Holy crapables this thing is embarassing to read today. - poopfoot Wed Jan 21 12:03:25 CST 2004 ----- This story was written during the first design stages of Shortbus1. The map originally was going to have a bus barn as one base and a fifties school building as the other base. It became clear halfway through construction that I a) didn't know anything about making a proper map and b) that it would be a hell of a lot easier to just make one base and copy it for the other base rather than make two unique bases. Some bits of the story will make no sense without an understanding of the Half-Life background. Any names in here that are not directly related to Half-Life are completely made up or coincidental. - Justin 'poopfoot' Pratt April 2002 ----- During the early fifties Standing Rock was a small, bustling community that had sprung up near a Department of Defense-owned facility for conducting non-classified research, only a few miles from the current location of the sprawling Black Mesa Research Facility complex. The town boasted three bars, two gas stations, a general store, grocery store and a post office. In 1958 construction began on a small school building for the town's younger children as the nearest elementary school was over one hundred miles away. Once finished, it bore the typical look of a building built during the fifties: cinder blocks, checkerboard tile floor, tiled ceiling, wood paneling and calming pastel colors. In its first year of operation, the school had fifty-three elementary age students, grades kindergarten through sixth. Thirty years later, the school district had exactly zero students after the last five families with children moved on to more populous cities and better jobs. The Department of Defense had transferred the nearby Standing Rock facility to the Department of Energy, which saw no need to continue funding and operating such a thing. The DoE was busily consolidating its various endeavours at newer sites, including the now-neighboring Black Mesa Research Facility, a place not interested in hiring the remaining non-cleared workers that lived in Standing Rock. Although the town lingered on, it was a pale shadow of what it once was: one gas station with a small food section open only four days a week, and a post office. Soon the gas station was closed after the owner's death due to old age, and only a few years later the post office disappeared when the town was disincorporated. Standing Rock began, thrived, dwindled, lingered and died in the shadow of the Black Mesa Research Facility, a small and innocent town on the edge of a hideous and bloated cancer full of monstrous lies. In the mid-nineties Black Mesa grew to the point that it literally swallowed what was left of Standing Rock, including the long-since abandoned elementary school grounds and a bus barn down the road. The school building was cleaned up, patched back together and refitted with proper network connections (after a thorough sweep by security personnel) and used as temporary, low-security office housing for new and incoming staff until more modern facilites could be built. After the completion of newer offices in the Sector C Test Labs and Control Facilites at Black Mesa, the school building was used as a crude warehouse, holding defunct and rather hazardous equipment that nobody wanted around in case it stopped being defunct and simply became hazardous. A handful of small buses, commonly referred to as "short buses", were unceremoniously dumped on Black Mesa by the Department of Defense in the late nineties due to various bureaucratic and obfuscated reasons. The Department had gained posession of the buses after the closure of a nearby Air Force Base and its attendant housing and schooling facilities. Black Mesa officials were rather unwilling to house, transport or even store the vehicles on their property and adamantly insisted the Department take them somewhere else. They had enough problems already with maintaining and storing their own large fleet of vehicles, and here the Department was obviously just plying off some minor hassle on poor Black Mesa. The Department would have none of that argument, and besides it was out of their hands and it was up to Black Mesa to find something to do with the buses. So in turn, Black Mesa went to its newest dumping ground of things it couldn't care less about and stuffed four small school buses into what was left of the Standing Rock Elementary bus barn and promptly forgot about the entire matter. As time went on, personnell often used the buses to ferry junked equipment to the old school building, not caring what they did to vehicles that were destined to be scrap. Sometimes, as goverment employees are prone to doing, the buses were being used for the rather unofficial and non-approved purpose of screwing around, loafing and damaging property in creative ways. Today the government employees have vanished, presumably into the mouths of several large and starving aliens, along with a small contingent of Marines. Mortar and gunfire rumble in the distance while bombers thunder overhead, dropping their payload just a few miles away on the Black Mesa complex. A horrific accident has loosed an army of violent otherworld creatues in and around Black Mesa, and the government is determined to clean up the mess at any cost. A lone small bus sits on the road between the school and the bus barn, the keys in the ignition and blood splattered all over the driver's compartment, the only remains of a hapless soul who tried to escape something obviously larger and hungrier. The idiot lights are on and a warning buzzer sounds endlessly from the dash to remind the now-deceased driver that he should put his seatbelt on lest something awful happen to him. The rest of the bus is empty, the seats long since torn out to make room for hauling things wider than the aisle would permit. A sign in the front admonishes riders to engage in NO RUNNING, while the back is marked as being an EMERGENCY EXIT. The last driver didn't bother to heed the first sign and didn't have time to make use of the second. It's the Shortbus. Get in, sit down, shut up and hang on.