To cure his boredom, he sometimes fires off a rocket or three at the floor or at the wall. These rockets can hurt him, drawing blood and gore, but the sensation is less of pain and more like that of an itch scratched. He runs to the blue, plus-shaped sign to heal his wounds. He collects more rocket ammo.

Sometimes, a player joins the server. A woman in a skin-tight suit, or an alien with horns extending from its jaws, or a robot in a rusted carapace - the company, no matter its shape, is appreciated. The armoured man continues running, and then, when he sees his foe, he unleashes hell.

Sometimes, he dies. Flak perforates his body, or plasma burns him to a crisp, and he watches his own flailing body smash against a wall and then crumple to the floor like a rag doll. A few moments of frustration and anger pass, which are accentuated by the killer taunting him. He's heard this taunt thousands of times before, in the same voice and intonation. It never gets to him.

When he's alive again, he's lost all his weapons and ammo. He starts running. The corridor divides into two, a ledge appears to the left, a giant open area reveals itself beyond a few covering walls. The key is to never stop moving, to never be a still, easy target for the enemy.

It's only after collecting four weapons that he realises he hasn't seen his opponent in a while. When he checks the scoreboard, he searches for a name on the 'red' side of the table. There's no one there any more.

He makes his way to the top of the space station, where he fires off rockets into space or at the vast red sphere that is the planet Mars. The rockets keep on going until they can't be seen any more, though a more informed individual might know that the flying rockets are culled when they reach the edge of the space this man lives in.

Up on 'top' of the space station, gravity is more forgiving. The man jumps higher and takes longer to come down. It's a light sensation, but irritating in its difference from regular gravity. He moves erratically, sinking through a hole in the floor back into the depths of the space station, where he keeps running until another player would join the server.

As he stomps through the station, he wonders why his digital hair stands on end when someone joins him. It's a sense of company, an interaction, he concludes. Hunting them, shooting at them, making them bleed and ultimately killing or being killed by them. It's the only way this armoured man knows how to interact with other beings, and he hopes these interactions bring as much joy to them as they bring to him.

---

maybe as a challenge for myself i could try to remake the UT99 weapons in my own style, while trying to adhere to the source designs, maybe the Unreal (+ return to Na-pali) weapons after, if i'm up to it (and maybe the UT3 designs though i see less point in that).