Xangô POV: Day 50

Current Wealth: 1 silver 47 copper

My brain was a giant artillery piece, and information was the ammunition.

Phrased like that, my need to walk around the shit-smelling, tattered village and take note of details and people sounded a lot cooler. I got on with it, despite my distaste for the task. Save from the fact that I’d already spent years getting used to just this sort of work, under my dad’s company, I was also motivated by the uniquely powerful desire to not be eaten alive. That was one of the few advantages of a giant zombie horde, I supposed.

Rinchester was far more categorically akin to Jhigral than Wolney, as I might’ve expected, but being frank, it was pretty far removed from either. Compact, like the city, but altogether lacking even as much scale as the town. Only a single building in the entire place that reached even as high as three stories. Apparently, it had been the mayor’s office back when they’d last had one.

That was about thirty years ago.

Now it was nothing but a relic. The village had, as I discovered, more or less been ignored by the local lord who ruled over it- a bannerman of Wolney’s governor. They’d become quite independent since, but not enough that they could weather the rotters, evidently. What interested me wasn’t actually the story of how their culture and leadership had developed, though. Just the fact that the mayor’s building was still fairly well maintained, and looked like it had much thicker walls than any other.

Clearly they’d noticed the same little detail as me. The building was box-like, with cobbled stones and primitive mortar making up most of its composition. Stepping inside, I could already see the hastily-made barricades that proved it’d been a hideout of choice, and recently.

I called on one of the people who’d struck me as closest the rabble had to a leader before, asking that he confirm. A tall fellow, for this world, he’d have been about average height back home. Wiry, gaunt with hunger, his hair was untidy and his eyes were sharp.

“Tucker.” He told me his name was. “Pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir.”

Oddly enough, he spoke with an American accent. Texan, if I wasn’t mistaken. When imagining the people in this region of the world we had decided on them having British accents. A foreigner then? And from a long way away. I resolved to ask him about it later.

“Yes sir, we’ve been hiding out here for the last few nights, as you may have seen the rotters have gotten through several of our other walls.”

I had seen. Little wooden shacks and huts with big planked walls, either torn apart or simply smashed inwards. There’d been dried blood congealed inside most of them. Apparently the little piggies who built their houses out of sub-par materials didn’t get to take refuge elsewhere after finding out.

“How many fighters do you have left?” I asked, hesitantly.

Tucker only snorted. “None, we never had any real fighters, this is a lumbering village.”

My jaw tightened as I stared at the blood, rephrasing my question.

“How many people do you have actively fighting, then?”

That gave him pause.

“Around thirty.” He said a moment later. “Last I checked we were outnumbered about ten to one, and only a few of those are guards. Most of them....Take care of themselves first.”

I swore. Not good, very, very bad in fact. We kept moving, and I kept tallying things. More ruined buildings, some still-standing useless ones. A barn which already had people shovelling excrement out of it- Solitaire was hard at work then- and an old alchemist’s shop. There was a bell tower, also stone like the town hall, and finally a storehouse which, when I checked the interior, mostly held lumber, timber and nails.

By the time my little survey was done, the better part of an hour had passed. I turned to Tucker as we moved out.

“How are people organised?” I asked him. Being honest it should’ve been one of my first questions, and my only reason for putting it off had been anxiety. His answer would very possibly determine whether I even had a chance of saving this town. Whether I even had a chance of saving myself.

Going by the expression on his face as he thought of an answer, I wasn’t exactly confident.

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“We don’t really have any official system.” He admitted. “Just sort of…Talk about things, and decide what we should do next together.”

It wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, I decided. If nothing else Darwinism would’ve taken care of the few morons that typically ruined such approaches. Still, it was another weight on my shoulders. We needed a more coherent leadership than that.

“From now on you answer to me.” I informed him, and spoke again as I saw the protest growing on his face. “You’ll see why after tonight, and you can make your decision then, but for now know that my brothers and I have a plan. We’re going to make a weapon to take care of some rotters for you, we’re going to add our own abilities to bolster your defence, and we’re going to fight tooth and nail to save both all of you and ourselves. But the price for that is that you do as we say tonight. If we die, we die, but if we live then you’ll have seen that now you have a chance beyond just crossing your fingers and buying time before the inevitable comes to pass.”

Truth be told, it wasn’t my best argument. I was tired, cold, irritated and worried. My father probably would’ve smacked me for making such a dogshit point. Tucker, though, lapped it up. I guess rhetoric was a bit less advanced in this world than ours.

“Damned if we don’t, then.” He sighed. “But only probably damned if we do. No choice there, is there?”

There wasn’t, and I made a note of how quick he was. Either his was a rare competence, or something about fighting an entire graveyard for weeks on end hardened people up. Probably it was both, and either way it was useful.

Intelligence: 6

Interesting.

We moved on for some time, until I finally came to the next of Rinchester’s points of interest. Perhaps predictably, it was Beam.

I watched him training the masses, and watched him do it well. Or at least I thought I did, truth be told I wasn’t actually sure what teaching people combat skills entailed. He seemed to be doing a good job of throwing them around and beating everyone up, however, which was probably a step in the right direction.

Beside me, Tucker spoke as he watched it all himself, voice touched by a bit of awe.

“Your brother is…Good.” He noted. I eyed him, sidelong.

“Very.” I agreed. “And there’s barely a scrap of magic in him, a lot of what you’re seeing is just raw physical prowess.”

He swallowed.

“Are you all this skilled?” The villager asked, turning eagerly to me, question infused with an almost sickening abundance of hope. It stabbed a guilty dagger into my guts to ruin it for him.

“We’re not.” I told him, practically watching the smile drop off his face. “But I at least can hold my own against most men, and our other brother- Solitaire- could probably fight two or more of me at once…And our companion, Argar, could beat any one of us if he put his mind to it.”

That at least seemed to restore some of the man’s confidence, and his thoughtful nod actually seemed to carry a fair amount of the hope I thought he’d lost. I wasn’t able to dwell on it for much longer, however. Trudging footsteps turned my focus around to the tall, furious Vitonnian woman we’d been chewed out by on first arrival.

She was still tall, now. And if anything even more furious. I braced myself for the lecture I knew was coming, watching her pull to a stop just feet from me and glare upwards. She barely had to tilt her head to stare into my face.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She demanded, thick, foreign accent cutting through the wind almost as easily as the wind cut through me. I weathered it regardless.

“Helping your village?” I replied, flippantly. It was maybe not the best choice, but it’d been a long day and a longer week, and we were burning daylight far faster than I’d have preferred.

She certainly didn’t seem to appreciate any of those contributing factors in her reaction, however.

“Giving everyone hope.” She growled. “You can’t seriously think you have a chance of making any difference here, not with a performance like that-” She gestured to Beam, who I thought was doing a perfectly fine job of teaching.

I couldn’t begin to argue against whatever apparent flaw she’d noticed, so I simply ignored the point entirely and sought to distract her from it.

“I’m not lying to anyone.” I told her. “I have hope, and so do all of you, as long as you-”

“We don’t have shit.” The Vitonnian snarled. “And you’re an imbecile if you think otherwise, because of you these people are staying with their heels dug in. Everyone should be taking that wagon the old fool snuck off with and using it to flee, that way at least some of us would live. As far as I’m concerned you’re killing everyone you convince otherwise.”

She turned on her heel and stormed off without another word, and I watched her go.

In all honesty, there was a fairly high chance she was right. But we needed money, and escaped refugees couldn’t pay as well as the inheritors of a newly-depopulated village. I wasn’t going to starve again.

Thinking about it all as starkly and coldly as that made my guts squirm. But I mastered myself. What choice did we have? None. This wasn’t a moral issue, it was a practical one, and as much as I hated Solitaire for the sheer brutality he’d unleashed without even asking…I could hardly claim to be an idealist.

We couldn’t afford to starve, couldn’t afford to die, and…In light of our modern culture, ethics, powers…We couldn’t afford to delay in gaining the power to help this world. Was I just telling myself that, as some justification?

Maybe. But that didn’t make it any less true. I swallowed the bitterness in my mouth, and turned back to Tucker.

“Let’s go and find my brother, Solitaire. I think he’ll have something you’d be quite interested to see.”