Chapter 0, Part 2 - High Seas

Days, months, years? How long has it been? Victoria questions herself before she saw the scratch marks around the walls surrounding her. Ah yes, 231 days, she counted. It smells of rotting corpse, but she got used to it long ago. Each and every sensation she experienced, she had gotten used to. Each and every step of every guard, every prisoner, of every rats, of every bug, she had unconsciously memorized. Her trial never came. She was never sentenced to anything. The outside world was nothing more but a far reaching realm. How many more days must she endure.

Before that thought leaves her mind, a familiar thump brushes her ears. Food! It is precisely 17:02, the time when food reaches her cell. They hand these out starting at 16:30, so her cell is probably quite far from the kitchen. The guard's cadence is different, a new guy?

The guard gives her the food in silence, yet he lingers for quite longer than anyone else had ever. Victoria looks towards the guard. He is . . . familiar. Before any words exit her mouth, the guard leaves. She looks down towards the bread, below it, something shines.

A key.

She ate her last meal there, and prepares to escape. She'd memorized the way in, and that is probably the way out. And sure enough, there's a lot of passages to other parts of the complex. However, there is one guard there. Not the one that gave her the key, but the usual warden around these areas. With enough 'persuasion', she managed to knock him out, and took his pistol and shortsword. She went back to her cell, and stuff the man inside her blanket upon her stone bed. This should buy enough time, yes, she thought to herself.

After about half an hour of crawling about, Victoria found where they stashed her stuff. Thank god, they didn't throw out her Durandal. She quickly changed there, and stashed her prisoner's clothed to be burned later. Using what little magic she could, she escaped undetected towards the sewers below.

An hour of traversal leads her out towards the North Sea. She's in Bremerhaven, near by the harbor, thankfully. She found an unattended merchant freighter and began climbing aboard as a stowaway. Half an hour later, the boat started to move without much trouble. As she leaves the small hiding place to find something to eat (loot) off of the ship, Victoria met the captain.

Long story short, she made up a fake story about being a daughter of a merchant named Christa Lorentz and having to go far away from the Zentrum Empire because of family problems, and offering protection for the ship from pirates around the Frankish Channel. The captain bought it, and due to his goodwill, she's allowed to be a temporary crew of the ship, and she was even given a room and bathroom access to clean herself off of the sewer stank.

Several days had passed. They went through the Channel without much issue. This is the last time they will ever be close to land, as they're heading towards the North Atlantic, towards the Central States. After about a week of travel, an ominously large storm approaches the ship. Victoria was forcibly woken up as the sway of the ship throws her off of her bunk. Everyone was panicking. The captain had lost all order. The ship is listing 10 degrees starboard. The captain shouts orders here and there, but nothing can seem to fix the issue. As she was about to try and help, a spare plank had hit her quite hard on the head, and she went under.

She woke up on the ruins of a former ship. No one nearby. No corpse, nothing. And immediately she was struck with a vision that calls her upon, to go East, towards the Sour Vintage. It seemed the island has civilization that speaks a language she spoke. At least it was somewhere to go to.