***This thread was originally started in the Gamer Connection thread, but resumes here.***
Darkness falls amid the meager campfires, campfires that use very precious timber. The logging camp of Feathered Falls feels the presence of darkness like another visitor and witness to its miserable state. For three weeks, no successful ventures have brought forth more than a few cords of Urld wood, a rich black bark sought by sages and alchemists. Newly hired hands have vanished like the loggers whom they replaced. A few stronger or stubborn men have returned to camp- lacking their axes, any wood, and perhaps their minds. While the small camp can provide for its workforce indefinitely, the spirit of its people might dwindle faster than any sundry supplies.
Heavy rains pour down your necks. This close to the timberline, the cold water aches the your muscles and chills bone. However, the logging foreman asked that people gather near his tent for some news. August Steadfellow, a fellow logger, returned this morning and straightway visited his foreman. His story seemed too impossible to tell second-hand, so “Cat-Face,” your de facto leader, asked August to tell it to you himself.
“They walked,” starts August, a young lad of no more than eighteen years, and assumes that his captive audience knows who ‘they’ are. Your question is quickly answered: “Bones picked themselves up out of the ground and walked! There were too many of them. Aarrrgh! They probably followed me here. We’re doomed. We’ll never leave this camp alive, and we’ll be like th…them.” The young man appears visibly shaken, and his stammering stems more from fear than any cooler temperatures. As his speaks, he withdraws into himself, shielding his eyes with his elbows as if horrifically reliving the experience. Even the fires around the camp seem affected by his speech- the smoke swirls around August in weird patterns and seems to make odd shapes. August finally collapses to the ground, and Cat-Face places a blanket around the man.
“Well, that settles it. Camp Feathered Falls closes tomorrow. Everyone will go home. We can’t get the wood we need to fund this mission, so we have to return to wherever we call home,” says Cat-Face. The rugged and short foreman appears un-shaken by the story, but rather matter-of-fact in his business bravado.
You are left standing in the growing darkness, being cold, wet, and possibly unemployed.
What does anyone want to do?
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