#homebrew computing

[techav]

Looking Back

Today, 26 March 2025, is the tenth anniversary of the first time I put power to a Z80 microprocessor in a breadboard and watched it blink some LEDs.

Within a few weeks that Z80 would be completely surrounded by other chips and hundreds of wires to form my first functioning homebrew computer.

Another week and I was already removing a 68000 from a (presumed) dead motherboard, with grand ideas of moving up to the 16-bit era (but absolutely no understanding of what that would entail)

It would be another two years before the first time I put that 68000 in a breadboard and successfully used it to blink an LED.

By the time another year had rolled around that 68000 was living on a soldered breadboard and for the first time on one of my projects, it was running real software — EhBASIC.

Always looking to more challenging projects, while I was building with a 68000, I was already reading through the manual for the 68030 trying to understand how to build with a proper 32-bit microprocessor. Just one more year and I had that 68030 on a wire wrap board, blinking an LED.

The next year I was doing the most ridiculous thing I could think of — free-running a Pentium CPU on a wire wrap breadboard to blink an LED. Because I could.

By the end of the next year that 68030 had moved from its wire wrap board onto a proper printed circuit board — my first ever 4-layer PCB.

The next year saw the towering expansion of the 68030 build, adding new peripherals and functionality.

Another year and I had an all-new 68030 build on a Micro-ATX form-factor motherboard developed in just a couple months ahead of VCF Southwest 2023.

The next year I focused on developing software for my existing 68030 board stack, rather than building something new from scratch. I succeeded in developing a minimal multi-user kernel to run four instances of BASIC simultaneously.

All along in between working on these projects I have done component-level repairs on various computers, developed expansion cards for the Mac SE, built PCs both new and old, burned out hard, developed some smaller homebrew computers, had a lot of false starts, failed projects, and abandoned projects, and completed some massive projects in my day job.

Looking back at everything I've worked on over these past 10 years I am absolutely amazed at how far I have come and what I have been able to accomplish. Much of it I still don't understand how I managed to actually pull it off, and I'm not entirely sure I could duplicate my successes.

Here's to the next ten years

[commodorez]

How would one go about learning how to make something like the cactus?

Like prerequisites, older code, hardware stuff, etc.

The main prerequisites I can think of are being heavily interested in vintage computers, and having the drive to try and fail and then try again.

I started with building Grant Searle's design, borrowing from other working designs as I went. However, for the front panel? That's alot of time designing, learning, simulating in Logisim, and testing with physical logic gates to produce something 100% original and of my own design. I imagine most folks won't want to go to the trouble of designing an entire front panel state machine like I did.

The good news is that there are way more kits that can help teach the necessary skills than ever before! Most notably, Ben Eater's 6502 kit is a really great way to learn many of the things that I've put into practice here. He has a whole youtube video series associated with it, walking through concepts, construction, programming, etc. step by step. Even if you don't build one of his kits, watching them is an informative process. *I* learned alot, even after having built the Cactus.

If you're going the Z80 direction, the RC2014 series of kits can teach you plenty. There's also glitchworks kits in a few processor types, but those tend to be a bit more for the advanced user. There's the 1802 Membership Card but that's small and not really expandable. I could be here all day listing kits that can help teach and build up experience.

I should mention that I have a computer science degree in my back pocket, but learning logic gates or using assembly was only lightly touched on in the course of my studies. Most of the programming I do involved messing around in BASIC anyway.

I really didn't have a game plan for some of it, so alot of my learning process was trial and error. Alot of errors, in fact. Still making them, and learning from them. I also took the harder route to construction, since I didn't know how to use EDA tools for designing PCBs like KiCAD or Altium or Eagle (don't use Fritzing for the love of fuck).

Oh, one other thing I can recommend: reading through contemporary 1970s computing magazines like Byte (check the internet archive for back issues). There are all sorts of cool projects and ideas present that can really guide you. It doesn't hurt to have a copy of Don Lancaster's TTL Cookbook on hand (I think it's in PDF form online).

Finding a community to help you out is also a great idea. Even back in the 1970s, many folks who jump-started the home computer revolution had the Homebrew Computer Club to help them out. Community meetings to bounce ideas off of, and help one another through debugging are essential in my book -- you don't have to work in a vacuum. I've got a few places I've asked for help, most notably the Retrotech Crew discord server. I've had the benefit of friends who also have homebrewed designs like @techav, who have inspired me with their ideas, but helped me out with mine. In turn, as I've learned, I've been able to help out others.

Hopefully that answers your question. Keep 'em coming!

[auberylis]

20250308 Major ALICE update!

For a couple months i've been working on a bunch of new stuff and improvements for Aubery's Logic Integrated Circuit Emulator (ALICE), and yesterday i concluded the works that have been planned! I am very happy to tell everyone that ALICE now crashes much less, the circuit tracing GUI became much more usable, and even more high-level devices were programmed!~

Circuit integration now works in full - watch me go from a basic logic gate based single-bit full adder to a 4-bit adder IC with a whole demo setup to test it, inside the same project!

Some high-level devices were added: everything but the ALU seems to be working correctly. TruthTable allows you to build a circuit and then compose its truth table in realtime! Using the pre-made compounds can be easier on the CPU than user-made ICs, even though i'm working on making everything run even faster. Oh, and now there's a "text" device to leave notes right on top of the circuit!

All devices now show a memo on what they do when selected, and a cohesive (although still and forever lacking) manual was started!

Finally, there are now demo projects! They and the manual are bundled within ALICE itself, so no need to download them separately from anywhere. I will work on adding more to them, with the general goal of one day having a "full basic 8-bit CPU" on the list!

Aside from these novelties, i worked real hard and made the GUI run smoother and explode less. Frankly, the code was pure spaghetti before this overhaul, and now it's at least meatballs with a side of spaghetti. It became better, i promise. Along with this, a bunch of minor bugs were eliminated, and i'm slowly ridding the project from depending on my old bmco.js utility library, which would make it run smoother.

There's a lot of plans for this project, and seeing people using it at all would greatly increase my motivation to implement them. Not like i am not motivated.. but you could make things happen faster! So! Use the thing, tell me when it explodes in your face - with saves and bug error texts preferrably - and show me what you made with it!

And one last thing: ALICE is now hosted on Gitea because i am tired of github's copilot bullshit. I will shut down the github repository soon enough -- nothing to lose, since there are no open issues out there or anything. If you feel like digging through my caverns of nonsense, or run ALICE locally, go ahead and download the source code from the Gitea repo!

[arconinternet]

Aquarius: An Aquatic Experience (DOS, Shane "Cloudee" Cloud, 2007)

You can play it in your browser here. Made in Sierra's SCI engine. Are YOU at least as smart as a goldfish?

[goodugong]

I’m putting an SSD into the first brand new computer I ever had, a 2009 imac. Actually very accessible! The front panel is held on with magnets rather than glue. It doesn’t know what hit it; it boots up so fast the progress bar doesn’t even fill. It runs way cooler because the SSD is so much more energy efficient (and leaves more open space in the case). The experience of using Finder on this 15-year old machine is so snappy and responsive compared to my current workhorse 2020 imac, it’s kinda wild how much more sluggish macOS has gotten in the last 10 years.

MacOS Sierra is so old that the internet certificates it ships with have expired, so I had to jump thru some hoops to get it working, manually adding Mozilla certificates for example. Homebrew refused to download its own ca-certificates cask, so I ended up having to download it on a different machine and transfer the package so Homebrew thought it had already downloaded it and skipped to installing. Very fiddly, but a labour of love. It takes fucking ages to compile anything though.

[converse-luke]

My brother: let’s do a homebrew dnd campaign we dm together!

Me, vibrating: so you’re saying I get to make a map?

[ms2253]

smolZINE #42 (released 2025-01-26)

gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/smolzine-issue-42.gmi

(cornquest is wonderful & reminds me of sanitarium)

[spielkritik]

Lesenswert: Spielen als Mutter, Screenfun-Heft-CDs, Blaster Master, Game-Boy-Homebrew, Conquests of Camelot & the Longbow

Die 193. und damit letzte Ausgabe von Lesenswert in diesem Jahr erlaubt sich den Luxus, einmal nur deutschsprachige Artikel zu empfehlen. Gleichzeitig verbergen sich unter den nachfolgenden Empfehlungen gleich mehrere Artikelreihen. Los geht es mit einem Artikel von Steph bei VSG, der den Auftakt für eine Reihe bilden soll. Während die Klage (oft männlicher) erwachsener Gamer, zumeist…

[techav]

On Recovering From Disaster

Just before disaster struck with my 68030 homebrew, I had a plan to fork the project and take it in two directions in parallel.

The first would be my minimal Multibasic setup which was running great and was something I would be proud to exhibit at VCFSW '25.

Since that was working well, I didn't want to do anything that might make it not ready for the show. So I had assembled a second main board that I could use with other peripheral cards to continue development. My plan was to rework the memory map to move ROM and I/O addresses to the upper half of the 32-bit address space, which would allow me to use a DRAM card for up to 16MB of contiguous memory starting at address 0 — a perfect setup for running a proper OS

And then I burned up my good mainboard.

I had a spare CPLD on-hand, and I was able to get another 40MHz 68EC040 for cheap. But the 4Mbit SRAM chips are expensive, and I thought that if I was going to be paying for more SRAM, I should get the 12ns parts that would allow me to run RAM with no wait states at 50MHz. Which would require adapter boards, and more pin headers, and would have just driven the cost up even more.

Paralyzed by indecision and the rising cost, I decided to switch gears. I already have the DRAM board I built years ago, I just needed to get it working. And if I'm doing that, I may as well do the work on reorganizing my memory map.

So that's what I did. I made a new branch on my newly cleaned up repository, and set to work. I updated the mainboard bus controller logic to remove the no-longer-needed SRAM control, adjust the ROM address to start at 0x8000,0000, and move the 6850 UART address to 0x8008,0000. This freed up the entire 2GB space between 0x0000,0000 and 0x7FFF,FFFF for the DRAM card to use for main memory (my bus connector layout only allows for up to 16MB main memory, but that's plenty for my purpose).

Next, I needed to build the control logic for my DRAM board. I've done this once before on my Wrap030-ATX project a couple years ago, so I used that logic as a starting point. It … kind-of worked. Sometimes. Maybe.

I was getting random errors all over the place. Sometimes it was able to copy all of ROM into RAM and verify the copy without error, but it would fail when running code from RAM. Sometimes it wouldn't even pass the first two simple tests of writing a longword to RAM and reading it back.

Back to the data sheets to plan out the logic. I drew out a new timing diagram down to 1ns resolution, accounting for the specified propagation time for my CPLDs, and the measured signal delays for my CPU. This gave me the information I needed to build out a new state machine for the DRAM controller. In the process I also caught a few other bugs in my original logic, such as not ensuring the DRAM Write Enable strobe did not get asserted during refresh cycles.

The new state machine worked much better, but I got my timing off a bit. It worked reliably at 16MHz, but not at the intended 25MHz. At least it was working though; I can move forward with 16MHz.

The next thing to do was get my 8-port serial card working with this new setup. Every time the computer tried to access one of the 8 serial ports, it would get a bus error. This was a tough one that had me stuck for a while.

It looked like the serial card was getting addressed and asserting DSACK0# as expected, but I couldn't confirm the signal was making it back to the CPU. Every time I tried to measure the DSACK signals, the probes would increase the line capacitance (I think) too much and cause the whole computer to fail before it even got to the point of trying to address the serial ports.

I have the DSACK signals in a wired-or configuration. The logic on each card connects to the proper DSACK signal via an open-collector buffer, and is able to pull the signal low to signal that card acknowledging the bus cycle. The signal is then pulled back up to +5V by a 1kΩ resistor. This works well enough for small, slow systems, but with long bus wires or lots of chips on the bus, the extra capacitance means it can take a long time for that pull-up resistor to get the signal back up to +5V.

I made a change to my DRAM controller to actively drive the DSACK signals to +5V briefly at the end of a bus cycle before setting the pin to high-impedance. This helps ensure a fast rise time at the end of the cycle so it doesn't disrupt the next bus cycle.

It didn't fix the problem with the serial card, but it did allow me to actual probe the signals live to see what was happening — the Bus Error signal was getting asserted immediately after the CPU addressed the serial card. This didn't make much sense to me. My main board logic will assert Bus Error if no peripherals acknowledge a bus transaction within 64 clock cycles. Nothing should be asserting Bus Error so quickly.

Except … the main board bus controller. My original memory map used the lower half of the address space for the main board, and peripheral cards used the upper half. So my original main board logic was built to assert Bus Error immediately for an unused address in the lower half of the address space. I hadn't properly removed that bit of logic, so it was now asserting Bus Error for any accesses to the upper half of the address space that weren't used by the main board.

The challenges of working on a project after six years. I had forgotten that bit of logic was even there.

With that erroneous Bus Error assertation removed, the machine was finally able to properly load my Multibasic kernel and run BASIC for 8 users again.

At the moment it is running stable at 24MHz on my 25MHz-rated full 68030. It may not be the 50MHz high I was at, but after the frustration and disappointment of the past few weeks, I'm absolutely taking that as a win. 24MHz is incredible.

[thekittyburger]

Just had to sit and listen to my computing teacher rant about how much he hates RGB lighting, thinking about my RGB 3ds status light add-on

[prokopetz]

With DND 5e being set up to cause DM burnout, can you give examples of tabletop systems that facilitate easy DMing? I love running a tabletop game but don't have the time to deal with 5e or homebrew anymore.

(With reference to this post here.)

This is an area where you're going to get a lot of bad advice, because there's no such thing as a tabletop RPG that's "easy to GM" in the abstract. Some systems make greater or lesser demands of the GM's time and skill, but the reason that Dungeons & Dragons has a massive GM burnout problem is a bit more subtle than that – indeed, D&D's GM burnout problem is considerably worse than that of many games whose procedures of play place much greater demands on the GM!

It boils down to the fact that games are opinionated. Even a very simple set of rules contains a vast number of baked-in assumptions about how the game ought to be played; in the case of tabletop RPGs, those baked-in assumptions include assumptions about what kinds of stories the game ought to be used to tell. The players of any given group, of course, also have assumptions – some explicit, many unexamined – about how the game's story ought to go. It's rare that these two sets of assumptions will perfectly agree.

Fortunately, perfect agreement isn't necessary, because tabletop RPGs aren't computer games, and it's always possible to tweak the outputs of the rules on the fly to better suit the desired narrative experience. In conventional one-GM-many-players games like D&D, this responsibility for monitoring and adjusting the outputs of the rules so that they're compatible with the narrative space the group wishes to explore falls principally on the GM.

Now, here's where the trouble starts: the larger the disconnect between the story the rules want to produce and the narrative space the group wants to explore, the more work the GM in a conventional one-GM-many-players context needs to do in order to close that gap. If the disconnect is large enough, the GM ends up spending practically all of their time babysitting the outputs of the rules, at the expense of literally every other facet of their responsibilities.

(Conversely, if that gap is large and isn't successfully closed, you can end up with a situation where engaging with the rules and engaging with the narrative become mutually exclusive activities. This is where we get daft ideas like "combat" and "roleplaying" being opposites – which is nonsense, of course, but it's persuasive nonsense if you've never experienced a game where the rules agree with you about what kind of story you should be telling.)

And here's where the problem with Dungeons & Dragons in particular arises. The rules of D&D aren't especially more opinionated than those of your average tabletop RPG; however, the game has developed a culture of play that's allergic to actually acknowledging this. There are several legs to this, including:

a text which makes claims about the game's supported modes of play that are far broader than what the rules in fact support;

a body of received wisdom about GMing best practices which consists mostly of advice on how to close the gap between the rules' assumptions and the players' expectations (but refuses to admit that this is what it's doing);

a player culture which has become increasingly hostile to players learning or knowing the rules, and positions any expectation that players should learn the rules as a form of "gatekeeping"; and

a propensity to treat a very high level of GMing skill as an entry-level expectation.

Taken together, all this produces a situation where, when the rules and the group disagree about how the game's story ought to go, the players don't experience it as a problem with the rules: they experience it as a problem with the GM. A lot of GMs even buy into this perception themselves, which is how you end up with GM advice forums overflowing with people telling novice GMs that they're morally bad people for being unprepared to tackle very advanced GMing challenges right from the jump.

(At this point, one may wonder: why on Earth would a game develop this sort of culture of play in the first place? Who benefits? Well, what we're looking at in practice is a culture of play which treats novice and casual GMs as a disposal resource whose purpose is to maximise the number of people playing Dungeons & Dragons. Follow the money!)

So, after all of that, the short answer is that there isn't a specific magic-bullet solution to avoiding D&D's GM burnout problem – or, at least, not one that operates at the level of the rules, because there's no particular thing that D&D as a system is doing "wrong" that produces this outcome; the problem operates almost entirely at the play culture level.

In practice, two things need to happen:

Placing a greater expectation on the players to learn and understand the game's rules; and

Selecting a system where the gap between the story the rules want to produce and the narrative space the group wants to explore is small.

It's that second one that's the real trick. In order to minimise that gap, we need to know what kind of narrative space your group wants to explore, and that might not be something you have a good answer to if you don't have good lines of communication with your players.

(As an aside, there's a good chance that we're going to see dipsticks cropping up in the notes insisting that their favourite system short-circuits this problem by being perfectly universal and having no baked-in narrative assumptions. These people are lying to you, and lending credence to the idea that there's any such thing as a universal RPG is a big part of how we got into this mess in the first place!)

[the-old-man-has-the-phonebox]

I wanna learn how to 🏴‍☠️ but I know for a fact my dumb ass will fuck it up royally and get a fucking Trojan on my computer on the first try

[baked-bread]

seeing graphics benchmarks online by other users because i'm searching online and i genuinely cannot find anyone posting a score under 1000 for the unigine benchmark softwares?? people are here like "yeah i had 1500 this score is terrible" meanwhile i'm out here w

absolutely winning with this cheap prebuilt desktop from at least 6 years ago. #1 in worst graphics known to man

[oldguydoesstuff]

Don Lancaster was a pioneer and legend in the homebrew computer scene of the 1970s and 80s. He wrote many cookbooks for building electronics and computers at home, which was pretty much the only way to go in the 70s since home computers did not exist.

I remember the TV typewriter cookbook and wanting to build one. This was basically just a keyboard and text video generator for your TV, not a complete guide to building a computer.

Yet even that held a great fascination for me as a kid and others back then. It was a time before computers or even DVDs or VCRs, and the idea of being able to control what was displayed on your TV was something really new and exciting.

Don Lancaster passed away this June. He was 83. RIP and thanks for your generosity in sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us, Don.

[dronebiscuitbat]

Oil is Thicker Then Blood: Polarity

Chapter 1: Sanctuary.

Title By: @oogaboogaspookyman

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

“Uugh…”

A drones hand, the palm scared with burns and the wear of nicks and cuts fumbles blindly toward the refurbished alarm on their nightstand, slapping the faded wood first before slaming the the alarm with their fist aggressively enough for the device to rattle.

The arm flops over the side of the bed with a deep purple cover, the soft purple LED on the back of their hand scraping against the hardwood floor as the being it was attached to attempted to go back to sleep now that the harsh digital beeping had stopped.

The bedroom was adorned with band posters, AC-DC, Metallica, Lamb of God, and Thousand Foot Krutch all haphazardly pasted onto the smooth wooden planks that made up walls. Two Guitars hung up on the walls, a purple hued electric one and a simple accostic one just below it.

On the desk, just in front of the bed, was a homebrewed laptop, thick and bulky, the top being stickerbombed with skulls, bats, and stars. Currently, there was a progress bar displayed for pirating music.

The grey office chair in front of the desk was old and slightly damaged, long scratches that had been patched and patched again throughout the years.

Along the three shelves that dotted the room, there were animal skulls, one with antlers, another with goat horns and sharp teeth, and yet another with a long snout and six eyes, paired with those were small trinkets, a lava lamp, a never-solved rubric’s cube, and a well worn, well loved little bat plush.

A lavender colored bean bag sat against the wall, squished from being used over and over and over again.

Filtered sunlight peered through the window, and a symphony of exotic bird sounds could barely be heard through the thick pane of glass that made up the window.

Light snoring filled the room as the drone fell asleep again, the blankets shuffling as they adjusted.

The door flung open.

“Tera! You're gonna be late for school again!” Came an older, yet familiar voice, her hand on her hip. Purple hair now tied in a long braid that went over her shoulder and signature beanie absent. She wore a dark purple sweater under a lack leather studded jacket.

Uzi Doorman sighed as the only response she got from her daughter was a deeper snore.

She raised her hand; a purple solver symbol appearing in her hand and around the blanket edge, pulling it off and exposing her 17 year old daughter. Long, black, messy hair, a tank top, and many scars covering her body, a darker grey standing out against the white of her chassis.

“Ter. Ter!”

“Huwah?” Tera grumbled, Sleep Mode message switching to a very sleepy display of closed eyelights, her hands come up to cover her visor. “Ugh. Mooom… Five more minutes…?”

“Uh-huh… and five more minutes turns into twenty and then an hour… Been there Jellybean. Get up, school time.” Uzi replied as Tera sat up, rubbing her visor and yawning, showing off a fearsome display of fangs.

“Schools stupid… Didn't you drop out?” Tera asked, waiting until her optics calibrated and everything wasn't a blurry mess.

“To raise you. And you know… I wasn't getting straight C's in all my classes like you.”

“It's great parenting to call your kid dumb Mom.” Tera sassed back. “And I get A's in Athletics and Biology!”

“I'm not calling you dumb, technically I'm calling you average.” Uzi smiled. Leaning against the doorframe. “Athletics is a gimme. I'll give a point in Biology though.”

“You try sitting still and listening to Mr. Riker drone on and on about math. Which. By the way, we're computers. We do that automatically. Why do we have a class for it?” Tera stretched, her back and shoulder joints making a grinding noise as she very subtlety winced, so subtlety her mother didn't notice.

“Same reason why you have a C in it.” Uzi chuckled. “Though arguing with you feels too much like arguing with myself, so I won't egg you on.”

“Gracías…” Tera replied, standing up and stretching out her long tail with a purple head on the end, the tail yawned too, blinking sleepily. Tera opened her inset closet and pulled out a red flannel shirt, which she slipped over her tank top.

“Still gotta go though.” Uzi said as she walked down the hall and down the stairs, her boots making them creak.

“…Bite me.” Tera grumbled, her tail twitching in irritation.

“Hah!” Came floating up the stairs, making the teenager roll her eyes.

She grunted as she bent down to grab her bag sitting next to her desk, a simple black duffle bag that had already been packed the day before. Her joints groaned and creaked, stiff from sleeping.

She pulled the bag up over her shoulder, and used the head of her tail to shut the door behind her.

The door directly in front of her in the upstairs hall was labeled Bishop, the shiny silver metal his name was ingraved on being well polished, compared to hers, which was dull and rather neglected.

Further down the hall, at the very end, there were her parents room, ingraved in the same way.

The only other door wasn't ingraved yet, but that belonged to-

“Sissy! Big Sis!” A pair of twins, currently both sitting at the kitchen table right next to each other, four years old and only te minutes apart, though if you asked the eldest, Bolt, it was twenty.

Bolt looked more like N, yellow eyelights and silvery-blonde hair, in a tiny, toddler sized worker body, smiling like a maniac at quite literally everything.

And then there was A.K, he shared the hair color of his brother but inherited his mother's purple eyelights, he was slightly quieter, instead holding dearly onto a dragon plushie as he awaited breakfast.

Speaking of breakfast…

N hummed as he wore a brightly colored pink apron that said ‘Kiss the Cook' Taking a tray of heavenly smelling oil cakes; a small pastry with oil filling, out of the wood-oven and setting it aside.

The Kitchen was decorated with pictures of family, Tera on her first day of school, the twins on the day they were born, N and Uzi on their wedding day…

And the largest, most center picture of the whole family, one twin each being held in N and Uzi's arms, with Tera standing in the middle and a Dissasembly Drone with thick, round glasses and a long, brown flowing duster that nearly touched the ground, his expression was deadpan, and attached to the duster was a thick leather book.

“Morning B! Ter!” N called in Tera's direction, making the teen turn around to lock into the white eyelights of her younger brother, 16 year old Bishop Doorman, with thick round glasses and long brown leather duster he used as a labcoat.

“Good Morning.” Bishop hummed back politely, face stuck into an engineering book the moment his greeting was complete. His tail, a white vial complete with a stinger tapped against the floor. “Oh, Tera's actually going to school today?” He sassed in a near monotone inflection.

“Put a sock in it, nerd.” Tera hummed back casually, sitting at the table and flopping her bag at her feet.

He rolls his eyes and ignores her, though both of thier tails are wagging afterwards.

N put a plate of oil cakes in front of them, giggling when Uzi thanks him with a kiss on the cheek.

“Ewwwwww.” The twins whine.

“Gross.” Tera agrees, popping the cake in her mouth and snapping her jaw, making it explode warm sweet oil into her mouth.

Bishop doesn't notice, his head is still buried in his book, though he does stab a cake with his tail and then put it in his mouth.

Uzi pulls N down to genuinely kiss him, exaggerating the wet and content sounds to spite and embarass her children.

Tera groans and looks away out the kitchen window, finishing her breakfast without looking at them, the twins cover each other's eyes.

“You should be happy your parents are still in love!” N said as soon as he regained air in his lungs, looking happy and content as his tail wagged behind him.

“I am. I just don't wanna watch my parents suck face.” Tera replied, her voice dripping with attitude as her tail picks up her bag for her, she drops her plate in the sink and waves her family goodbye without actually looking at them.

“See you after hells over.” She says as she opens the front door. Only for her mother to protest. “Not in front of the twins!”

The door shuts behind her.

She leans on the railed walkway that lead up to the Doorman residence, looking down on the town below…

Nestled in a clearing of giant, towering trees, though not enough of a clearing to endanger the solver drones down below, a repaired and functioning pumpjack was working away at the center of the walled town, houses stacked on top of each other to fit inside the circular shape, it was early enough that there were very few drones out and about yet, aside from those on thier way to the school building, through a small street that lead away from the open courtyard.

The Doorman residence was the tallest building, the second being the town hall located just across the pumpjack, and it was almost a labyrinth of walkways and stairwells to make it up to it.

Partly because walking to it had been an afterthought.

Tera shook off the last vestiges of sleep as her bat-like wings unfurled from her back, the hands on the ends flexing and the organic joints inside popping before she took off into the air, sending leaves and misplaced refuse blowing out around her.

The small settlement of Sanctuary (N's name when they first started building and it stuck.) Consisted of about 500 drones, the surviors of the now extinguished planet of Copper-9, and their decendants.

The houses wrapped around the pumpjack, two floors stacked on top of each other to accommodate every family who lived there. Though that wasn't the whole of Sanctuary.

There was a gate that led to the outside, defended on either side by manned watchtowers. A barracks that sat next to the town hall where gaurds were trained with the weapons they could make without advanced machinery.

Swords, spears, axes and bows, the medieval weaponry of old human civilization coming back to aid their spiritual successor in a new, alien environment.

A medbay and nursey sat next to that, for every gaurd that got mauled by the wildlife, or every pump worker that got their fingers stuck in the gears.

Past the medbay was a wooden paved street that lead deeper into Sanctuary, and just inside this is where Tera landed, spooking some students lingering outside the school building.

Her wings folded back into her body as she adjusted her bag on her shoulder and began to climb up the few stairs to it's double doored entrance, sighing heavily before she pushed open the door… and walked inside.

Today was just another day.