thedollsyhouse application
Character: The Junker (no actual name given)
Series: Planetarian
Version: Some days before the start of the visual novel.
Age: Never stated, but since he was born in the early stages of the War and the game starts over thirty years later, probably in his late twenties, early thirties at the oldest.
Gender: Male.
Appearance: The Junker is a well built, somewhat tall man who stands at about 5’10”. He’s a man who maintains his appearance only as much as necessary to get by-his messy black hair falls is back to being down to a few centimeters past his shoulders and is cut unevenly in a couple places and grey eyes. He’s pale, as though he’s never seen the sun a day in his life-and he probably hasn’t, not with the rain-and it’s equally easy to determine that he hasn’t bathed in a long time, if the mud and to a lesser extent, blood that cakes his outfit is anything to go off of.
His outfit, like everything else, is only maintained as much as necessary and was made for warmth, protection and flexibility. He’s a man who cares nothing of fashion, and probably wouldn’t know it if it hit him in the face. He wears a military-issue waterproof cloak that’s been proofed against infrared radiation and is patterned with urban camouflage low over eyes. He also sports a set of night-vision goggles that have a bad habit of blinding him anytime he goes somewhere well light. Needless to say, the cloak and the goggles will probably be abandoned a short time after he enters the house.
That aside, the main portion of his outfit is much simpler than his accessories, consisting of mostly black and grey and all probably well made to be able to handle a fair amount of damage and trudging through an endless, acidic rain rain. A long sleeved shirt with a small breast pocket, a pair of thinsulated gloves, belt, pants, and thick boots. Under his gloves there’s a fairly simple wristwatch with a waterproof lid that has to be wound out daily.
In the breast pocket of his shirt there’s a waterproof case containing a single (dry) Camel cigarette. Fastened to his belt is a canteen. The knapsack he carries with him at all times has a back up cloak (the same kind that he wears), a mobile water purification system, antibiotic ampoule and syringe, as well as a few hard biscuits as rations and a pair of binoculars. He could probably fasten a couple more things to his belt and knapsack if he wanted or needed to. As far as weaponry goes, he carries a 40mm high-explosive flechette gun with long distance sight, but lacks the tracer functionality and ballistic stabilizer that more “advanced” models have, as well as six AP (composite armor-piercing direct-blast AC-DHESH round set with a 10-meter proximity fuse). In other words, he carries a grenade launcher on him. In his knapsack there’s also a PDW with a few magazines to go along with it.
Will edit this to make the wording less awkward later.
Personality: The Junker is a man who was never able to experience life's finer pleasures. To someone in his his position, heaven would be sitting in somewhere relatively even somewhat dry and relatively safe with a bottle of liquor and a cigarette. Unfortunately for him, he’s rarely able to find any of the above. Both liquor and cigarettes are a rare commode and even without that, he’s all too aware of the dangers of his own world. He manages a swing of liquor perhaps once ever several months and has access to cigarettes even less. More often these precious items-especially the latter, which are easily damaged by the Rain-have to be saved for trading posts where they can be given up to fetch more relevant things such as ammunition.
Everything is about survival to the Junker, he values his own life above all else. He knows little of affection and doesn’t tend to give much thought to other people, generally viewing them (particularly those that existed before the war) as a selfish race that brought their current state of disrepair upon themselves and prefers to avoid them when he can. He knows that others will see him as a liability or a threat, or perhaps on extremely rare occasion even a partner, but years of hardship and abandonment have taught him how dispensable he and others are. He knows perfectly well that if he is kept around, it will only be as long as his body and weaponry are fairing well. His first abandonment is one that left a lasting impact and came when he was still a young boy, likely even while the War was still raging on, and he was abandoned because of a defect in his hazard suit.
He holds others in the same light. People are good for partnership on the rare occasion-were viewed as even better when he was young and inexperienced, when he needed the guidance that older and wiser individuals could offer-, but at this point, in general he prefers not to get involved with them for too long at this point. In one partnership with another Junker, it can be assumed that this was only to up his own chances of survival and he was left untouched by the older Junker’s death. His only thoughts on the matter are that he wishes that the older man’s words had been “desolate and a little more stoic”. He appreciated the information that was given and the perks that came with it, but found his being caught by a simple trap to be inevitable. He also seems adverse to holding conversation as a whole, giving curt responses and quickly growing irate when people talk for too long or are verbose. He prefers to be able to do what needs to be done and move on. Likewise, he doesn’t tend to care to stay in one place too long or give anything past what’s relevant much thought. Sometimes, often times he does feel tired of his life, of the Rain that never falls and the current condition of the world, but what can he do but to move on?
While when he does talk he's incredibly blunt and tactless, the Junker is surprisingly patient and rarely outright loses his temper. This is often shown through Yumemi, whom in spite of how irritating he finds it, he's able to to deal with her chatter for several days and in spite of her constantly frustrating him, refrains from acting out on that annoyance. He's more inclined to walk away from a situation that's escalating than to pick a fight pointlessly and is more than capable of ignoring someone's more irritating quirks so long as he has reason to. All in all, it takes a special kind of person for him to get attached, along with a decent amount of time. Had he not slipped, he would have ran into the first person to make him long for companionship in years, perhaps since before his first abandonment by the name of Yumemi. The talkative, cheerful robot, left untouched by the war and without a trace of malice to be found managed to warm his frosty heart after much persistence and genuinely warmhearted statements that he could never expect from a living person, as well as her showing him the sight of the stars. And even with her, he insists that if push were to come to shove, he would abandon her. He questions why he even cares, and futilely tries to remind himself that she’s just a robot.
He is, however, very intelligent. He has to be, to get by in a post apocalyptic world and survive as a Junker, someone who raids even sarcophagus cities and has the pleasure of dealing with war machines on a semi-regular basis. Over the years he’s collected vast amount of knowledge from others about the workings of the “old” world, before the War and the Rain, but even more than that is simply that he’s perceptive and flexible enough to be able to adapt to just about any situation that might present itself in his world, from figuring out how to take down a killer war machine to fixing a planetarium’s projector. He’s careful of traps, and of people, and more than capable of quickly analyzing and taking action accordingly in any situation he might be tossed into.
He's also known to have dreams-nightmares--about this past, in spite of his general apathy about the matter, as well as about war machines in general.
Fears: Death. In spite of how stoic he tends to be, this is one of his glaring fears in game. Everything is about survival. Everything is about moving on, even if he doesn’t know why. Everything is about making it so that long journey wasn’t pointless. He’s afraid of other Junkers that might be better armed or might otherwise be able to overpower him. He’s also quite afraid of War Machines, but as those don’t exist in Dollsy that fear will more than likely shift to ghosts, undefeatable monsters, and in general ones that he might not be able to kill off. Complete silence tends to set him on edge as well.
Weaknesses: Social situations kill him. He’s terrible at forming relationships with others and scarcely does so, as detailed in the personality section, something that could be a definite hindrance in a place like Dollsy. His night vision goggles occasionally blind him when light exists. Dollsy is completely different from his native environment-standing in one place, unable to be exited or moved on from, relatively small, etc-and contains many things that he’s only briefly, if ever encountered. He doesn’t know how to do many simple such as cooking simply because there was no time or opportunity to learn them.
There’s always the constant risk of becoming an alcoholic in an environment where liquor is provided and frankly, he’s absolutely filthy and is probably lucky that he hasn’t gotten any serious infections as of yet.
Strengths/Abilities: While the Junker’s environment has left him a failure when it comes to domesticated tasks, it has left him resourceful and more than a little skilled in the department of combat.
As stated in the appearance section, the Junker carries a 40mm high-explosive flechette gun with long distance sight, but lacks the tracer functionality and ballistic stabilizer that more “advanced” models have, as well as six AP (composite armor-piercing direct-blast AC-DHESH round set with a 10-meter proximity fuse) and a PDW with a few magazines to go along with it. He knows how to use both and WELL. It’s safe to say he’s fair well even in close combat, however. He’s also fairly quick and intelligent enough to deal with some pretty nasty war machines, which are certainly nothing to scoff at, as well as other Junkers. His senses are sharper than most people's (in that he pays more attention), encouraged both by the lifestyle he leads and the constant onslaught of Rain that obscures everything, not to mention the constant threat of traps that have been laid about. He's also shown to be literate, which is noteworthy because during the time he was born, the early stages of the War had already begun and such things had begun to flicker out of existence.
History: The cause of the War that has shaped the Junker's world, and in turn the Junker himself, is said to have been a mix of global overpopulation, the depletion of the Earth's natural resources and perhaps most importantly, the failure of the Space Colonization Project. As a result of this, the War started. The then-world leaders fired their germ-bomb warheads from orbital satellites at major cities, which were then evacuated, with the intention of seizing control of everything once things had settled down and people had come to reinhabit the cities. This, unfortunately, would never happen, as the surrounding cities had been vaporized in thermonuclear warhead strikes.
Every year after the outbreak of the War the Earth's human population cut in half, for at least the next ten years, the Earth's population was cut in half every year and by the tenth, the countries that had started the war no longer existed, but even this could not stop the war. In spite of the fact that the majority of the human populace was dead and the fact that there was little to left to kill, those with the power continued to airdrop autonomous battle mechs collectively known as Warmongers. The Junker describes the reason for this as being that the War was no longer the conquest of land; it was nothing other than the internecine creed of revenge and massacre and says that “The purpose of life became merely to live, and thus did man stop producing anything other than man.”
Twenty years later, the 'Rain' began to fall and it never stopped. It was poisonous, acidic, and dangerous to consume without being filtered, and even then it has a rustic taste and smell to it. The rain poisoned the soil and bodies of water, although it is believe that groundwater has been left untouched, withered plants away to nothing, cracked concrete and turned steel into rusty garbage. The sun and stars were no longer viable and seasons became a thing of the past as a result. The world was left in ruin by the Rain.
We only find out bits and pieces of the Junker’s history. He himself doesn’t deem his past to be important at the point he's taken from and so it generally is only brought up during periods of sleep or when he's given good reason to consider it. What we do know is that he was born during the early stages of the War. In his earliest memories, those that he has to struggle remember, before the Rain had settled into the world, he was a little boy and lived in an overcrowded Colony where food, water and medication were limited and there wasn't nearly enough to sustain everyone. Back then if he went outside, he was almost always required to wear a protective suit as a result of the marks the War had already left, but the toxic contamination was concentrated in the souther hemisphere and so there were times when the smog was absent and he was allowed to go out.
He remembers that on a cold winter night he was taken outside of the airlock, held in the arms of a woman that he assumes to be his mother, standing with him in the darkness and staring into the sky, along with the other adults in the area. He can no longer remember if the stars were in the sky then, and only knows that woman to be a mother as a result of the affection she had given him, something that he has long since forgotten. Past that one memory, for as far back as he can remember the atmosphere had already been damaged and it was the sun was rare to see and the stars were a thing of legend. Traveling missionaries had preached to him about them “in reverent voices, as if they were reciting verses from their mold-ridden holy books”.
Time passed as he traveled with the Colony, he saw many people die, to sit down and simply stop moving. All this time he had been told by his elders that they just had to keep going a little longer, that they were going to a place with edible foods and pure drinking water, with people of his age and the other children's, but he would never get there. Eventually similar happed to him. He collapsed from exhaustion, beginning to doze, and while he recalls hearing a scream, in the end when he woke he found himself alone. He had been deserted due to the defect in his hazard suit, but at that time could not bring himself to feel despair about being left behind or fear at the thought of death. He was only relieved that he would no longer have to walk, aware of the fact that another Colony, his Colony, was being “burned to the ground”. He recalls staring at the light that he assumed to be from the sun, barely visible past the clouds and the rain, without feeling anything at all.
But somehow he never just stopped moving. At some point after this he found himself in a Training Corps, learning how to survive in the newly destroyed world, to live in spite of the war machines and the other horrors. The Junker was told to never stop moving and to always angle in toward the defensive perimeter and charge forward without fear. If he ever had a name, by it is likely that by this point it had long since been forgotten.
During the final human counter offense he would see an entire company of infantryman killed for the sake of destroying a single Hedgehog-B with handheld weaponry, orphans who hoped to be heroes and wanted to save what was left from the war machines, some of them less than ten years of age. He recalls that they spoke bravely of winning the War and returning the world back to it's natural order, in spite of their evident fear. They only had the clothes on their backs, the rifles they had been given, and synthetic chocolate in their rations pack. In the end, they all died. Their limbs were severed and their dog tags were blacked by naplam, their assault rifles with melted barrels, all left to the Rain. The Junker was likely the only one to walk away from this alive, miraculously able to make a hasty retreat and avoid being detected by the senors himself.
The Junker himself has a vague sense of time for these events, but it's likely after this that he became a Junker and began his travels, once or twice pairing up with another Junker, but otherwise keeping to himself. And moving. Always moving. Later in a location that's the name of is never given (the Junker himself is unaware of exactly where it was), but knows it to have been a place far colder than where he is before dropping into Dollsy, he recalls seeing a village with a few survivors of the Final Massacre just inside the perimeter of the Third Line. They had fashioned an idol out of the wreckage of various battle mechs and placed it in a church with a shattered roof. He recalls that the name they gave it was one of a flower of summer and turned in circles, praying to it and in a foreign language and believing that if they did so, the rain would stop.
At one point a Junker he teamed up with informed him that “The only way to do better is to plunder a sarcophagus city.”. The older Junker's chatter was annoying, but his skills as a Junker could not be doubted. The older man served as a scout, while the Junker would be the enforcer. It was from this man that he learned of the few few sarcophagus cities that were located along strip of the east coast, of the “the abundant riches and untold dangers that lay therein”. He describes the most irritating thing in the sarcophagus city to be the time when he met a robot, telling the Junker not to talk to it and that it is not a thing of this world. The Junker was unable to get details out of him.
Eventually the older Junker died, caught in what the Junker himself considers to be an obvious booby trap with the final words “a can of sardines from my hometown...brings back memories...”. As a result, he dug a grave for the older Junker, burying him with a tin of sardines that were likely indeed from his hometown. He did, and still does, wish that his partners had been more stoic and less desolate. All the same, he moved on, and he was on his way to such an sarcophagus city when he slipped and found himself in a house.
Series: Planetarian
Version: Some days before the start of the visual novel.
Age: Never stated, but since he was born in the early stages of the War and the game starts over thirty years later, probably in his late twenties, early thirties at the oldest.
Gender: Male.
Appearance: The Junker is a well built, somewhat tall man who stands at about 5’10”. He’s a man who maintains his appearance only as much as necessary to get by-his messy black hair falls is back to being down to a few centimeters past his shoulders and is cut unevenly in a couple places and grey eyes. He’s pale, as though he’s never seen the sun a day in his life-and he probably hasn’t, not with the rain-and it’s equally easy to determine that he hasn’t bathed in a long time, if the mud and to a lesser extent, blood that cakes his outfit is anything to go off of.
His outfit, like everything else, is only maintained as much as necessary and was made for warmth, protection and flexibility. He’s a man who cares nothing of fashion, and probably wouldn’t know it if it hit him in the face. He wears a military-issue waterproof cloak that’s been proofed against infrared radiation and is patterned with urban camouflage low over eyes. He also sports a set of night-vision goggles that have a bad habit of blinding him anytime he goes somewhere well light. Needless to say, the cloak and the goggles will probably be abandoned a short time after he enters the house.
That aside, the main portion of his outfit is much simpler than his accessories, consisting of mostly black and grey and all probably well made to be able to handle a fair amount of damage and trudging through an endless, acidic rain rain. A long sleeved shirt with a small breast pocket, a pair of thinsulated gloves, belt, pants, and thick boots. Under his gloves there’s a fairly simple wristwatch with a waterproof lid that has to be wound out daily.
In the breast pocket of his shirt there’s a waterproof case containing a single (dry) Camel cigarette. Fastened to his belt is a canteen. The knapsack he carries with him at all times has a back up cloak (the same kind that he wears), a mobile water purification system, antibiotic ampoule and syringe, as well as a few hard biscuits as rations and a pair of binoculars. He could probably fasten a couple more things to his belt and knapsack if he wanted or needed to. As far as weaponry goes, he carries a 40mm high-explosive flechette gun with long distance sight, but lacks the tracer functionality and ballistic stabilizer that more “advanced” models have, as well as six AP (composite armor-piercing direct-blast AC-DHESH round set with a 10-meter proximity fuse). In other words, he carries a grenade launcher on him. In his knapsack there’s also a PDW with a few magazines to go along with it.
Will edit this to make the wording less awkward later.
Personality: The Junker is a man who was never able to experience life's finer pleasures. To someone in his his position, heaven would be sitting in somewhere relatively even somewhat dry and relatively safe with a bottle of liquor and a cigarette. Unfortunately for him, he’s rarely able to find any of the above. Both liquor and cigarettes are a rare commode and even without that, he’s all too aware of the dangers of his own world. He manages a swing of liquor perhaps once ever several months and has access to cigarettes even less. More often these precious items-especially the latter, which are easily damaged by the Rain-have to be saved for trading posts where they can be given up to fetch more relevant things such as ammunition.
Everything is about survival to the Junker, he values his own life above all else. He knows little of affection and doesn’t tend to give much thought to other people, generally viewing them (particularly those that existed before the war) as a selfish race that brought their current state of disrepair upon themselves and prefers to avoid them when he can. He knows that others will see him as a liability or a threat, or perhaps on extremely rare occasion even a partner, but years of hardship and abandonment have taught him how dispensable he and others are. He knows perfectly well that if he is kept around, it will only be as long as his body and weaponry are fairing well. His first abandonment is one that left a lasting impact and came when he was still a young boy, likely even while the War was still raging on, and he was abandoned because of a defect in his hazard suit.
He holds others in the same light. People are good for partnership on the rare occasion-were viewed as even better when he was young and inexperienced, when he needed the guidance that older and wiser individuals could offer-, but at this point, in general he prefers not to get involved with them for too long at this point. In one partnership with another Junker, it can be assumed that this was only to up his own chances of survival and he was left untouched by the older Junker’s death. His only thoughts on the matter are that he wishes that the older man’s words had been “desolate and a little more stoic”. He appreciated the information that was given and the perks that came with it, but found his being caught by a simple trap to be inevitable. He also seems adverse to holding conversation as a whole, giving curt responses and quickly growing irate when people talk for too long or are verbose. He prefers to be able to do what needs to be done and move on. Likewise, he doesn’t tend to care to stay in one place too long or give anything past what’s relevant much thought. Sometimes, often times he does feel tired of his life, of the Rain that never falls and the current condition of the world, but what can he do but to move on?
While when he does talk he's incredibly blunt and tactless, the Junker is surprisingly patient and rarely outright loses his temper. This is often shown through Yumemi, whom in spite of how irritating he finds it, he's able to to deal with her chatter for several days and in spite of her constantly frustrating him, refrains from acting out on that annoyance. He's more inclined to walk away from a situation that's escalating than to pick a fight pointlessly and is more than capable of ignoring someone's more irritating quirks so long as he has reason to. All in all, it takes a special kind of person for him to get attached, along with a decent amount of time. Had he not slipped, he would have ran into the first person to make him long for companionship in years, perhaps since before his first abandonment by the name of Yumemi. The talkative, cheerful robot, left untouched by the war and without a trace of malice to be found managed to warm his frosty heart after much persistence and genuinely warmhearted statements that he could never expect from a living person, as well as her showing him the sight of the stars. And even with her, he insists that if push were to come to shove, he would abandon her. He questions why he even cares, and futilely tries to remind himself that she’s just a robot.
He is, however, very intelligent. He has to be, to get by in a post apocalyptic world and survive as a Junker, someone who raids even sarcophagus cities and has the pleasure of dealing with war machines on a semi-regular basis. Over the years he’s collected vast amount of knowledge from others about the workings of the “old” world, before the War and the Rain, but even more than that is simply that he’s perceptive and flexible enough to be able to adapt to just about any situation that might present itself in his world, from figuring out how to take down a killer war machine to fixing a planetarium’s projector. He’s careful of traps, and of people, and more than capable of quickly analyzing and taking action accordingly in any situation he might be tossed into.
He's also known to have dreams-nightmares--about this past, in spite of his general apathy about the matter, as well as about war machines in general.
Fears: Death. In spite of how stoic he tends to be, this is one of his glaring fears in game. Everything is about survival. Everything is about moving on, even if he doesn’t know why. Everything is about making it so that long journey wasn’t pointless. He’s afraid of other Junkers that might be better armed or might otherwise be able to overpower him. He’s also quite afraid of War Machines, but as those don’t exist in Dollsy that fear will more than likely shift to ghosts, undefeatable monsters, and in general ones that he might not be able to kill off. Complete silence tends to set him on edge as well.
Weaknesses: Social situations kill him. He’s terrible at forming relationships with others and scarcely does so, as detailed in the personality section, something that could be a definite hindrance in a place like Dollsy. His night vision goggles occasionally blind him when light exists. Dollsy is completely different from his native environment-standing in one place, unable to be exited or moved on from, relatively small, etc-and contains many things that he’s only briefly, if ever encountered. He doesn’t know how to do many simple such as cooking simply because there was no time or opportunity to learn them.
There’s always the constant risk of becoming an alcoholic in an environment where liquor is provided and frankly, he’s absolutely filthy and is probably lucky that he hasn’t gotten any serious infections as of yet.
Strengths/Abilities: While the Junker’s environment has left him a failure when it comes to domesticated tasks, it has left him resourceful and more than a little skilled in the department of combat.
As stated in the appearance section, the Junker carries a 40mm high-explosive flechette gun with long distance sight, but lacks the tracer functionality and ballistic stabilizer that more “advanced” models have, as well as six AP (composite armor-piercing direct-blast AC-DHESH round set with a 10-meter proximity fuse) and a PDW with a few magazines to go along with it. He knows how to use both and WELL. It’s safe to say he’s fair well even in close combat, however. He’s also fairly quick and intelligent enough to deal with some pretty nasty war machines, which are certainly nothing to scoff at, as well as other Junkers. His senses are sharper than most people's (in that he pays more attention), encouraged both by the lifestyle he leads and the constant onslaught of Rain that obscures everything, not to mention the constant threat of traps that have been laid about. He's also shown to be literate, which is noteworthy because during the time he was born, the early stages of the War had already begun and such things had begun to flicker out of existence.
History: The cause of the War that has shaped the Junker's world, and in turn the Junker himself, is said to have been a mix of global overpopulation, the depletion of the Earth's natural resources and perhaps most importantly, the failure of the Space Colonization Project. As a result of this, the War started. The then-world leaders fired their germ-bomb warheads from orbital satellites at major cities, which were then evacuated, with the intention of seizing control of everything once things had settled down and people had come to reinhabit the cities. This, unfortunately, would never happen, as the surrounding cities had been vaporized in thermonuclear warhead strikes.
Every year after the outbreak of the War the Earth's human population cut in half, for at least the next ten years, the Earth's population was cut in half every year and by the tenth, the countries that had started the war no longer existed, but even this could not stop the war. In spite of the fact that the majority of the human populace was dead and the fact that there was little to left to kill, those with the power continued to airdrop autonomous battle mechs collectively known as Warmongers. The Junker describes the reason for this as being that the War was no longer the conquest of land; it was nothing other than the internecine creed of revenge and massacre and says that “The purpose of life became merely to live, and thus did man stop producing anything other than man.”
Twenty years later, the 'Rain' began to fall and it never stopped. It was poisonous, acidic, and dangerous to consume without being filtered, and even then it has a rustic taste and smell to it. The rain poisoned the soil and bodies of water, although it is believe that groundwater has been left untouched, withered plants away to nothing, cracked concrete and turned steel into rusty garbage. The sun and stars were no longer viable and seasons became a thing of the past as a result. The world was left in ruin by the Rain.
We only find out bits and pieces of the Junker’s history. He himself doesn’t deem his past to be important at the point he's taken from and so it generally is only brought up during periods of sleep or when he's given good reason to consider it. What we do know is that he was born during the early stages of the War. In his earliest memories, those that he has to struggle remember, before the Rain had settled into the world, he was a little boy and lived in an overcrowded Colony where food, water and medication were limited and there wasn't nearly enough to sustain everyone. Back then if he went outside, he was almost always required to wear a protective suit as a result of the marks the War had already left, but the toxic contamination was concentrated in the souther hemisphere and so there were times when the smog was absent and he was allowed to go out.
He remembers that on a cold winter night he was taken outside of the airlock, held in the arms of a woman that he assumes to be his mother, standing with him in the darkness and staring into the sky, along with the other adults in the area. He can no longer remember if the stars were in the sky then, and only knows that woman to be a mother as a result of the affection she had given him, something that he has long since forgotten. Past that one memory, for as far back as he can remember the atmosphere had already been damaged and it was the sun was rare to see and the stars were a thing of legend. Traveling missionaries had preached to him about them “in reverent voices, as if they were reciting verses from their mold-ridden holy books”.
Time passed as he traveled with the Colony, he saw many people die, to sit down and simply stop moving. All this time he had been told by his elders that they just had to keep going a little longer, that they were going to a place with edible foods and pure drinking water, with people of his age and the other children's, but he would never get there. Eventually similar happed to him. He collapsed from exhaustion, beginning to doze, and while he recalls hearing a scream, in the end when he woke he found himself alone. He had been deserted due to the defect in his hazard suit, but at that time could not bring himself to feel despair about being left behind or fear at the thought of death. He was only relieved that he would no longer have to walk, aware of the fact that another Colony, his Colony, was being “burned to the ground”. He recalls staring at the light that he assumed to be from the sun, barely visible past the clouds and the rain, without feeling anything at all.
But somehow he never just stopped moving. At some point after this he found himself in a Training Corps, learning how to survive in the newly destroyed world, to live in spite of the war machines and the other horrors. The Junker was told to never stop moving and to always angle in toward the defensive perimeter and charge forward without fear. If he ever had a name, by it is likely that by this point it had long since been forgotten.
During the final human counter offense he would see an entire company of infantryman killed for the sake of destroying a single Hedgehog-B with handheld weaponry, orphans who hoped to be heroes and wanted to save what was left from the war machines, some of them less than ten years of age. He recalls that they spoke bravely of winning the War and returning the world back to it's natural order, in spite of their evident fear. They only had the clothes on their backs, the rifles they had been given, and synthetic chocolate in their rations pack. In the end, they all died. Their limbs were severed and their dog tags were blacked by naplam, their assault rifles with melted barrels, all left to the Rain. The Junker was likely the only one to walk away from this alive, miraculously able to make a hasty retreat and avoid being detected by the senors himself.
The Junker himself has a vague sense of time for these events, but it's likely after this that he became a Junker and began his travels, once or twice pairing up with another Junker, but otherwise keeping to himself. And moving. Always moving. Later in a location that's the name of is never given (the Junker himself is unaware of exactly where it was), but knows it to have been a place far colder than where he is before dropping into Dollsy, he recalls seeing a village with a few survivors of the Final Massacre just inside the perimeter of the Third Line. They had fashioned an idol out of the wreckage of various battle mechs and placed it in a church with a shattered roof. He recalls that the name they gave it was one of a flower of summer and turned in circles, praying to it and in a foreign language and believing that if they did so, the rain would stop.
At one point a Junker he teamed up with informed him that “The only way to do better is to plunder a sarcophagus city.”. The older Junker's chatter was annoying, but his skills as a Junker could not be doubted. The older man served as a scout, while the Junker would be the enforcer. It was from this man that he learned of the few few sarcophagus cities that were located along strip of the east coast, of the “the abundant riches and untold dangers that lay therein”. He describes the most irritating thing in the sarcophagus city to be the time when he met a robot, telling the Junker not to talk to it and that it is not a thing of this world. The Junker was unable to get details out of him.
Eventually the older Junker died, caught in what the Junker himself considers to be an obvious booby trap with the final words “a can of sardines from my hometown...brings back memories...”. As a result, he dug a grave for the older Junker, burying him with a tin of sardines that were likely indeed from his hometown. He did, and still does, wish that his partners had been more stoic and less desolate. All the same, he moved on, and he was on his way to such an sarcophagus city when he slipped and found himself in a house.