"Soon," Immanuel Jade says in a hopeful tone, turning away from the stairwell.
Action: Immanuel Jade takes a closer look at the drunk soldiers placed in cells. How are they like the door, and not like drunk soldiers at all?
Well, these doors actually
are doors-the barriers here are purely physical to you...and yet, you wonder exactly how real they are. If you learned the secrets of this place, could you step through the walls?
And, if you learned to subvert
this reality, perhaps you could learn to do the same to the 'outside' world. Though you suspect your captors have not yet grasped the entirety of the existence they know is just another rusty pipe, churning away in the grand works of creation.
...
And, insofar as drunks are concerned, they exist as well. At least as much as you exist. They snore, they breath, they mumble in their sleep. You can't quite make out what it is they are saying-you'd have to get closer, which could be awkward-but, both of them seem to speaking in numbers. How odd.
"Maybe we can find food or at least water out that way. Come on, Lucky." She picked up the dog - somewhat awkwardly, but she didn't want to force the creature to be walking on a fresh wound - and looped the stump of her arm through her horse's reins. "I'm going to go check it out. If you want to come with, feel free; otherwise, maybe we'll meet again in Sevenforks.
Vic goes to look around the farmhouse and the surrounding area.
~Vic begins her search by finding the water pump-a bit rusty, but a little elbow strength sends clear, cold water flowing into an old, cracked bowl. You place Lucky down gently, and he begins to drink. Leaving you free to explore...
...
You find surprisingly little, at least to your untrained eye. You discover no signs of violence and few clues to the fate of the people that lived here. The Barn, once filled with hay for animals, now lies fallow. The small stables and pens have been knocked flat, as if the livestock fled out of fear, or desperate hunger and thirst. You innocently lay a hand on a sad little doghouse, and the entire thing falls over into the dust with a rotten
*clump*.Lucky stares at you from the distance, and you can't help but feel a bit guilty.
What else you find is...discomforting. Tools seem to have been dropped where they lay, jobs abandoned right in the middle-you find a pitchfork roughly thrown to the ground, a half bale of dusty hay in one corner, never to be finished baling. A hammer and a spread of rusted nails lying on the ground, creating a yellow shadow of dead grass underneath-below a window shutter that won't be repaired any time soon. A small crack in the cellar bulkhead, a can of sealing wax laying empty on it's side, never filled in-the cracked widened and split-water has trickled down over the summer, and the basement smells dense and humid with old, brackish water, and a plenitude of rotted vegetables in neatly lined glass jars. You even find plates, cups and silverware (It was decent silverware, you note-the sort one lays out when expecting company) laid out on the table as if someone was eating, but any food is long rotten, or gone to the local animals.
Most surprising is the place hasn't been looted yet. The farmhouse has four rooms on the second floor, and a combination dining and living room taking up the entirety of the first. There are many things even the least callous of men might take for a gift-old clocks, fine brick-a-brack, a few good iron tools not gone entirely to rust. Of the bedrooms, only three were occupied. One was a childs room, surely, and the other the adults-the third, seems like a guest room. It seems less comfortable, but more finely furnished, as if in the expectation of guests. The fourth is entirely empty, except for some old bones scattered on the floor-looks sort of like prairie chicken bones to you, though much larger than you would have expected.
You may choose to search any of these rooms more closely, but at some point the words 'ransack' and 'robbing the dead' start bubbling up in your mind. Not, of course, that they are dead...
Author
Topic: The Far West-Ch.1/Light for Some-others, A Deeper Darkness (Game thread) (Read 21809 times)