HomeFeaturesRimWorld
The Tragedy of King Beef - a RimWorld: Royalty story, part one of twoA beast with a mind… a mind… and fists!
A beast with a mind… a mind… and fists!
Once his shocking new circumstances have filtered through the hosepipe-like tangle of his brutish nervous system, the King has only one thought: “I must amass as much beef as I can”. With his mission set, our monarch gets to work - but while he sets to it, we should find out more about the man himself. WhoisKing Beef?
King Beef is not a complicated man. He is a farmhand who became a butcher. A butcher who became an astronaut. An astronaut who found a mace forged from uranium, and lost his mind on the black edge of space. With nothing but his herd for company, King Beef has paced the deck of his fusion-driven barn for 33 subjective years, but thanks to the reckless shortcut through the Diogenes cluster which brought him here, relativistic distortion has meant that his life has spanned nearly a millennium of objective time. King Beef neither understands, nor cares about, that.
Also on the list of things King Beef doesn’t care for are: other people, social convention, and the concept of “having enough beef”. On the list of things he does care for are just two items: being strong, and acquiring a huge quantity of beef. Item one is covered, at least, as he still has his strength. Beef is an ungainly colossus of a man - wearing his massive, unpowered armour all day every day has made him something like a hybrid of Geoff Capes and a rusting JCB digger, and thanks to the low gravity of the moon he has landed on, everyone he might encounter here will have the constitution of a bag of quavers, when weighed against his enormity.
But to maintain his horrid power, the King must have Beef, and so he has begun constructing a ranch. Although he has landed in a completely barren landscape, he has found a few saguaro cactuses, and felled them to make a simple cabin, where he can cut boulders into rough-hewn blocks for further expansion. As the cows nibble at the hay mound outside his door, King Beef settles into his cactus-wood bed (in full armour), and dreams of gravy.
Hiroshi is an easygoing fellow. He is happy to sit and begin work on battery-inventing, in fact, the moment the King has gruffly patched up the donk-marks in his torso. He even rescues a pair of camels from the toxic gloaming, and tames them. But over the next few days cooped up with his titanic, heavy-breathing host as the fallout worsens outside, he begins to wish he had laid down and welcomed braying death at the hooves of his pursuer.
King Beef merely shakes his head in sorrow, and withdraws his mace.
The Tragedy of King Beef will conclude on Wednesday.
