<div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">Resurrection (Apocalypse World: Chopper)</div><div class="spoiler_body">There'd been a dozen kegs the night they buried Hammer Pete. Good beer. The stuff no-one had anymore. There'd been half that many bottles and canteens of water at her waist when she staggered out of town into the depths of Hell to dig up his grave, and no-one had those anymore, not even her. Once, she wouldn't have had to steal water. Wouldn't have had to filch a stick to lean on. But she knew that nobody would follow her out onto the cracked surface of Hell's Anvil. They'd tried to kill her and left her strung up to the roadsign outside of town. Warning to others. They'd backed their big old rattle-trap truck three times over her hawg before somebody with a dollop of sense yelled at the driver to stop, that the old bike had been worth something as parts.<br/><br/>Her nails were broken and her knuckles were bloody from turning over the rocks of the caern. Easy rocks for a posse of drunken bikers to hoist into place beside a bonfire in the cool of night. Harder for a lone and parched woman under the scorching sun. When the rocks were gone, the time-packed sand wore at her hands until they were raw. The more of it she dug out of Pete's grave, the more of it seemed to slip and slide back in, driven by the wind that was closer kin to a blowtorch than to a cooling carress on her cheek.<br/><br/>For a time, she thought she'd remembered wrong. She stopped more than once, staring in panic around the horizon of the cracked playa. That hill there. That butte. That mound. Could the mound have moved? Wind-driven, years-shifted? Then she found his skull, tugged it out of the sand's sucking grasp, hurled it aside, out of the shallow pit she was making.<br/><br/>They'd buried the Hammer the Old Way. Standing in the saddle. Down in the cool sand between the shanks of his thighbones was a bike. An old bike. A true hawg born out of the Motor City's long-stilled furnaces with the old aitch-dee stamped on its tank. The kind of hawg that didn't quit, it just kept going so long as you kept feeding it hate and spite and scooping up the oil that drooled out of it to pour back into its pans. But it had been the Hammer's Harley, and here she was profaning his grave. And how did she think she was going to get it up and out of there?<br/><br/>She strewed yellowed, crackling ribs for a time, then took a sharp piece of broken bone and uses it to punch holes in the discolored plastic of the water bottles, tearing them open and licking at the jagged, chemical reek for any faintness of moisture. It wasn't enough. But if she could get the hawg, she wouldn't need water.<br/><br/>She wouldn't need anything.<br/><br/>---<br/><br/>Sand crackled and ground in the old bike's hubs as she leaned against it, weakly trying to shove it along with her body-weight, but she was too lean, too weak. The water had left her body, flown off to the cruel sun and she was a dried-out husk, light as a feather, barely able to shift the ancient, crusted mass of steel. Her unbooted feet sank in the shifting powder of the playa's clay tiles, feeling them crunch and give beneath her with each unsteady step. <br/><br/>The sun wasn't cooperating. It should've been setting. Should've been letting the cool night out. And it should've been over there, unless she'd turned, somehow, lost track of where she was going. <br/><br/>She cursed the sun and leaned against the bike's burning metal, embracing it. She didn't need water. She had the Hammer's hawg.<br/><br/>When she came to, the sun was behind her again. Had she slept all night? The unyielding embrace of the jagged metal beneath her ticked slowly as it heated up, drinking in the sun's fire. She tried to stand. Failed. Tried to pull the bike upright again. There was no sign of the playa's edge. No indication of her guiding hill.<br/><br/>It occurred to her in a moment of feverish clarity that she could follow the bike's wandering track back, follow the corkscrewing gouge of her deliriumed path to the hole in the ground, crawl in next to what was left of the Hammer and pull the bike in on top of her.<br/><br/>But she couldn't get the bike up again. She couldn't even cry. Not for Hammer Pete, struck down so young with such a fine ride. Not for herself here on the Anvil at the End of the World. All the tears were gone.<br/><br/>Having stolen her tears, the sun hovered in her vision, seeming close enough to reach out and touch. Bloody, it hung low ahead of her as she lay half-across the fallen hawg, unmoving.<br/><br/>After a time, it didn't even feel hot.</div></div><br/><strong>Rez</strong>(sometimes<strong>"The Resurrection Lady"</strong>or even<strong>"Vulture Momma,"</strong>but outsiders had best be careful using the latter to her face)<br/><br/>Female, mid-to-late twenties (<em>who's going to ask?</em>), snake-lean and snake-cold. Except for her eyes. They're dry, cracked-amber. Far too much hyena-madness and desert sun in those eyes. No matter where she is. No matter if the sun's up or won't be up any time soon enough to save you. Her eyes burn. She's slim, wiry almost to the point of boyishness, and the lines of whipcord muscle under her brown skin lend her no air of soft femininity. Small breasts try to break that axe-edge profile, but she tends to keep them strapped down under old banded canvas. No false modesty, more the old Amazonian idea of keeping sensitive things under wraps and out of the way. With, admittedly, a little less knifework in the implementation. She keeps her dark hair shaven down, save for a single thick-braided Mongol queue that reaches her hip. Like most of her gang, she wears piecemeal oil-black leathers, thick-layered and savage, ornamented with plates and spikes of metal, ruffs of dark, wind-worn vulture feathers...and the occasional braided human scalp<strong>(2-Armor)</strong>. Snug across the small of her back is a sawn-off over-and-under gun, chopped close to the chambers and its triggers wired together like some massive devil's derringer<strong>(3-harm close reload messy)</strong>, and resting over her shoulder or upright in its stand on her bike is the remains of a sand-blasted stop sign, its edges honed sharp as hell where they aren't jagged<strong>(sub for "machete:" 3-harm hand messy)</strong>.<br/><br/><strong>Cool +1</strong>(Unimpressed by any bullet that isn't in her.)<br/><strong>Hard [+2*]</strong>(Hasn't just seen Hell, has been Hell for plenty of other souls.) (Marked by SgtDan)<br/><strong>Hot -1</strong>(The desert and the lifestyle have left their marks. She's too weathered and scarred to be encompassed by a term like 'pretty.')<br/><strong>Sharp +1</strong>(Those eyes definitely see things.)<br/><strong>Weird 0</strong>(Sometimes they've seen things they shouldn't.)<br/><br/><strong>Hx:<br/></strong>Amanuel: -2<br/>Barbarossa: +1<br/>Truth Strong: +1<br/>Uncle Marco: 0<br/>Warner: +1<br/><br/><strong>Chopper Moves: </strong><br/><strong>Pack alpha: </strong>when you try to impose your will on your gang, roll+hard. On a 10+, all 3. On a 7–9, choose 1:<br/>• they do what you want<br/>• they don't fight back over it<br/>• you don't have to make an example of one of them<br/>On a miss, someone in your gang makes a dedicated bid to replace you for alpha.<br/><br/><strong>Fucking thieves:</strong>when you have your gang search their pockets and saddlebags for something, roll+hard. It has to be something small enough to fit. On a 10+, one of you happens to have just the thing, or close enough. On a 7–9, one of you happens to have something pretty close, unless what you're looking for is hi-tech, in which case no dice. On a miss, one of you used to have just the thing, but it turns out that some asswipe stole it from you.<br/><br/><strong>Bike:</strong>Rugged, Aggressive, Vintage, Guzzler (Power +1, Looks +1, 1-Armor, Weakness +1) (Hammer Pete's old H-D)<br/><br/><strong><em>LOS BUITRES</em> MC* (3-harm gang medium savage 1-armor)</strong>are an unusually large (+Medium gang size) and nasty bunch of blood-hungry scum who seem to've knocked over at least one well-off individual's armory (+1 Harm), but since somebody killed and ate their last mechy-techy boy their bikes haven't been as well maintained as they might...And parts can be hard to come by (Vulnerable: Grounded). They look and act unsurprisingly like refugees from The Road Warrior: black leathers, armor, black vulture feathers everywhere, lots of skulls and scalps which once belonged to other people (who no longer need them) swagged onto their bikes, and precious little to no respect at all for the sensibilities of others.<br/><br/>(* All the good names are taken, by somebody, somewhere. So...no relation to "The Road Vultures MC"...They have better things to do after the Apocalypse.)