by HL TRUSLOVE
Add The Hermit (E.1) to your character sheet.
Add Scavenger Village (Chapter 9, L.9) and The Bridge (Chapter 11, L.11) to map.
4.11
The hermit watches you for a long moment before suddenly spitting on the ground in front of you, making you jump. They shake their head and begin to stamp out the fire with a heavily booted foot.
“You’re an enemy to me, outsider,” they say in way of explanation.
“What? Why?”
“You come to ‘take back this land’. As if it belongs to wild beasts. It doesn’t. We live here, the remnants of the old world that you forgot. We made this place liveable again and now you think you have some sort of right to it? You think you’re better than us because you come from across the sea? Think you can lead us? Let me tell you, outsider – we’ve had plenty of leaders and all they bring is blood.”
They take the cooking carcass off the extinguished fire and gather their own things. You can feel your brow tighten.
“So who leads you now?”
“Nobody leads me!” they say with a harsh chuckle. “They’re all children fighting over dust and dirt. I make my own way. I’m free.”
“You say ‘they’re all children’. Who do you mean?”
The hermit sighs and tugs their hatchet out of the ground. You worry you’re going to have to fight, but instead they begin to trace shapes in the ash and it takes you a moment to realise they’re drawing directions.
“The bridge used by traders. The camp. If you go to these places you’ll understand why so many of us live like me. And why leaders will only ever cause suffering.”
They leave as you mark down the places in their crude drawing onto your map.
END.
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Add Scavenger Village (Chapter 9, L.9) and The Bridge (Chapter 11, L.11) to map.
4.12
Your hands press down into the flesh of the hermit’s throat. Their skin feels scaly and rough, and though they beat at you ineffectually with their fists, soon they can’t fight any longer as you choke the breath out of them.
You sit by their body as you eat the meal from over the fire – it’s greasy and tasty, filling your belly fuller than it’s been for a long time. Then you wipe your hands on their coat and inspect their belongings.
The hatchet might come in handy, and you attach it to the side of your pack. You’re not enthused by the idea of rifling through this hermit’s clothes but it’s probably a good idea to make sure you have everything that you can reasonably use. Apart from bits of pocket lint and debris, the most interesting thing you come across is a piece of paper that appears to contain directions. You compare it to your map and mark down the location shown.
You spend the night by the fire and the corpse and leave the next morning.
END.
Add Cruelty to your character sheet.
Add Hatchet (O.4) to your inventory.
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4.13
“What’s going on here? Who are you?” you demand, shaking them by the lapels. The hermit whines underneath you, panicking but also tired and weak.
“I’m just a traveller, please, take whatever you want,” they moan. You almost feel a bit guilty, but you’re also worried if they hadn’t been challenged they easily could have hurt you. You sigh and get up, taking the hatchet from the ground and offer them a hand up, which they take with hesitance.
“I’m looking for people. If I give you a map, can you show me where they might be?”
The hermit nods shakily, blinking back tears. You hand them your map and they scribble onto it with charcoal from the fire, fingers still trembling. When they’re done you snatch it back and leave the way you came, armed with new information and the hatchet you didn’t give back.
END.
Add Hatchet (O.4) to your inventory.
Add Scavenger Village (Chapter 9, L.9) and The Bridge (Chapter 11, L.11) to map.
Chapter 5
The Ship
5.1
The rhythm of your steps falls into a steady routine as you walk ever onwards towards your destination. Though concerned about the sheer volume of people you may meet, it might also be the best place for you to find information about your lost party. This ship. This village. It was, after all, one of the places Mari wanted you to go to investigate in the first place.
By midday the wind has dropped to a soft and steady murmur, and you can walk without your collar pulled up around your face. The sun, high in the sky, casts dim light through a filter of grey clouds. The land now is varied and tough as you find yourself moving higher above the coastline.
As you crest a small hill you break into a jog. From this vantage point you look down on the landscape around you. The trees and shrubs below give way to bare knolls, covered sparsely in short, coarse grass. In places the rain and wind has carved muddy scars into the exposed earth. To the north, the rise of the land stops suddenly, replaced by a flat coastline that rolls gently into the steel grey sea.
There, between the mouth of the river and the expanse of the sea, you see it.
The dark amber of the ship’s metals stand out against the muted greys of the surrounding area. Lying dormant, leaning slightly lopsided away from the coast, it sits in the mud of the estuary surrounded by the slowly lapping flow of the shallow river.
Not created by the winds or the seas like the world it occupies, the ship cracks the horizon with its geometry. Its bow is sunken below the mud of the riverbed while the stern is lifted some twenty or so metres in the air. The vessel’s ancient metals have been eroded and fractured where it meets the flow of the water. Broken down by the passage of time, its hull resembles the hollow rib cage of some great felled beast. The remains of the old world’s last great behemoth.
The ship, you think to yourself, must be over three hundred metres long – the largest structure you’ve ever seen above the ground. Your only comparison, the boat that brought you to these lands, would look miniature next to it. You try to imagine the history of this thing, and the lost culture that must have created it. You think of the possibilities it represents. A thousand thoughts race through your mind as you stand there in a daze of awe and excitement.
A moment passes. You return to the world around you as the words of your brief echo in your head.
Find a suitable vantage point – Turn to 5.2, Needs Sharpshooter.
* * *
Look for signs of humanity – Turn to 5.3, Needs Knowledge.
* * *
Lay low and observe the ship – Turn to 5.6.
5.2
You suddenly become aware of your position. Your body forms a silhouette against the shape of the hills, which is easily spotted from lower ground. Another shape, just as unnatural as the ship. You drop to the floor quickly and rummage through your bag for your scope.
Scouting the area around your position, you spy a large oak at the peak of a hill to the east. With one eye to the ship, you move carefully along the ridge towards the tree. Lying prostrate on the cold ground, you pull your rifle up to your cheek and peer down the lens to the land below you.
From nearly a kilometre away, you scan the decrepit ship for any signs of movement.
The wind breaks the silence, sometimes gently brushing at your face, sometimes whipping the grass around you into frenzied spasms. Kind and cruel at the same time.
In your crosshairs you see smoke rising from an open hole in the hull of the ship, a thin stream of black that curls upwards and dissipates in the wind.
You look away from the lens, and with your eyes alone you are barely able to perceive this tiny detail. Pointless to try to keep watch without the use of the scope, so instead you continue to observe closely through it, steadfast against the ground.
Time passes. Nearly an hour goes by as you observe the ship from your hidden vantage point.
You’re beginning to wonder if the smoke you saw rise earlier was ju
st a trick of the mind – a hopeful illusion you convinced yourself to see – when suddenly and without warning you see movement on the deck.
An old hatch, mottled black and yellow with the remnants of ancient paint, swings open and from it clambers a pair of figures.
The first to emerge, a man, perhaps fifty years old, is dressed in a heavy animal-skin coat. His legs are covered in a rough woven fabric and his feet are wrapped in crude leather boots, bound by cords around the ankles. He reaches into the hatch to help a second figure up onto the deck. The second, a younger man, is dressed similarly, but carrying a large pack also made from animal skins. From his waist hangs a pair of unplucked birds, tied together at the neck.
The pair converse freely, unaware of your presence. The older man points eastwards and moves his hands in a curve as if describing some landmark or natural feature. The younger man nods and in the palm of his hand traces a shape, which the older man watches with intent. They speak a while longer before a third figure emerges from the hatch.
Carrying a bundle of cloth in her arms, the woman smiles at the two men. This trio of natives move along the deck of the ship towards the waterline. The old man clambers over a twisted metal railing and into the ankle-deep waters. The woman hands him her luggage as she follows. A layer is peeled back from the cloths revealing the face of a baby, who yawns and blinks in the bright sun.
Upon seeing the infant’s face you pause, looking up from the lens to the ship. From this distance the three of them look tiny, like insects crawling across a great boulder.
You mark every movement the group makes, every interaction between the adults and their environment. You watch for details that must seem commonplace to them, and feel an intense fascination with observing them from a distance. The overwhelming sense of mundanity presented in their actions is a feeling you struggle to process as you watch, unsure of how to proceed.
Fire a warning shot – Turn to 5.4.
* * *
Continue to watch the ship – Turn to 5.5.
5.3
In your studies you often encountered reports of rudimentary settlements scattered throughout the old world. From accounts sent back by explorers and settlers, it became apparent that some groups of survivors had gathered together for protection, trying to emulate life before the war.
You remember what had made your professor’s face light up when talking about these people – the fact that they seemed to be peaceful compared to the predominantly rougher survivors that explorers from the vault had met. The way the small settler groups acted was not typical of the usual behaviour, and reflected what some argued was a development in their social standards.
That term had never sat right with you. Development. It was as if the scholars had drawn a straight line from ‘mud-hut savage’ to themselves, deciding that nothing outside of that linear path could possibly survive.
Perhaps, you’d thought to yourself, these reported settlements were living memories of the world as it used to be. Before the war, people had lived in cities of millions. It seemed only right that some of the earliest survivors would have tried to emulate that lifestyle, and it had been passed on to their descendants.
You keep one eye on the ship as you carefully move down the hillside to a small shrub which sits slightly closer. You sit cross-legged beneath its branches which spike you in the face and neck, but dare not try to move again – instead you put up with the pain and jot down notes into your notebook.
From your vantage point you watch as small distant figures emerge from the surface of the iron ship, busying themselves with daily tasks. Perhaps a dozen people are moving goods from place to place, unloading supplies from the backs of rudimentary rafts tied up where the ship meets the waterline. They mostly seem to be in crates and barrels so you could only hazard a guess at what’s inside them. Given their proximity to the sea, probably fish.
You continue your watch for what must be hours. As the day passes you notice that the majority of the supplies seem to have been moved to a central area within the ship, which you can just about see. You can see the hubbub of congregated survivors and goods changing hands. It seems to be some sort of trading spot – a bartering post, perhaps?
You continue to take notes on the different survivors you can see running around on their orange-flecked settlement. They range in height and size, from wizened elders, hunched over from age, to children playing. You spy a pair who can’t be more than six years old running across the deck, engaged in a game of screaming and shoving – seems that kind of game comes naturally to all children, no matter where they come from. You make a sketch of their clothes – almost a uniform in their similarity, all of them are covered from neck to feet in an ochre-brown material that seems to be furs or leather.
After observing for several hours you reckon that as many as a hundred people must be living within the interior of the ship. It’s the largest settlement that you’ve heard of in this place. They don’t seem to have access to electricity and it’s difficult to tell how technologically reliant these people are without being able to see inside the ship. You don’t hear the whirring of any machinery, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any. Apart from that, all you can make out is a few swirling spires of smoke ascending into the sky and disappearing. They clearly have fires, then. Maybe they’re getting ready to start cooking dinner? It is early evening, after all.
You flip your notebook shut. Even though it’s been interesting to watch, you haven’t yet had any new insights that you haven’t previously encountered either through your own research or the research from explorers before you. Without entering the ship yourself, it is difficult to say how permanent their settlement is, or answer any of the tantalising questions that surge through you as you run the reports and figures memorised from your studies through your mind.
In the years you spent between charts and maps, poring over travel accounts and photographs for new insight, you never once read an ethnography that satisfied your curiosity. The so-called explorers they sent this way were scared children, unable to understand the complexities of the survivors’ lives, unable to understand the fear that plagued them. You read nothing in all that time but coy reports of exotic rituals spotted through binocular lenses, or fearful warnings of savagery written as justification of more weapons’ shipments.
There was something missing from all these accounts. A void of understanding, where failed scholars had attempted to plug the gap with wild speculations.
You would not fail. With every swiftly written note, you feel yourself drawing closer to the unknown truth that, soon, you would discover.
But there was something wrong. A barrier in your wisdom that would not be overcome from sitting and watching from a distance. To know you must experience. You would have to contact them directly.
Add Outfit Sketch (F.8) to your notebook.
* * *
Leave, having done enough for the day – Turn to 5.7.
* * *
Risk getting closer to the ship – Turn to 5.8.
5.4
The shot screams out across the landscape, echoing in the hills around you like thunder.
As the ringing in your ears subsides, you notice the silence.
Where you expect the panicked screams of women and children there is only the wind, blowing calm and evenly at your face.
As the bullet struck the surface of the ship, sending sparks flying into the air, the youngest of the trio threw himself to the ground. Crouched in fear, the others look cautiously to the skies, unsure of the source of the noise.
Signalling to the other two with an outstretched palm, the older man grips the railing of the ship and slowly makes his way back from the waterline. From his crouching position he begins crawling, on all fours at first and then flat on his stomach. Shuffling himself forward awkwardly on his elbows, he reaches an open hole in the surface of the ship where, leaning his head into the darkness of its interior, he appears to shout.
In a moment the s
erene calmness of the ship is broken as many figures suddenly emerge from its interior, spreading out across the metal of the deck like fearful ants. Twenty or so people run in all directions, shouting and pointing to the horizon in an eruption of chaos. Figures stand with their hands above their eyes, scanning the surroundings for danger.
Some carry rudimentary weapons which you look on with pity. Against the power of your firearm, the spears and slings they hold close are objects of comfort rather than protection. As you see the confusion on their faces, you find it difficult to feel any sense of fear or apprehension you might once have felt.
Bows and arrows against the lightning.
In a few minutes the shouts and screams have faded, and a short while later the first to respond have begun to drift away, returning to the shelter of their interiors. A few brave, or perhaps foolhardy, individuals remain on the deck, patrolling the walkways and watching the landscape around them with great vigilance.
No threat of retaliation seems to arise as the world around you falls again into complete silence. No threat at all emerges as you eagerly watch the movements and reactions of the survivors below. A strange sense of complacency, even resignation, seems to fill them. It is as if sudden moments of fear and confusion are nothing more than a passing element of their daily lives.
