illphated
Out past the fractured blue ridges of the wasteland, under the poisonous shimmer of the Tiberium sun, Casey McBride worked miracles.
The world was broken. Tiberium crystals sprouted like weeds from every crack in the earth, mutating the soil and anything unlucky enough to linger. Most folks had given up trying to tame it. But not Casey.
With her battered cowboy hat pulled low over her green eyes and a plasma wrench in hand, she crouched under the belly of a half-dead GDI harvester, coaxing its coughing engine back to life. Sparks snapped around her nimble fingers, but she hardly noticed. Fixing machines — busted harvesters, glitched Orca transports, even fallen Nod drones — was second nature to her. She could solder a circuit board better than most generals could strategize.
Around her, the cowboys — a ragtag mix of harvest hands and Tiberium wranglers — stood wiping their brows, pretending to be busy but mostly watching the woman work. They got distracted easy these days: Tiberium storms on the horizon, mutant raiders on the prowl, the creeping madness that too much crystal exposure brought.
“Y’all can stare or you can saddle up,” Casey barked without looking up. Her Southern drawl cut through the thick chemical haze.
The men shuffled, embarrassed. Casey was the one who kept the harvesters rolling and the base supplied. No Casey, no fuel. No fuel, no defenses. No defenses, and the mutants would tear them apart by nightfall.
She finished with a clank and a hiss of steam. The harvester coughed, then roared to life, a mechanical bull ready to ride. Casey wiped her hands on her torn denim and flashed a crooked smile.
“That’s one down. Now let’s get the rest before Nod decides we’re easy pickin’s.”
One by one, she wrangled the scattered cowboys back into line, fixing what was broken, patching what could be patched. Under her command, the harvesters rolled back into the green fields of death, engines howling against the storm.
In a world where everything was falling apart, Casey McBride could fix anything — machines, people, hope.
And she wasn’t about to let Tiberium, Nod, or even hell itself say otherwise.