You glance up to see a quartet of rifles pointed in your direction, and you can’t help but feel a sense of scathing disappointment in yourself. It seems you’ve been so engrossed in scavenging and looting that you hardly even bothered to Scan for predators.
If you can get out of this, you’re sure that you won’t make that same mistake again.
“Raise your hands!” says one of the four people, which you immediately comply with.
The four of them don’t look particularly aggressive, and seem just like any normal folk. In fact, they remind you of the Watch back at the Settlement. Although their rifles seem to be well-maintained, they’re all clearly different makes and models. Not only that, but whatever armor they’re wearing is relatively bare-bones, such as padded sportswear and helmets.
You perform a surreptitious Scan just to get a sense of their mental states and find that none hold any malicious intent towards you. In fact, they seem more fearful and anxious than anything else. One of them in particular appears to carry quite a lot of anger, so you keep your eye on him as much as possible.
The last thing you want is for him to freak out and unload on you.
“What’re you doing here?” asks the person who has been commanding you.
This person appears to be the oldest of the group, with graying hair and wrinkles to match. You guess he’s about 50, and clearly has some experience under his belt. What’s more, you notice that he’s holding his rifle in a similar way to how your Dad holds his rifle - which must mean that this person has had some military training.
Makes sense why he would be the one leading these people.
“Just passing through,” you answer. “Not meaning any harm to anyone.”
The angry one of the bunch scoffs audibly, as though in disbelief.
“Passin’ through?” he says. “More like stealing what you can from this here shop!”
“Why, does this store belong to you?” you retort. “Highly doubt it belongs to anyone these days. I mean, if someone did, they would’ve pulled all their stuff out way long ago, right?”
“That don’t matter, smartass!”
The angry one raises his rifle at you, then jams it forward threateningly as though he’s going to fire it. In response, you exude a low-level Surge to help calm everyone down. Although it works to some degree, and their anxieties ebb slightly, the angry one hardly budges.
Whatever anger issues he has is clearly deep-seated.
“Calm down, Carl,” says the leader of the group.
He puts his hand on Carl’s rifle and lowers it for him. The rest follow suit soon afterwards. You lower your hands as well, once you’re sure it’s okay for you to do.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” says the group leader. “Never know who you can trust around here.”
“Don’t sweat it,” you reply. “Better to be safe than sorry these days, so I don’t blame any of you.”
“Glad you’re reasonable.”
“I try to be. So, I take it you all live here?”
You gesture at the town around you, but you realize that can’t possibly be right. You didn’t sense anyone the first time you walked into town, and so these people must have come from somewhere else. Unless of course, they’re just now coming home.
“No, not really,” says one of the people. “We live a bit northwest of here. We’re just kinda patrolling right now.”
“Oh, sure, tell the dang stranger everything about us, why don’t you?” Carl blurts out. “How do we know we can trust ‘em?”
You’re actually with Carl on this, and he definitely has a point. Trusting others in a world like this is kind of a luxury. If you didn’t have any powers at all, you’d have no idea if you could trust them, either.
If you even got a sense that these people are out to kill you, you would have gone all out with a truly debilitating Surge, or a lethal Interrupt. You’re relatively certain that you could easily cripple these people with a thought.
Thankfully, you don’t have to test that fact at all.
“Tricky thing, aint it,” says the group leader. “Trust, that is. It’s kind of an exchange, isn’t it? Gotta give trust in order to gain it. Let’s start things out the right way, maybe get a little more trust going - what’s your name, stranger?”
You open your mouth to tell them, but realize that you don’t actually want to. It goes a bit beyond trust to give someone your real name, at least the way you see things. All kinds of crazy powers exist, and who knows what people could do with your name…
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Plus, your name doesn’t really mean much in this broken world. Whoever you were before all this happened is long gone, and all that’s left is you.
And who you are is a tourist, a vagabond, a drifter.
“I’m no-one,” you say with a sigh. “Just traveling so I can find my place in the world, if such a place actually exists anyway.”
“Can’t say I understand, but I can respect that,” says the group leader. “How ‘bout we call you Nomad, then? Got a nice ring to it. You’ve already met Carl. That’s Janet. Next to her is Steve. I’m Frank.”
“Nice meeting you all, all things considered.”
Frank chuckles lightly as he slings his rifle over his shoulder.
“You headed anywhere in particular, Nomad?” he asks.
“Westward,” you reply. “Trying to find people and purpose. I was following the I-80 westbound, but decided to stop here for some supplies. And now that I’m thinking about it, I need water badly. Happy to trade with you all if you have any.”
“We’ve only got our patrol kits with us,” says Steve. “I don’t think we’re allowed to trade that, are we?”
Frank nods his head to confirm their inability to trade, then turns back towards you.
“If you want, we can lead you back to our township,” he says. “We’ve got a trading post set up there that you can capitalize on. As long as you behave yourself, anyway. If you don’t, we’d be forced to shoot ‘cha.”
“Sounds fair,” you say. “Lead on, I guess.”
“Well, we’ve gotta finish our rounds first. But you’re more than welcome to join us. You’ll have to stay out of our way in case we run into anything, though.”
“I’m not exactly helpless, and I could maybe pitch in if things get to that point.”
You open up your poncho to reveal the pistol strapped to your thigh, which Frank nods at in acknowledgement.
Of course, you also have your psionic powers at your disposal, and could make their lives infinitely easier. You could literally do another Scan to confirm or deny if anything’s out here that could be a threat to them, and that would be that.
In fact, you do just that and do yet another Scan of the township around you. Besides all of you, there aren’t any other people out here. Noir is off on her hunt, though many of the critters in your vicinity have fled thanks to how noisy you’ve all been.
You say none of this, though. Simply, you aren’t sure if having powers is something you want to share just yet. You have no idea how they’d react to that kind of news, after all.
The quartet then gets back to their patrol with you in tow. Like the Watch used to back in the city, they go down street by street and check them dutifully. Sometimes they’ll go into a house or a shop to do a bit of scavenging - usually for various sundries. Toilet paper and clean clothing and what have you.
They pick through what few things can be found, and stow them away in their packs. You note that they don’t fill their bags to the brim with things, and only take one or two items at a time. Even if there’s a whole host more to take from.
Almost as though they’re being quite sparing in their scavenging. You’re not quite sure why they’re doing this, but you don’t exactly ask why. You simply leave them to their proclivities.
All the while, you all chat genially among yourselves, mostly in an effort to get to know you better. You find these people to be decent enough, and certainly trustworthy enough. Frank is a former member of the military, as you guessed. But he left the service long ago to be a homesteader. Janet had always been a safety inspector for the area, specifically for the buildings and structures. Steve was a humble grocer who has since turned his skills to farming.
They tell you that everyone puts in time to patrol, no matter what their duties are in this new life. Everyone’s trained to shoot with rifles, and share the burden of protecting everyone else. Basically, no matter who they are and what they do for a ‘living’, they all equally do their best to keep everyone safe through armed resistance.
Through your chats, they tell you that they’ve certainly had their share of bandit gangs and wild critters such as the random, rare Crag. Though they mostly deal with boars more often than not.
All in all, they’re just regular folks trying to make it in a hostile world as best they can. They seem to have the usual worries that most survivors have - food, water, clothing, shelter, a future…
Well, except for Angry Carl. He seems to keep to himself, stewing in his simmering anger. His thoughts seem to swirl around certain words and phrases he has heard over and over again. He seems to think of them cyclically, similar to how your mind works.
But instead of refining the thoughts until they’re more coherent and meaningful, they seem to echo over and over, unchanging.
You can’t exactly tell what the words and phrases are, or mean. Some part of you recognizes that he’s remembering parts of a show or a broadcast, and replaying them in his mind. But they aren’t congruous, and come at him like fragments of an entire conversation.
Part of you thinks that if Carl had become psionic, he might have turned into a Crazed.
You wonder how he had gotten like that, if the apocalypse changed something in him. But then again he might have always been like that from the get-go. A part of you can’t help but think that if you were Frank, you would never take Carl with you on a single patrol. He’s more of a liability than a boon, that’s for sure.
Anyone with an itchy trigger finger isn’t really suited to protect others, at least in your opinion.
As you all walk and chat, you pull out one of your meat skewers and munch away at the lukewarm meat. You wonder if this is a bad idea, if the meat has grown bacteria or parasites in the meantime. But it’s too late for that now, and you polish off one of the chunks hungrily.
“What’s that?” asks Janet.
You wipe your mouth and chew faster, just so you can reply.
“Ah, just some opossum,” you say. “Wanna try?”
You offer her one of your skewers, but she refuses.
“I can’t take your food,” she says. “That’d be rude of me.”
“You ever eat this stuff?” you ask. “I only just started learning to hunt, so I don’t know if there’s anything better to catch.”
“Opossum’s alright,” says Frank. “Definitely good eating in ‘em, even if they’re rank and rowdy little bastards. You’ll definitely find plenty of ‘em out here, so ain’t no small loss to hunt ‘em.”
“What do you all usually eat?”
“Nothing too fancy. We got plenty of wild deer and hogs in these parts, so we’re rich in venison and pork… We got chickens, too, but we got them mostly for their eggs. Got a couple plots growing corn and green beans and such, too.”
The more he speaks about their township’s food setup, the more you find yourself jealous of it. Of course you’d like to have a food source that’s reliable and secure, so your stomach practically grumbles in complaint.