Periapt [Survival in the world of a Cursed CRPG, Progression, Crafting, LitRPG]

Book One: All Is Silent at Beckett’s Sound

Part Two

The Hospice

The hole Hollis had pushed through the barricade was easy enough to patch. He wasn’t sure how that stack of stone, dirt, and what appeared to be salt was enough to keep the skeletons at bay, but it must have been.

Truthfully, the barricade and even the skeletons had lost his interest. There was shouting in the distance. Something was wrong out past the remnants of the wall that had once enclosed this part of the facility.

As soon as he was done, he ran outside, under the shadow of the canyon cliffs to the east, and saw a group of people at war with a very large, very long fish that didn’t even seem to care that it was up out of the water.

There was more flat land on the bottom of the canyon than he had imagined. The river itself broke into three or four fingers as it flowed through the area, with one large and the others much smaller.

A building like a primitive chicken coop had been built in a lazy part of one of the offshoots of the river, and the giant fish had managed to break the coop wide open, sending strange, floating bird nests downstream. A rail-thin man with a large grin was doing his best to stop the nests from flowing too far away by corralling them with his arms.

[Naturalism lvl. 6] You see a large snakehead fish attempting to feed on captive grebes.

Both snakeheads and grebes were normal animals back on Earth, though a snakehead was not usually the size of a large alligator. Grebes did have floating nests, but they did not completely encapsulate themselves inside them. These grebes did just that, only to stick their slender heads and necks out of the nest to peck the thin man trying to corral them. They were like a duck’s slender cousin.

The snakehead had gotten hopelessly snared inside a large gillnet, but it had lost interest in that when it noticed the coop full of nesting birds.

It didn’t, however, notice the people shouting or throwing rocks at it. Its gills breathed the air just fine, and its front fins functioned as if they were front legs, letting it crawl its way through the shallow water.

It excitedly dug into the coop, which had been made of mud and sticks, along with some hewn wood and scrap metal. When it found a grebe encased in a nest, it would slurp up the bird and nest altogether.

The woman who had been on a horse was shouting orders as she marched down into the water to find one of the ends of the gillnet. “We’re gonna haul it up out of the water. Help me secure it so it can’t swim off. Hurry it up.”

A younger woman dutifully helped her, while three other men were on the offensive.

“Do I have a clear shot?” one man asked. He held onto the reins of his horse with one hand and had grabbed a handful of river rocks with the other.

“It’s the big growling thing, you loon,” another man with a bowler hat screamed.

“I'm asking if there are people in the way. Tell me when I’m good, Tawny,” the first man screamed. He was black with an American accent. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty-two. Hollis realized the man was blind.

“Rain down on it, Royle,” the older woman, Tawny, said as she wrapped the end of the gillnet she had grabbed around a sturdy post up on dry land. “Just get its attention. We’ll do the rest.”

The blind man, Royle, launched the handful of river rocks into the air in a gentle arc over the fish. It looked like the rocks would miss the creature, like they would sail right on past it, but as the rocks passed over the fish, the man forced his hand downward violently and the rocks shot straight down toward the beast.

That absolutely got the fish’s attention.

The rocks hit the fish, the broken coop, and the river as if they were many times the size they actually were. Hollis wondered what kind of creature he bartered that ability off of.

The fish quickly lost interest in the coop and started backing its way toward deeper waters, only to suddenly remember it was caught in a gillnet and begin thrashing in the shallows.

More of the grebes hidden in their nests floated down the river toward the skinny man, who was having increasing trouble keeping them together as the birds would poke their beaks out like lightning and peck him.

Royle, who apparently couldn’t see, stayed by his horse and listened intently.

[Vigilance lvl. 6] You see a blind man. The way he tilts his head in your direction, you figure he can sense you, too. His horse looks at you, protective of its rider. Its legs end in clawed paws, not hooves.

“I can shoot it,” Hollis said, walking toward the action. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Stand clear, and I'll shoot it!”

Introductions could wait.

“How about you quit bragging and start shooting then?” the man, Royle, said as he climbed onto his horse’s back.

One of the other men, who was currently stripping down to his long underwear, noticed Hollis taking aim. He was a wild man, with a long, tangled mane of gray hair.

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“Ain’t no use,” the man said in a deep growl. “This demon’s got more hearts and brains and everything else than you got bullets.”

The man then grabbed a large hunting knife and started running toward the creature with nothing but his boots and long johns on. He stopped on his way and grabbed a burning bundle of dried leaves that looked like a florist’s magic wand from Tawny, who seemed to be in charge.

One way to activate a plant’s abilities was to burn it, though this was usually for medicinal purposes. Hollis had never seen it used in a fight. It was usually used to cure the diseases explorers caught during quests.

“Damn, Otis, what do you think you’re doing?” the bowler hat man asked as he backed further up on shore. “They’d have asked me. I’d have done it. Old fool.”

The old man Otis was gassing out the fish. He got close to the creature as it thrashed, while sticking out the smoking bundle and holding his breath. The snakehead breathed in the smoke through its gills and slowly began to calm down.

“That’s a pretty girl,” Otis whispered as the noise from the thrashing quieted.

“Otis,” Tawny screamed, “you don’t have but a few seconds on something that big.”

Otis didn’t seem to mind. His hair blocked most of his face, but Hollis recognized a kind of reverence in the man’s stance. He was whispering to the fish like he was soothing a sleepy child.

Then, when the smoking bundle was almost spent, and Tawny was about ready to have a coronary, Otis drove his knife into the fish’s spine right behind the head. He had to smack the heel of the knife with the palm of his hand a few times to get it to go through, and when it was in, and Otis wiggled it around a bit, the fish stopped moving.

The man in the bowler hat was ready to jump back into action once the fish was dead and grabbed the gillnet from the post. “Somebody help me with this,” he yelled. “I can’t do it all by myself.”

Hollis jumped right in front of him and started helping him pull the large creature to shore. [Drudgery lvl. 5]

“Wait a second,” the man said. “Who the heck are you?”

“Hollis Hood,” he said.

“Alrighty then. The name’s Dakota Clay. Put your back into it, or Miss Tawny’s gonna flip her lid,” was all the man said in response as they continued to pull.

The wild man Otis joined in, and so did the young woman. Eventually, they got the fish all the way out of the river and up onto a small grassy patch.

Hollis looked around at the group of survivors just as they were looking at him.

“Hey,” he said. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

He hadn’t practiced his greeting, but he knew how to be friendly.

“Sounds like we got ourselves another fella from our neck of the woods,” Royle said, still riding his horse. Hollis realized that the creature acted as the man’s eyes. It was better than a seeing eye dog, perhaps.

“Paul, honey,” Tawny screamed from further down shore. “Don’t pick up the nests. The birds don’t like that.”

The skinny man who had been corralling errant bird nests seemed happy as could be with the situation, whether the birds were pecking him or not. He slowly moved them back upstream toward the ruined coop.

This Tawny, Hollis assumed, was the very same Tawny from the letter he had found at the trailhead.

“You,” she said, pointing at Hollis, “Take a step back for a bit. I don’t know how you got through those skeletons, but I need to examine you before you can mingle.” She turned from him to the young woman, “Jane, you go get breakfast ready. Folks will be hungry soon.”

“Hungry for snakehead, I hope,” Dakota said. “I'd rather starve.”

Snakehead, in Periapt, wasn’t just big. It reeked like used engine oil.

Tawny ignored him. “Otis, butcher this thing. It should be fine to eat, even if it is the wrong season for it. Dakota, get your hoveleer friend and try to patch up the coop. Get those birds back inside before they peck my son’s eyes out.”

“That thing isn’t my friend,” Dakota said as he obeyed his instructions.

She continued, “Royle, dear, maybe the gillnet was too much to hope for.”

She stopped to take a breath as everyone went on their assignments.

“It seems to me the gillnet worked just fine,” Royle said. “Mighty big fish from what I can tell.”

“Yes,” she said. “Big fish. Ate more than half our flock.”

Royle’s face dropped. “That’s unfortunate,” he said as he rode his clawed horse away.

Other than Otis sawing through the thick hide of the snakehead, that left Hollis and Tawny.

“You picked a busy day to show up,” she said. “Before you tell us about how you’re going to deliver us beyond the Great Pass all savior-like, strip down to your undershorts. I need to check you for injuries. Those rattling bones are mighty dangerous. If you were infected, I won’t kill you, but you won’t be able to stay. You understand?”

Hollis nodded. When he had played the game, the locals treated him like a hero. This woman, Tawny, was not so charmed.

He stripped down to his boxers. As he did, she caught sight of his clothes and weapons.

“You come from down the trail or what?” she asked. "Packing heavy for a newcomer."

Hollis shook his head. “Arrived in Beckett’s Sound a few days ago from the sea. It wasn’t what I expected it to be.”

“I imagine not.” Tawny grabbed him and maneuvered his body with a firm grip. He recognized the look in her eyes, the way she methodically examined every surface of his body, starting in the extremities and moving to his torso. She was some type of doctor.

She noticed the bruises on his hands and forearms.

“You already been farming?” she asked.

“I cultivated a root to drain the pool the bones were in. They fled,” he said.

She almost looked impressed, but hid it quickly. “Summer is the worst time to go down into the ruins. Fall and winter, the bones aren’t so feisty. You don’t seem to have any wounds that the varmints could have entered. You drink the water?”

Hollis shook his head. “There’s supposed to be a tonic you can take to kill the parasites, the bone worms. I get the idea they were once used medicinally for repairing bones, then killed off.”

Tawny laughed. “Kaziers know all about potions, and tonics, and magic philters that exist or existed somewhere, somewhen. They tell us about them, how it’s traditional medicine, and ask us for them. They almost never know how to make the potion, though. Get pretty frustrated when I tell them I don’t either.”

She had dealt with a lot of players, it seemed.

“Kaziers, that’s what, people from the Cat’s Eye?” he asked.

She stepped back. “Cat’s-Eyers,” she said slowly. “Interesting bunch. Little boys pretending to be men, mostly. Can’t make a fire. Can’t shoot an arrow or whittle a stick when they get here. Quick learners, though... Put your clothes on and come help with breakfast. Try to earn your keep, or you won’t have it.”

She walked back toward the river, where her adult son, Paul, was still basking in the joy of those birds and their floating nests. In the distance, the well-groomed man with the bowler hat, Dakota, was bickering back and forth with a large muskrat called a hoveleer as he tied the coop back together with twine.

Otis, the mountain man, was cutting fish filets by the dozen right there on the grass. The snakehead, as he had warned, didn’t have the normal amount of organs, but had dozens of small duplicate organs: livers, stomachs, and hearts that spilled out on the grass next to the filets.

Back up near the hole in the cliff where the facility had been, the young woman Hollis hadn’t been introduced to yet, Jane, was helping dozens of sick people out of their cliffside shelters and down to a banquet setup with lots of chairs for breakfast.

Royle rode his clawed horse along the shore where the gillnet that had been his idea was once set up. There was a sadness in his face and posture that Hollis often recognized in himself.

He had found people, and whether Tawny mocked him for it or not, he was going to do whatever it took to help them.