Burning Plains, Pt 4

After your soulful journey with that long-dead family and learning the power of Astral Memory, you take a decent sleep upstairs before continuing on your journey the next night. You spend the next few days afterwards hopping from farmstead to farmstead along endless grassy plains and bountiful lands.

As you continue on your lonely journey, you realize that it's becoming significantly hotter the more you travel. And it isn't just because there's less shade - you're certain that the temperature here in the plains is much higher than the temperature back in the city. 

There, you could at least walk in the sunlight for a few minutes at a time without getting burned. Here, you find you can do no such thing. You could perhaps last a dozen seconds before your skin begins to burn. You thank the stars that there are more than enough shelters along the way to keep you cool and safe during the oppressive daytime. 

Though there have certainly been a few extremely close calls thus far - you only just found your most recent shelter just as dawn rose. Having that close a call has certainly put a spring in your step as you travel tonight, not wanting to be caught out in the heat any longer than needs be.

Of course, you've scavenged and looted your heart out all along the way as well. How could you not? All these juicy farms and ranches in your path are too tempting to resist. Sure, most of their treasures have long since been taken or rotten away, but you're still able to find quite a great deal to stuff into your inventory.

Perhaps the most abundant thing out here has been water, to your absolute surprise. Just about every farmstead and ranch has had water wells of various kinds with plenty of groundwater in their reserves. Beyond that, many also typically have multiple drums filled with reserve water, already filtered and sanitized for potability.

So you have pretty much drowned yourself in water thus far, and have filled your bottles and water bladder to the brim at every stop. No sense wasting a single opportunity.

One of the more helpful things you've found is a regular tarp. Well, perhaps not quite regular - it's not just any old cloth. This one is relatively large and also completely waterproof. It's certainly a bit more rugged, and could handle quite a bit of environmental abuse. Any rains that fall will be hard-pressed to reach you underneath its cover. 

Plus it frees up your poncho and allows it to be used as a blanket instead.

You're able to roll the tarp up neatly alongside your sleeping bag, allowing you to stow both of them easily via your backpack's bottom straps.

You've also picked up a bundle of paracord, which your bushcraft book highly recommends. Although you've been practicing making rope out of the copious amounts of grass out here, having a professionally-woven rope is akin to having a bar of silver.

It's roughly 10 meters in length which allows you to make plenty of your survival tasks much easier. Lashing your shelters together, for one thing. Of course, you haven't exactly needed it thus far considering you've been staying in buildings.

But you're certain that you'll need it at some point and so stuff it in the center of your tarp/sleeping bag roll.

One other thing you're ever so glad to find is a simple flashlight. Well maybe this one isn't quite so simple. It isn't battery powered like most others, or rather, not with disposable batteries. The vast majority of disposable batteries lost their charge during the apocalypse, and even some rechargeable ones couldn't be recovered.

A few kinds of batteries have lasted through the apocalypse, however. Mostly ones whose build quality is far above average. Though charging them takes longer, their maximum output has permanently been degenerated and so they can't store as much as they originally could.

The flashlight you've found works rather well despite all those downsides. This one appears to have a hand crank that you can flip out on one side. Spinning it up charges the flashlight with electricity, allowing it to operate for about half an hour. 

Plenty enough for you to rest your Temperance and ESP. You've certainly been getting much better with both of them, and have refined them so they use far less energy than before. But they're still taxing to use no matter what, and so you'd like an option to allow you to give them a reprieve if needed.

Plus, you might be in a position later where you can't or won't use your psionic energies. So this flashlight is a good placebo for those times.

You stuff it into one of the many pockets on your cargo pants, somewhere in easy reach.

And speaking of useful tools, you've also picked up a camping hatchet. Though it certainly can't replace your Telekinetic axe, it serves very well as a simple placebo. Like with the flashlight, there will be times when you just don't want to use your powers, so having this is going to come in handy when you need to source some wood the old fashioned way.

The hatchet comes with a little leather sheath which you can hang on your belt for easy access. You slide it up close to your knife, so they're both on the left side of your waist. This allows you to draw either one of them with ease at any given time, with either hand.

And perhaps among the most valuable things you've found along the way are all kinds of informative and knowledgeable books. Though you don't keep most of them with you permanently, you make sure to read them as much as you can.

You spend perhaps an extra hour or two reading the books you find, usually before you go to sleep, or just after you wake. And once you're done with them, you leave them at whatever shelter you finish them at.

The handful you've read (or are about to read) are about land navigation, wilderness survival, gear maintenance, negotiation tactics, and local fauna identification.

It's the last one that you're most interested in, as you want to better understand the critters and animals that live in these plains. The more you know about them, their habits, their diets, their predilections, the easier it is for you to predate or avoid them.

Or simply watch them if you feel so inclined. You've never really found animals very fascinating in the past, perhaps because you're from the city. Now that you're mired in all kinds of wildlife, you find yourself utterly amazed by them.

Of course, the book doesn't tell you anything about the alien animals that also roam the planet now. But it can glean some clues through similarities in their behavior. And if anything, this book has prompted you to catalog the alien animals yourself.

Perhaps by practicing with regular earth animals, you could start to observe alien ones.

You've already found yourself a journal and pen, with which you've begun to sketch and note down all the alien wildlife you've already come across. Such as the Stampeders that you saw back in the city - those massive ones with the metal hooves. And of course the Grazers, which you found mostly around the city outskirts - they're the long-necked kind that eats all kinds of vegetation.

Among your notes are the two Crags you've come across as well - the bone and the stone kind. Since those are the most you know about, their pages contain the most notes thus far. There are also more sketches of them, which is natural considering you've been up close and personal with a number of them.

The last things you've picked up are spare clothes - shirts, pants, socks, underwear, and so on. Simply, without soap the clothes you wear become more and more worn as the days go on. And also dirty and crusty and at times, gross.

Though you've been rather liberal with washing them out at the farmsteads with the copious amounts of water you've had access to, the dirt still gathers up over time. 

Having fresh, clean clothing is certainly a great luxury, and so you've found that having a few extra pieces in your backpack for use or for trade is ideal. They're worth their weight in gold, at least in your opinion.

All that pretty much sums up the items you've picked up just in these past few days. These farmlands have been incredibly rich and bountiful, and you're sure you're going to miss them the moment you pass the last one.

In fact, they've been so bountiful that you've had to leave behind quite a lot of loot. Many had all kinds of shotguns and rifles and their respective ammunition. One even has its own armory, where its previous owner had clearly assembled and maintained their many firearms. 

Each also has a variety of protective equipment, from heavy gloves to robust helmets, and even ballistic vests in one case. The ranch with the armory and ballistic vests appeared to have been owned by someone who had served in the military, as there was also a ghillie suit in one of the closets.

Another farmstead had stacks of cash stowed away inside of a thick safe, in multiple national currencies. Next to them were a handful of passports from different nations, a rugged cellular phone, and a razor-sharp karambit knife. 

Despite the sheer array of useful and valuable items, you decided you didn't need any of them and left them where they were. You could certainly barter with any of those weapons for a great profit, but the plain downside is that you'd have to carry them around in the first place.

You've already got plenty stuffed in your bags and pockets already, and picking up more weight would only slow you down further. In fact, you feel as though you should lighten up a bit and potentially ditch some of the things you don't really need.

As you had told Frank weeks ago, you would much rather stay relatively light during your travels. Of course, you're not really sure how feasible this is, considering how much equipment you've picked up thus far. 

Logic tells you that the further you go west, the more equipment you'll need.

Perhaps you should have accepted Frank's offer for an upgraded backpack - you might need more space after all. But you wave that thought off quickly - that's a problem for another day.

You spend much time ruminating on your journey as you travel under the quiet, starry sky. Most nights are serene, with the air being relatively crisp and light, even if a little warm. The smell of grass and rich soil swims around you, giving you a sense of peace and calm to help tidy your mind and heart.

A thin and sharp scent invades your nose out of nowhere, snapping you out of your reverie. The smell is familiar - that of burning fabric. When you glance down away from the stars and back down towards the ground, you find numerous patches of glowing orange lines scattered in the distant plains ahead of you.

You don't have to use any psionics to realize that there has been a great fire out there, and portions of the grass are smoldering quietly. Like coals in a dying campfire. 

Anxiety bubbles up within you, and ascends slowly and steadily as you travel towards the burnt landscape. It only takes a couple of hours before you arrive at its edge, with the heat rising with every step. 

You eventually reach a point where the charred grass crunches under your feet, and the acrid smoke of burning foliage is thicker in the air. It's enough to make you cough and choke, so you find no other choice but to don one of your dust masks. Though it certainly helps keep your lungs from burning, that scent still invades your nose.

And the heat has become less bearable now; you can almost feel it washing over you in waves even despite the lack of visible flames anywhere close to you. They'd be easy enough to spot in the darkness, even beyond a couple dozen kilometers, perhaps.

But there are none in sight, only the glowing embers of dead flames.

A wide Scan reveals precious few animals around you - understandably so. There's nothing left to eat here, save for the burnt corpses of the critters that couldn't run far or fast. The only animal thoughts out here are those of scavengers and carrion feeders, whose minds are filled with thoughts of overcooked meat.

But you and Noir trudge ever onwards despite the dead and dying landscape before you.