Farrah did end up lighting that third cigarette.
The streets of Sambourough brought back too many memories. She’d spent over twenty years of her life here, and back then, before the End, the Fall, or whatever else people liked to call it, she thought she’d spend the rest of her life here too. But now, each month felt like a year.
The wind hissed through the trees, agreeing with her.
In this part of town, evacuation procedures had been followed more strictly. The leftmost and rightmost sides of each lane had remained free, allowing for emergency vehicles to pass, and creating a corridor for Farrah to follow. It seemed so much narrower on foot, even though she knew her SUV – which was still likely parked by the canal – would pass through here with ease. But the cars felt like they were closing in on her, trapping her among metal walls, just like they’d trapped their owners. Owners who were long gone, having broken free of their metal cells to crawl with unquenchable rage towards the nearest living people.
Scan
- Directional
- Targeted
Cost: Free.
A fast-moving array of dots appeared two hundred meters west. Farrah didn’t need to spend extra Power to know what those were. She climbed onto the nearest car, and hastily went through her rucksack, checking her ammo. Those crawling fuckers were a bullet sink. But at least they didn’t attract any walkers right away, unless there was a head in the mix, which Farrah had heard accounts of, but had never witnessed for herself. The crawling swarms were also much better at spotting the living.
Farrah scanned the area again and swung her Steyr AUG over her shoulder.
Cartridge change
Modified the bullet diameter without modifying the ammunition of a firearm. *Requires individual attunement to each new weapon*
Trained >>> Mastered
Cost: 1P for cartridge body change. 1P for bullet head change. 2P for propellant type change. 2P for primer change. 1P for rim change.
Domain benefit
One additional level of mastery. 50% chance of cost being free.
Silencer
Fully removes the noise produced by a bullet being fired, and the noise it makes on entry and exit. *Requires individual attunement to each new weapon*
Expert
Cost: Weapon-dependant. Current: 1P per bullet. 1P per 10 meters travelled after the first 10m.
Domain benefit
85.5% chance of skill being free.
Farrah hesitated for a second. There was another skill she could use, but its effect would last for hours, and it felt like a waste to use it on such a small target. A swarm of mismatched body parts crawled out from a neighbouring car and quickly changed Farrah’s mind. There were hands and feet in the mixture. From the way they moved, it was unclear if they carried the clusters of ribs and long brownish intestines or if the other organs also had a will of their own.
Ammo Efficiency
Reduces the chance of using a projectile munition from 100% to 5% per shot. *Requires individual attunement to each new weapon*
Expert
Cost: 2P per 5 hours of usage. 1P to interrupt effect.
Domain benefit
85.5% chance of skill being free.
Several rounds of 00 buckshots hit the swarm. It split apart, flanking Farrah’s car with too much coordination for a mutated cluster of remains.
Farrah focused on one of the groups, eliminating it chunk by chunk, and making it leave a train of unrecognisable bits of flesh that stopped half a meter before the car. She increased the calibre of her next shot, taking most of the other cluster out before it had time to start crawling up the car. She did miss a hand and a slithering chunk of guts, however.
She jumped off the car, shooting down the hand – and half of the car roof – just as it was about to leap at her face. She felt pressure on her shoe, and stomped onto a brown-grey organ.
She scanned the area, to make sure it was really over. Before putting away her gun.
Some of the mutations made more sense than others. These fuckers just existed. Farrah would have stipulated that they formed from walkers who’d taken too much damage, but that simply couldn’t explain their abundance. The other theory was that they mutated like everything else from a single corpse, slowly reforming its bones and flesh into a mixture of almost identical limbs and guts.
Farrah glanced to her left, to a foot, the remaining skin on which was just a few shades darker than her own. The hand that’d climbed onto the car had undeniably been a pinkish white, although there wasn’t enough left of it to check.
A thundering sound of an explosion came from four or five blocks down. Farrah grabbed the lanyard of her Steyr, ready to shoot. A second explosion reverberated through the desolate streets mere seconds later.
Scan
- Directional
- Radius
Cost: 1P per 500m radius from focal point.
Two kilometres, and nothing. Well, all the zombies within ear range were now headed in that direction, but there was nothing in the vicinity of where the sound would have come from. Farrah zoomed over the grey outlines of buildings. No yellow or blue dots were hidden under them. Whoever or whatever had caused that explosion was gone.
Farrah did think it over, before activating her run skill and heading in that direction. She’d in and out before the newly-formed hoard came. And even if it did catch up to her, she could shoot her way out, not really risking anything anymore now that they were already on high alert.
If it’d been a fellow Collector, it was her moral obligation to check on who it was and inform any friends or family if she’d cross paths with them. As morbid as it sounded, the thought of that Collector perusing a unique quest – which she could repeat and finally unlock some new skills – did cross her mind.
She came to a stop over a collapsed hole in a four-lane road. Cars were drowning in cement, and smoke was coming out of several of their boots. The ones closest to the epicentre of the collapse were fully burnt. Over a dozen of walker corpses, and two distinct masses of bone and burnt flesh were scattered by the epicentre.
Farrah scanned the area one last time, before scanning it vertically and allowing herself to slide down one of the concrete slabs. Getting into the tunnel under the road proved to be a bit of a challenge, and Farrah promised herself she’d turn around the second she found a human corpse. She stopped, her legs dangling into the empty two or so meters below her. Before letting herself fall, she ran her gloved fingers over the asphalt. It was covered in black burn residue, most likely dust, but its pattern seemed almost organic.
Flashlight in one hand, Farrah dropped her rucksack, then slid between the cracks at the epicentre of the crater, hung from the border, before letting herself fall the remaining few dozen centimetres.
----------------------------------------
Domain Entered: Warren
Pinned notes available. Display notes?
Yes
No
Farrah knew her favoured domain well enough. What she didn’t know was how to get rid of the pinned message, after having spent weeks trying to pin it.
She took a look around the tunnel, scanning it in the process. There were three mutated walkers making their way towards her from the south-east. Nothing on the opposite side. There was a second tunnel, perpendicular to the one she was in now, the entrance to which had collapsed under fresh rubble. Burn marks could be seen here too, both over the rubble and the roof of the tunnel.
There were no distinct marking over the plain concrete walls. No cables, no voltage boxes, only triangular patches of white vinyl, no bigger than Farrah’s hand, that reflected her flashlight light, and pointed towards the collapsed tunnel entry.
She scanned in that direction as far as she could. Then, she reduced the precision of the scan and checked an additional 5 kilometres further. With the grey on grey rasterised squares, she couldn’t tell where the tunnel led, other than it connected to the metro and its maintenance network. But at two three meters tall, and five meters wide, it seemed excessive for simple maintenance.
Farrah spun towards the southern end of the tunnel, aiming her pistol. The walkers stayed just outside of the range of her flashlight, but she could see their outlines moving in the shadows. They were tall and deformed, with no skin hiding their bare muscles, that protruded from their bodies like a colony of mushrooms trying to escape a pot of substrate all too small.
Farrah fired six shots, ten another volley of three. A groan came from the shadows, and two of the walkers lept out of it. On all fours, one of them immediately darted for the shade to the left of the collapsed ceiling. The other got stunned by the light for just the second Farrah needed to pierce its skull.
She pointed her flashlight at the remaining one. It shrieked, turning its back to her. Its back muscles were an unnatural greyish red. They enveloped most of his spine, making it seem like they’d grown around the bone, and not the other way around. Farrah put it out of its misery.
Whereas with the surface walkers there was a justified debate to be had about any vestiges of humanity, with creatures such as this one, its new nature was more than apparent. Farrah didn’t know what made them mutate. No one really knew. And she wasn’t sure which one of the two fates was worse; to become a creature unrecognisable as having once been human, or to tread the streets in your very own body, no longer in control of who you were or what you did…
As she shone the light down by her feet, she noticed traces of blood. Not from the mutations that is, as it continued past Farrah, down the north-west hallway. Farrah scanned the area once more, and having seen no yellow dots on the rasterised map, yelled:
“Hey! Is anyone there? I’m a Collector too, do you need help?”
A cacophony of groans and moans came from the collapsed ceiling. Hands reached down, scraping and cutting themselves against the concrete, but none dared to enter a domain that wasn’t theirs. Not yet at least. In a few hours, there would be more, and the ceiling would collapse, letting them in.
“Hey!” Farrah scanned the area ahead, returning her map to its vectorised view, before heading down there in a brisk jog.
A few more meters ahead she saw what’d made that tunnel and the roof collapse. A grenade launcher – a large more modern version of an RGM-40 – laid on the ground. Its stock was bent, and deep claw marks dug into its empty barrel. Two cartridges lay on the floor a bit to the left, droplets of blood coating one of the two. Farrah understood why they’d been discarded. The grenade launcher looked like a non-standard version, a heavily modified military thing. Skills could increase cartridge size, but not decrease it. If they didn’t fit, they were worthless. And there were few Collectors specialised in explosives either way.
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Farrah considered picking them up because they could still be traded at a keep, but with how often she threw her rucksack around, caseless grenades were the last thing she needed.
She continued following the blood trail. It quickly turned into isolated droplets, which eventually stopped under a white lab coat.
This was weird, even by Collector standards. The coat was ripped along the back and one of the sleeves, ang gorged in blood that hadn’t yet began to dry.
Scan
- Directional
- Targeted
Cost: Free.
But there was no-one ahead. No humans that is, as four more mutants were slowly making their way towards Farrah.
She glanced back, feeling uneasy. She could shoot her way out, and leave the way she came. Her ammo was basically free in this domain, but she’d be left vulnerable from three sides. She wanted to leave. Her flashlight flickered in silent agreement.
She took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down, as she picked up the coat. She’d forgive the strangeness of it all if only it had a cigarette in its pocket. What it had was a plastic key card, with a blue line running along the top, just above a small ‘scan here’ symbol. On the other side, seven capital letters, printed on matte white popped from the glossy card surface.
“No way…” Farrah muttered as she read over and over the single word ‘Obelisk’. “Fuck…” she swore in disbelief.
Then, a sudden wave of panic hit her, and she hastily checked her System screen.
Stats
Skills
Goals
Other
Power
Luck
Conditions
Goals not fulfilled
Addiction
She took a shaky breath in. She hadn’t used up all her luck on this. Not that she knew how to do that, but she’d heard about it happening to other Collectors. And her task of ‘finding the Obelisk’ was still there.
She pocketed the key card, loaded two more 9mm bullets into her pistol, and carried on down the tunnel. She didn’t know who – or more likely what – was waiting for her there, but she was going to get to the bottom of this. She needed answers about this project, organisation, whatever it was, and why the need to find it heavily hampered quest spawning. And if it was something bad, something too big for her to handle, then she needed to know who or what it was to be where it wasn’t.
Several mutant kills later, she found herself on the rail tracks leading to the ‘Lowborne Cemetery’ metro stop.