Quote:
The little village is unnaturally empty and devoid of all life sans that which came from Destiny City. To add to the eeriness of everything, sometimes a small area will randomly feel cold and unnerving more than the rest of the town. Close investigation of the area will result in finding a small piece of weathered metal; you can just barely make out runes carved into it, but it's not large enough for you to make out anything. As soon as the metal is picked up, the mood in the area immediately fades and, oddly, you feel safer holding it. You may only find one of these per character!
Sighing and moving as carefully as she could, Ilmare paced the little hut that she and Saiph had taken for themselves. She could see weak light peeking under the door and knew that they now had a few hours worth of relative peace. And since Saiph was still curled up asleep, Ilmare decided to go outside to explore the village a bit. Let the kid sleep, she thought. Poor thing needs it. She wasn’t sure how much experimenting the girl had done, but Ilmare knew from her own that powering down didn’t work. Which presumably meant that if any of the normal people here were magic, they couldn’t power up either. Shaking her head, she carefully opened the wooden door and slipped out, closing it gently behind her.
As she walked, she was careful to stay in sight of the hut. The few people that she saw scuttling around she nodded to. There was no point in generating hostility.
“Well self,” she muttered under her breath, “where the hell do we look?”
As she studied the village she decided that the edge nearest her own hut would work. She could see if there was anything worth looting in some of the more run down buildings. Feeling a little better with a concrete plan, the corrupt senshi strode briskly to the area and spent a few moments peeking into broken doors or past shattered windows. The sheer lack of any indicators of life was alarming. Sure, there were her fellow Destiny City folks, but there should have been natives here. Someone had built the village. So where were they? Tumbledown cottages and rotting crops were a sign that someone had been here at some point in the not so distant past, right? Did the monster eat everyone? For that matter, where did the monster come from?
“What a damned mess,” she growled. And then paused and shivered. It never really got warm here, but for a moment, she had felt as if she’d wandered into an icy patch. Rubbing her arms in an attempt to feel a little warmer and less spooked, she glanced down and found herself looking at the remains of a flower bed. The flowers were withered husks, but she still knelt and scrabbled a little in the dirt. It really looked as if whoever had planted the flowers had been trying for a big garden. And she wasn’t sure, but she thought she’d seen a faint glint of something in the dirt. Hoping for a bit of glass that she could use as a firestarter, Ilmare searched carefully.
After several minutes, she came up with a small bit of metal. Disappointed, she would have tossed it away if she hadn’t seen what looked like faint etching. Holding it nearly to her nose and trying to clear dirt away with her thumb, she was sure that there was writing of a sort on the wee thing. But it wasn’t anything that she could clearly make out. Well, maybe Saiph would find it interesting. Holding the metal tightly in her hand, Ilmare began to head back to the hut. As she walked, she slowly realized that some of the ever present sense of oppression had lifted. And while she didn’t feel safe, she felt a little safer. Was the metal some sort of protection charm? If it was…
All the more reason to get back to the hut and Saiph.
(Word Count: 573)
