Maha's Exodus by Sunny

A lean and rugged young man stood at the edge of an unused field, nervously twisting his square toed cowboy boots in the dirt road as he waited. The tall, dry prairie grass of the adjacent field waved in the slight breeze. It almost beckoned him into the dense cluster of trees opposite from the road across the property line. He kept a wary eye on it, watching for any sign of movement inside.

The McMahon brothers had a certain tradition on their 18th birthday which their father, a stoic traditional rancher by the name of Malcolm, knew nothing about. The loss of their virginity to the girl on the neighboring farm. And the youngest of the group, Isaac, had had his celebration last week.

Isaac didn't know much about girls; he had no sisters, his mother had passed giving birth to him, and rural farm life had condemned him to being homeschooled by his eldest brother. The little he did know came swimsuit magazines his brothers would swipe on their rare excursions into town for supplies they couldn't make themselves on the homestead, like gasoline or batteries. He knew from this at least women had an appealing shape with their curves and smooth, unblemished skin. He knew as well as they indeed lacked a penis, having instead an extra hole called a "vag." He had delivered enough calves to get the rough idea, but most of the specifics of actual women were a mystery to the young Isaac. A mystery that would soon be unveiled by the hulking figure pushing through the foliage of the grove.

He had seen Daisy before, but always from afar. The neighbor to the McMahon's ranch seemed friendly enough, always waving when he was working on the property line on the family tractor. Sure, the way she chose to do things was a little strange; in lieu of machinery or pack animals, she opted to do almost all of the work by hand. Plowing fields, dragging trailers of hay bails, clearing fields with a scythe, and so on... His brother/teacher had told him of people like that called Amish who didn't use modern conveniences for moral reasons. He always assumed the blonde beauty was one of those.

As she approached the fence, Isaac realized how massive the woman actually was. The barbed wire property line only reached just under her curvy hips which she cleared it with a jump, not even bothering to climb over it. As she impacted the ground, Isaac was in awe at the way her womanly parts jiggled. Daisy's mesmerizing breasts and hips rippled and shook with the sheer force of the huge farm girl's impact. As she stood up to her full height again, Isaac came to a startling realization; she was at least 8 and a half feet tall. He was not a small man by any means at 6'2 with a build befitting of a born and raised farm hand, but the stature of the she-colossus absolutely dwarfed him. Her uncovered arms rippled and bulged with herculean muscle under tan and worked skin. It almost reminded him of tanned leather.

A warm smile crossed her cute freckled face as she grew closer, dimples forming in her rosy cheeks from the midday head. The young man craned his head up to meet her emerald eyes. It was nothing like the magazines... he could get lost in those eyes, falling into their verdant embrace like falling down a well never to be heard of again.

He broke out of his musings when a pair of plentiful, overall covered breasts blocked out her face. Two strong arms wrapped tightly around the youth as he was ground roughly into a dense set of denim obscured washboard abs. Her melodic, sweet voice rumbled through her body as she spoke.

"Howdy! You must be lil' Isaac! Mr Malcolm told me all about ya last time he come over and fixed muh well pump. I woulda done it myself but..." Daisy let the boy go, and took a step back. She giggled as she flexed her hands, turning them around back and forth to show off her calluses and tendons; each finger was as thick and hard as a shotgun barrel. "Muh hands are kinda big for a lady, and I couldn't quite get 'em into the teeny tiny box. And his company was welcome, 'course. Not like muh lazy bones brother was gonna do it..."

Isaac winced at the nickname "Lil' Isaac." His father would use it as a term of affection, but it was the source of much teasing from his brothers. He responded to it nonetheless, for politeness's sake.

"Yes'm, that's me. Isaac."

She giggled and waved her hand. "Shoot, none of this ma'am business, yer makin' me feel like an old lady. I'm just a girl yet." A devilish smirk crossed her face, and her eyes filled with something the farm boy had only ever seen in the eyes of a pent up stud. It was something that caused his face to flush red. "And bein' a girl, do ya know what we do to freshly made men?"

"Um... no, I wouldn't rightly know ma- uh, miss Daisy."

Her voice lowered into a gravelly, husky whisper and she leaned down. Isaac scrunched his eyes closed, as if she were about to bite his head off. But all that happened was a gentle peck on his forehead. "C'mon back to the grove, and I'll show ya. Lil' Isaac..."

===

A black smoke belching machine raced across the slimy pink landscape, the screws by which it propelled itself spinning furiously at the behest of its single rider. On reaching a crevice in the ground the rider brought the machine to a halt, switching off the engine to save precious fuel. As she pulled up her goggles, the rider revealed a pair of blood red eyes framed by pale skin. The rest of her clothes were the custom for her people; an open garment resembling a black leather trench coat that reached her knees, only partially obscuring her pert breasts, and a pair of loose pantaloons tied with a thick yellow rope around the waist. A boxy metal backpack hung from her shoulders. It weighed a ton, but she had grown used to carrying the thing on her hard and lean body from months of work. On her feet she wore heavy, waterproof boots with exoid hide reinforcement. The ground she trod on was soft but immensely springy, and the woman didn't sink into its pink surface as a consequence. She made her way to the edge of the crevice, and peered in. At its bottom was mana, food for all of the people of Gynon.

She pulled a handset from the box on her back. A hissing buzz filled her ear as the mana scout put it up to her face; "Maha reporting. Found a cache worth our time. Leaving radio on beacon mode. Copy?"

A heavily distorted male voice chuckled over the airwaves; "Formal as ever, eh Maha?" Nothing from the woman. She had been trained well, but was a bit of hardass for the dispatcher's taste. Finally he relented, and told her what she expected to hear; "Copy, message received. ME 'Singing Volter' en-route to your location. Stay safe, keep watch for other scouts and extractors."

"Roger." She hung the handset back on the heavy box, before removing it and laying it on the ground. She flicked a switch under the handset, and a red light began to rhythmically flash.

The scout sat on the edge of the deposit and sighed. These short breaks between finding deposits of mana, and waiting for the huge mechanical collectors to lumber to her location were the only time she wasn't busy working or putting out fires. The new tribe she had joined was one of the most incompetent she had ever met. If not for their machines, they surely would have starved by now. They wouldn't even last the journey to her home in the forests beyond the land of Gynon. What was once her home, anyway.

The machines, named "crawlers" by the Gynonites, were practically unknown to her people, who tended to settle in one place and harvest all of the natural resources there. Only once in several generations would the forest tribes make an exodus to a more resource rich area. They had little need for the great loping strides of the Gynonite's crawlers, nor did they have access to great quantities of the required fuel; namely, blood.

While of course people could be sacrificed to the great blood engines in time of great need, the main source of the precious substance was provided by the land itself. Once in a generation, the Great Gate to the land of the dead burst forth in an epic flood. Rivers a dozen miles wide flowed in every corner of the land, and the Gynonites took as much as they could store to fuel their machines in the times between. For a time after each flood, the entire land's industry was devoted to gathering, refining, and preserving the precious fuel provided by their home. They certainly were a strangely precise and pragmatic people, but it was understandable to the Maha why. Before the advent of the blood engine, Gynonite tribes had to carry everything they owned on their backs from mana deposit to mana deposit. A life of mere subsistence compared to the forest dwellers life of plenty and greater leisure as a consequence.

Maha's grandmother once told her that the Gynonites were once a forest tribe themselves driven from their land by her people to take their home land, a place abundant in the hard, gray crystal called steel. But that was long ago, and it seemed the Gynonites didn't remember. Or if they did, their grudge was not strong enough to prevent Maha to live and work among them.

A soft rumbling in the ground alerted Maha of the Singing Volter's arrival. She stood up from the ledge of the deposit, and watched the machine approach. It was a citadel of iron which rolled on recycling tracks, its powerful blood engine providing the motion to propel it across Gynon's wet ground with incredible efficiency. Woven houses lined its back; it reminded the scout of the type of satchel a mother might carry her child in over long distances. A more than apt metaphor for the machines role for this tribe. While not the most impressive crawler in the land, without their iron mother none of her 50 odd residents would be able to sustain themselves in this land. Mobility and survival were the same to these people.

Maha slung the radio back over her shoulder, and mounted her scout vehicle once again. Another day's work completed. Suddenly, a huge tremor wracked the ground! It thew her machine into a free-fall for a moment, but she managed to wrestle its weight to keep it upright until it landed. As she bounced to a stop, Maha spun around worriedly. The Volter was currently balanced on the edge of a single recycling rail. People hung from hand railings, personal items rained to the ground, and the machine itself groaned as it teetered precariously. Maha joined a small fleet of scout vehicles that ejected from the Volter's side. It was a hodgepodge of all sorts of different makes and models of the machines, the only commonality being the blue symbol of their home crawler crudely painted on the largest continuous space available.

Lashings were already thrown down by the crew as the four scouts scrambled to secure them against their tow points. The blood engines screamed like the souls it was supposedly created by, and the little vehicles managed to right the ME Singing Volter with a slam against the ground. Maha wiped the sweat from her brow and looked over her gauges. The fuel needle was on "E." Hopefully there would be enough mana from this reserve to trade for fuel. She hopped off the machine, and began to push it the short trek back to the crawler.