When I prepare a project bible, I include some mood-setting pieces. This one's no exception. This is the one for Gamma World:
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A Day in the Life
Jausten woke to find frost on his tent, and all across the West Meadow. He laughed out loud at the sight, hastening the others' march from sleep into wakefulness. Frost season meant the end of this year's war against the yellow vines: now they'd go dormant each night, and the Brothers of the Wolf could walk up boldly in the darkness to burn the vines' roots without dodging stingers or lashes. With even very moderate luck, they'd have the vines cleared from all the important forest routes before the great winter beasts stirred out of their dens.
The band of five hunters was ready to move just as the sun cleared the sentinel hills, east across the valley where the Wolf Tribe made its homes. Entrauw took the lead this morning. Neither the strongest nor the fastest in this band, he did have the best hearing and an intuitive sense for where the dead men would gather. Jausten didn't realize that he massaged the scar on his left shoulder whenever he thought about the dead men. Like most young hunters, he'd wondered just how much harm a thing with a human body but no mind to speak of and half his speed could do to him. The answer proved to be "quite a lot, at least when they trap you in a narrow pass with no way out but through them." Now he respected Entrauw's abilities very much.
Entrauw's chosen path took them off the old road up a U-shaped canyon. Jausten knew that glaciers made these places; he'd seen the sudden melt to the south, when someone in the White Elk Tribe turned on an Old Time motor and then couldn't turn it off. That whole valley caught on fire, and the heat made its way through buried cables up into what had been a glacier in the east ridge. In less than a month, the whole mass of ice melted, wiping out everything below it…except for the motor itself, which continued to hum behind its protective walls. It took the spring lightning to finally stop the thing, and the fires burned all that summer. The Wolf Tribe couldn't complain too hard, though, since the refugees provided the Wolves with three wives and an assistant healer. But he was daydreaming again, Jausten realized, and brought himself back to the present.
Whatever had been here before the Final Wars and the ice was gone now, pulverized along with everything else into the smooth granite slabs and jagged limestone pebbles underfoot. Two streams ran through the canyon, separated by a low rise, along which Entrauw marched his Brothers. They had a good view in all directions, and in any event the dead men didn't like the rock and marshy stream beds. By going this way, the Brothers avoided the dense forests along the southwest road, which the dead men liked very much.
The Brothers all froze in place as an all-too-familiar screeching whine, as harsh as bone splinters on jagged metal, echoed from the canyon's upper reaches. When they weren't immediately attacked, they dropped into hunter's crouch and slid off the rise. Somewhere up ahead were mutants of one species or another, animals with the giant milky eyes that fired arrows of burning light. Maybe it would have been better to take on the dead men....
