady Heart ANIMATION

The Guilt-Eaters of Lament

Silence wasn’t the absence of sound in Lament; it was a substance. It poured into the gaps between broken buildings, a thick, dusty syrup that swallowed Rem Saverem’s footsteps as soon as she made them. Her survey mission had been simple: confirm the abandonment of this SEEDS colony outpost. But her escape pod’s crash-landing three kilometers back had turned a routine check into a fight for survival.

The buildings, all white adobe and curved arches, were pristine, untouched by the planet’s rust-colored dust. Yet every window was a dark, hollow eye. Her Geiger-counter clicked a benign, monotonous rhythm. The only anomaly was the silence.

And the mirrors.

They hung at every intersection, polished discs of what looked like salvaged ship hull, dangling from frayed ropes. In the first one, Rem saw her own reflection—pale, ash-blonde hair tied back, blue eyes sharp with fatigue, the utilitarian lines of her SEEDS uniform. In the second, a block down, her reflection was slower to appear, as if the glass had to remember her face. By the third, the reflection smiled a fraction of a second after she did.

A dry wind sighed through the empty streets, carrying a whisper. It sounded like her name.

“Rem…”

She spun, hand on her ion-pistol. The street was empty. The whisper came again, not from the air, but from her own mind, a memory given voice. Tesla. The name was a fresh wound.

“This is a psychological manifestation,” she said aloud, her voice swallowed by the waiting silence. “Isolation stress. Auditory hallucination.”

“Is that what we are, Rem Saverem?” The new voice was liquid, mellifluous, and came from directly behind her.

She drew her weapon in a smooth arc, settling into a combat stance. The man standing there was impossibly tall and slender, dressed in a coattail jacket stitched together from a thousand silvery, reflective scraps. His face was long, handsome, and eerily familiar—it was the face from the mirrors, but alive. His eyes were pools of polished mercury.

“We prefer the term ‘symbionts’,” he said, his mouth not quite syncing with the words. “Or ‘cathartians’. Guilt-eaters is so… visceral.”

“What are you?” Rem demanded, sighting down her pistol’s barrel. “A rogue AI? A neural projection?”

The man—the creature—laughed, a sound like tinkling glass. “We are the consequence that lingered. This colony didn’t die of famine or plague, Rem. They died of regret. We simply… facilitated the feast.” He took a step closer, ignoring the weapon. “And you, my dear, are a banquet waiting to be served. The guilt you carry… it’s exquisite. It has layers, like a fine wine. The sharp top notes of professional failure. The deeper, richer tones of a sister’s betrayal. And the foundational palate… the love for something you believe is a monster.”

Her breath hitched. Nai. How could it know?

“We know because you show us,” it said, answering her unspoken thought. It gestured to a nearby mirror. In its surface, Rem didn’t see herself. She saw the cold, sterile lab on the SEEDS ship, saw her sister Tesla’s defiant face before the lockdown, heard her own desperate, unanswered pleas.

“Stop it.”

“We are not doing it,” the creature crooned, circling her like a predator. “We are merely the mirror. You are the one who cannot look away. Do you regret following orders, Rem? Do you regret not fighting harder for her? Or do you, in the darkest hours, regret that she made you doubt your precious Project?”

“I have no doubts about the Plants,” Rem snapped, but her voice wavered.

“Liar,” the mirror-man whispered, now suddenly beside her ear, his breath cold and odorless. “You love the independent ones. Like the child, Nai. You love its potential. You fear its power. You lie awake wondering if you are nurturing a god or a weapon. That cognitive dissonance… it is our ambrosia.”

A second figure emerged from a nearby doorway. A woman, composed of the same shifting, mirror-like fragments, her form reflecting a younger, more anxious Rem. “The weight is crushing you,” the female echo said. “Let us taste it. Let us have the moment you first called Nai ‘it’ instead of ‘him’. The moment you chose protocol over kinship.”

Terror, cold and sharp, spliced with a strange, hypnotic seduction. The offer to be free of the gnawing, constant shame was profoundly alluring. She saw it in their silver eyes—a promise of oblivion.

We’re making a weird little sci-fi western, and it’s nearly there.

Vagabond Home is a short film about survival, memory, busted electronics, and reluctant connection. It’s quiet, dusty, strange—and full of heart. Think crumbling tech, half-melted rations, and two lost souls wired into a fading system.

We’ve got the script. We’ve shot the first scenes. We’ve built the world. Now we just need a little help to finish the job.

What we need:

Gear rentals & basic production costs

Editing & sound design

Festival submissions & outreach

A little wind in our sails

We’re using Ko-fi to raise micro-funds. Every bit goes directly into the project—and supporters get updates, credits, and our eternal gratitude. If you want to help bring a dusty dream to life, or just support some low-budget sci-fi with soul:

Meryl Stryfe: Watchful Creed ANIMATION

Echoes in the Dust

The crimson sands of Gunsmoke whispered secrets on the wind, a mournful tune that played across the cracked earth and skeletal remains of long-dead settlements. Meryl Stryfe, her duster a familiar shield against the biting grit, adjusted the scope of her rifle. The town of Oasis End was a misnomer of the highest order; a collection of sun-bleached adobe husks huddled around a brackish well, its silence more profound than any scream. She was here on a tip, a garbled message from an informant about a "voice that steals souls." Vague, certainly, but in her line of work with the Bernardelli Insurance Society, the vague often led to the catastrophic.

A flicker of movement in the skeletal remains of what might have once been a saloon drew her eye. Meryl hunkered down behind a petrified sand dune, her heart a steady, practiced drum against her ribs. The figure that emerged was wrong. It moved with a disjointed grace, a puppet on unseen strings, its form vaguely humanoid but stretched, elongated in the shimmering heat. It was the creature from the reports, the one they called the ‘Choral.’

As she watched, a voice drifted from the creature’s direction, a voice that sent a shiver down her spine despite the oppressive heat. It was the voice of her long-lost partner, Milly Thompson, sweet and guileless. “Meryl? Is that you? I’ve been so worried.”

Meryl’s breath caught in her throat. She knew Milly was leagues away, safe, yet the sound was so perfect, so heartbreakingly real. “Show yourself,” she called out, her own voice tight.

The creature stepped further into the open, and Meryl’s stomach churned. Its skin was the color of bleached bone, and it had no discernible face, just a smooth, ovoid head. But as it ‘spoke,’ a ripple, like heat haze, emanated from where a mouth should be. “Don’t be like that, Meryl. It’s me.” The voice was a perfect imitation of her own, laced with a seductive, almost hypnotic cadence. “We can finally be together. No more running. No more Vash.”

A cold dread, sharp and familiar, pierced through the shock. The creature was a mimic, a predator that used sound as its lure. But this was more than just mimicry; it was a violation. It was taking her memories, her deepest desires, and twisting them into weapons.

“You’re not me,” Meryl stated, her voice regaining its steel. She sighted the creature, her finger hovering over the trigger.

“Aren’t I?” the voice, her voice, purred. “I am the you that craves peace. The you that is tired of the chase, of the endless cycle of destruction that follows that man.” It took a step closer, its movements unnervingly fluid. “I can give you that peace. A world without the Humanoid Typhoon. A world where you are not just a footnote in his chaotic story.”

The words struck a chord deep within her, a discordant note of truth she rarely allowed herself to acknowledge. The exhaustion was real, a constant companion on the dusty trails of Gunsmoke. The desire for a life less… explosive, was a quiet ember she often tried to extinguish.

“What are you?” Meryl demanded, forcing the unsettling thoughts away.

The creature tilted its featureless head. “I am what you want me to be.” And then, the voice changed again, this time to that of Nicholas D. Wolfwood, the itinerant priest with a cross heavy with more than just faith. His voice was a low, sardonic drawl that had so often grated on her nerves and, to her eternal frustration, sometimes soothed them. “Still carrying the weight of the world on those pretty little shoulders, aren’t ya, girlie? Some things never change.”

Meryl flinched. The casual intimacy of the nickname, the weary amusement in his tone—it was all so perfectly him. “Wolfwood is… gone.” The words tasted like ash in her mouth.

“Is he?” the creature’s Wolfwood-voice crooned, a chillingly accurate imitation of his cynical laugh echoing through the deserted town. “Or is he right here, telling you to put down the gun and listen for once? You’re always so quick to shoot, so slow to understand.”

It was a masterfully cruel seduction, a psychological assault designed to disarm and dismantle. The creature was not just mimicking voices; it was weaving a tapestry of her past, her regrets, her unspoken longings. It was a predator of the heart.

“And what do you want me to understand?” Meryl asked, her grip on the rifle unwavering.