Ramblings in a Desert Planet

Zig talks about one of the things that he hates the most about Menahat

It’s all yellow, dust and death, I’ll tell you. Yellow, dust and death as far as the eye can see. You don’t even got to be smart to tell - one brother of mine even said it first himself. “This could be the first time I ever thought to associate any shade of yellow with something so grim… bleak… What was the word again?” he asked. And that word was death. Every day since then, that quote of his would replay in my head at least once. Every day it annoyed me, but at least that gave me something to complain about other than the sand. Stuck with our jobs, the only way the boys and I could escape from this hellish landscape is back at base camp. It was also the only place that contained any sort of life that wasn’t the occasional cactus. We believe that camp is, by far, the only place with recorded life on the entire planet, and its population doesn’t go any further than the Boss and his men. As refreshing as it may sound, especially when you think about the absence of everything that we’d taken for granted in Doldogo and Wyterra, even the camp doesn’t hide from this curse of the colour yellow, too. And for what? Camouflage? Ain’t nothing lives on this Godforsaken planet - at least, nothing that can kill us. 

It’s only been  half a year since landing here on Menahat and I’m surprised I hadn’t gotten sick of this place sooner. Maybe it was Beht’s strange fascination with the place, as lacking as it is. Maybe it was Gorrik’s almost manic levels of optimism that kept me going. Or, could it possibly be our special treatment from the Boss? But, even so, I know that one of these days, this planet will drive me right out of my skull to the point of no return. Imagine you’re in my shoes. Imagine everything around you is yellow. You see yellow. You touch yellow. You hear yellow, smell yellow, taste yellow… all that is yellow is happening to you constantly. Eventually, you’ll get so sick of seeing any shade of the goddamn colour that, even at the glimpse of sweet, sweet gold, you’ll want a pistol right in your mouth! And if the pistol so happens to be of the colour golden yellow, fitted nicely inside of a golden yellow box, and placed real low and easy-to-reach on a golden yellow shelf – what the hell?! - you may as well just keep going. At least, by living on there’s a chance that the last thing you see won’t be any kind of yellow at all!