You jolt awake with a gasp, face half-buried in the dark mulch of the forest floor.
The taste of blood is thick in your mouth as you spit and painfully push up off the ground onto your hands and knees.
Brain’s fuzzy. Hard to focus. Everything hurts.
You slowly drag yourself nearby stump and lean against it to catch your breath. You begin to collect yourself.
Your skirts and tunic are tattered and caked with dirt and… blood. Too much blood to be only yours. You feel around and realize you are absolutely covered in cuts and bruises, and your nose is broken.
You are carrying:
A pounding headache
Broken nose
Cuts and bruises
Tattered clothing (worn)
Well traveled leather boots (worn)
You are missing:
A picture, torn from its frame
Something extremely important
You close your eyes and focus. You hear the wind rustling through the grass and the occasional chirping of crickets and buzzing of winged insects. From somewhere, a distant hoot echos through the trees. Nothing out of the ordinary, except…
You try to figure out what’s missing so you can mourn its absence, but you can’t remember… You just know it… several things… are not here. This headache certainly isn’t helping either.
Maybe with some context clues it’ll become more clear.
You brace yourself against the stump and shakily pull yourself to your feet. Absolutely every part of you hurts but you manage, nothing appears to be broken, at least.
You realize you’re wearing a pair of well made but old leather boots. They crunch on the leaves and twigs in the glade in a familiar manner. You’ve had these boots for ages. they’re one of the most reliable objects you own.
You are carrying:
A pounding headache
Broken nose
Cuts and bruises
Tattered clothing (worn)
Well traveled leather boots (worn)
You stagger over to the cabin. The entire structure is in absolute ruins, the roof is caved in on one side and large portions of the walls and roof are just completely destroyed. Shattered bits of wood, stone and glass are scattered outside the walls, as if something burst out of it with a massive amount of force. Outside a hole in one wall you see the twisted remains of a cast-iron wood burning stove.
You step inside. The inside of the one-room cabin fared no better than the structure itself and beyond how utterly wrecked it is, nearly every surface is covered in a layer of kudzu vines that have sprouted out of a hole in the floor.
The following things of note turn up in the cabin:
A well-made wooden dresser, half-destroyed. Inside you find a familiar set of travelling clothes you haven’t worn in ages, and scraps of various other ruined appeal.
Two well-made wooden beds with straw bedding, utterly ruined.
Beneath one of the beds you find your leather belt and scabbard for your sword, they are undamaged.
A wooden picture frame with discernible bits of a picture still pinned to the corners. Something was ripped out of this intentionally.
A full length mirror with a sharp stone embedded in the center of it and a spiderweb of cracks covering it.
Various domestic sundry items are scattered across the floor, mingled in with the vines. Cooking implements, small tools, things like that. No lantern, however.
You look in the mirror. These clothes are absolutely wrecked. The simple cotton skirts and tunic are pierced and cut in multiple places, and show signs of constant use and repair. You don’t remember where you traded for this outfit but you know you wear it all the time and it’s seen it’s last.
You get a flash of recollection, an explosion, wood and stone ripping into you, the cabin, ruined in an instant. Something striding towards you from within, carrying something extremely important.
Your head pounds.
You pull your ruined tunic up and inspect your wounds. Most of them are on your side and front, None of them seem too serious or like they were inflicted by weapons. You’re pretty sure most of these were caused by pieces of the cabin hitting you as you turned to look at it. You’re confident you could treat these easily with the right materials. None of the wounds look more than a couple hours old.
Your nose looks like hell though. Popping it back into place is going to suck.
You also note that you have several old scars that have long since healed.
You are carrying:
A pounding headache
Broken nose
Cuts and bruises
Tattered clothing (worn)
Well traveled leather boots (worn)
You are missing:
A picture, torn from its frame
Something extremely important
Examine the beds
Check for drag marks on the floor noting if the beds had been pushed together. Check the size. Was the second individual a lover, a friend, or a child?
The beds are in separate corners and it occurs to you that you built both of them. The bed with the belt and scabbard underneath is your bed. The other is roughly the same size, big enough for an average person. Both bed show signs of having been used regularly before whatever happened that destroyed the cabin from within.
You realize it’s obvious that this is your cabin, filled with your things. You struggle to remember anything else about the second bed but you feel like your brain is trying to escape out of your ears. This headache is massive, whatever laid you out after the explosion did a number on you.
(Going to avoid hogging it myself, but to keep it moving through the early stages…)
Try to find a pot and something to start a fire with amongst the sundries.
We’ll be able to treat the wounds more safely if we can boil water first. Of course, we’d need to find some water. Oh well, one thing at a time.
Don’t worry about it. Hog away, we’re not doing votes on what to do (yet). I’m not going to make a federal issue out of everything, either, as you can see below.
You dig through the kudzu and manage to pull out a stewpot. It’s only moderately dented. You keep looking but can’t find any flint and steel. Thinking about fire, you walk over to the wood-burning stove outside the cabin and open it up. Inside are a couple glowing embers that you use to start a file with some pieces of the cabin and some firewood you scrounge from the glade. You had a nice stack at one point but it’s scattered from the explosion.
The fire crackles to life and burns merrily in the glade, piercing into the darkness and casting shadows across the trees. The warm glow of the flames is slightly comforting.
You look around and the rain barrel by the back of the cabin has just enough water left to fill the pot. You set it over the fire.
