Last week a challenge came up over at /r/WorldBuilding which was to create a story of a world or culture that exists in more extreme environments. I felt like it would be a good time to stretch some creative muscles and see what I could come up with. So below you'll find my answer for the Extreme Environment challenge.
The teeth of the venomous steel jaws of the cave surrounding the dwelling are always one of the trickiest parts of checking in on the people of Old Los Angeles. The people who choose to still dwell here generations after the planet was evacuated and the sun burst spewing the planet with radiation somehow continue to thrive. The Dead Angels are a people of short tempers and almost shorter life spans. If their rebreaters aren't attached directly after birth a lung full of the radioactive dust in the air would make their lungs burn and their skin melt. There are those here and there that had their rebreather attached a little too slow, the effects are like seeing a still flag made of skin attached to a skeleton, their features sag and wave with each step they take.
The Dead Angels have found a language of their own through grunts and hisses that are audible through the rebreather they have developed their communication. Even the puffs of exhaust from the rebreathers are used to convey the message. It seems to be some combination of ancient communication methods of smoke signals and even more primitive grunts and guttural noises. However just because they are unable to communicate with the higher crust members of society, that now live off planet, it doesn't mean that the Dead Angels are primitive at all. There are volumes of information scratched into old shards of broken glass and written on steel with old oil. The ingenuity of these people to make what was left behind work for them and serve their purposes is a testament to their determination to survive in these less than inviting remains of what was left behind to burn.
Every night as the acid rain storms against the rotting remaining structures of Old Los Angeles the Dead Angels drag closed the mouth of their cave and flip the switch on the generator they have salvaged and pieced back together, powering the discarded screens that line the floor of their cave creating a shimmering and shining landscape buried here below the remains of the city. The light plays off of the corners and edges of the steel. Each night as the younger Dead Angels settle in for bed the parents take turns twisting and moving scrap metal, casting shadows on the ceilings and grunting, telling stories to their children as they slip off to sleep to the sounds of the toxic weather outside.
The shadow plays may be the closest the children ever get to a normal existence. Each day for them is spent crawling through holes and dragging back salvage that the rest of the residents of Old Los Angeles have grown too large to retrieve. This salvage retrieval isn’t without its own dangers, loss of digits and limbs are normal, burns and acid damage scar each of the Dead Angels, crude prosthetics are created for those that have lost a limb, and maybe it is because of the harsh existence and the frequent amputation of limbs that the Dead Angels have been able to recreate such functional replacements even from the scraps of a past civilization.
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