Our third session opens with a planned trip to the farmer’s market and swap meet and a look at the updated chore wheel, along with a couple of other notes. The mayor’s efforts to cut the “budget waste” in the Morts program has trickled down to an effort by the station head to conserve ammo – anyone with less than five shots used by the end of the month gets special berry pies from the market, and those who go over get nothing. In addition, Molly (the station head) has noted a lot of stress in her people and is looking to have someone take on some group activity planning once a week or something – movie nights, whatever – and placed a note to that effect on the memo board.
Edison is really excited by the concept of being in charge of entertainment and he basically corners Molly at breakfast the next morning with barely contained excitement over being in charge of entertainment, possibly doing plays or improv games. Molly tries to gently suggest that a group movie may be all people are willing to do, at least at first, and limits him to one improv/acting evening a month. Will that matter? Who can say?
Oscar is taking the budget issues to heart and has fixated on the idea of having goats at the Hub, providing meat, milk, fiber for yarn and fabric, and an additional way to help maintain the grounds, create fertilizer for his garden, and get rid of food waste. He hasn’t brought this up yet, but he’s secretly measuring out where they could live and doing the math.Bonesey has taken some of Randy’s notebooks and is reading them assiduously, in hopes of improving his necromantic skills and getting his little bone puppets working better. No one knows quite what to do with this but offer vague encouragement, and it’s not like he goes out of the way to tell anyone else what he has going on. Todd (on Team 2) suspects something, though. Bonesey is already an object of fascination for him, given his desire to join the Republic of Davis necromancy programs. He is paired with Bonesey this week on the chore wheel, and the result is that he won’t give Bonesey a minute to himself that he isn’t required to.
River gets paired with Miranda doing maintenance, and she’s really annoyed overall and fixated on getting this pool fixed. Oscar wants to turn it into more of a pond feature, and River is amenable to at least talking about that – anything that would create a decent amount of filtration is up for discussion. Miranda doesn’t want to do anything and has, in fact, locked herself in her room, playing loud music and yelling at anyone who tries to get her to come out. She agrees to come out and do dishes AFTER everyone leaves for the trip if they will just LEAVE HER ALONE. GOD, THIS SUCKS.
Taking some of the random stuff from Randy’s, the group goes with Molly to the market leaving Miranda and Rory at the Hub. Molly, River, and Oscar buy the food for the next two weeks or so, with Oscar hovering over the produce and the goat dairy stuff like a creepy fan. Edison finds the magic stuff trader and gets a medallion he found looked at, with the end result being “let me look this up and come back next time for more info.” Bonesey buys a file to file his finger bones into spikey talons, a move that makes everyone else vaguely uneasy, and River is approached by Mr. Patel (the owner of the farm and market) who asks if the Morts would be willing to look into a situation for a little extra pay.
With Molly’s encouragement, River listens and finds out that the farm’s been having small bands of alpha zombies attack. That’s not terrible – zombie attacks happen, and it hasn’t been in such numbers that anyone was really at risk. But they’ve realized there’s a pattern and food is being stolen from the fields at the same time. If the Morts would come and take a look and see if they can figure out who’s behind it (and ideally put a stop to it) they’d be happy to cut a deal/pay the Morts in food and services.
River and the team agree, leaving out Todd from the equation (he doesn’t care, really, because he’s got other fish to fry, as it were). They get the food back to the station and then go out to the farm. The most recent incursion was two days ago, ravaging a section of a tomato field. They figure about two big burlap bags (about what one big or two medium people could carry) in nearly ripe tomatoes are missing. At the same time this happened, further down the fence line, a bunch of zombies had gotten into the orchard, which is where the family was, out of range to hear or see what was happening to the tomato plants. The team (guided by Priya, the Patels’ oldest daughter), they climb up into the barn to look out and see nothing in particular, except for clear land to the west (co-incidentally, the same direction as the cemetery from last session). They decide that they should split into two teams, once to look for evidence of the thieves, and one to track the zombies back. Any bets on which one gets into trouble first? Check back next time!
No comments:
Post a Comment