between then and know

[intricate_engineer]

It was a trap.
Glen should have seen it coming, but she'd thought the offer might be genuine. Wasn't the possibility of immortality worth the risk?
Well, not this time.
Her pendant, her way out, was broken.
She tried to use it anyway.

Comments

[pythbox]

And she arrives in a barren wasteland, dry cracked ground stretching out to the horizon in every direction, marked only by the withered husks of long-dead trees and the brittle stalks of long-dead grass.

The sun is low in the sky, casting harsh shadows from the dead plants; in the direction the shadows point, off in the distance, a low hill is the only significant variation in the shape of the landscape visible from where she stands.

[intricate_engineer]

This is not where she meant to go.
She tries to leave.
The pendant lies uselessly in her hand.
She's not getting home that way.

She carefully pockets the pendant, and begins to inspect her surroundings.

[pythbox]

It's warm out, on the verge of uncomfortably hot, and the sky is a clear blue. The air is very dry. The dead plants are very dead. That distant hill is the biggest landscape feature visible, but there are a few other dips and rises in sight here and there.

Nowhere does there seem to be water.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen looks for the nearest shade.

[pythbox]

The dead trees' shadows are spindly enough to be mostly useless for this purpose. The hill seems like it might be her best bet.

[intricate_engineer]

She heads towards it, taking a mental inventory of her supplies.

She's always prepared for emergencies, but she doesn't know if she's prepared enough for this.
She has her bag. It's sturdy and light.

She has her computer, with an internal generator that should last for years. Unfortunately, her connection to the database is broken and she has very little information stored in the computer itself.

She has a bottle of emergency rations. Each one is 500 calories and contains vitamins and sodium. She should have 80 pills. At three a day, that's about 27 days. But they don't contain enough protein or fat, she doesn't think she could live off them for that long.

She has a hydration unit of her own design. It contains liquid hydrogen and oxygen and can mix them to form water. It can also, very slowly, extract water from the air. Under normal conditions, it could make enough water to last a week under and can extract a day's worth of water every two days. She doesn't know exactly how the heat and dryness will change that, but she'll need to find more water soon.

She has basic first aid kit with healing accelerators, antibiotics, painkillers, antivenom, bandages, gauze, scissors, tweezers, and tape.

She has a translator unit, which she could scavenge for parts.

She has a soda and a bar of chocolate.

She has a basic repair kit that will do nothing for her pendant.

She has a spare pair of socks.

She'll check when she reaches the shade, but she thinks that's it.
She hopes it will be enough.

[pythbox]

The sun sinks lower as she approaches the hill; the shadows lengthen.

As seen from this side, the hill itself is just a big rounded lump of the same dry cracked earth. The stumps of a few dead trees cling to its gentle slopes, and here and there a lonely root pokes through the lifeless soil, looking a little like twisted white bones.

Is the air a little less dry here? It seems like it. And those roots... life held on here for a little longer than it did in the rest of this barren waste.

If she walks around the hill, she'll find out why.

Sheltered in its crumbling curve is a large open pool of water. It looks like at one time the hill was round, and then this part of it caved in completely, exposing a stone pit that then filled with water. There are also signs that the water level used to be much higher, but there's still enough left that she shouldn't worry about dying of thirst anytime in the next few weeks, if she can get drinkable water out of this unpleasant-looking stuff.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen does circle the hill, keeping an eye out for any sign of life.
When she comes upon the water, she grins and punches the air.

She kneels down by the pool, dipping her fingers in.
She doesn't want to risk drinking it now, but her hydration unit should be able to filter out the water and she could boil it.
She'll need a container.
She lays out the contents of her bag.

She doesn't have much that she didn't remember before.
A tin of mints, plastic bags in the first aid kit, a packet of tissues, a few crumpled papers.

[pythbox]

The water is slightly gritty but pleasantly cool. It has a very mineral-rich smell, which may or may not be to her taste.

There's also another, bigger hill visible to the east, now that this one isn't blocking her view. It seems farther away, though.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen looks at the sun and tries to estimate the time.

[pythbox]

Late afternoon moving into evening. She might or might not be able to walk to the second hill before dark, if she's fast.

[intricate_engineer]

She decides to risk it.
There's no obvious shelter or source of food here, and she has enough water to last a few days.

She heads towards the second hill, taking large, even strides.

[pythbox]

Parts of the hillside are grey stone rather than grey-brown dry earth. There is less of a smell of water here, but there is something that might be much more interesting:

Carved into a vertical stone face on the hill's northeast side, a huge rectangular doorway, maybe two meters wide by three meters tall. Ancient, weathered hinges suggest the former presence of long-departed double doors. There doesn't seem to be any light inside, but it makes a better shelter than anything else she's seen so far.

[intricate_engineer]

She enters cautiously.
If there are animals here, this would be a good place for them to hide.

She takes out her computer, and turns it to its brightest setting.

[pythbox]

The tunnel proceeds straight into the hillside at a slight downward slope for a few steps, then curves to the right and opens into a rounded chamber. There are no signs of current animal habitation: just a few drifts of dust and sand on the bare stone floor, and old grooves in the walls here and there that look unsettlingly like claw marks.

A few hard-to-identify pieces of broken wooden furniture are scattered across the uneven stone floor; directly across from the tunnel to the outside, a badly damaged wooden door stands crookedly in its hinges, looking like one good kick would knock it loose entirely.

All in all, the place is not promising from a defensive standpoint, but does look like it would hold up against weather. As for comfort... well, maybe she'll find some less-than-totally-destroyed furniture behind that door.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen takes a picture of the claw marks and then kicks the door open.

[pythbox]

Goodbye, door.

Beyond the ex-door, another short curved tunnel leads to a much wider chamber; this one must take up most of the middle of the hill.

In addition to broken furniture, this one contains rather a lot of old bones, many of them also broken. Is that a human skull? Looks like it. There might be more, but that's the only one that's intact enough to recognize at a glance.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen carefully picks up the skull.
She doesn't have the expertise to determine if it's real, but she takes several pictures of it anyway.
She also photographs some of the other intact bones and the insides of several broken ones.
She goes to inspect the walls.
Are they stone? Is this a natural cave?

[pythbox]

They are stone, and they don't quite look carved, exactly, but neither do they look rough enough to be perfectly natural. Something weird about that.



Among the broken furniture in this room is a heavy wooden chest, upside down and smashed apart with some unrecognizable trash scattered nearby. It's in slightly better shape than the fragments of chairs and tables and what might once have been an empty bookcase, not to mention the round metal plate folded nearly in half; perhaps what's left of the chest might contain some useful object or other that wasn't destroyed with the rest of this place.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen slips the metal plate into her bag, and heads over to the wooden chest.

[pythbox]

Inside the wooden chest:

A sack of extremely dessicated vegetables.

A few scraps of fabric that disintegrate at the slightest disturbance.

More than a dozen loose marbles of varying sizes, all made of something not quite exactly like coloured glass. They pour out of the chest and roll across the floor when it shifts during investigation.

Two books in surprisingly good shape, and one that falls apart like the fabric into dust and paper fragments.

A small empty crystal vial with a faceted crystal stopper, and the shards of a few more like it.

A pair of heavy gloves, miraculously intact, made of what looks like dark brown leather with a silvery sheen.

A selection of tools, some recognizable (tongs, tweezers, a mallet), some less so. Many feature the same silvery-brown leather as the gloves.

Another metal plate, similar in character to the bent one but undamaged and about twice as large - more than a foot across, where the other was more like six inches. This one also has a fancy ceramic backing. The metal side is perfectly flat, almost but not quite mirror-polished.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen is delighted to find the tools and the metal.
She wants to inspect them more closely, but it's going to get dark soon, if it hasn't already.

She seals the books, carefully, inside a plastic bag and sets them back inside the chests.
She does the same with the paper fragments, lifting them one by one, salvaging what she can.

Then she begins gathering pieces of wood. She makes three piles near the broken door.
Fragments, medium, and large.
For now, she ignores anything she can't easily carry. She inspects the wood for fasteners as she goes.

[pythbox]

There are plenty of chips and splinters, and a number of pieces like chair legs and corners of tables, and a few bigger ones like the three big pieces of the door.

Much of the furniture seems to have been held together by well-fitted wooden pegs. Here and there, the shape of a piece suggests that this chair or table or box was actually carved all at once from a solid block, improbably enough. Nails are rare, but there are a few, and some metal hinges from broken boxes.

[intricate_engineer]

She gathers the pegs and the few nails and hinges in small piles next to the chest.

The design of the furniture is interesting. It suggest a high level of craftsmanship. The furniture carved out of a single piece of wood suggest genetic engineering, magic, or giant trees. The lack of other technology makes her doubt genetic engineering, but doesn't rule it out.

She heads outside to judge the time and the weather.

[pythbox]

Evening, just past sunset. The sky is clear, and the temperature is warm but getting colder; there's a bit of wind picking up, too.