Being a Stalker

Recently I've been reading Roadside Picnic, a book I picked up after playing through every Metro game 2 times over, watching Tarkovsky's Stalker, and with STALKER: SoC on my to-play list. All of these were inspired by the same book, which is phenomenal to me. If I enjoyed every single one of these, where Metro is my favourite game series, and Stalker is my favourite movie, then surely I would enjoy the source material, surely?

And enjoy it I did. I got it about half a week ago and I'm already almost halfway through the damn thing. It gives me such unimaginable fantasies - imagine it, a Zone, where danger is everywhere, where people refuse to set foot, that is shrouded in mysteries, artefacts unknown to the human mozg.

"Really? A place with no-one at all, with absolute silence, an intangible death in the air, but full of such wonder? Could such a magical place really exist?" I feel myself asking. If there's anything Metro, Stalker, and STALKER have been able to capture, it's a warped sort of fantasy, but a fantasy nonetheless - of doom, and the romantic, dead silent atmosphere that comes after. 

RP has had me thinking the same things; what I would give to be paid to explore long-since abandoned-by-human-kind buildings and complexes, where my main enemy is the elements and not man, where my footsteps reverberate and where the drops of water 3 halls over echo down mouldy pipes, taking out various meters to monitor gases in the rooms, a geiger counter, monitoring gas mask filters, throwing nuts and bolts to check for anomalies, so on and so forth.

What a wondrous job that would be! To be a stalker...