Surviving Arkadia

The wire gate wasn’t sturdy enough for us to use the pry bar on it. It took a combination of kicks to the gate and jiggling the frame to force it open wide enough for Amris’ broad shoulders.

The floor inside the chicken wire corridor was ankle deep in fallen leaves and other detritus. The wind had blown anything loose and light into the wires and that had slowed it all down just enough to tumble through the gaps and drop to the ground. Fortunately the air was damp so the leaves and papers were slowly turning to mush and did not crunch audibly beneath our feet.

At the end of the corridor was an unlocked door that let us into the central block of the hospital. The moment I opened the door I could smell humans.

“How many?” whispered Amris, wrinkling his nose.

“Three or four I think,” I whispered back, “They’re not close but they are definitely in the building with us. I’m getting soap, chemicals and worry. Maybe an undertone of fear?”

Human sweat smells differently depending on whether it’s from exertion or emotion. Some of the people up ahead of us had recently experienced emotions extreme enough to trigger a physiological response.

“One of them is closer than the others.” Amris’ voice was even quieter, barely audible. “I can hear someone moving around a couple of rooms away. It sounds like they’re washing glassware.”

I used my tapstone to send a message back to Sarah and Asser on the train. I let them know that we had reached the main block of the hospital and that there were people inside it. Any scavengers following us should proceed with extreme caution. I told them about the formal garden and that it was worth sending foragers to it.

Amris and I split up, heading for different rooms off the main corridor through the heart of the central building. My room was some kind of lab. There were rows of experiment benches weighed down with distilling apparatus, and glass fronted cabinets full of chemicals hanging from all the walls.

My limited medical knowledge was enough to understand that we needed some of these chemicals and I looted those into my bag immediately. But then I paused. This Hospital wasn’t entirely abandoned. They were probably using it as a dispensary. The room I was in smelled musty and there was a thick layer of dust over all the bottles that I had looted, so I didn’t have to feel guilty about the stuff in my bag but should we really be taking things that they might need?

If I wasn’t so worried about ambush I could just go and ask someone. Maybe I should just go and ask someone anyway? They didn’t have to know that I was part of the Exodus from Moonstone. I didn’t have much currency or trade goods on me but I was in a room full of containers.

By the time I’d finished searching every box, drawer, jar and cubby hole in the room I’d found over a hundred of the shiny golden coins, some rings, a very nice gold and sapphire necklace and a couple of extremely fancy handkerchiefs. I’d also added another level to my SEARCH skill, taking it up to 4.

I didn’t have to go back out into the corridor because there was a second door leading out of this room.

It led to a very similar room but this one was a mess. It looked like it had recently been ransacked. Cupboards stood open with empty shelves. Drawers were hanging out, some had fallen to the floor and there were papers and random detritus strewn all over the place. I recognised a lot of the mess as pill making equipment. There were a couple of large tablet presses on the counter and a lot of pill rollers in the drawers on the work benches.

There was a drift of cylinders across a couple of the countertops. I took a closer look and discovered that they were empty pill containers. I picked one up and it felt like plastic but one of my SCAVENGER career abilities told me that they were made of a kind of starch.

I understood immediately that these were made to be disposable. They were meant to be filled with pills and then thrown onto a compost heap or midden when the pills were finished. These ones had all been used and then returned here. Perhaps at some point they’d been so short of materials they’d been recycling the containers? Or perhaps this was just where the ones used inside the hospital were collected to keep track of the drugs?

The cylinders were stiff but flexible and they reminded me of something. Not just pill bottles back home but something else. Something clicked in my brain and I had a moment where I was simultaneously sure I’d hit the jackpot and unsure that I was thinking of. Then I caught up with myself and knew, with absolute certainty, that I could make shotgun shells with these.

The endless grinding of MAKE BASIC GEAR and TAILORING was finally going to pay off. My measly one level of MAKE ADVANCED GEAR was enough to make the shells but if I’d been on my own I wouldn’t have been able to make a shotgun. But I wasn’t on my own. I had friends, and one of those friends was Asser, who made things far more complicated than a double barrelled shotgun twice before breakfast. Well, not literally. He usually had breakfast before he began his morning’s tinkering.

I pulled out one of my crochet net bags and stuffed it full of the used pill containers. As I did so I noticed that they all had handwritten labels and that all the labels indicated the same drug, Celerity. It wasn’t something I was familiar with. I made a note to ask Trudy about it.

This room had two doors apart from the one I had entered by. One led back to the corridor. The other was ahead of me and led to a room that I was sure had someone in it. I could smell a nervous human man in that room and, now that I was close enough, I could hear the small sounds of him moving about.

I grabbed my tapstone to let Amris know that I was close to one of the people he’d heard but I was distracted by an incoming message from Sarah. She said that Trudy was heading to the formal garden to see if there were any medicinal plants worth collecting and would be available if I needed to ask her about any medicines I found.

For a moment I was caught up by indecision. I should go and get Trudy… no, I should message Amris first.

Before I had a chance to pick one the door in front of me opened.