DAY 54: GREENHOUSE (FOURTH SHIFT)

[deathandgin]

By the end of lunch, Alaric was still hungry and still stuck on the middle of a perfectly balanced scale, the only difference with the scale having a new, possibly unrelated third option: it was either some sort of conspiracy (obviously of the supernatural sort), he was actually crazy, or he’d just had the very bad luck of being kidnapped by

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[hissecondshadow]

Soren nodded. He'd watched Sothe and Volke pick enough locks to know that there was a precision to it that had to be learned rather than taught. Even if there'd been time for S.T. to show him how it was done, the time it would take Soren to awkwardly attempt it on each lock tonight would be a danger in itself. Unless they had someone with them who was confident in their skill, it would be faster and therefore safer to attempt to break through the locks. Soren added finding a heavy object to his mental list of things to do.

"There's a town nearby?" Soren hadn't heard anybody mention anything. He'd been working on the assumption that they were in the middle of nowhere, with nobody to help them. It was unlikely that the village could provide anything in the way of trained soldiers. They, Soren noted with a grimace, all appeared to be within the building, working for the opposite side. Nothing new there. But enough villagers might help to turn the tables, if only through sheer power of numbers. If they could provide weapons, makeshift or otherwise, so much the better.

[toxicspiderman]

The kid hadn't been here long enough for a field trip, but S.T. was surprised no-one had mentioned the place. They had to do something about the bulletin. Revive the glory days of handbills. Go all out and invent black powder and cannons and spatter the place with an infodump of explosive proportions.

"Yeah. Doyleton. Most generic American small town on the planet. Maybe the only one, too." If it was part of the set dressing, that was very likely. "Not a place you want to be at night. Time before last, the buses were late and we ended up stuck there. You think this place is bad, you don't want to end up there. The people turned into zombies." Not everyone got late-night TV, so he clarified. "Rotting, animated corpses. Legend says they reproduce by biting people, but it wasn't quite that bad." There had been rumors, but it sounded like a weird case of the munchies rather than an all-out zombie invasion.

"They drag us there once a week. Dunno if the General will ixnay the trip this time. Guess we'll have to see if he's still here in a few days."

[hissecondshadow]

Several bits of S.T.'s terminology went over Soren's head, and he debated asking for clarification. Some of them were guessable - 'American', given the context, had to be a place or some other sort of geographical feature. It wasn't really important to the overall information he was being given, which was that S.T. only knew of one nearby town.

Soren wasn't particularly happy to find out that it didn't seem as though it would be as useful as he had hoped. Zombies didn't sound like the sort of monsters he wanted to encounter any time soon. Still, if they had all survived the attack, and yet presumably been taken on the trip during the day, with nurses out on the watch for suspicious behaviour as they ever were, then...

"What were you using as weapons?" There had to have been something within the town that had helped them fight. Soren knew he wasn't the only patient lacking in the strength department, and two days here had been more than long enough to learn that not everybody was willing to help everybody else. If the weaponry was impressive enough, it might be worth a trip there in the future, when they had more manpower at their disposal.

As S.T. said, everything depended on the general for now. His move.

[toxicspiderman]

S.T. was used to people not quite keeping up with his descriptions. When it mattered, he'd slow down. Press got the non-condescending version. Everyone else had to ask, for clarifications or for him to just shut up. The first was a lot more likely to work. Along with the girlfriends, he'd lost one college roommate who'd gotten so pissed off at him rattling off answers to the guy's gut-level physics class that he'd punched him. By the time S.T. had come to, all that was left were some unwashed boxer shorts and some empty ramen packets.

In retrospect, doing it with his eyes closed had been a bad plan. Especially since he'd been drunk enough that after the first two questions he'd just started making shit up. It was the first inkling he'd gotten that he could have a tremendous career in lying to people if he wanted. If you were smart enough, and had no morals, it was easy. S.T. had morals.

"Anything and everything we could find. Fire. Blunt objects. Cars." The heavy metal blasting from the stereo hadn't done much. Sonic warfare required eardrums on the side of the victims. Spider had liked it. Vintage and shit. Like installing a pipe organ in the back of a Chevette. Loud transcended time.

"The town was back to normal the next time. Including the locals we'd wasted." They hadn't identified specific people. Zombification didn't play well with IDing, and they'd been actively avoiding dental checks. But there hadn't been any funeral processions or boarded-up windows. A lot of dirty looks, but the population levels were steady.

[hissecondshadow]

Fire. Ashera, why hadn't he thought of that before? He might not be able to summon magic without a tome, but there was still the possibility of doing it the traditional way. Soren had never really bothered enough to learn how to make one, but he was fairly certain that he had picked enough up over the years to figure it out. Knives were fine in close combat, but he was, and always had been, more comfortable attacking from a distance.

If he managed to convince Ranulf and whoever else Ranulf had pulled together to head into the grounds tonight rather than the basement, there had to be fallen branches or similar that he could use. He would need to be careful about the flames burning out after it had been lit, but if things came to their worst, he trusted Ranulf to provide a distraction while he got it going again. And if he got a little burned taking some of their enemy down, well... It wasn't as though he hadn't sustained any injuries learning magic. This was just a slower method, that was all.

Then, hadn't S.T. mentioned something about explosions before? He was probably as good a person as any to discuss these sorts of plans with.

"I don't suppose you know the easiest way to light a fire around here?" There had to be enough materials around to use as fuel, but without magic, Soren didn't know the best method of igniting them.

[toxicspiderman]

"Easiest way is to find some matches. Still easier said than done, but you might be able to palm some in Doyleton." S.T. still had some from the trip where the security scanners had turned into actual zombies rather than just mindless drones.

There was always the boy scout method, but that required patience and an enemy willing to sit around and wait. Neither was likely, and if this kid knew how to do it he wouldn't be asking.

"It wouldn't be too hard to cook up something that would spark, but the trick is keeping it from going off in your pocket. Anything in particular you wanted to light on fire?" Fire and explosions made a better weapon in open spaces than indoors. Less chance of friendly fire. But S.T. wasn't opposed to blowing things up. Not after a few weeks here.