"The Last of Us": ABCs from the Watchpocalypse

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Quantifying the mean level of creepiness suffusing all strata of life on the Watch (i.e. the Unease Index) has become the purview of a single federal agency, the Office of Mutants & Berserkers (OMB), culminating in its daily issuance of the Watchpocalyptic Threat Forecast (WTF).

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Rolling along the rubbled terrain — soaking in the (ob)scenery, basking in the blasted embankments, touring the tortured earth — becomes a joyous outing when elementally fused to one's very own biomechanical "carriage".

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

"Soliloquy of the Salt Flats" — a stream of consciousness poem by an anonymous hermetic monk of an uncertain one of the multitudinous nomadic tribes — is a modern classic celebrating the delirious existence of a sun-seared supplicant's devotion to a desiccated desert deity promising deliverance from the frangible saline laminae encrusting the landscape.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Tubers in possession of a low-grade (even by Watchpocalyptic standards) intelligence — mutantically-induced lifeforms zoologically categorized as Tuberculoids — are a common, though vaguely disturbing, sight on millions of meagerly apportioned dinner tables.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Undertakers have been taking-under so many so regularly for so long that they've become the rockstar gods of the Watchpocalypse, holding legions of loyal, lovesick groupies in thrall to their occulted agenda by dint of their malignant, mortuary mojo.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Vampirism — due in no small part to the woke antics of various Public Broadcasting partners and their shadowy coconspirators sapping the vital fluids from our Western patrimony — has become a normalized lifestyle in all sectors of Watchpocalyptic society. Sad!

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Wacky Racers competing in the Wacky Races — though thought by many of our forebears to be naught but a comical and fantastical 20th century children's entertainment — was actually a popular Watchpocalyptic sporting event broadcast into the distant past with Tachyonic signal-boosting. Conditioning the generations of the past to zealously embrace their dystopic future by a keen balance of whimsy and dread is the raison d'être of many the Watch's top scientists.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Xstatic Tribulation Chemicals, aka XTCs, are so-called "party drugs" specifically engineered to enhance and heighten the agony and woe of retributive castigations regularly ordained and imposed by Empyrean powers and principalities in order to chastise a wicked and wayward Watch.

[Wosbald]

+JMJ+

Yoghurts, Creams, and Custards are among many a Watchpocalyptic child's summertime iced favorites, though concerned parents-groups have long cast a suspicious eye on their fitness as foodstuffs. The products' necessary deep-freeze is an uncontroversial step in their processing, easily achieved in many locations on the Watch, such as the Snow Plains of Frigia. But as for the peculiar livestock from which such "treats" are crafted, their disturbingly glandular, mammalian animality — when considered against the Watchwide bovine extinction — immediately gives away the game. Or should that be … gaminess?