While going there, he figured that memory was something to cherish. How he had... died? Was tragic, but others who weren't here had perished too.
Remember fellow pilots while walking, and chant their names like a mantra. But he says his own every third name, to remember that he is the entity standing here, not them.
Be sure to thank the nice gun-lady for her words before we go trotting off to explore. An elfin officer is nothing if not courteous!
+1 Do all these things.
You give the ears a quick once-over. Yep, still pointy. Granted the woman is blindfolded, though that doesn’t seem to impede her much. She also looks human, and humans are pretty keen on throwing the word ‘humanity’ around like it was something for everyone else to be aspiring to.
Doesn’t really help much that none of the other races sounded particularly good when attached ‘anity’ to the end. Elfanity? Sounds like swear words used by elves. Orcanity? Large ocean predators doing needlepoint. Koboldanity? Just sounds like a dance fitness craze with a lot of yip-yapping.
You politely thank the nice gun woman in blue for her help and start walking toward the settlement. She waves at you as you leave, then turns and perches back on her rock and looks toward the ocean once more.
Just as an added precaution, for whatever it's worth, you begin chanting the names of all the Virgil's crew that you can remember, interspersing your own name for every third. There's still a strange dissonance when you remember them. Your early memories of them, getting acquainted as closely meshed gears part of a cutting edge project; these war against your final memories of them, getting torn apart in unspeakable ways that make your mind recoil a little. You feel something... shift inside your mind as you chant, though it's difficult to tell if it's significant or just PTSD starting to kick in. You breathe deeply, focusing on the names and early memories as you chant and walk.
The day is pleasant for walking. It’s a little on the lee side of twenty degrees, and there’s a steady salt breeze off the ocean. The ground is mostly level, and the largest resistance to your passing is in waist high scrub with woody stems and small, shockingly rough, leaves. With the impossibly vast dead city spanning the horizon ahead of you, the pastoral scenery reminds you of some of the drone footage that Nat-Geo shot of the New York exclusion zone- a weird contrast of park style nature abutted against the ruins of civilization.
A buzzing in your hand interrupts your repeated mantra, and you conjure your phone between your thumb and pointer finger. There’s wifi in the area. You look down at your phone. You look at the settlement. You look down at your phone again and check your available networks.
WhyIsThereNoGoddamnCoffeeIt’s only got a bar of signal, but it’s something. You tap it experimentally, it’s a secure network and asks you for a password to connect. You close your hand, banishing your phone, and add at least one concrete goal for the day: Get the Wifi Password.
You try to get a feel for the town as you draw close, and it’s surprisingly difficult with the ruined gigapolis in the background throwing all sense of scale to hell. If one assumes that the sun, now past its highest point, is still mostly going west as it heads toward the city skyline, then east side of town, where you approach from, appears to have been cultivated for agriculture. Large areas have been ripped clear of brush and planted in neat rows with a multitude of different shrubs. It doesn’t look so much like a farm field as it does an enormously expansive vegetable garden. Large stone pens, like the kind that they show luddites raising goats or pigs in, also present in a sort of cloverleaf network around a two story scrap-house that seems to loom outside the settlement proper.
A sense of foreboding fills you as you pass by the two-story scrap house at the edge of town. While the large gardens seem well worked, the two story house is dark windowed and the pens surrounding it are in a clear state of partial abandonment. The house itself appears to be made out of a hybrid of materials, rock in the first story likely pulled from the ground, but patched together with a mixture of plastic sheeting and welded metal plates that look like they were pulled out of the ruined city. Despite the ramshackle materials, it’s clear that the house was put together with the care and precision of an architect. It may be made from scrap, but it has straight angles and no noticeable cant on its foundation. Its windows are gaped open wide, and it looks as though the door was broken inward, but the rest of the building seems more in neglect than in ruin.
Still... The longer you look at that broken door and those empty animal pens the more certain you become that something unpleasant happened here. Above the broken-down door a sign still survives. “Darrien Farm”.
After a brief pause you keep walking, heading towards the settlement proper. Unlike the ruined building behind you, it clearly possesses electricity and life. You’d guess the town consists of perhaps fourty or fifty larger buildings of between one and three stories, with several dozen smaller buildings that have the look of houses spread out on the north and south like wings. Streets are wide and cobbled rather than paved, there’s no major vehicle traffic that you can see -- though you do see what look like a couple people on bicycles. While the day is still bright enough that there’s no artificial illumination on the streets yet, you can see that many windows have visible lights within. Construction is similar to the ‘Darrien Farm’ building you passed, scrap materials worked together with care and great effort to create surprisingly sturdy buildings. The difference here is that these look meticulously maintained. You can see more than one person on ladders redoing paint or repairing parts of structures.
As you draw closer, it becomes painfully clear that you’re the center of attention and everyone is being careful not to show it. One of the men, a stocky human, repainting colorful whorls on the side of a house has been repainting the same spot for a good half minute and keeps making sidelong glances at you. As you take your first steps on to the settlement streets, knots of people keep forming just across the street, breaking up suddenly if you move closer to them as if they all remembered better places to be. One young woman, comfortingly elvish in features, you surprise as she comes around a corner at the other end of a makeshift ‘block’ of buildings, and she immediately starts to wave at you, her expression delighted, before she clearly remembers something and blushes furiously, bowing her head and pointing down the street you’re already headed on.
Attempts to engage people on the street meet similar results to the woman you surprised. They barely speak, backing away from you and giving directions by pointing. You know they’re not mute, you can hear hushed conversations dying as you come close and erupting as you leave. The people here clearly have had some forewarning of your arrival, and they’ve equally clearly been told to give you handsign directions rather than interact with you directly. Their racial mix is familiar, though with a significant helping more humans than you expect -- as if their kind needed the boost -- and their attire is not entirely beyond your expectations. A lot of what they wear looks handmade, but the styles they’re definitely trying to emulate are at least close enough to what normal people wear. Strikingly, there do seem to be a number of folk in manufactured, even powered, garments that you wouldn’t expect to see anywhere but off a corporate production line.
With the small size of the town, and the repeated pointed directions of its laconic citizenry, you find yourself at its center quite quickly. There’s a structure there, a dome that the street simply curves around in a roundabout in the only non-right-angled intersection you’ve seen thus far. The dome is also not the same scrap construction as everything else, but rather looks to be carved from a single massive stone. There’s no joint or seam on the outside to indicate pieces mortared together, just a smooth polished grey surface and a single arched entrance, lacking any sort of door, in the side of the dome closest to you.
You approach slowly, feeling as much as hearing the murmured conversations of the town around you hush as you draw close to the dome’s entrance. Peering in, your eyes take a minute to adjust to internal gloom of the windowless dome. It isn’t pitch black within, there are scattered survival lanterns around the room. The radium powered lights glowing with a baffle softened LED glow that paints everything in pale blue.
The interior of the dome is covered in pictures. You take a step forward, almost involuntarily. Some of the pictures are crude drawing of little artistic merit, others are old style physical photographs, many on the outer wall are modern spray prints, but there’s also a fair number of holographic emitters on the floor that broadcast 3d renderings with varying levels of fidelity and power. All the pictures are of people. Young, old, male, female, human, elf, orc, dwarf, kobold, even one that looks damningly like a troll.
All these rememberings are places around the central feature of the dome’s interior: a well of the same monolithic construction as the dome itself. The well’s lip is at waist height, and, unlike any well you’ve ever seen or heard of, it’s brimming. Pitch black in the pale blue light, the water in the well continues back from the lip like a sheet of black glass, so perfectly full that it seems a single drop would make it overflow.
You’ve been around some pretty heavy arcanotech before. The kind of stuff that makes your teeth buzz and idiots believe is turning the young generation into gay frogpeople, and this well radiates a similar, buzzingly powerful, aura.
On the one hand, you could walk out of here and pin someone down to do more than point.
On the other hand, you have no idea what you’re doing here and everyone here seems pretty keen on you going to this well.
1x Powerful Conflicted Memory (Personal)
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Topic: [SG] Arisen (Read 5634 times)