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

[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.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen heads back to the inner room.

She shouldn't need to worry about being eaten. There have been no signs of life whatsoever. No recent kills, no droppings, not even any living plants.

But it's going to get cold soon, very cold if the other deserts she's lived in are anything like this one.
She's wearing light clothes and is already getting chilly.

She needs a fire.
She has wood, but no matches.
She doesn't have a blanket either, another emergency basic she didn't think to include.

Glen is the architect of interplanetary travel. She'd never expected to be stranded. She'd prepared to be injured or holing up somewhere safe until the danger passed, but stuck? Never.

Of course, she thinks, staring at the wood. Even then, matches would have been useful. Glen's just never had much thought for wilderness survival.

She wishes Alex was here. This is, essentially, his job.
Of course, if he was stuck here, he'd be trying to survive until Glen could come rescue him.

She could start a fire with her computer's generator, but it's unlikely she could dismantle and reassemble it with the available tools. She's not going to sacrifice her computer, not unless things get truly desperate.

Wasn't there something about rubbing two sticks together?
But that seems ridiculous, she doubts she could build up enough friction...

Flint. She needs flint. It might still be light enough.
She heads back outside.

[pythbox]

The flat dead ground is very flat and very dead and not especially resource-heavy, but if she inspects the outside of this hill, she'll find a few promising-looking rocks. Actually, quite a few promising-looking rocks. Some resemble flint; others look like they could be raw gemstones, if she's in the market for those.

[intricate_engineer]

She circles the hill.

It's been a while since she's used flint and even longer since she's seen it in its natural state, but she can't take every rock.

So she grabs every rock that's a dark black, has broken into a sharp edge, or that has an oily shimmer. She hopes one of the criteria will be effective. If she picked up any gemstones, it's by accident.

She stops when her bag begins to be difficult to lift. She does one last check of the surrounding area before heading inside.

[pythbox]

Surrounding area: Still dead. Still flat. Still no signs of anything coming to eat her.

Inside, everything is right where she left it.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen settles down next to the chest and sweeps the rocks onto the floor. She digs into her small toolkit and pulls out a small wire cutter with a steel head. Then, she dims her computer until the outlines of her hands are barely visible in the dark.
She begins striking the rocks, one by one, watching for sparks.

[pythbox]

Rock number two: sparky!

[intricate_engineer]

Glen grins and turns her computer back on.

Now to start a fire.
Glen has never started a fire before.
Well, once, but that was an accident! It also involved several unintended exothermic reactions and a tank of hydrogen which doesn't seem relevant here.

She doesn't user her paper, because though easy, it would be a waste of her very finite resources.
She definitely does not use the books.

Instead she takes the knife and begins to shave slivers off a piece of wood. Once she has a small pile, she places several small pieces of wood around it, then strikes sparks into the shavings.

[pythbox]

Sparks, sparks, sparks... yep, that's a fire. It would be congratulating her on her technological prowess if it weren't too busy burning.

[intricate_engineer]

Glen pushes a few larger sticks in and makes sure the area around the flames is clear.
She accidentally breathes in some smoke and coughs.
She probably should have built the fire closer to the door.