The Bastion, unfortunately, is now the only piece of solid land that survived the Calamity. Rucks, an elderly gentleman with bronzed skin and white hair, sat in his pitched-up tent made from white canvas and fabrics, quietly pondering the events and stories that led them this far.
A proper story is supposed to start at the beginning, but it ain't so simple with this one.
Praying to the Mother that the kid would wake up, it'd be up to him to make the choice of the bastions two core functions, restoration or destruction of the old world. If they'd been allied with the Ura, with Zulf and his people, then maybe, they could have used their methods of creating artificial anchors for the old world to bring more of the old world back slowly.
But they couldn't. Not when the kid had been forced to fight an entire battalion of angry and confused people in a country he never saw, bitter over things the kid hadn't done, in wars he never fought in. Despite the Bastion having been attacked and heavily damaged by Zulf, the kid still brought them back, wounded by his own people for leading the assumed enemy to the heart of their own bastion.
But Rucks did, and it was for that reason he didn't just go ahead and restore the world, instead of leaving its fate to the one who had never had a chance to experience it, to the one who actually collected the cores.
"Come on kid... Get up, it ain't funny."
"Oh Mother... And here I thought you had enough of me. You could have undone the calamity itself, but instead, you choose to live in a world like this?"
"I gotta admit kid, I ain't put much thought into that idea, but carrying on? With you here? We can't go back anymore. But I suppose we could go wherever we pleased."
"And if anyone's left out there, I sure would like to see the look on their faces..."
"When we dock this thing right on their doorstep."
Rucks paused in speech for a moment, untying one of the sails underneath the belly of the Bastion, the landmass converted to a flying island.
"But I'm getting ahead of myself, I could really use a first mate yknow."
It's been six months, two weeks, three days since that fateful day, flying through storms, rain, and shine. No solid ground to be seen yet, but one fateful day, the bastion flew right over the land its refugees would come to know as Equestria, casting an ominous shadow despite it being high above the ground, before it suddenly stopped at the edge of the frozen north, its sealed monument suddenly opening, detecting a shard nearby.
Rucks tried to find out wherever the shard was, but it was obscured in snow and ice. He couldn't see anything, and frankly, all that cold reminded him and Zia of the Ura tunnels. The site of the last human battle. Despite this The Kid seemed undeterred, lifting up his Caelondian Hammer, and taking the Galleon mortar with. It hadn't taken much convincing for The Kid to not[ use the strongest thing in their armory, the Calamity cannon, in place of his hammer. Rucks still wasn't happy with himself for the creation of a portable prototype for the Calamity.
With that mortar and a hammer, he's like a one-man demolition squad.
He never was one for words, always quiet and rarely speaking outside of what was said from a dream occurred by eating too much of Zia's cooking or taking the faintest drag from Zulfs fine glass pipe. He headed on to the Skyway, a lift created to take people long distances with the force of the wind, and was whisked away to who knows where.