Cleaning up, and arrival at Laketown
check the grave we dug for those zombies.
You return to the site of the buried zombie parts. You're not even surprised to discover a bony hand only half-buried, its fingers clawing through the dirt attempting to pull the rest of its weight free from the ground.
Crucially, however, you notice that at least your arrival it was attempting to claw its way out in a direction fully 120 degrees away from the direction of your arrival. It's only after you come to within 5 or 6 feet that it gives up clawing through the dirt and attempts to reach in your direction. Failing, the wrist rotates and the fingers begin clawing sideways attempting to pull itself in your direction, stopping occasionally to grasp at you.
Difficult to kill, perhaps, but it seems that they're at least not omniscient. Though you can only guess at the magic that allows a burned set of bones to know you're standing next it even at this short distance. Meanwhile from the It also occurs to you to wonder whether this is the first set of bones to escape...or the last. You're tempting to dig them all out to see whether the less articulated pieces like a ribcage is capable of useful movement. The hand bones in front of you certainly seems to be limited to movement like a living hand would be capable of.
Ultimately you decide that digging up a bunch of animated bones all by yourself in the middle of potentially zombie-infested woods is simply too dangerous for that tiny extra little bit of confirmation. Instead you return to camp and share your findings with the others.
See if there's some wildlife around. Might as well try to improve our food situation
You did see a buck yesterday, though briefly, so you know that wildlife is still in the area. Heading a short distance off the road, you...
(Hunting, target 99, roll 91+10 SUCCESS)
...make it about 50 feet off the road and immediately spot a deer. This comes a surprise to you, since hunting usually takes hours. It was completely unrealistic to expect to be able to hunt down a deer in the 20 minutes it will take everyone to put out a campfire, wash up and leave, but you were lucky. Quietly notching an arrow and drawing your bow, you aim for the lungs, and release.
(Archery, target 50, roll 94+22 SUCCESS)
Today is your lucky day, it seems. You completely expected that the deer would take the hit and run off like they usually do. Depending on where a deer is hit, they can routinely make it anywhere from 100-300 yards before they fall to the ground to rest, and then slowly bleed to death. Standard practice would be to simply let the deer run and fall where he may, then wait, potentially for a a few hours, for the deer to bleed out and die. If you immediately give chase, the deer will continue to run, making it more difficult to find. Whereas if you simply wait, the deer typically won't stray far.
You, however, were fortunate, and scored a shot through both lungs, and the deer dropped immediately. Consequently you won't have to deal with the difficulty of convincing the party to wait around for a couple hours.
You quickly field dress the deer, leaving the organs where they lay and return to the party with about 80 pounds of deer across your shoulders.
He would roast his caught squirrel, and offer it to the person with the second lowest amount of food. That person would be Pencil.
He would then start moving to scout ahead, while the rest of the party deals with the robed stranger.
You roast the squirrel and offer it to Pencil. It's not very much, and it's very gamey, but he appreciates the fresh meat.
You then scout up ahead along the north road. To your good fortune, the road appears clear. After perhaps 5 minutes of not finding anything but road, you return to the party.
The two of you both still feel sick to your stomach. Whatever it is, it's not a head cold. You're not congested at all, but your stomachs hurt and you feel like you want to puke but can't. You'd both like to roll over and go back to sleep, but given the situation, waiting here to die is clearly a poor choice. You'll just have to press on and hope you recover.
-10% penalty to all actions, and double water consumption until further notice
EveryoneHelp Clear up the Campsite like the twine and such, and keep moving forward toward lake town.
Keep watch while the camp is cleared up, then head with everyone else to Lake Town.
Help pack up the camp,
Get a move on to Lake town.
Get going to Lake Town afterwards.
Still involved in her own nefarious plans, Digital continues forward on the path.
Follow the group.
Stamping out what remains of the fire, you gather up yourself and prepare to resume your journey. Dustan cooks a recently caught squirrel and offers it to Pencil, who along with Romans both feel sick to the stomach, but assure everyone that they'll be able to keep up. Some of you are not so sure of that and begin to wonder if they're a zombie risk, but say nothing.
Meanwhile, Dustan heads north to scout and Kashyyk and Hawk each head briefly into the woods. Kashyyk returns to report that the bones you buried the previous night are still animate and have at least partially dug themselves out, but that they only seemed to react to his presence once he was very close. You infer that they probably couldn't sense your presence from several hundred feet away, and probably didn't spend the entire night crawling slowly towards your camp. Probably. But they were mostly definitely still moving.
As you ponder this, Hawk returns with, to his mild surprise, a medium sized doe on his shoulders. Considering that preparing the meat now would take some time, you decide to cut it into quarters, with Hawk, DigitalDemon, Andres and Kashyyk each carrying a quarter. It's generally best to let wild game sit for a few days before preparation, and you're not in immediate need of food. You can afford to wait. At the very least, perhaps you can prepare it tonight. Hawk estimates that once the inedible parts from been removed, it will probably worth about 10 person-days worth of food.
About this time, Dustan returns to report that the road ahead seems clear. Romans coughs a few times, and you each get up and begin walking.
Search for some Edible Plants
Examine the surrounding flora for health and damage where possible; the state of the vegetation might provide clues as to the general state and goings-on of the area.
(Crazyabe: Herb gathering target 99, roll 8+10 FAIL)
Along the road, Crazyabe and IronyOwl occasionally check the vegetation along the side of the road. As before, it seems to be generally a mix of trampled, eaten and partially regrown. You find nothing edible, and even non-edible plants appears to have been picked. To Crazyabe's educated eye it looks as if many people with no knowledge of plants at all, in their desperation for food, were randomly trampling through and sampling every random bush in hopes of finding something edible.
And yet, at the same time, whatever mob came though here seems to have done so some time ago. The destruction seems a few weeks old, and new life has sprung up from the death of the old. Nothing immediately edible, but given a few more weeks it might be difficult to tell that the devastation ever occurred.
Until winter sets in, at least. Snow is visible on the mountains to the north and east. You don't know how cold it will get, but given the slight chill of even midday, you'd best be prepared for a cold winter.
In any case, it occurs to you that your plant-picking efforts might be more successful if you were making the attempt not so close to the road. You already know that a massive flood of refugees has recently fled from this region. Perhaps if you ventured further into the woods, you might have more success. But deep woodland searches being generally incompatible with keeping up with the party, you refrain from going off on your own too far for now.
Shortly after midday you spy a man on the ground struggling with a large wolf on top of him. You yell to try to scare of the wolf and rush forward to help. Before you can close the distance, however, the wolf tears into the man's throat and shakes violently.
And then yelps and jumps back from the man, them flop over onto its side, thrashing wildly.
You slow down your approach as you see the man slowly pick himself off the ground and lumber over to the thrashing wolf and descend upon it, biting and swallowing chunks of flesh until the wolf stops moving. The sound of drawing your weapons attracts the mans attention, and he turns to you, his face and shirt soaked with blood.
Another zombie.
being outnumbered and already injured from its fight with the wolf, you dispatch it easily, but as before, even after being mutilated beyond the ability to simply stand, his various parts keep moving. Hacking off arm arm simply reduces it to crawling along the ground while the body continues to fight you. Cut off its head and the jaw continues to snap. With even burning and burying not having been successful the previous day, you're uncertain what to do to truly "kill" it. You settle for rendering the various pieces at least small enough to present no immediate threat, well aware that this could become a problem in the future if you're unable to find a solution.
You take the opportunity to rest. Romans and Pencil comiserate over their illness as she removes the bandage on his arm and inspects his wound.
(Romans healing attemptl, target 50: roll 20+11 FAIL)
Her superb previous treatment seems to have prevented infection, but the wound is not healing particularly well. A significant portion of muscle was bitten away, and it causes him pain to rotate his forearm or move his wrist. While it hasn't become any worse, it doesn't seem to be getting better very quickly either. Without either successful intervention or a stroke of good fortune, this might be an injury that stays with him for a long time. Romans puts on a new bandage and discards the old one, occasionally coughing all the while.
As for the wolf, at least for the ten minutes or so of your stay, it doesn't noticeably move. A few of you suggest taking it with you to see if perhaps it does become a zombie, but simply takes more time to become active. Noone volunteers to carry it. A few others suggest keeping the meat, but given the uncertain safety of zombie-contaminated meat, and your freshly caught deer, you decide not to take that chance, and instead resume your journey north towards Laketown.
SundownAs the sun approaches the horizon and you consider setting up camp, but decides to walk just
one more hill hoping for a view of the land on the far side. Reaching the crest and looking down you see devastation before you.
A brush fire has devastated the area, leaving only a few burned out husks of trees still standing. The lake is clearly visible, and along it the remains of perhaps 20 half burnt-out wooden buildings of various shapes and sizes. With mixed feelings of hope and dread you make your way towards them, hoping to find some survivors. It doesn't take long before you catch the first glimpses of movement. Yes, there are definitely people down there. Perhaps ten, perhaps twenty. It's difficult to be sure. You're quite certain you can reach the remains of the town before dark. A fifteen minute brisk walk at most. However, as you get closer, you notice something.
The forms walking around down there don't seem to be
going anywhere. They're not walking between buildings. They're not carrying anything. They're simply meandering aimlessly through the streets.
It will be dark soon.
Pencil: Injured arm: -10% combat rolls, plus hindered right arm| Sick: -10% penalty to all actions, and double water consumption
Romans: Sick: -10% penalty to all actions, and double water consumption
Hawk +1 hunting skill, +1 Archery skill
Hawk, DigitalDemon, Andres and Kashyyk: +quartered deer carcass
Romans -1 bandage
Food status:
* DigitalDemon, 1 day food & water, plus ~20 pounds of unprepared deer
* Dustan, 1 day food & water
* Hawk, 1 day food & water, plus ~20 pounds of unprepared deer
* Kashyyk, 1 day food & water, plus ~20 pounds of unprepared deer
* Romans, 1 day food, 4 days boiled lakewater
* Pencil, no food, 3 days boiled lakewater
* Crazyabe, 1 day food & water
* Andres, 1 day food & water, plus ~20 pounds of unprepared deer
* IronyOwl, 2 days food & water
This so seems like it should be a thing that bay12ers go to and have meetups at every year.