Hey, so, if you’re reading this, first of all I’d like to know how you got your hands on my diary. Second of all, if it’s because I’m, you know, dead, then thanks for taking the time to read what I’ve written. It’s kind of a comforting thought. Anyway, my name is Hope! I’m seventeen years old, they/them. I like farming sims and books. And I’m writing this because magical extraplanar alien mecha have invaded, and I need some way to vent!

See, it’s not enough that giant bird robots are stomping around trying to kill all of us. My older sister Hazel happens to be one of the Pilots fighting them, using mecha of our own. She gets a railgun. I have to make do with a diary, I guess.

I miss her a lot.

So yeah, I’m going to be scrapbooking headlines right out of the news and recording my own experiences as the world tries to get itself ended by the Nondwellers – that’s what we call the alien mecha. Oh, and hey, if I am dead and you’re going to post or publish this yourself for a quick buck or something, could you at least title it the way I would? I already have it picked out.

“I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream.”

“Armageddon Syndrome: Studies Show Mental Health Crisis Greater Risk Than Radiation Poisoning”

No kidding. If it’s not people deciding to take an early exit themselves to beat the Nondwellers to the punch, it’s people turning on each other and doing their work for them anyway. Case in point, someone broke into the house today, probably looking for supplies. I remember dad saying that nobody would dare do anything to a house with the indigo lance symbol of an active mecha pilot in the window. I guess the specter of Hazel defending all of us didn’t matter much to this guy, though, because he put a brick right through that same window.

He was climbing through when mom and I stormed into the room, and I guess his courage gave out, because he tumbled back out and ran for it.

All the Pilots and mecha in the world can’t protect us from each other.

“Civic Protests As Emergency Services Grind To A Halt”

We didn’t even bother calling the police about the break-in – they’re too busy trying to quell protests about how the police won’t respond to things like break-ins.

Hazel gave me a call. An octet of Nondweller mecha managed to surround her and her squad in some kind of formation, their colors shifting even more wildly than usual, and unleashed ‘the worst psychic storm we’ve seen yet – I put a railgun round through one of them after ten seconds, but Towers still won’t talk and Summers just keeps crying. It was the most terrible pain I’ve ever felt. If they’d made me an offer to get them to stop, I would have taken it.”

“I wish I’d been there to help.”

“I wish I was there to help.”

“Yeah, well, neither of us are.”

“Taxi, Drone, Mech: How Three Vehicles Defined One Family’s Relationship With The Tech Industry”

Interface tech is everywhere these days. Mecha were just the start. There was this article about a family that spends all their time interfaced with various machines and only talk to one another on a subnet while they’re plugged in. I guess some people spend a little too long plugged in, though. Or maybe they plug in to the wrong thing.

You hear about people deciding that the Nondwellers are, I don’t know, the wrath of a god or something, but you never expect to meet any of them. Sober, anyways. But the campus was raided today, and Mr. Grayson got hauled away. Normally I’d suspect them of blackbagging someone speaking against the establishment, but the things he was screaming as they hauled him out of the classroom were bizarre and truly apocalyptic. How we were all the real Nondwellers, how our souls would be ‘purged by their holy light, and our bodies made to complete the labor of the gods.” Anderson said they also hit Grayson’s office, and that there was some sort of Interface-capable device in there, covered in Nondweller writing.

I’ve felt despair and helplessness about the war before, obviously. Who wouldn’t? But I’ve never been as viscerally scared as when Grayson locked eyes with me, clinging to the door frame to keep from being dragged out for another few seconds, and promised that our screams would echo through the void.

“Bloody Loss of Experimental Mecha Type Hits Military Hard”

Turns out Grayson and the nutters don’t have a monopoly on new spiritual interpretations of the world. I was walking Erica home from swim practice – I got through a bunch of chapters waiting outside the pool – when we passed this street preacher howling about how we’d ‘built effigies of man as tall as towers”, and would all be destroyed for daring to riff on god’s greatest work unless… well to be honest I’m not sure what the criteria was. Fight the Nondwellers with sword and shield, maybe? Not sane, whatever it was. But just as we were getting out of earshot he claimed that the annihilation wreaked upon one of the effigies was proof of his words.

Erica whipped out her phone, and on one of the non-approved news sites, there it was: a mecha that was trying to reverse engineer some of the Nondwellers’ abilities sure managed to manifest a psychic storm – inside its own base. The base personnel who weren’t driven immediately insane apparently didn’t last much longer, because the pilot went insane and started leveling the place with its version of the ‘dwellers’ eye beams. 

Small mercy they didn’t try the whole ‘raised the dead to consume the living’ thing as well.

I had taken out my own phone and was already typing, but Hazel beat me to it.

“Wasn’t me, sib. We did have to put her down, though.”

“Oh thank the stars, sis. You deal with enough danger, the last thing I want to hear is that they plug you into something that kills you before you even launch.”

“Yeah. Shame that Bonnie’s folks have to hear it.”      

“Social Services Struggling With Influx Of Orphans, National Guard Steps In To Help”

I haven’t heard anything from Hazel herself about it, but the Steel Terror made another appearance, and her squad had to try and intercept it. Still has the typical wings, but the rest of it is humanoid, and given its late appearance in the war it’s a sign of the Nondwellers building something to emulate our own mecha. They stopped it, but it got away, and not before blasting a few city blocks into rubble and blood.

Between outright civilian casualties and military losses, there are a lot of kids around without any parents left alive. Three alone in my class, but aside from Anderson they at least had extended family that, you know, exists. Can’t speak to their quality.

A lot of kids have nobody, though, and as the system starts to break down the kids have started to fall into a kind of feral existence. Moving in packs, raiding dumpsters, flash mobbing grocery stores, ganging up on other kids for pocket change. National Guardsmen have started building additional housing, running supplies to houses, doing the big sibling routine for some of them. Some people have been muttering about the Guard trying to vacuum up a bunch of expendable recruits, but at the rate things are going the kids would end up in a rattletrap mecha anyways. We all might. Might as well get to eat in the meanwhile.

“President Signs Emergency Powers Bill”

School closed for the day on account of a near-breach of the defensive line, but the sirens never even went off, so Erica, Anderson, and I spent most of our time down by the lake. Erica went for a swim and I read an entire novel – romance, fantasy, absolute tripe, the best – while Anderson went on about dimensional theory and terraforming projects.

We’re really good at parallel hobbies.

We all got on alert on our phones, so of course Anderson and I started yelling at Erica to hurry up and get back on the right side of the lake so we could all run to the shelter, but it turned out that it wasn’t a full breach. Instead, it turns out President Burnett has signed an emergency powers act, ‘dissolving all municipal authorities and tying those existing structures into the federal body.”

“So, what, no more city council?” Erica was still toweling off as Anderson read off the article.

“Well, they still exist, but it looks like they can’t do anything without Burnett and the Conclave telling them to.”

I reminded them that the Conclave had followed literally every word Burnett said as if it were gospel since the 61st Mechanized got wiped out and the former capital had to be evacuated. 

So it looks like Burnett is calling all the shots.

“New Nanotech Weapon Offers Hope For Mecha Corps”

Anderson is in the hospital. Turns out Grayson left a little something behind that the raid apparently missed. Graveyard two blocks away is a lot emptier now, at least for a little while. Thank… well, whoever, that Nondweller raised-corpses aren’t infectious like in those old movies Hazel used to like. As it is a lot of people got hurt, and some killed, before local security and a unit of Marines moved in and put the dead down for a second time.

Erica’s all torn up about it. Emotionally, she didn’t get mauled like Anderson did. You’d think she shared every hit with him, though, the way she went on. Used every bit of that champion’s charisma to bluster her way into the ambulance and the hospital room, even before his family got to see him. I mean, we’re all really good friends, it’s not like I’m not upset about Andy, but Erica’s gone above and beyond. Hidden feelings coming out?

If he wakes up, maybe something good will come of that monster’s parting gift.

No surprise that the military would want to get back at the Nondwellers. The entire ‘raising the dead’ thing has been a nightmare and a blasphemy no matter what religion you do or don’t adhere to since the first attack. The news said they’ve cooked up some nano tech that lets our mecha take over and puppet Nondweller mechs that have had the intelligence destroyed. It could just be more propaganda nonsense or an idea that will go awry like the reverse engineering, Hazel can’t confirm or deny it one way or the other, but for once I’m really hoping they’re telling the truth.

Let them get torn apart by the corpses of their fallen.

“Attack Takes Out Capitol Building, Legislature In Chaos”

The Nondwellers hit the new capital last night, and the Capitol Building itself got blown to smithereens. Hazel and her squad weren’t on that defensive line, so much the better – two Pilots dead along with who knows how many troops. Burnett got out, but so far it seems like most of the Conclave is just… gone.

I guess the President will have even less trouble telling the Conclave what to do, now.

The flood of refugees never seems to stop, and now we’ve got people from both capitals in the mix. A new family moved in next door, and their kid Kory is about my age, already dropped into our class. They seem… a little spaced out, most of the time, but it’s hard to tell if they’re just Like That or if it’s a consequence of what they saw before they came here. 

They sat with Erica and I at lunch, though, and I asked them if they liked Stellar Cloudburst Vale, and that actually got a smile. Maybe we can be friends?

“Soldiers on the Home Front: Why We Need More Gardeners, Composters, And Other Domestic Practitioners”

There’s been this big drive for the ‘home front’ to contribute more towards the war. Gathering scrap metal, using less energy, and endless ways to stretch out food supplies. They even had Hazel on some vid about it, talking about how she always appreciated whenever someone’s fresh fruit or vegetables got shipped to the front as a care package. We’ve certainly never been able to send her anything like that, and she’s never mentioned getting any sort of food from anyone else, but…

She looked so damn tired. Oh, her uniform was as crisp as always, her hair in that neat crown braid that can fit under her helmet, the smile was perfect. She looked just like the posters. But there was something in her eyes, a slight slur to her words that I don’t think anyone who didn’t grow up with her would notice.

When I’m honest with myself, I know that the drops of bad blood between us are because on most days I resent the fact that she actually gets to do something that matters. As dangerous as it is, as scary as it is, she can exert a degree of control over all of this that I just can’t.

Today, though, I’m going to see about planting some strawberries.

“Pilot Hazel Chosen To Head Foray Into Red Zone”

The damn brass sent them into a thresher.

The Red Zone is where human life can barely still exist, and even then only by eating rats and skulking in the rubble and doing everything possible to not be noticed. Why the hell the call would be made to send Pilots there I don’t know. If I was feeling charitable I might guess the military had learned of some weakness, or some opportunity, that mecha could take advantage of. I just find it more likely that they sent them out there for a stunt to make themselves feel better about just how much of the world is in the Red, or outright Lost. 

They’re already calling it the Day of the Halls after those damn quantum tunnels the Nondwellers use to get here. The mecha got just outside of the range of their artillery support, who of course wouldn’t put one tread into the Red Zone, and Halls just started opening up all over the place. Hazel and Towers fought their way out.

Summers is MIA.

“Dying Pilot Waxes Poetic About Peach Trees, Singer-Songwriter Girlfriend, As She’s Pulled From The Wreckage”

She didn’t make it.

Somehow Summers fought her way out of the Red Zone by herself, missiles expended and her railgun destroyed, but she took so much damage she crashed right outside the base. She was still alive when they pulled her out of the cockpit, but not for long. All the news reports are playing up this story about her talking about her girlfriend, and the peach trees they used to sit under, and how it was all worth it to protect her. 

Hazel tells it differently.

“She was screaming. In pain, at us for leaving her behind, for her mother. Somewhere in there was the Summer I knew, and maybe there was a sobbed out wish that she could have seen her girlfriend again, but mostly it was just screaming… the sob was pretty close to the end. I think they got the peach tree stuff from a diary entry. I don’t know.”

And, of course, they need more Pilots. 

They hauled Erica away. I guess her name had come up in the lottery way back, she had all the right physical and mental markers to be a Pilot, but somehow she dodged the draft. Well throwing her weight around to see Anderson must have put up a red flag, and they found her, and they grabbed her right out of Anderson’s room and shipped her off to the mecha corps.

“Personal Heat Shield Generator Company Under Fire for Inhumanely Hot Warehouse Conditions”

Anderson woke up. I went to see him, introduced him to Kory (which didn’t take long, they spent most of their time staring out the nearest window). Told him about how Erica had literally had to be pulled away from his side, how she was training to be a Pilot now. Good odds she’d end up with Hazel and Towers.

He got really quiet after that, like he was thinking about a problem he couldn’t solve. 

Another sign of how things just keep breaking down – safety regulations? Who’s heard of them? Ground troops need some way to not be incinerated by an eyebeam that hits ten meters away, sure, that’s why the personal heat shield generator tech got developed in the first place. Even Pilots wear one just in case. Doesn’t keep the workers from being cooked themselves since the factories have practically every feature that doesn’t directly contribute to production stripped away. 

Don’t these people realize that if you kill the entire workforce with heat stroke then the damn generators aren’t going to get made anyway?

“Highschoolers Flock To Afterschool Assembly-Line Jobs Under New Emergency Permissions”

It’s child labor, plain and simple. But we need the extra ration cards, and as much as Hazel appreciated the meager strawberries I was able to send, they won’t save her if the magnetic coils on her railgun can’t be replaced when they break down. So, after school every day Kory and I walk down to the assembly line and put Slot N into Hole O and connected Wire P with Plug Q, respectively, for three hours. 

It sucks, but there’s something about the monotony of it that gets Kory talking, and we’re actually bonding a bit. Mostly about how we both found ourselves outside of the binary – I still like the odd skirt now and again, Kory prefers everything as unisex as possible, and somehow we both got lucky enough to have cool parents. They also started playing SCV again, and while our taste in books is very different it’s kind of nice to hear them talk about why they liked the latest horror novel.  It sure beats them just following me around.

Anderson’s out of the hospital, but he’s still not back in school. I visited him at home, though, and he was… well he seemed okay, but he was scribbling in one of his notebooks the entire time, even when we were talking about sending a care package to Erica. I only caught a glimpse, but it all looked like Nondweller script. The kind on their mecha. The kind that Grayson had scrawled all over his office.

“County Fair Delayed Due To Rain Of Ash, Organizers Confident Attendance Will Be Unaffected”

Pilot Erica deployed for the first time alongside Hazel and Towers. Bad luck to go against the Hidden Kris for her first time out. The damn stealth mecha had already wiped out another base and sent its personnel’s corpses against the local civilian population. Good luck to have my sister and, yeah, even Towers for her squadmates. Towers’s cryo cannon was just what they needed to pin the Kris down, then Hazel shoved her energy lance down its throat. Far as we can tell from the reports, Erica got the unenviable task of burning away the walking dead with her incinerator.

Of course, as a sign of both which way the wind happened to be blowing and how close the front line is these days, we’re now getting hit with a heavy ashfall. The county fair’s delayed so they can clean up enough of it to keep the rides going and cook the food and stuff. We’re all still planning to go. Personally, the ‘dwellers can kill us all and turn our corpses into puppets, but I will be damned if I let that stop me from stuffing my face with friend dough and then getting sick on one of the whirly rides. Some things are just sacred.

“Proposed Mass Grave Site Running Up Against Zoning Concerns”

A Hall opened up right inside the defense perimeter of Hazel’s base last night, and what came out was more of a living stone statue than a mecha. Definitely Nondweller though, same shape and writing, and the ‘mecha’ that the Pilots are already calling ‘The Ancient Rascal” played merry hell with the defenders.

“Hope, it was ridiculous. The damn thing was just teleporting all over the place, firing lightning bolts at us, breathing some kind of noxious gas at the troopers trying to set up launchers. We fought a mecha that could float and turn invisible, like, a week ago, and this was somehow even more annoying. Also, you know, terrifying.”

Hazel, Towers, Erica, and the base itself were still standing when the Rascal opened another Hall and retreated. More than half of everyone else weren’t, though.

We’re running out of places to put the bodies that don’t cause even more problems. 

“Icarus Solutions Stock Soars After Winning Legal Battles Over Location Of Daedalus Low-Earth Orbit Weapons Platform”

Anderson has left. Well, been taken, more like. I guess the authorities finally copped to the fact that his legal guardians have been nonexistent since he moved here, and as he’s legally still a kid he’s been sent off to a new orphanage. He didn’t seem too torn up about it. 

“I’ve been keeping in touch with Erica from a distance, I can keep in touch with you and Kory just the same. Honestly, things here haven’t been the same for me since Grayson. A new place might give me a new and better starting point.”

He was more into talking about the Icarus Solutions news while we were waiting outside his house for the Guard to come pick him up. I guess it was a whole thing, the new weapon sats interfered with all kinds of civilian satellites and they had to deorbit the ISS Museum to make room for them. They also apparently make launching anything manned prohibitively dangerous for the next twenty years. Anderson seemed genuinely pissed off for the first time since… well, ever, really, which says a lot considering what he’s been through. He got a little bit into a rant about how we were closing the doors to the universe just to burn our own house down, and then he was gone.

“Pilot Hazel Speaks Out Against Command Treatment Of Pilots; Officers Deny Long Workdays, Constant Scrambling”

“I can’t believe you actually said all that live on screen.”

“Yeah, well, what else even has a chance of working? Summers was a burnt out wreck even before we went into the Red Zone. Towers used to sneak a drink just to spite the officers and to be the cool kid, now I’m pretty sure he drinks a bottle of whiskey a week and he’s hooked on, like, three different kinds of uppers. I’ve tried keeping a better eye on Erica since you asked me to, but I don’t think she’s slept in like three days. I have to take a stim with every breakfast or the collective withdrawal symptoms will catch up and just vaporize me. We’re not going to survive long enough to kick the ‘dwellers out of our reality if we all burn out.”

“You think anything will come of it?”

“Who knows, but at least it has them scrambling for a change. Besides, what are they going to do? Suspend me? Sure, let them get in the giant robot, see how long they last before their neurons fry. Even then, they’d probably last ten seconds in a fight.”

“… did you see the news? About the orphanage?”

“Yeah. Undead pop up out of nowhere, much on a bunch of people before the Marines purge the place. A lot like that damn cult that hit your school.”

“That’s where Anderson got sent. And… he’s listed among the missing. I checked.”

“Aw, fuck Hope, I’m sorry.”

“I think he might have been the one to do it.”

“Wait, what?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know anything for sure, but I think Grayson’s attack did something to him, I don’t know, left some sort of trauma behind, there was all this writing in his notebook… does Erica know he got taken away?”

“Fuck. No, no, actually she’s been complaining about him not responding to her letters all of a sudden, said she was going to swing by his house on her next leave. Of course, who knows when that will be.” 

“Don’t tell her.”

“Hope-”

“Don’t. Tell. Her. Better a mysterious disappearance that probably means death than a betrayal. That’s what I’m hoping it is, anyway.”

“A Relationship To Die For: War-Widow Speed-Dating Events On The Rise”

We were in the middle of a history test when school was dismissed on account of an earthquake. Apparently the fighting got so close it actually caused the earth to shake – Hazel confirmed later that it really had, and they’d actually been in eyebeam range of our house before our mecha managed to force the ‘dwellers to retreat. As it is, the school library was more of a school pile-of-books-on-the-floor. Kory and I volunteered to help put it all back on the shelves tomorrow, after we get out of the assembly line.

Once Hazel and I got past the somewhat morbid idea of there-but-for-the-grace-of-a-Nondweller’s-priorities-go-we, we had to talk about the fact that Mom is dating again. Speed-dating, even. I mean, we’re both sort of glad that she is. Losing Ina sucked, we’re never going to get enough therapy for that, and that’s true for nobody more than Mom. It’s just… kind of weird? 

I mean, for obvious reasons, sure. We know that anybody that Mom meets isn’t going to be some kind of replacement for Ina, and that still doesn’t stop a little bit of off vibes about seeing her with anyone else.. But it’s also kind of weird to hear her gush about the woman she met while playing Warrant to Jaunt at Party Game Kingdom. 

“Pilot Hazel Receives Highest Military Honor For Holding Midwestern Line”

Towers fecked off to try and outflank the ‘dwellers on his own and got his mecha’s right leg blown off for his trouble, Erica’s incinerator tank got breached and she had to bail out, but Hazel ended up holding the line all by herself against three ‘dweller mecha. I’m not sure whether to be proud of her or be pissed at her for always getting herself into, like, the worst possible situations. 

Mom and Celine – Celine is sort-of-maybe-kind-of living with us now, some of the time – got into a screaming argument over groceries for the house. Hey, turns out the midwestern region was one of the few breadbaskets we had left, and now it’s been smashed. Zoom go the prices, and always upwards of course. I think it might have been their first fight. 

They’re not worth as much as they used to, but maybe I can earn a few more ration cards if I skip the last period at school and get to the assembly line early. 

“Mech ‘Apocalypse’ Good News For Evangelical Church, Pastor Says”

The defensive lines have all broken. Towers was killed. Erica’s mecha went down, but there was no confirmation about whether she lived or died before it was all over. We’ve lost, and the planet belongs to the Nondwellers now. I suppose they’ll need a different name. The street preachers are having a field day, of course. Easy to preach the good word of your new interdimensional bird mecha magic gods if there’s nobody to fight back against them.

For weeks I had nightmares about how Hazel had died. Incinerated by beams, driven insane by the storms, a walking corpse sent to purge our entire house. 

Then, out of nowhere she turned up. Scarred, terrified, but alive. Turns out her mecha had been given an experimental stealth system based on tech recovered from the Kris, and when it all went to shit she simply vanished. We’ve been using that system to hide – me, Hazel, Mom, Celine, Kory and their family.

EPILOGUE

“… do you want to talk about it?”

“… Towers was never not an asshole. But when the Rascal came for me, he took the hit that would’ve killed me. As for Erica, I saw her running for the rubble, but after that… no idea.”

“…”

“I know how good the Hidden Kris’s stealth was. But when I was running for it… Hope, I swear the Terror was looking right at me. And not just for a second, either. It tracked my movement for a good ten seconds.”

“What do you think that means?”

“I think it means they let me go. And I don’t know why.”

–

I teach Hazel how to plant things that will grow into food. I show her how to maintain the parts of her mecha long after they should’ve worn out, and some deranged ways to put together replacements with a box of scraps. Kory and I both teach her, and some of the others, how a story can set you free, even for a little while.

FIVE YEARS LATER

Hazel’s stealth tech had been fully reverse-engineered, now. We’re a veritable pack of nomads, growing every time we find more survivors hiding away in the rubble, moving sight unseen past Taker nests. Hazel keeps us safe if the Takers ever do spot us. Mom and Celine teach the kids about what things used to be like. Kory tells stories of great heroes that fought so we could live, and kindly leaves the names of Hazel, Towers, Summers, and Erica out of them. I keep things working, and keep people fed, and people call me Par Hope.

TEN YEARS LATER

We’ve figured out a way to create a Hall of our own.

There was quite a lot of debate about what to do with it. Link up with the other nomad clans and their scattered and scrap-built mecha, and launch an attack on the home dimension of the Takers? See if we can build a Hall that crosses time as well as space and realities, and have another go?

Kory and I ended up being the deciding votes – Hazel abstained, citing old grudges as cause enough to disqualify her – and we decided to instead find a new home. Jewel turned four this year, and xe don’t know anything of the past other than stories from Nana and Mamo Celine. Why risk xir life for vengeance, or on a gamble that we can do better on a second try? No, our child deserves an actual future.

We’re leaving this reality behind. We’re going to find a new one, one the Takers know nothing about. Damn it all, we’re going to have a home that you can’t find by following the footsteps of a giant robot.

??? YEARS LATER

The Takers have returned. 

To be honest, we truly thought they were a myth, and the first attacks through their suddenly-appearing Halls were devastating. We’ve dug up all of the old records and testimonials, however, and now we’ve got their measure. We know what The Ancient Rascal is capable of, we have a good idea of how to take down the Steel Terror. 

Founder Hope, my great-several-times-over-grandparent, might have yearned to leave the Takers behind forever, but they at least had the foresight to write down as much as they could about the world they left behind. 

They’ve Taken one reality away from our forebears. They won’t take this one from us.

 – Pilot Morgan of the Jeweled Kris Mecha Corps

–

Created by Jacqueline Bryk, I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream is a solo game of siblings from the perspective of the one left behind, while the other gets in a giant robot and fights to save humanity. 

Your first steps are to determine who your character is, who their sibling is, and what the Threat is. This is done quite simply via each requiring a number of categories to be filled. For the player character you have to choose a name, pronouns, a look, other friends, hobbies, and how you feel about your sibling. For the sibling you have to choose name, pronouns, look, weapons (in addition to a railgun, which they always have), their relationship to the player character, and other mecha pilots. As for the Threat, you have to choose a type, a look, their weapons, and a common name. You’re told to choose one to two options for each category, and while you can certainly make up your own, each comes with a list of ideas you can simply choose from. In some cases the lists are quite extensive, in others they’re a fair bit more limited, but what all of them do is guide the player to assemble a world that very much fits in with the genre conventions associated with mecha, particularly the ‘big otherworldly threat’ variety.

Neon Genesis Evangelion and Pacific Rim come to mind, although the game that Railgun is explicitly called out as a love letter to is 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. 

Now, for materials aside from the game text you’re going to need a twenty-sided die, a deck of playing cards with Jokers, and whatever you’d like to record your game with. You split the deck of cards into all of the non-face cards (the Headlines Deck), and all of the face cards (the Boss Deck); the Jokers get put aside for now. Every turn you’re going to roll your d20 and draw a card from the Headlines Deck. Your d20 is serving as an Events Die, and corresponds to a list of events that are a little smaller scale and closer to home than the goings-on from the Headlines, which is a much larger event about the war and quite often involving your sibling in some way.

The Wretched & Alone DNA that Bryk spliced in is most evident in the Headlines, with each suit of cards corresponding to a broad but unique category of events: Clubs tend to focus on technology and the enemy, Diamonds focus on economics, Hearts focus on relationships and emotions, and Spades focus on politics and op-eds and such. Clubs and Diamonds, unsurprisingly, are the ones that feature multiple entries that have a blank spot in the Headline where you need to put your sibling’s name.

Cards are discarded after they’re drawn, so you’ll never get the same Headline (or Boss, we’ll talk about them in a second) twice. Events, however, are quite possibly going to repeat – when they do, you’re supposed to build off of what happened before, but “escalate it somehow  – make it more intense, intimate, etc.” The result for 16, which is a local Threat-worshiping cult getting exposed that includes one your teachers, came up a number of times in this playthrough, which eventually ended in Anderson vanishing, quite possibly becoming a cultist himself.

Now, for the Bosses. Every fifth turn and every time you roll a 20 on the Events Die you draw a card from the Boss Deck in addition to the one from the Headlines Deck. Unlike the Events and Headlines, the Boss Deck results are generally quite a bit more abstract, mostly reading (to me) as a title or epithet, so they’re a bit harder to work with than Railgun’s other prompts. “These can be events, unique threats, armies, or even stranger things,” writes Bryk in the explanation. The Steel Terror, Hidden Kris, and The Ancient Rascal got interpreted as unique enemy mecha by me, while Terrible Pain and Day of the Halls were events. 

As for the Jokers: after the first draw from the Boss Deck, you shuffle a Joker into it. After the second draw from the Boss Deck, you shuffle the second Joker into it. When drawn from the Boss Deck themselves, either Joker brings the game to an end. So, the game could end on turn 2 if you roll a pair of 20s right off the bat, although the odds are obviously not in favor of that happening. If it was the Red Joker, your side wins the war but at the cost of your sibling. If it was the Black Joker, your side loses, but you reunite with your sibling. You could, in theory, choose which Joker to put into the Boss Deck first, trying to gamble on the chance that you might draw it next. For my purposes, I had both Jokers face down and didn’t know which got into the deck first. While Hazel got to keep fighting for a fair bit longer in the end, the uncertainty did make that next Boss Deck draw a fair bit more tense. While it simmered down a bit once I knew that both endings were now on the table, the Jokers lurking in the deck continued to keep things tense throughout.

Once you resolve the Joker itself (did you first learn about the end of the war or your sibling’s death, or how do you hide from the Threat), you move to the Epilogue. The first part of the Epilogue takes place immediately after the war ends, and heavily depends on which Joker you drew. If you won but your sibling died, the prompt asks you about how you deal with their death and what scars the Threat left behind on the world. If you’re reunited in the world now belonging to the Threat, the prompts inquire as to how your sibling opens up to you and how you actually end up better equipped for the new world than them.

The second part takes place five, ten, or fifteen years in the future, and details how the player character (and the sibling, if they’re alive) are shaped by and deal with the world they now find themselves in. There are some suggestions, but this part is much more open-ended. That covers the minimum number of entries for the Epilogue, but you can do as many time-skips as you want to – I jumped on the idea of an ancestor finding Hope’s journal the second I read it.

–

I happened to have some games of my own in the Sci-Fi Is The Best Bundle on itch a while back, and when I spotted I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream in said bundle it immediately lit my brain on fire a bit simply with the title and premise, and also because I’ve been reading Paul Czege’s The Ink That Bleeds. Czege writes a bit in TITB about playing multiple solo journaling RPGs at the same time and letting them feed off of one another, and I immediately started thinking about alternating between playing Railgun and my own Lost Among The Starlit Wreckage like that with the LATSW character being the sibling. There might still be something there (and maybe a review of The Ink That Bleeds, now that I think of it), but first I had to knuckle down and deal with Railgun on its own.

I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream continued to light my brain on fire past the initial impression because it moves the spotlight to somewhere different than its genre usually focuses on, and then prompts you to tell a story from that usually-off-screen position. It’s one of the things that a solo game is uniquely well-suited to doing, and Railgun does it very well. Its prompts are many and varied, often with quite a lot to work with, and there’s an interesting balance between the chance for escalating repeat results with the Events Die and the never-have-to-do-the-same-one-twice of the Headlines/Boss Decks. As mentioned above, this game was made as a love letter, and that comes through very clearly to the game’s benefit.

It can also be said that the options to choose from for various things and the various events and Boss results make for a pretty rich random info generator. I could see getting a lot of use out of Railgun in tandem with something like The Mecha Hack: the Headlines being used as mission inspiration or flavor text, the Bosses being named mecha, all the character options being put to good use filling out the NPC (or even PC) cast, and so on.

Also, in case you’ve been following Solitaire Storytelling for a bit and want a comparison take on the solo mecha journaling game subgenre: Laser Beams Like So Many Stars tackles the spotlight change with an interesting and slightly meta take on mecha fans, Railgun goes for an emotional gut punch with making the bit character that the pilots usually make grand speeches about protecting the real main character.

You can get I Have No Railgun And I Must Scream on itch.io for $5, and every purchase will also create a free community copy for someone else to enjoy!

The world is at risk. The military is worse than useless. The only hope for humanity is the mecha corps, piloted by children and young teenagers.

Unfortunately, you’re not one of them.

What kind of story will you leave behind?