The year was 2091 when you left.
The technology was brand-spanking-new, and the corporations that owned it became the richest in all of human history by exploiting the fact that nobody on Earth was happy, getting the people who inhabit the serene valleys of the Bell Curve to sell off all of their worldly possessions and, prince or pauper, cram themselves into a sketchy freezerbox and be fired off at a distant sun, never to be seen again. (God willing.) This didn't just lead to dozens of official, government-sponsored colony missions with actual objectives and trained specialists of course, suddenly, any minority or fringe group whose (paying) membership could fill a sportsball stadium could crowdfund themselves their own 1,500-pod Colony Ship, made in bulk beyond the atmosphere in some vast staryard packed with increasingly-spindly Indians.
Representatives of every single ethnic group on Earth were to be found suddenly trekking across the Milky Way alongside ideological separatists, whether conservatives, liberals, religious pilgrim societies, monarchists, basically every Mormon, far-removed simps of some ancient civilization, vegans, every form of communist, and every form of fascist as well.
And you.
And you quickly regretted it.

Greetings, this is the "my first quest" disclaimer. Also I'll be using AI for some accompanying images, but not for the narrative content itself.

>>6231851 (OP)
You awoke suddenly, like a light switch, and the first thing you could feel was an intense, turbulent vibration. You can't see. You can't move. Your violently churning stomach drops as you feel momentum carry you... down? Sideways? You're unable to tell, maybe both? BANG! Fuck, fuck, fuck, your mind races. A red light above your head activates, dimly illuminating the inside of the pod you've inhabited for the past 742 years. All you can see in front of your face is metal. You're going faster. This isn't how it was supposed to work. The pods were only supposed to jettison like this in emergencies. Fuck, fuck, fuck, your imagination runs wild. A scene from some old movie where a guy gets cooked alive in a pod like this as his crewmates helplessly watch. You panic. You notice the awful smell. You try to scream, but vomit instead. The smell gets worse. You're going faster. It's getting hot. The smell somehow gets even worse. They were supposed to put us down in the fucking shuttles! Faster. More turbulence.A sudden roar, and momentum reverses itself. Your body is shoved upward, you bang your head, and fall back into unconsciousness.

You awaken again, somehow. Blood has caked on your face, and your former stomach contents likewise have dried on your jumpsuit. You open the one eye not covered in your various juices and see... the sky. Thank fuck the terraforming drones worked, or else you'd have suffocated by now.
With great difficulty and exertion you wrench yourself out of the pod and roll ungracefully over the side, falling onto the soft, grassy ground.

None of the decisions that led you here were objectively smart, but you made them all the same. This is because you are (or rather, were):
(Pick One)
>A rebel on the run.
>A fool and a dreamer.
>Full of piss and vinegar.
>Write-In.

While the majority of your belongings were stored in the habitation you were assigned on the ship, someday to be detached, de-orbited, and become a prefabricated apartment block, you were encouraged to use the storage space in your sleeper for a few vital items. In addition to some emergency supplies and personal items, you decided to store:
(Pick Two)
>A weapon, ammunition, and some related gear.
>Extra food, water, and means of water purification.
>A set of basic tools, farming implements, and seeds.
>Money, in the form of precious metal coins.
>Your personal android. (Provide a name, you degenerate.)

>>6231853
>A rebel on the run.
There were 'federal agents' outside my 'house'
>Your personal android.
Someone else can think of a name, but more people is always better in this game.

>>6231853
>A rebel on the run.
>Extra food, water, and means of water purification.
>Your personal android. (Provide a name, you degenerate.)
John Jon.

>>6231890
>male android
gay

>>6231864
You can pick a second piece of starting equipment.

>>6231897
Oh yes, I missed that. I guess i'll add
>A weapon, ammunition, and some related gear.

>>6231900
No problem! Thanks for joining us.

I'll be letting the vote run until this evening, considering it's a weekday. I may make this a dedicated Tuesday thing going forward since that's what I have free.

>>6231853
>>A rebel on the run.
Read, paranoid, antisocial, "thinks government is out to get him but really wasn't" on the run.
>Your personal android.
A-L. Al. Short for Allie or Alan, depending on whether anons want a ladydroid or a brodroid. Our only friend.
>Extra food, water, and means of water purification.
Naturally, as a paranoid lunatic, we "know" how to make "weapons"... We can figure it out eventually, at least.

>>6231921
Ladydroid, obviously.

>>6231853
>A fool and a dreamer.

>Extra food, water, and means of water purification
>A set of basic tools, farming implements, and seeds.

>>6231853
>A rebel on the run.
I want to lean hard into the "far-removed simps of some ancient civilization" of this, or maybe just go full Andrew Ryan. This rebel may or may not actually be wanted by the government.
>Your personal android. (Provide a name, you degenerate.)
Personal Artificial Intelligence Network. PAIN, because having an evil name for an AI is always a good sign.
>Extra food, water, and means of water purification.

Alrighty, locking 'er in and writing it up.
We're a former rebel that skipped off Earth and decided to pack our emergency storage with water and foodstuffs. We also selected the waifu option therefore ensuring this quest will last a thousand threads.

>>6232054
You really gotta choose your waifu at start in Rimworld, the people you get from events are always trash.

[1/3]
You got hit in the head pretty hard during the landing. The wound, somewhere on your scalp, still occasionally sends a trickle of blood down your face. You make a conscious effort to collect your racing thoughts and recall important details in order to see how badly off in the cerebral department you truly are.
You are Stanley Harper, twenty-nine years old, formerly of Hendersonville, North Carolina. Alright, you got that much. Buzzing is what you remember next. A nearly decade-long experience of rebellion and unrest has solidified an intense aversion to the telltale signs of aerial drones and an unhealthy dose of general paranoia.
You went into the Appalachians with many others all those years ago with visions straight out of several old movies and paintings. Romantic flanks of grey-clad riflemen under a waving, defiant flag, well-known actors playing the role of guerillas against a foreign invader, and the songs and aesthetics of rebel groups from across the globe danced through the minds of many, but the realities of modern guerilla warfare made themselves known painfully quickly. The woods wasn't where you went to fight, it was where you went to hide, to squeeze yourself into a ball underneath a thermal-insulating tarp while the drones buzzed overhead, hoping they didn't detect a hint of human warmth and drop a bomb straight into your lap. You hate the buzzing with a passion, and that fact will likely follow you to the grave.
The pain you feel right now unlocks further remembrances of your recent past. The sores, blisters, and fatigue as you marched dozens of miles through the backcountry. The hunger, while always being on short rations. The scramble after your team fires off their mortar or buries a mine or two. The sight of the houses and businesses you left burning after one of their occupants offended one of the officers you seldom got to see. The occasional flash drive with payment in crypto. Finally being able to return (though always incognito) to civilization for a brief respite to soothe your soul and burn that payment away, only to get a knock at some motel door days later calling you back up into the hills.

>>6232073
[2/3]
Uneasily, you walk a short distance downslope to a nearby pond, the muddy ground ringing it sucking at your feet as you roughly stumble to your knees and cup several handfuls of still water into your face and rub both fresh and clotted blood from your visage. You use your newfound and very helpful ability to properly see to inspect your surroundings.
The landing site looks, at first glance, idyllic. A grassy plain with young trees interspersed every so often, bushes, wildflowers, ponds... You hear birds chirp occasionally. In the far distance you spy hills and mountain ranges that betray the first sign that this biosphere didn't occur here naturally. The oaks and evergreens on the distant mountains resemble an orchard, all evenly-grown and spaced, planted in rows by some terraforming machine decades ago in order to help drag this rock towards becoming an epitome of habitability. What you don't see is any sign of human civilization, which is very concerning, seeing as your expedition was supposed to be the second one sent to this particular planet.

You labor your way back up to the pod, sleeper sickness still pulling at your every muscle, and begin unloading the storage compartment of your pod. First come the boxes of MREs that you desperately hope are still good over half a millennia later, a big plastic jerry can full of potable water, and a box containing a the most durable-looking hand-pumped water filter you could find at the local sporting goods store. You remember vowing when choosing your emergency supplies never to be subject to the level of hunger and depravation you experienced back when you made a living fighting blue-helmets in the rocky armpit of the country. You hastily withdraw a backpack of your own containing some clothes and toiletries. Then comes the "official" emergency gear included with the pod, a small first aid kit, flare gun, hand-cranked radio, and a survival hatchet.
Then came the biggest, and most troublesome item to move, a long, black, human-sized box that resembled a hard-shell rifle case crossed with a coffin. She was inside, hopefully undamaged.

>>6232074
[3/3]
The use of personal androids wasn't unknown to the rebel groups of the Second American Civil War, but their use was rare due to their cost and was typically as suicide attackers, drone bait, couriers, or mules. You blew a substantial crypto stick on buying and jailbreaking a domestic android and fitting her out to be your battle buddy, much to the amusement, jealousy, and frequent derision by your less orientally-appreciative squadmates. They laughed, but hey, if the UN can use them, why couldn't we?
She's not charged after all this time, naturally. You forego opening the case for now, unrolling a well-worn portable solar panel on top and plugging it in. Green light. Good sign. It's going to be some time to gain a substantial charge and the day seems to be fairly young, so you have some time to kill.
Pick One
>Patrol, Troopie! Other humans, other colonists, resources, who knows what's out there?
>Establish Your Camp. Now is just as good a time as any to properly unpack.
>Use Emergency Equipment. Try to make contact with humanity using your pod's equipment.
>>6232062
I'm using some of the theme, but it's not a live-play, mainly an illustrative device.

>Establish your camp
I wanna get everything unpacked and set up, maybe start looking at good spots to dig trenches + tunnels, planning, and digging if we have enough time!

>>6232077
>Use Emergency Equipment. Try to make contact with humanity using your pod's equipment.

>>6232077
>>Establish Your Camp. Now is just as good a time as any to properly unpack.
Prepare first.

>>6232077
>Establish Your Camp. Now is just as good a time as any to properly unpack.
Let's go set up somewhere with a natural shelter, we don't know how bad the weather might get around here.
Also, those grey caps and mention of a Second American Civil War, are we ex-Neo-Confederate?

>>6232077
>Establish Your Camp. Now is just as good a time as any to properly unpack.
Woah lone survivor start, this is gonna be rough unless the android has a full set of skills

>>6232124
>Also, those grey caps and mention of a Second American Civil War, are we ex-Neo-Confederate?
The Second American Civil War in this setting is a complex clusterfuck of an event that will definitely be explored further due to its' effects on the first generations of space colonists from North America.

Next update tomorrow. Have a good evening, folks.

>>6232139
Well, that's not a no, so: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpSR0oI5zy8

>>6232077
>Establish Your Camp. Now is just as good a time as any to properly unpack.

Calling the vote, we're setting up and digging in!

>>6232156
You're right, I didn't. Sad to see the 2ndSCSB are retiring by the way, I got to see them live at the 150th Gettysburg.

[1/3]
While at first the soft grassy plain you landed on seemed like a refreshing landscape painting, as the minutes tick by your brain steadily presents you with various and conflicting downsides inspired by your recent past. The big, gray, scorched dildo sticking out of the sod surrounded by boxes is very visually obvious. But you want to be seen, right? Yes? No? Fuck. You learned that being out in the open leads directly to death, and if you were sitting in one place you dug your ass into some sort of hole or you became drone food. This is a different situation, but your instincts are crying out against you. After some deliberation, you decide to compromise. You could wander around or fuss with the radio and put off making camp until the android wakes up and have her help you with the gruntwork, but something tells you the sleeping sickness will pass more quickly if you stay active. The pod is big, empty, its' insides caked in vomit, useless, and it's what would draw visitors, so you can leave it behind. Moving all of this too far is going to be a bitch, though. Stanley decides to set up a hidden camp overwatching the landing site.
You get to work moving all of the equipment you own to a low fold of ground on the other side of the pond. It's rough work in your condition, but you feel the sluggishness and nausea steadily leave you. On your back-and-forths from the camp to the pod and back you see some things of note; there are berry bushes growing around and ground squirrels chirp and scamper from hole to hole. Useful! You're unsure about the long-term survival prospects of this area, but you'll be able to persist for some time.
Stanley begins unpacking in earnest, withdrawing a dark green tarp and propping it up into a basic shelter with a pair of pine branches. The smell of your jumpsuit has been bugging you since you landed, so you decide to peel it off and change into the spare clothes you kept in your pack. Then begins the camoflaging, you gather ferns and bushes from around the area and sculpt a hide around your camp, leaving a gap facing towards the pod's landing site. In this gap you use your survival axe to wearily scrape a small fighting position in the soft ground from which you can keep hidden while leaving an eye out for rescuers. You regretfully recall the weapons you left in the storage space of your habitation on the ship. Keeping the flare gun and its' cartridges in your belt and pockets prevents you from feeling entirely naked.

>>6232529
[2/3]
The sun sinks low in the sky as you gaze satisfactorily at your new temporary home. The solar charger blinks red as direct sunlight slips away and the shadows march across your campsite. She won't be able to function for very long on just one day's solar charge, but it'll at least allow you a peaceful night's rest knowing that a pair of unblinking eyes are open and watching the perimeter for you. Opening the case, you see her much as you left her, the form of a woman wearing a gray jumpsuit and boots with pale skin and white hair that reached slightly below her shoulders. Another pang of regret as you remember that her combat gear and weapon have also been left shipside. You unplug the solar charger and gingerly hold a button on the side of her head, which flashes green after a few seconds. Her eyes open and stare upwards at the sky, her expression blank.
You speak. "Good morning, Allie."

"Good morning, sir. I currently have nine hours, seventeen minutes, and fourteen seconds of charge at the average usage rate." she intones.

You grin. "Corporate code check, please."

"Nigger." she states, gracefully rising from her box and sitting crisscrossed beside it.
You let out a light chuckle. It took more work to overcome the hardened layers of personality censorship inherent in the standard personal android model than it did to make sure she didn't immediately lock up and try to contact police upon being ordered to hold and use a firearm, but you considered the effort worth it. It was good for a laugh now and again, and it helped assure your squad that the android you kept around was jailbroken enough not be transmitting their location to counterinsurgency forces.
You briefly point out important items in the camp for the benefit of her code; where food was to be stored, where the water was, the medkit, the fighting position, and rattle off some commands in order to prepare for the night.
"Check out the wound on my scalp, prepare cold camp dinner for one person, and then night watch until dawn, please."

"Of course, sir.
She dutifully rises from her sitting position and begins her tasks, starting with inspecting, cleaning, and bandaging the clotted gash on your head as you try not to squirm. Thank heaven it wasn't worse, you've seen how bad head injuries can get. After Allie's ministrations you lay back inside your lean-to as you consider your plan going forward. This place seems temperate, mild, and quite habitable, but you won't be able to stay here long-term. You don't have the proper tools, seeds, or building materials to try and make a proper homestead where you are right now, and have no idea where "here" is. You could have landed three miles from civilization or right in the middle of this planet's equivalent of Siberia. Foraging and trapping will sustain you for now, but not forever. You don't know the seasons, the weather patterns, or even exactly how long a day was on this planet.

>>6232530
[3/3]
Allie carefully places a prepared MRE and a full canteen in your lap as you lie deep in thought and lightly steps into the foxhole you constructed earlier, her head and eyes begin slowly scanning the surroundings as you pick at the... food product stuff. Even seven hundred years of hunger wasn't enough spice to enjoy this stuff. At least your nausea was done and dusted and you could confidently keep food down. Turning back to the thoughts at hand, you resign that you know far too little and need to spend the coming days gathering intelligence, but the question is how.
(Pick One)
>Foot Patrol, leaving the campsite hidden and Allie on the charger. Oh man, it sure would be nice if a Buc-ees was just over the hill.
>Fiddle with the Radio, staying in camp another couple days until Allie has the charge to watch the camp while you're gone seems prudent.
>Both? Once you get her charged, Allie can act fairly autonomously, given orders. It might be a good idea to send her out in one direction, and take another yourself.
>Write-In

>>6232531
>Both? Once you get her charged, Allie can act fairly autonomously, given orders. It might be a good idea to send her out in one direction, and take another yourself.

>Fiddle with the Radio, staying in camp another couple days until Allie has the charge to watch the camp while you're gone seems prudent.

I also want to develop the fighting position more, dig it deeper, reinforce it. Dig some Vietnamese tunnels with shooting positions. This position needs to be ready for the devil itself on our doorstep.

>>6232552
I love where you're going with this, just be aware that I'm not sure how well I can represent underground structures in Rimworld, given it doesn't have z-level support.

>>6232493
Lucky man. I'm not a burger so I never got a chance to see them live. Shame they're retiring.
>>6232531
>You grin. "Corporate code check, please."
>"Nigger." she states, gracefully rising from her box and sitting crisscrossed beside it.
Hah. Made me laugh. I'll vote for
>Fiddle with the Radio, staying in camp another couple days until Allie has the charge to watch the camp while you're gone seems prudent.
I'm not so sure about fortifying this position so deeply early on. We don't know if the area is suitable for long term stay just yet, I'd say we dig some trenches and maybe just one tiny living area to protect our gears from the element instead.

>>6232530
>"Corporate code check, please."
>"Nigger."
Best waifu, well played QM
>>6232552
Hell yeah support for this with pic related

>>6232552
>>6232531
+1 support.
Really enjoying this Mr. QM, please keep up the great work!

Locking in for Fiddle with the Radio, writing 'er up before I knock off to bed!

This coming week will be experimental schedule-wise, first time QM'ing and all that. I'll see about keeping updates frequent while we get the quest rolling along but work may get in the way. If shit does happen be assured that I will at least be available Monday or Tuesday.

[1/5]
After some careful deliberation, the thought of leaving all that can be currently called yours behind, vulnerable, to go trekking for an unknown amount of time is decisively pushed into the "Fuck no." category. At least without Allie being awake to attempt to strangle anybody bent on stealing your shit. God, what you'd do to have your rifle back. You spoon the remains of the chemically-heated stew into your mouth and take several gulps of plastic-tasting water. You lean outside your makeshift shelter to check on Allie. She kneels in your fighting position, motionless save for the slow rotation of her head from left to right and back again. You lean back inside. Then you check her again. You sigh and lay back down on your back with your head braced against your backpack as the day's toil on your body helps coax you into what could generously be called sleep.
A period of restlessness hits you somewhere past midnight, and you slowly roll out of the canopy. The night around you is bright enough to make out the outline of objects around your camp thanks to this world's two moons, the only movement you detect being the slow rustling of shrub leaves in the soft breeze and Allie's head as she keeps a dutiful watch. Looking up, the sheer amount of stars you can see reminds you of being in the far backcountry, the places where light pollution from the glittering sprawl of the South's urban centers didn't reach. The sight puts you more at ease as you try to pick out which of the stars up there you successfully left behind, and, lightly cursing yourself and proffering a reminder that you're going to need all the sleep you can get, you roll lazily back into the canopy and pass out. Jetlag is a bitch.
The first thing you notice afterward is the morning sun's rays keyholing through the open side of your lean-to and hitting you directly in the goddamned eyes. You groan, dissatisfied and longing to return to sleep, but sit up nonetheless. You have shit to do.

"Good Morning, Allie." you croak, sleep still holding onto your throat as you stretch the stiffness out of your back.

"Good Morning, sir. I currently have one hour, seventeen minutes, and nine seconds of charge at the average usage rate."she states from the fighting hole.

"Alright..." You pause. "Stand down from night watch, prepare cold camp breakfast for one, and play some music." You rub your eyes, and then suddenly freeze as your tired brain processes what you just said. You fell for it again.

>>6232853
[2/5]
"Fuck! WAI-" you start, but it was too late. Her mouth was already open. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqEmAsUXVJY

You have no idea whether this was a joke played on you of Allie's own accord or a devious prank that gestated in the mind of one of your fellow rebels one day, but every time you asked Allie to simply "Play Music" without specifying what, that fucking coconut song was always the first one to come out of her mouth. Out of over thirteen-thousand pieces of music you had stored on her, there was no way it was a fucking coincidence.

"SKIP, RANDOM!" you cry, Merv Griffin's torturous melody stops and is replaced with something just as vintage, but far more appropriate for a slow morning in your eyes.

You rub your forehead in fading annoyance, now fully awake, and sit down on top of Allie's case as she lightly putters around the camp, withdrawing the requisite items and preparing a simple bush breakfast for you. Another unidentified stew with meat chunks. The light of thought briefly illuminates you, and you trudge to one of those berry bushes you noticed yesterday.

"Allie, what are these? Are they safe?"you ask, returning with a handful, hoping they are in fact blueberries and not some sort of alien berries that give you a disease or something.

She blinks and tilts her head slightly. "Vaccinium corymbosum. Blueberries. Safe for human consumption in this state." Thank fuck. Breakfast was made infinitely more pleasant by their addition.

>>6232854
[3/5]
The earlier musical mishap helpfully reminds you of the radio equipment you pulled from the pod, which you grab from the lean-to and start to tinker with. The walkie's batteries had naturally discharged over the years in transit, but the cranked radio seemed to work just fine, given some initial effort. You had Allie sacrifice some of her remaining power to juice up the handheld's batteries before returning to her case to recharge herself. Add "charger incompatibilities" to the list of things that are a bitch. Slowly scanning through the frequency range of the cranked radio first, you hear a lot of static, some garbled and unintelligible noise, and just one station that you can hear clearly. It seems to be a music station. You place the radio down and resign to listen in order to gain what information you can. The songs are mainly instrumental, typically either folkish or more on the hard rock side, and in English, though accented in a way you don't recognize. While listening, your inaction begins to engender anxiety, so you resign to work on your camp some more. The canopy comes first, you pull it down, stake it up better, and re-pitch it in a typical A-frame style. The white water container finds its way inside so as not to be obvious from above and your spare clothing combined with some careful scraping of the ground lead to a more cozy sleeping arrangement.
Unhelpfully, it seems there are no news breaks, talk programs, or advertisements to give you additional hints as to the nature of the broadcaster and the station plays the same couple dozen songs in random order, but you do glean that this is coming from people already settled here, not anybody from your expedition.
You start to frequency-scan with the handheld walkie-talkie as you whittle and shave branches into stakes to place in random locations on your camp's perimeter, with not much luck. You catch mostly static and fragments of conversations in definitely-foreign languages, and so far the attempts you make to broadcast don't elicit any intelligible response, but you keep trying in between bouts of busywork.

>>6232855
[4/5]
It was two days later when the handheld crackled to life, surprising you whilst you were using a tool that was very much not a shovel as a shovel in the service of your marsupial-like compulsion to burrow. Your camp now had camouflaged fighting positions with cleared fields of fire on every side, the one facing your pod's landing site could now reasonably be called a slit trench. Punji stakes jutted randomly into the gathered greenery that shielded your temporary home from observation. You still had nothing with which to properly fight with, but the project made you feel better about yourself and the ability for Allie to keep guard whilst you were away.
You ungracefully scramble out of the trench to reach the radio, slightly collapsing one of its' walls and ensuring future work for yourself.

"What was that? Is somebody there?" you say into the radio.

"Yeah, who is this? Why are you on our net?" the voice of an older man responds, with an accent similar to the one exhibited from the music station.

"Hey, I came down in an escape pod a few days back and I need to figure out where I'm at."

Only silence, for a moment, and the voice comes back with a dramatic tone shift. "You pieces of fucking shit!"

You blink in astonishment. "What?"

"You heard me, asshole! We had a good thing going here until you fucking pissbaskets came over here after us! You led the fucking Hoteps right to us, and now everything is fucked! Go to hell!"

Sitting speechless for a moment, you mentally unpack everything that was said before raising the radio in an attempt to get more information, but the voice isn't responding anymore. The guy was probably one of the first-wave colonists, given the accent. You know you've heard the term "Hotep" before, but your mind is drawing a blank as to where. Given the radio is a handheld and not a proper base station with an external power source and antenna, the guy couldn't have been that far. You're at a loss for how to apply this information for now beyond a mental note that one or more groups on this planet are very unhappy that you're here.

>>6232856
[5/5]
You sling your backpack and settle its' weight on your shoulders. Allie is up, on guard duty, has charge enough for a day and a half, and you've resigned to finally leave camp and take a proper look at your surroundings. Taking a long, thoughtful gaze at the landscapes all around, you come to a decision about which way to go from here.
(Pick One)
>Northwards, to the Printed Forest.
>Eastwards, to the Rolling Hills.
>Southwards, towards the Mountain.
>Westwards, downslope into the Valley.

>>6232857
>Southwards, towards the Mountain.
Let us begin the search for Agartha. The snow and wind-blown cold is where a proper Aryan like us belongs.

>>6232854
Man, the rebels sounds like fun people.
>>6232857
>Eastwards, to the Rolling Hills.
Let's see if there's something we can use as a source of food.

>>6232857
>>Eastwards, to the Rolling Hills.

>>6232857
>Northwards, to the Printed Forest.

>>6232857
>>Southwards, towards the Mountain.
Little did Stanley know, that deep to the south was a land named Hyperborea, filled with gnomes.

>>6232856
Off, but what mods are you using? Are the hasty firing positions in the mod usable, and create an advantage in defense like real hasty firing positions?

>>6232864
>Man, the rebels sounds like fun people.
If you've ever been around bored soldiers, you'd understand. Or Allie has developed some emergent behaviors, who can say?
>>6233156
The firing positions in the screenshot are Ditches from Fortifications - Neolithic, but in the mod are mainly used to hinder movement. Vanilla Furniture Expanded - Security has trenches that provide a cover bonus to pawns inside if that's what you're looking for. I have loads of mods in my current list.

>>6233389
You good QM? Hope you haven't been rimmed to death.

>>6234981
Yep! Still alive! Just a very eventful week.
Sessions for tomorrow and Tuesday is the plan. Bring in a friend and let's break this tie we have going on.

>>6232857
>EAST
Sounds the easiest to explore

Good morning, folks!
Locking in for Eastwards, we're bound for the Rolling Hills, an area much like that which we've landed upon.

[1/3]
In a way, it was nice to be back on the move, it was how you lived during the war, though your past acclimatization felt stifled, likely by your time on the ice. Feet ached, knees hurt, belts and straps chafed, but the singularity of your situation allowed ample chances to distract the mind. All around you are refreshing views of a natural land untouched by humankind, which strikes ironic as nothing here was, technically, natural.
Just the same, the green, rolling hills unchoked by kudzu, trees untainted by bark beetles, and the light, efflorescent breeze evoked a refreshing feeling in Stanley as the first miles ticked by.

A dark bank of rainclouds had been pacing up from the west for some time and around midday they finally overtook you. With the tarp obscuring most of your body from the oncoming precipitate and raising wind, your search for humanity is now accompanied by the pattering of rain against your makeshift poncho and the sucking of the moist ground against your footsteps.

Hours later, the rain still persisting, you come across your first sign of human civilization as the afternoon starts to draw closer to evening, a winding path of packed dirt that winds through the lows and gaps in the small foothills. Kicking some small rocks into a discrete sign of the direction you came from, you follow along the unkempt track.

More signs of civilization follow shortly. A camp was pitched near a broken-down wreck of a small military transport, the rain pattering the abandoned ashes and sundry trash items of a former campsite into the dust of a small turnout.
The armored car is riddled with bullet-holes. It seems at first glance that it has been thoroughly picked-through by scavengers since its' abrupt end. Stanley spends a restless night in a scrape a slight distance away from the destroyed transport, as sheets of rain ceaselessly carpet the land.

>>6235977
[2/3]
With lingering soreness, pervasive dampness, and a stomach refilled by centuries-old fare, Stanley continues down the trail, mindful of his time limit. He'll have to turn back by around midday in order to get back to the landing site before Allie runs out of charge, leaving the camp entirely defenseless. The rainstorm slackens to a sprinkle, the hills come and go, and you at last find the terminus of this particular road. Unfortunately, it isn't a convenience store that also happens to sell firearms and camping gear.

You tramp up the dirt path towards a corrugated metal structure into a widening driveway punctuated by a derelict van, several items of scrap and garbage, and a large pile of firewood. A field sits beside the ersatz-farmhouse, overgrown with weeds. You call out, hoping to rouse any occupants. The only sound that greets you in return is the drumming of rain on the sheet metal roofing. Coming closer, you see additional evidence of the strife endemic to this land. Two human skeletons molder in the dirt outside the structure, and the picture gained by the scattered appliances and trash is one more of looting than a lack of maintenance.

The inside of the main structure is no better kept than the outside. Another set of human remains is found completely desiccated within, with the addition of several long-dried patches of blood and bile. The smell is rotten, and immediately drives Stanley back to the doorway for gasps of untainted air. You see scattered clothing, boxes, shelving, and detritus.

With some difficulty indoors due to the olfactory situation, you search the area thoroughly, inside and out.

-There is no stock of food to be found here.
-If any weapons and ammunition were here, they were taken by whomever plundered the homestead.
-The set of lockers near the door contain some well-worn hand tools associated with farming, seemingly undisturbed.
-The fixtures in the bathroom are smashed and the plumbing is nonfunctional.
-The appliances both inside and out are likewise smashed in or perforated by rather large bullet holes.
-Whatever mattresses and bedspread previously adorned the bed are long gone, leaving the bedframes behind.
-Behind the cabin is the homestead's power generator. It is out of gas, but seems otherwise overlooked.
-The buildings themselves seem sturdy enough, being constructed of metal beams and sheeting upon a concrete foundation.
-There are some Building Materials here, left over by the previous owners and unwanted by the looters.
-The field is overgrown, with significant gaps in the fence surrounding it, but you notice that some of the original crop of potatoes has survived.
-The homestead has a well, which is undisturbed and contains cool, clean water, which you immediately take advantage of.

>>6235981
[3/3]
The sun rises to its apex at the conclusion of your search, leaving Stanley with deep apprehensions on the eve of his next decision. The brief radio exchange, the shot-up armored car, and now the ruined homestead have coalesced into a picture of general unrest and insecurity, a far cry from the mental images of a peaceful life you had when you took the shuttle up to the colony ship.

The discovery of the Ruined Homestead has raised some new possibilities.

You could move your camp here entirely and take advantage of the ruins as a shortcut to establishing a more sustainable base. Alternatively, you could leave this place behind you, wary of the occupants' fate becoming your own, and bring the Tools and what Potatoes you can carry as seedstock for a homestead of your own, either at the Landing Site or in some yet-undiscovered area that may be more suitable to you.

The need to return to the Landing Site is inevitable no matter what you choose, but for now, you like the idea of:
(Pick One)
>Settling Down Here.
>Continue Your Exploration.
>Something else?

>>6235984
>bury the dead
Its what I would want

>>6235984
>Continue your exploration
This is the first frigging area we found and I don't want to go "first girl" syndrome on locations; we can decide later when we find more options. I'm a bit worried someone might be tracing our radio if we really ticked him off but I'm sure we're far enough from anybody to be okay for a little while longer.
This place is a solid 8/10 for the clean water and free generator. We'll have to bury the bodies and maybe find a pastor to say a few words, but it's a good spot.

>>6235984
>Settling Down Here.
If someone already looted the place, they probably won’t be back for more unless they realize we set up shop here.

>>6236053
>>6236050
That too.
>>6236051
My thinking is that, since we’d just be getting started with settling down, we’d still have ample opportunity to explore for better camp sites.

>>6235984
>>Continue Your Exploration.
>Bury the dead.
>"Here lies an unknown homesteader. May they rest in peace, and may they forgive any who may move in after them."

>>6236055
>>6236053
I know how psychology on the Rim works. Unless the spot you first move into is ASS, like, absolutely foul; no resources, completely exposed, shit weather, etc. you end up hunkering down and staying there forever. Sometimes you end up staying even if it's ass. Not to mention that those raiders are on POINT, they find your ass in like 2 weeks and come knocking to kill you and steal your shit even if you have 3 potatoes and a dream, like this poor fellow. This seems to mostly be using Rimworld as a storytelling device, but the overly-aggressive rando on the radio makes me think that the raiders may be just the same.

>>6236061
I’ll trust this judgement. Just so long as we keep this place on the radar. >>6236053
Changing my vote to
>Continue Your Exploration.
>Bury the dead.

>>6236079
Ideally we want:
>Somewhere temperate; A little warmer than average is good for farming and a little cooler than average is good for power-saving.
>Mountainous; more mountains equals more mineral wealth and the possibility of creating a fortified bunker immune to siege bombardment. Some mountain layouts are better than others, but even a few small hills is better than flat land... although then we'll have to worry about infestations, if we dig too deep.
>Running water; good for power, and (although not basegame, there's mods for it and QM already seems fairly modded) a river gives us a method of relatively fast travel by boat that ignores the mountainous terrain and the ability to fish.
>Low-to-no pollution; we don't have any genemods capable of handling toxic waste.

These aren't all essential, but all are beneficial.

Alrighty! Locking in for Continue Your Exploration with the write-in suggestion for Bury The Dead. Update to follow.

I feel like I kinda goofed up the flow by not having this vote once we got back to camp, but oh well. Live and learn.

[1/5]
Time was not on your side, but the tragic story of these unfortunate homesteaders tugged at you enough that you resolved to give them as proper a burial as could be given under the circumstances. Allie possibly being bricked for a few... hours or more shouldn't be an issue. You hope. The exact amount of time in a day on this world still eludes you without a watch, and Allie's software understandably wasn't intended to account for the finer points of being on a planet that wasn't Earth. Anyway, at least you had a shovel now.
The rain finally ceases as you finish one grave and move on to the next. You wonder who these people were, having been left nothing but their bones, their home, and rotten, illegible papers from which to identify them. One skeleton is significantly smaller than the other two. A family, you figure.
You give them the utmost care as you bear them to their final rest, facing their home, three slabs of corrugated metal to mark their presence, with a message crudely engraved on each with the back of your knife. "Here lies an unknown homesteader."
As the final shovelful of earth lands, you realize you have no formal prayers to offer, so you wing it. God should understand.

In a somber mood you march back down the road you came from, additionally laden with the homesteaders' farming tools and a burlap sack filled with their final harvest. The color of the overcast skies shifts as the day slowly yawns into what you figure is the late afternoon. You feel like the days are definitely longer than Earth's, but precision in the matter is impossible. Uphill, downhill, uphill, repeat. Your steps blur into a disassociative peace.

A peace you only notice because it suddenly deserts you. You freeze. Something isn't right.

Your head swivels sharply, attempting to find the source of your instinctual reaction.

Buzzing. DRONE.

A well-rehearsed series of actions quickly follow. You drop the tools, which fall onto the path with a clatter. Likewise the sack of potatoes. The tarp you formerly used as a poncho flies out of your pack as you plunge onto the grass besides the trail, tucking yourself into a ball underneath it.

You dare not look, lest your face reveal your heat.

You listen.

The buzzing comes from up ahead. It's following the trail. You lie completely still. Closer, closer, closer... It's right on top of you. You don't know what kind of drone it is. If it was a hunter-killer, the impact grenade would be on its way. You flinch. Your breath stops.

The buzzing continues behind you. No change in speed. No change in course. A deep sigh of relief. You wait for some minutes after to be sure the drone wasn't going to double-back before you scamper back onto the trail to pick up your fallen tools and potatoes.
It was a great struggle to meet with sleep hours later, your paranoia was refreshed far more than your body.

>>6236561
[2/5]
No peace comes with the morning sun. No reflections your surroundings. No deep thoughts on the meaning of it all. Just the tensity of your instinctual need to move quickly and unseen. Off the path, but within sight of it so as not to get lost. The instant you come across the marker you left on the trail, you veer hard in the direction of the Landing Site. It'll be a couple more hours. You hope the drone was tethered to watching that road and didn't see your campsite. You'll be damned if you don't meet whomever is operating surveillance drones, or any group in this area for that matter, on anything but your own terms. This was a land of death.
You cross over and down the hills with an energetic gait as they slowly flatten out into the grassy plains that define the area where you first came to reside on this planet.
As you crest a small hill, the innocuous perimeter of shrubs and greenery that defined your camp comes into view. You see a gap in the bushes, a form, something black and red. You don't see Allie.

>>6236563
[3/5]
Jogging the final yards, it's apparent that the bivouac isn't as you left it. The first thing you notice is the dead guy lying in a pool of his own blood. Either he's been here since hours after you left and is starting to decompose, or he hasn't showered in months, or both. It's an average-sized black guy, somehow dressed both raggedly and gaudily at once, with a dark, elegantly stitched half-jacket over a roughspun dark green tunic and trousers. He's also wearing some sort of bandolier with a dozen small, wooden tubes dangling off it by strings. He's obviously dead, with half of his head caved inward and flies swarming him. His weapon lies beside him in the grass, and thematically fits its former user. Some sort of musket, with its rough, dimpled woodwork embellished along the length of its' long barrel by shiny brass bands. You pick up the musket, inspecting it further.
It has "MACHOGO" carved on the stock in hardly-decipherable script. It has been discharged.

The latter fact has you begin a brief hunt for Allie, cursing your tunnel-vision.
She sits cross-legged, embraced by the shrubbery, her eyes closed and body entirely still. Like the portrait of a fancy lady in deep meditation at some vacation spa. Her jumpsuit has a slight gash at one of her thighs, through which you can see an imbedded musket ball. While a proper robo-modder you certainly were not, you figure the damage not to be serious. Her battery ran out, she wasn't disabled.

Looking around the rest of the camp, it seems entirely unchanged. The ration crate was undisturbed under a bush, its' contents unpilfered. The water and water filter were still where you left them, and Allie's case and charging setup still lay in the center of camp. You haul her over and start her to recharging, at least enough that you can get her side of the story before she needs to juice back up for a couple of days.

Your initial anxiety is somewhat offset by the fact that you now have a firearm, even if an archaic one. Trying to recall the details from movies about the First Civil War, you attempt to familiarize yourself with the weapon. It sparks from a flint, isn't rifled, and rattles slightly when you shake it. After a few moments' inspection, you intuit how to load it. The tubes on the dead raider's belt are pre-loaded charges, a touch of powder goes in the pan of the lock, the rest goes down the barrel along with the ball, you ram it home and cock it. Ready to fire.

You point it at a bush about fifty yards away, and squeeze the trigger. BANG! The bush shudders from the thumb-sized ball's passage and a startled bird from within darts into the sky.

>>6236565
[4/5]
Armed. With an actual firearm. You feel so much better, but now you have new problems. Chiefly, you need to know exactly what happened here.
You set Allie up and press the button on the side of her head, she should be good for a brief exchange.
The smell was really starting to get to you.

"Allie." you say as her eyes open, somewhat curtly.

"Good Morning, sir. I currently have seven minutes and nineteen seconds of charge at the average usage rate. Entering power-saving mode."

"Why is there a dead guy in my camp?" you ask.

"I apologize sir, I currently have no location specified as Dead Nigger Storage." she states indifferently.

You snort loudly. "No, no, uhhh..." You take a second to collect yourself. "Combat Report, please."

"Of course, sir. Two unknown men were detected approaching the Landing Site twenty-seven hours, four minutes, and thirty seconds ago. The men approached to within the twenty yard warning distance of the camp. I emitted the required warning. Both men immediately discharged firearms and vocalized violent intent. I subdued one man in close combat. The other man suddenly fled North. I have suffered superficial damage to my right thigh." she recounts.

"Drag the body out there by the pod, then return to your case, please."

"Yes, sir."

You pinch your nose in frustration. Your camp has been found. If North was where the raider's partner fled, it's likely where they're coming from. You wonder how long it'll take him to reach his fellows. How many of them are there? Do they only have muskets, or were these guys outliers? Are they the Hoteps the guy on the radio mentioned, or the First Colonists?

>>6236566
[5/5]
You hunker atop Allie's occupied case and take a breather. It's time to figure out what to do next, and how. Keep the bivouac here and dig in further, or pull up stakes and go nomadic while you continue to search your distant surroundings, or something else?

(Pick One)
>Dig in. You don't want to fight, but By Jingo if you do, you've got a gun, you've got a trench, and a killer android too.
>Go Nomadic. There are too many unknowns to be comfortable fighting these guys right now. A rebel knows when to run.
>Settle in a previously discovered location.
>Write-in.

The discovery of the Ruined Homestead has solidified the usefulness of your long-range patrols in your mind, the tools and seed potatoes you gained will no doubt be extremely useful. The direction and objective of the next patrol should be:

(Pick One)
>North, to the Printed Forest. If you're about to Jack Hinson this shit, you need to do some proper reconnaissance on these raiders.
>East, to the Rolling Hills. What's on the other end of that road that lead you to the Ruined Homestead? The thought of that drone chills you.
>South, to The Mountain. More raw distance from the Raiders and the chance of a more defensible position in the rocks, perhaps?
>West, to The Valley. A total unknown, it'd be nice to change that. If the raiders expect you to run, doglegging them westwards might throw them off.

>>6236567
>Go Nomadic. There are too many unknowns to be comfortable fighting these guys right now. A rebel knows when to run.
We should keep moving. The fact that there are raiders and a drone about doesn't bode well for how safe this region actually is.
If this isn't too much, I'd like to string the dead guy up somewhere, make a whole spooky scene of it. Something to dissuade his companions from trying to find us.
>South, to The Mountain. More raw distance from the Raiders and the chance of a more defensible position in the rocks, perhaps?
Having a more defensible base to store our stuff and let Allie charge up in peace might be nice.

>>6236567
>NOMAD
>MOUNTAIN
Gotta go, Allie!
Still not fond of digging in just yet, the open grounds don't favor a defensible camp, and the sole location we found is not at the top of the list.

>>6236567
>>Go Nomadic.
>South, to The Mountain.

If we can't find a good spot, then the forest would be good. A lake/island or river would be excellent, if we run across it.

>>6236567
>Go Nomadic. There are too many unknowns to be comfortable fighting these guys right now. A rebel knows when to run.
>North, to the Printed Forest. If you're about to Jack Hinson this shit, you need to do some proper reconnaissance on these raiders.

>>6236567
>Go Nomadic. There are too many unknowns to be comfortable fighting these guys right now. A rebel knows when to run.
>South, to The Mountain. More raw distance from the Raiders and the chance of a more defensible position in the rocks, perhaps?

Btw, how many days worth of rations and water do we have?
Also, why can't Allie charge while active?

Oh, and there are two other recommendations i suggest.
>write in
>Scavenge through our drop pod to see if there are any useful electronics inside of it
>leave markings and false trails in different directions from the landing zone to make it harder to follow our trail

> Dig in
Raider attacks will only get stronger. The abandoned homestead had s power plant, I don't ghink Allie's case is equipped with a reactor that keeps her online indefinitely.

Also if it was actusl rimworld, start farming devilstrand if we have the farming skill for it. And by Goddess I hope at least one of you have a pro-cannibalism ideoligion.

But you write like a Soldier, OP. You have seen too much shit to imagine actual rimworld things. So no human resources, please and thsnk you.

> North, to the printed forest
ISTAR is king. Since we don't have the full nine yards, recce will have to be enough. Hope we had some specwar training/exp before we became a human popsicle.

>>6236614.
>Btw, how many days worth of rations and water do we have?
For just Stanley? Right now, a few weeks of food, and, so long as there's a water source that isn't too brackish for the filter (like the Landing Site's nearby pond), a full 10-liter container of potable water.

>Also, why can't Allie charge while active?
The pitiful charging rate and short cable length of her travel case's solar panel, mainly. A proper power source will allow Allie to charge on a more enviable timeframe, up to her full seven days' charge.

>>6236567
>>Go Nomadic. There are too many unknowns to be comfortable fighting these guys right now. A rebel knows when to run.
>South, to The Mountain. More raw distance from the Raiders and the chance of a more defensible position in the rocks, perhaps?

Inshallah it looks good

>>6236567
>>Go Nomadic. There are too many unknowns to be comfortable fighting these guys right now. A rebel knows when to run.

With an overwhelming majority supporting skedaddling in the direction of The Mountain, that's what we'll go ahead and do! I'll try my best not to leave as big an update gap as last week's, but 12s are a bitch, so I can only promise my best.

You doing ok QM?

>>6239365
Yeah. Second week in a row my job has made a liar of me, the universe has decreed that this is going to be a Monday-Tuesday thing.

[1/3]
It's time to go. Skedaddle. Vamoose. Book it. Live to fight another day, if fighting raiders is even the career you want to permanently embark upon. Another decision for another time. To be fair, if this group is sending boys out into the field with muzzleloaders, they mustn't be the ones behind that drone you encountered on the road back from the Ruined Homestead. You hope. Whether or not you feel the need to wage a brand new war so (subjectively) soon after leaving your last one, displacing is what your focus is now.

Allie is both your biggest benefit and biggest flaw when it comes to a life entirely on the move. Being an android, a construct intended to replace human workers in many menial jobs in addition to being capable of domestic tasks, she can carry more than you're able to with little issue. The problem comes from, naturally, your charging situation.
Using most of the day to utilize the solar panel that came with her travel case, and not being able to use most of the night due to not having proper night vision gear, that leaves dusk and dawn as the only travel hours you can utilize, unless there's a full moon.

Actually, you're not sure this planet has a moon, now that you think about it.

And so your crepuscular journey southward continues, with you out in front with Machogo's Musket in hand, feeling like a mix between the Confederate soldiers of old and some Afghan tribesman with a gaudily-decorated jezail. Allie trails behind you, presenting a silly sight with her petite body dwarfed by the belongings she dutifully hauled. You're not sure how much more you'll be able to carry between the two of you, your backpack was stuffed to the limit.
As far as ammunition went, you weren't badly off. Only twelve pre-measured charges were stored in dangling wooden tubes along the length of the looted bandolier you wore, but at its' lower end was a pouch that contained more powder and a handful of musket balls for perhaps thirty shots in all.

The distant mountain steadily looms larger in your view as the open plains turn to hillier and narrowing terrain, the exposed rock of the planet jutting out in spots beneath the greenery, giving a fading glimpse of the planet as it had been for eons before the arrival of human terraforming drones. On the mountain's jagged face you notice an unnatural contour, a straight line, some sort of path that swirls up the circumference of the slope and meanders out of sight near a pile of rocky scree. This sign of direct human influence becomes your intended destination.

>>6240192
[2/3]
The going gets harder the closer you come to the mystery path as the ground beneath you shifts from grass to rocky loam and the need to thoughtfully pick your way up through crevices and draws presents itself. You look behind you.

"How are you holding up, Allie?"

"I currently have two hours, five minutes and fifty seconds of charge at the average usage rate, sir."

You look back upslope, taking a large gulp from your canteen. That should be just enough to make it up to wherever that road leads, but not much more.
The last fifty feet to the path are a tedious endeavor, whomever built the path up the mountain had partially hacked it into the mountain face and partially used gravel, dirt, and other refuse to create a fill for the path to be built upon. It takes three strenuous trips to get yourself, Allie, and all that you carry over the final embankment. It occurs to you throughout all of this that, while very visually obvious from the far distance, this pathway is Very Defensible.

The final mile is a comparative breeze. This could be considered a road, in the more rural and impoverished parts of Earth that you left. Although still constructed of dirt, it was well-graded and wide enough for a truck to comfortably travel, if only one-way. You come across the top of the pile of loose rock you had spotted miles before and identify it as tailings, the miscellaneous, unusable rock often piled high outside underground mines. By the size of this pile, the mine you bet you're coming close to is of a substantial size.

>>6240193
[3/3]
Soon afterwards, you find the entrance to the mine in question as the road curves inside the mountain through a small, jagged gorge. For better or worse, this place too, seems abandoned, though thankfully not looted as was the case at the Ruined Homestead. A closed door hangs askew in the framework of timbers supporting the main passageway. Exploration on the mind, you briefly worry about bad air, a condition in abandoned mines that occurs when oxygen-displacing gasses stagnate and slowly suffocate the unwary, but a slight breeze carrying through the gaps in the door assuage your concerns for now.

With a faintly-palpable relief, Allie unburdens herself of your goods, supplies, and her travel case and places them delicately on the ground near the side of the road. She then sits down in a meditative pose, crosses her legs, and closes her eyes, a well-known series of movements indicating that she is shutting down due to low charge. You roll out her panel and plug her in, leaving her to her rest.

You take a break before investigating further. Your own body's weariness after the journey up the mountain makes itself known as your activity pauses and thoughts are allowed to turn inward, you polish off the remaining water in your canteen between breaths before refilling it from the large, white water canister in the supply pile.

With a sigh, you look upward to the sky. Just at that moment, something bright catches your eye. You squint. An escape pod, like the one you came down on. A trail of vapor and smoke follows it as it arcs across the sky. You quickly sprint out of the gorge in order to keep sight. It flies North in a lazy ballistic trajectory, its' retrograde thrusters firing with a crack audible even at your current distance. You lose sight of it just before it touches the ground, but from your high vantage point, you're confident you can track down the pod's exact landing site.

It landed in the same general area you just came from, the area where the Unknown Raiders would be looking for you if they returned, and you're certain that they saw that pod land as well.

Do you drop everything to go to your fellow colonist's rescue?
(Pick One)
Yes.
No.

>>6240194
YOU CAN'T TELL ME WHAT TO DO QM
>Nes.

>>6240200
lol based

I'll mark it as 2/3rds of a Yes due to letter count.

Quick question before choosing. Would Allie have enough power to leave with us as support for this mission or would she crap out before being able to help in combat?

>>6240213
She's totally depleted and needs to recharge. You'd be leaving Allie and all of your gear behind and unprotected, hence the dilemma.

>>6240218
>>6240194
in that case
>Yes (with caveat)
>bring Allie and our resources to a the pile of rocks and bury both in gravel in such a way it looks as natural as possible, but could relatively easily be dug back out. (Use the tent from our previous camp to wrap up Allie before burying her in the loose gravel)
>Approach the landing site sneakily. remaining undiscovered has higher priority than the colonist surviving.

>>6240194
>>6240224
+1 to this. I can get behind this plan

>>6240224
+1

Alright, we're going for the pod!

>>6240224
Burying everything in the tailings pile would be a bit much for the time constraint, but I'll let us obscure our things slightly before we leave as a compromise, it is fitting for Stanley's paranoia.

>>6240194
>>6240224
>>6240194
>>6240224
This is a very fine plan. We can assume any inhabitants in the pod would have sleeping sickness, or maybe it's all the rest of Stanley's stuff being ejected to where he landed.
Either way, a good idea to scope it out.

A quick little flavor vote for you all to ponder while I finish writing and making screenshots for the upcoming (action packed!) update.

What was the main reason Stanley decided to flee the war and join the Colony Expedition after fighting for years?

>A surefire escape from defeat, government monitoring, and justice.
>To carry the cause he fought for onto a new world and frontier.
>Disillusionment, either with the ends or means of the conflict.
>An entrancing, idealistic image of life on a colony world.
>Write-In.

>>6240556
>To carry the cause he fought for onto a new world and frontier.

>>6240556
>Write-In. (slight mix between 1 2 & 4)
>After having fought for a long time against the state in the civil war, our character wanted to retire from the fighting (seeing as his side wasn't winning anytime soon) while still contributing by making a home for him and anyone whom shared his ideals. An idea that, looking back, seems quaint in our current predicament.

Oh also, i propose the visual design for Allie is changed from the current white bodied android look to Elster from Signalis.

Elster's design seems like it could both fit the more humane design of (as Allie was originally meant to be) a homeworking android, while also reflecting the more hardened modifications our character would have given her.

Especially since nearly no respectable insurgent would keep their Robot white unless they lived in Alaska or Siberia.

>>6240556
>To carry the cause he fought for onto a new world and frontier.
The South(?) will rise again.

>>6240556
>>6240654
This is good. That mix of idealism, spirit and regret is potent.

>>6240194
>Yes.
>>6240556
>>To carry the cause he fought for onto a new world and frontier.

>>6240567
>>6240654
Changing my vote to this.

>>6240655
It's funny you bring that up, in my mind's eye I imagined Allie looking sorta like a color-swapped Elster. The reason Allie looks the way she does is entirely because the mod I'm using for her is...weird. Androids in it aren't typical pawns, they're mechanoids, so they can't be edited with the character editor or use the station that changes their hairstyle/color, so they're set as they are by the modder.

Later on I can open the floor to an Allie Redesign in another little flavor vote, once I can wrangle some drawfags into doing a few concepts if you guys are up for it.

(Fun fact: The game has a bug that generates a new, random hairstyle directly on top of her existing hair every time I load a save, meaning I have to delete and re-create her every time I open Rimworld. We're on, like, Allie 12 right now.)

>>6240556
>Disillusionment, either with the ends or means of the conflict.

>>6240735
Try these ones. My personal preference for "basically 100% human but a robot" is the top two, then the second for more mechanical androids (unfortunately unmainained), and then the third is "Detroit: Become Human" style androids.
https : //steamcommunity . com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2889326293&searchtext=android
https : //steamcommunity . com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2890036704&searchtext=android

https : //steamcommunity . com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3270639973&searchtext=android

https : //steamcommunity . com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2975771801&searchtext=android

>>6240654
Also supporting this vote.

[1/3]
You knew that if it was you, the last thing you would have wanted to wake up to was a musket ball in the head.
You also knew that, for the moment, the best chance of finding somebody you could trust to not try and kill you was to find a fellow colonist from your expedition.
Allie and the supplies were a problem. You ran back into the gorge and quickly stuff them into a small rocky alcove, shoving some boulders in front of them to slightly obscure them from sight. You anxiously kick some rocky dirt over the entirety, clouds of dust settling onto your stash. It blends in. Sort of. Fuck, it'll have to do. You check your canteen. Full. Good.
Proceeding back out into the open you fix your gaze on the distant spot where you lost the pod as it went down, and resolve to do your best to make it to that exact spot as fast as you can. Unburdened by supplies and the tyranny of Allie's battery, with only your backpack, survival axe, bandolier, and musket, the trip back down the mountainside takes a fraction of the time that it did going upwards, though the trip is no less hazardous. You come close to stumbling or twisting your ankle a few times while navigating down some small slopes and your musket earns a new crack in the wood of its' stock when you briefly lose your balance, but, in less than an hour, you're off the elevation and back amongst the grassy hills, bearing hard in the direction of the new landing site, you estimate that you'll get there around dusk.

Panting hard, you break for a moment in order to drink and settle back into the familiar mindset you'll need in order to fight. You take stock.
You have, either on your person or in your backpack:

Machogo's Musket Loaded. You can manage a shot every twenty-five seconds or so. Accurate enough to within a hundred yards... or so.

Musket Bandolier Twelve rounds at the ready, you have thirty shots in total if you get a few minutes to recharge the tubes.

Survival Axe Nearly pristine. More of a hatchet, but the distinction won't matter to whomever you bury it inside.

First Aid Kit Nearly Complete. A couple items were used to patch you up after your own landing, but nothing in it is exhausted.

Water and Food Enough for a half-day. The rest of your supplies are back in camp.

Your Tarp Always with you. You never know when the drones will return.

>>6240801
[2/3]
The pace at which you move grows steadily slower and more deliberate the closer you come to the landing site, mirroring the steady sinking of the sun into early dusk. There was no helping it. Blundering into a group of raiders at full speed would do you or that colonist no good. You dash from cover, to concealment, to cover again, each time taking a second to listen and look at the area surrounding you. Nothing so far. You keep checking for silhouettes, movement, light, anything to betray the presence of others. Still nothing. Move again. Look again. High alert. Sweat drips from your brow, you quickly wipe it with your sleeve. Holding the musket at a low-ready position for so long is very awkward, given the length and how the weight was balanced, but you manage.

You're confident that you held the bearing you needed to, the only factor that remains is the distance. You continue forward, caution increasing, into sparse forest choked by undergrowth, until you see a small light in the distance. A small fire. You resist the urge to quicken your pace. The shadows grow long and the sun continues to sink towards the horizon.
The light gets bigger and contrasts more and more with the darkening woods as you stalk. You see movement, and freeze. The shadows of three men shift excitedly amongst the branches and tree trunks. You continue to creep forward, gun pointed dead ahead, leaves and branches silently glancing from the passage of its' long barrel. From bush to bush you drift. You start to hear sounds. Objects clattering. Voices. Boisterous, words you can't decipher. Closer, closer...
You see the pod, and three shadowy figures moving around it. You're at the edge of musket range now. You sit low behind a small cluster of shrubs and fix your gaze on the scene.

You note three men, all dressed similarly to the one Allie killed at your campsite.
One, with a floppy pink hat, is struggling with his spear to open the top hatch of the escape pod. He has a large wicker shield beside him.
The other two are busying themselves with the contents of the pod's storage compartment, tearing open packages, dumping contents, and happily chatting to one another in a language you are still unable to understand.
The man with the red turban has more accoutrements than the others, a voice of authority, and a musket visually similar to yours slung across his shoulder.
The final raider is sitting cross-legged by a sports bag, and has an unloaded crossbow in his lap, a quiver of bolts at his side, and some sort of thick vest.

All three are unaware of your presence and seemingly unconcerned with the possibility of attack, occasionally whooping and laughing loudly when a choice piece of plunder comes into their possession.

>>6240802
[3/3]
You have no idea how long it'll take the raider with the spear to open the pod's upper hatch and skewer whomever is inside. It's time to either shit or get off the pot.
Darkness is falling rapidly, and the moonless night shortly to come will promise to grant obscurity to any that flee into the darkness. Looking down the barrel of Machogo's Musket, you're confident you can hit one of the raiders to commence the engagement and even up the odds a little in your favor, but which one?

(Pick One)

>Pink Hat. "The last thing I need is the spearman rushing me while I reload."
>Red Turban. "I want the only other guy with a musket downed first."
>Crossbow Guy. "He's unloaded, but with the fastest-loading weapon here."

Decision made, you slowly rise above the shrub and draw up for your opening shot. What will you do after you squeeze the trigger?

(Pick One)

>Rebel Yell. Drop the musket, draw your hatchet, and charge. Violent surprise may win the day.
>Run and Gun. Sprint back into the darkness, dogleg, and reload for another shot.
>Bait and Burrow. Draw them into a chase and lose them in the woods, distracting them from the pod's occupant.
>Something else. Write-In.

>>6240804
>Red Turban. "I want the only other guy with a musket downed first."
>Run and Gun. Sprint back into the darkness, dogleg, and reload for another shot.

>>6240804
>>Red Turban. "I want the only other guy with a musket downed first."
>Run and Gun. Sprint back into the darkness, dogleg, and reload for another shot.

>>6240804
>>6240826
support, also 1v3, not good odds.

Hah. I swore that I replied to the flavor vote from a couple days ago, but I guess that I'm turning into a full-bore schizo.

>>6240654
Here's your winner. Reminds me of the story of the Confederados who went off to Brazil after the war. I'll be exploring this further once I get a chance to do so!

On top of everything else, I have a wedding to go to as well, so I'll be seeing you boys on Monday!

[1/]
Adrenaline starts to seep in as you prepare to dramatically shift the jubilant mood of the marauders. You notice everything. The wind rustling through the leaves around you, the crackling of the campfire around which the raiders have gathered, and their every vocalization. The long barrel of Machogo's Musket sways steadily, then comes to a complete standstill as you exhale, composing a lethal departure point whose intended terminus is the chest of the raider with the blood-red turban. He squats perpendicularly to you, jibbering excitedly while rifling through a large hiking backpack, his own musket sitting at his side.
You slowly squeeze the trigger.

Clic-FFFFFTHHH Your stomach drops. "Fu-" CRACK! A goddamned hangfire!

The Red Turban raider was in the middle of standing up as your slightly-delayed shot screamed through the foliage. The thumb-sized lead ball found purchase in his right leg, barely above the knee, the force of the impact kicking his legs out from under him and sending him, only just risen, crashing back into the dirt. He howls in surprise, and then profound pain, his knee completely shattered and immobilized.

You take off into the bushes, thankful that the hangfire wasn't a complete misfire. You hear yelling behind you, the wounded raider bellowing in agony, and his companions shouting in surprise and hasty instruction. There's no way they didn't see the cloud of smoke you left after a glance around. Footsteps, branches breaking, a shadow darts, delayed, into the darkness after you. The spearman.
Making a hard 90-degree turn, you start fumbling with your gun. Powder into pan... close the pan... You leap over a rock after covering some distance and duck back beside it. Powder and ball into the barrel... You listen. Your pursuer stomps through the undergrowth in the falling darkness, some distance away. Take the ramrod out... Ram it all home... He halts, and shouts bitterly back towards the camp. The crossbowman responds in kind. Their stricken leader shouts at them both through his anguish. Return the rammer... Cock the gun... click. You tense. Did they hear that?

CRACK! thwunk!

They absolutely did. A crossbow bolt whistles above your head and a musket ball smacks angrily into a tree trunk off to your right, sending chunks of bark scattering into the grass. You dash further into the lightless woods. You hear the spearman again, whooping and hollering as he charges through the forest towards the rock you just left behind. You slide into a crouch, turn, and raise your weapon to the darkness. An animated form hops above fallen logs and stones with a wide wicker shield in one hand, and a long spear in the other. He raises a loud, screaming war cry as he closes the remaining distance. You squeeze the trigger once again, with a brief prayer flashing through your mind.

>>6244717
[2/2]
FFTH-CRACK! The musket fires true, with a nearly-imperceptible delay between the flash in the pan and the firing of the main charge.

The spearman's war cry is cut short in brutal fashion as the heavy slug of lead effortlessly passes through the center of his square shield and hits him directly in the chest with a meaty smacking sound. His momentum carries him forward as he falls to the ground, twitching, the only sound you hear being a faint gurgling noise. Another bolt whistles through the woods as the crossbowman continues to loose arrows into the darkness, blindly. You can hear him shouting a word, perhaps the spearman's name, repeatedly. Panic drips from his voice. You notice that you no longer hear the cries of the raider in the red turban.

Shifting positions once again, you reload with the alacrity afforded by the knowledge that the spearman is no longer trying to catch you on the back foot while doing so. The crossbowman ceases calling for his fallen ally, and bolts stop buzzing through the bushes at random. Having left the illumination of the campfire, you're unable to see what he does next. Will he try to aid his wounded leader? Is he laying in ambush, waiting for you to emerge? Did he just run off for help? There's no way of telling for sure through the newly-shifted banks of the fog of war. The darkness surrounding you is now total, with the only light to guide you being the campfire and the picturesque field of stars up above.

With the fight now being one against one (or perhaps, still two?), you grip your reloaded weapon tightly and decide on what to do next.

Do you:
>Stalk.
>Wait.
>Rush.
>Do something else... (Write In)

>>6244719
>Write In
>Carefully stalk through the trees. Make sure to keep distance from the spearman as you do so, try to get into a position to snipe at the crossbowman. Keep to a mostly north-westwards path to take cover behind the nearest pair of trees (straight and bushy one).

>>6244719
>>6244726
>Like so. Alternatively could try to move in a straight path and take a peek. If the bowman ran off without dragging away turban, keep watch from the treelines to see if there is an attempt to ambush, peek out and finish turban with a shot if nothing is spotted. If the bowman is still there or trying to help up turban, take him out first.

>>6244726
+1

>>6244726
>>6244730
>>6244732

We're playing it safe and slow! Update to follow soon.

[1/2]
The implied mind game between yourself and the remaining raider begins in earnest with your first steps back towards the camp and the light of the campfire. Your paranoia goes into overdrive with every step geared for silence and everything in your sightline diligently examined for a human silhouette. These guys didn't seem like experienced fighters from what you've witnessed so far, with the spearman rushing out alone and the crossbowman firing several shots at nothing.

Still, amateurs can get lucky, and you didn't come all this fucking way to catch an arrow in the chest.

You slowly stalk your way around the right side of the camp, staying as low as a human can whilst remaining on its' feet. From tree to tree. From bush to bush. Every minute feels like an hour, every step like a mile. You hear a loud gasp from inside the camp, followed by moaning and strained words. Red Turban has regained consciousness. A bush rustles unnaturally on the far side of the camp, gaining your attention. You creep around the tree in front of you in order to gain a better vantage. Red Turban is now visible to you from your new position, and the nature of the wound you had inflicted upon him more clear. He lies in a patch of grass close to the campfire near where you had fired at him, he had made an attempt to drag himself to safety, without much success. His musket was left behind, discharged, where he had initially fallen. Blood pools around his lower half in a color similar to his headgear, the disparate drops on the grass reflecting the flickering flames of the nearby campfire.

You raise your loaded musket, brace it against the rugged bark of the tree, and wait patiently. You knew what to do next, and steeled your soul for the moment to come. It was going to be ugly, that much was certain. Using wounded men as bait was a tactic as old as warfare itself you were sure, and moments from your past where you played the part of both hunter and victim of this particular form of war crime march through your mind. Red Turban, in his desperation, couldn't help but to play the part he was given. His head scanned the darkness west of the camp, where his crony had likely fled. His pleading voice was far weaker than the howling he'd emitted when first shot. He didn't have much longer.
More rustling. The crossbowman was there, you were absolutely certain. Firing a shot into the bushes, however, would cede the advantage back to the raider while you reloaded. You didn't know how much of the current trap and mind game the crossbowman was cognizant of, but, in the end, Red Turban's requests for help eventually proved to be tempting enough bait to get the raider to emerge.

>>6244979
[2/2]
Fear was the defining feature of his face as he dashed from the bushes where he previously lay waiting, and the fact that you could read his features so well demonstrated how close the exchange had come. Loaded crossbow in one hand, head and eyes frantically darting all around, he made directly for his stricken leader. Upon reaching him, he made a brief attempt to use his free hand to help his comrade upward. Then he froze. Red Turban's hand grasped forlornly at the bottom of his tunic. His wild and distressed eyes locked with yours. The magnitude of his mistake fell upon his mind like a boulder from on high. For a half-second, you thought he might attempt to surrender, given you had him in your sights and him without his crossbow even being raised, but he shook himself out of his fugue a second later and attempted to raise his weapon. You squeezed the trigger.

KA-CRACK!

Red Turban was still gripping his tunic as he fell.

It was over. The crossbowman, spearman, and musketeer are all down for the count. The familiar shakes overtook your extremities as the adrenaline wound down, making reloading your musket afterwards a more tedious process. You watched Red Turban sink back down, still and silent.

What do we do with Red Turban?
(Pick One)
>Attempt an Interrogation. Above all, you still need information. (Write-in one question.)
>Finish him off. No sense in letting him suffer any longer.

Meanwhile, inside the escape pod, another soul from the doomed colony expedition silently waits, having gone through an ordeal far more traumatizing than your own landing had been. You wonder what their story is, what they brought with them, and, briefly, if they're going to come out smelling as awfully as you had.

Who is our third colonist? (Or second, depending on how exactly you view Allie.)
(Pick One)
>A member of the expedition's medical staff.
>Another veteran, either friend or former foe.
>A handyman hired on to build the future colony.
>A future farmer, enticed by the promise of land.
>Write-in, out of 1,500 pods, who knows who else is coming down?

>>6244983
>>Another veteran, either friend or former foe.
Totally a former foe, but only because it's funny. I'd be fine combining this with one of the others for a retiree/reservist or a combat medic/engineer.

>>6244983
>>Attempt an Interrogation. Above all, you still need information. (Write-in one question.)
Who are your people?
>A future farmer, enticed by the promise of land.

>>6244983
>WHO ARE YOUR PEOPLE?
>VETERAN, FORMER FOE

>>6244983
>Attempt an Interrogation. Above all, you still need information. (Write-in one question.)
Who are your people?
>A handyman hired on to build the future colony.

>>6244983

>Attempt an Interrogation. Above all, you still need information. (Write-in one question.)

1: what ground is he and the others from?
2: who were the people on the radio and what is the local history of this area and it’s weird hostility?
3: do what way are his peoples towns and are there any caches of goods left by his people, or sources of resources nearby?
4:ask him if he knows anything about the abandoned farmers house we found.

>A member of the expedition's medical staff.

Need someone with an understanding of medical problems, otherwise we might just catch get an infection and die suddenly.

I won't be able to do an update today, unfortunately. I'll try and push it out as soon as I'm able to. Weddings are a bitch.

In the meantime, after a close vote, we've decided to Interrogate Red Turban and attempt to ask him about who his people are.

Also, the inhabitant of the Escape Pod is another veteran of the Second American Civil War, one belonging to a group or faction that Stanley actively fought against.
I'll put up another vote to give you guys some more input.

What sort of Group/Faction did this new colonist fight for?
(Pick One)
>The remains of the Federal Government.
>The United Nations peacekeeping forces.
>An ideologically-opposed guerilla group.
>An ideologically-similar, but competing, guerilla group. (Think Groypers vs. Patriot Front or Democratic Socialists vs. Communists)

Also, how are you guys liking this quest so far? I'm absolutely open to feedback, being as it's my first quest (and first time writing a story that I wasn't forced to do in school).

>>6245287
>An ideologically similar, but competing, guerrilla group.
>Our character is anti-centralist neo-conservative regressivist
Basically like the mix of a modern American conservative as well and socialist policies originating from nations across the sea, think "i hate big government, but i fucking hate corporate cock-sucking even more."
wants to return to the ideals of an idealised past that remains undefined until it can be used for shoehorned arguments. Most other resistance cells see this group as milk toast and without an attempt to restructure the systems that caused the civil war to begin with.

Classic nicknames used against this group are "Do-overs" (In the way of doing a year again in school) "Archaeologists" (Constantly digging up the past) "Denialists" (pretty obvious why)

>The person within the pod is a neo-liberal accelerationist agitator
Has most of the same views, but believes the acceleration of the state and degeneration of societal standards was the only way for people to awaken to the absurdity of America at the time. Something that most other rebel groups blame as being the very reason the state even ended up in the Orwellian nightmare situation both of them now escape from.
Most of their leadership died back in the influencer culling's of 2088, where the state's crackdown on "non-supervised voices" ended with a wave of mass suicides at the prospect of needing to have an actual job or ending on basic government assistance. Most of the more popular ones who survived did so by pivoting into resistance icons and PR advertisers.

Classic nicknames used against this group are "Spiders" (for their networking and web of contacts) "Genies" (got what they "wished" for) "crab pots" (pulls everyone else down with them)

Wanted to make the characters flawed and have history which they can bicker about.

This way while having a common enemy it will create a fun character dynamic of “fuuuck of course I had to get stuck with the boomer centrist / extremist Vtuber fan(girl/boy)”


Also I like the quest so far, the usage of Rimworld for the visuals definitely works well in your favor QM. I hope to see more from you, since what you have shown has been pretty good.

>>6245329
Sounds absurd. I fuck with it.
+1

>>6245329
>>6245287
+1 support. It has effort so it should be rewarded.

I like the quest QM. As another anon said, the Rimworld graphics definitely help, and the writing is fun and engaging. I am excited to see where it goes!

>>6245287
>>The remains of the Federal Government.

>>6245287
>>6245329
I’ll back the high effort write in

Alrighty! We have a winner. >>6245329

Writing a brand new schizo-ideology is going to be a challenge and I like things about both write-ins you've provided, so I think I'm going to borrow a little bit from both.

In other news, I'm experimenting with using ArmA 3 to stage screenshots as well, and building the first explorable settlements in Rimworld.

[1/]
Click.
You slowly emerge from the bushes, fully loaded, with your weapon pointed squarely at Red Turban as you approach. While a grenade may be expecting too much, a pistol or knife may not be. He lay mostly still next to his deceased fellow raider, his chest rising and falling shallowly. His eyes are fixed upwards towards the sky. Coming closer, you see firsthand the real reason that so many wounds caused by musket balls in wars long past resulted in amputations. Your shot impacted the leg just above the right knee, inflicting a large, deep avulsion where flesh and shattered bone were wrested from Red Turban's leg. Blood still wept from the grisly wound in pulses and collected in the sizable pool underneath. It was a wonder that he was able to shoulder and fire his musket while coping with an injury like this.

Your eyes meet as you loom over him, your gun barrel directed at a point on his forehead underneath his turban. Gritted teeth, sweat, and a look of defiance mark his mature, tattooed face. You utter the first words you've spoken to another human in over seven centuries while hoping that, despite not hearing any English during the late firefight, he may be able to comprehend your words. You clear your throat.

"Hey! Can you hear me? Who are your people?" you say. "Do you understand me?"

Red Turban's eyes narrow. He makes a start at a breath, but erupts in a brief, painful coughing fit instead. You prod at his head with the muzzle of the gun impatiently. He turns his head back towards you with annoyance.

"Hotep-i." he responds with suddenly rising emotion. "HOTEPI!" What you can only interpret as the vengeful screed of a dying man follows afterwards, his yelling and curses echo through the woods, interrupted only by his gasping and coughing. You weren't getting anything else out of him, you feel, and, recalling one of the grim sayings popularized by militias and paramilitaries on all sides of the late war, "You didn't have the proper facilities to take prisoners."

K-CRACK!

So these were the Hoteps, whose presence on this planet the man on the radio laid at the collective feet of your expedition. Perhaps having killed a few could earn you some points in their book.

>>6248578
[2/6]
You sense movement on your left. You briefly see a pale face in the gap of the exit hatch on top of the pod before it disappears, the hatch closing once more with a CLUNK!. You sigh in annoyance, stepping back towards the pod. At least this was a confirmation that the colonist was still alive. With all the noise made in this area in the past five minutes, the time to get lost was now.
"BANG! BANG! BANG!" you loudly knock against the side of the pod with the butt of your musket. "COME ON! WE HAVE TO GO!" you hollered at the pod.

Silence.

"MORE OF THESE NIGGERS ARE COMING AND I'LL LEAVE YOUR ASS BEHIND, YOU WANT THEM TO FUCKING EAT YOU, ASSHOLE?!" you lied loudly, having no idea of their dietary preferences or the proximity of reinforcements.

Nothing, for several seconds. You were about to engage in another round of banging and yelling when suddenly, a stirring noise reverberates from inside. The hatch unlatches, and the thin, harried face of somebody in their late teens emerges, topped by a mop of messy brown hair. His eyes anxiously flit from you, to the dead raiders, to your gun, and back again. A horrid smell wafts from the open hatch, not unlike the one that accompanied you when you landed. You grimace. He looks sick. He opens his mouth to speak.
"What th-" he manages before dry-heaving, his stomach long devoid of contents to expel. You haul him out of the pod by the collar of his blue expedition jumpsuit, and, despite your half-hearted attempt to catch him, he quickly tumbles over the side and onto the ground below, landing on his side with a thud.
"m-motherfucker..." he croaks.

"Come on, let's get your shit together. Quickly. We've got to go." you retort, looking around the campsite. Returning to Red Turban's corpse, you pull the blood-soaked bandolier from his body and pluck his discharged musket from the grass nearby.

"Who the hell were those guys?... What happened to the other col-" he starts, picking himself off of the ground as he starts to look through his pilfered baggage.
"I have absolutely no clue, man. Not the time." you interrupt pointedly. "Take this... and put this thing on." you say, handing him Red Turban's musket and offering the associated bandolier of ammunition, causing additional confusion and incredulity as the kid struggled against asking what year it was supposed to be. Red Turban's musket was markedly different than the one you carried, it was much shorter and seemed better-made, though just as gaudily decorated with brass, knife carvings, and indecipherable text. The kid complied, likely still in shock at his sudden change in circumstances.

>>6248579
[3/6]
"What's your name?" you ask him, as he hurriedly scoops a handful of discarded survival meals into the open maw of his hiking backpack. You rifle through the backpack formerly belonging to Red Turban, not finding much beyond some sort of dried meat, personal items, and goods formerly belonging to the kid.

He responds between heavy breaths. "Brayson. Who are you?"

"I'm Stanley. I landed a... fucking... week or so ago." "Are you good to go? We need to get back up to the mountains." you said, taking a brief look at the moonless night that extended beyond the campfire. A pained grunt was the only response. The kid hoisted the hiking backpack onto his back and nodded, looking nervously at the surrounding darkness. The crossbow, quiver, and the associated bolts and quarrels end up in or hastily tied-to your backpack as well. It would take some time, but you're sure that Allie could be taught to use it to great effect.

Fashioning a rudimentary torch from the cracking campfire, the two of you march off southwards, into the darkness. The only sounds that Brayson emits are related to his fading cryosleep sickness, you decide empathetically not to push him -too- hard after the shock of his landing. After about an hour of picking southward through the woods, you find a small scrape in which to wait until morning, and knock the torch out on a patch of dirt.

The smell emanating from the kid makes it impossible for either of you to sleep.

Once the light of the next day crested over the horizon the torrent of questions that had been building up inside Brayson was finally released. You field as many as you were confidently able, and by the end he seems crestfallen at the fact that you were only slightly more knowledgeable than he about your mutual situation. You decided to follow up with musket familiarization, as inexperienced a teacher as you were. "Do you know how to shoot?" you ask. He hesitates for a moment. "Yeah..." The tone indicates to you that the kid was reluctant to reveal how. You let the issue drop for the moment as you explain to him how to load and fire his new weapon. You learn for yourself while doing so that this musket was rifled and, unlike yours, possessed proper iron sights, meaning that it would be significantly more accurate and longer-ranged than your own. It might be better off in your hands, but that was a decision for later.
It was time to continue on back towards the mountain, your supplies, Allie, and the abandoned mine you have still yet to explore.

>>6248582
[4/6]
While younger than you by several years, you nonetheless intuited that the kid may have been another veteran of the war you both left behind. Curiosity took hold in you. Going about figuring out who he fought for would be a delicate and possibly inflammatory proposition. Aside from the remnants of the old Federal Government and the United Nations occupation forces tasked with helping it regain control of the nation, there were literally hundreds of militias and paramilitaries involved in active combat, both large and small, and only a few of those could you count as neutral or friendly to the cause of the New Confederacy.
The kid could be even be former drone ops, heaven forbid.

Yep. You will have to proceed with caution and tact.

"Hey, uhh... Brinson?" you spoke. The kid bristled. "Who the fuck did you fight for?" The kid froze and avoided your gaze as you passed him on the trail.

"Wh-... uhh... the Redemption Army out of Evansville." he stuttered in surprise. "How in the hell di-?" His response was interrupted by your laughter, causing him to stir in insecure annoyance until you finished.

"Haaah. Oh man... Fuck. Did you guys ever find a new 'Grand General' after Knoxville, or did you go back to listening to vidtube girls? you ribbed. Brayson's eyes lit up in both recognition and anger.

"You're a fucking Johnny Reb! No wonder your ancient ass knows how to fight with a musket. Whose stinking time machine did you get pulled out of?" he quickly retorts.

"The same one your mighty CPAP-sucking dude Bagley came out of. Is it true the last thing he ate was a Twinkie?" you respond with a chuckle. The kid shook his head with a stifled smirk at this remark, likely no fan of his former commanding general. Few people had been.

The jousting between you would continue, though more lightheartedly, for the rest of the journey back towards the Abandoned Mine from which you had came. You had no apprehensions about Brayson now. In the end you were both footsoldiers, not officers, and much of the piss and vinegar that would normally accompany an exchange like this was tempered by mutual experiences, exhaustion, and the comforting familiarity of Earth politics on a world about which you both knew very little.

At least some carpetbagging R.A. goon was better than a UN drone operator.

>>6248583
[5/6]
Returning down the rocky path which lead to the mine, your first and foremost stop was the crevice in which you hid the powerless Allie, your remaining supplies, and the tools you recovered from the Ruined Homestead. Pulling the large rocks outwards, you note that everything thankfully still lay as it did the day before. Brayson poked around the entrance to the mine.
"There's still fuel in this genny, here." he notes, tapping the red tank of unidentified fuel next to a dusty generator with his foot. You look up. "It work?" you quickly ask. "Battery is dead, otherwise I think it's fine." he says. You decide to try and juice the battery enough to fire the generator up. Once that's done, you could run the lights and ventilation inside the mine and charge Allie up to maximum and have her running for three whole days at a clip. You set the retrieved battery beside Allie's case and attach it to the charger's leads.

Turning your attention towards the mine itself while the kid examines the other items lying outside, you open the door in the entryway and are greeted with a slight breeze touched by the scent of old wood and machinery, more good news. The mine -probably- didn't have bad air, though you would remain cautious. Just inside the entrance through a short side-passage was a small workshop containing the tools and machinery used to maintain the mine itself, and others you don't recognize. Off to your right another passage branches off and terminates in a cave-in, though you can see through a gap above the rock pile that the passage continues towards two closed storerooms.

The ambient light from the entrance didn't extend any further, so you return outside until the generator can be started.

You're immediately greeted by laughter from the kid.
"Hah! So Johnny Reb brought a sexbot with him! Who's this supposed to be modelled after? It doesn't look like a 'Scarlet O'Hara'..." He excitedly belted from above the case where Allie lay motionless. You knew this moment would come, but were used to similar ribbings from your old squad.
"Why, were you too poor to get one of that Silla-trace lady before she killed herself instead of getting a job?" you retort, referencing a vidtuber theorized to have been paid to shill for the Redemption Army.
This resulted in another verbal contest and a lively debate over the optimal use of jailbroken droids in warfare that would continue as you took the somewhat-less-dead battery back to the generator and hooked it back into its cradle.

>>6248585
[6/6]
The generator sputters anxiously before finally catching up and stabilizing with a steady hum. On the other side of the mine's entrance, a ventilation fan begins to spin. Inside, you see lightbulbs strung along power cables on the ceilings and walls faintly glow red, and then white. With Allie at last charging from a proper power source, you return inside with Brayson in tow. The upper level of the mine continues towards a timber-built gallery with a set of worn wooden ladders leading downwards. You kick a small stone down the hole, which plops into a body of water after a half-second of silence. Perhaps now that the generator is running, a pump can be used to access more of the mine. Other passages branching from the gallery lead to another pit, far deeper, which seems to have been used recently as a latrine, with a box-toilet near the edge and a water basin for washing. None of the other passages on this level lead to other entrances or rooms.

This mine was an interesting opportunity, just as the ruined homestead had been. You take note of the characteristics of this place.

-The defensibility of the mine and its surroundings is superb.
-Shelter is a given, but water is also abundantly available here.
-The maintenance workshop is small but versatile, with opportunities for crafting.
-Food will be a problem. Hunting, foraging, and farming down-mountain will be necessary.
-The generator provides power and ventilation, but more fuel will have to be acquired soon.
-Expansion and improvement are possible, but will be labor-intensive.

Solid potential. Enough so that somebody has used this place as a shelter of their own, recently.
Brayson looks at you from his seated position up against a roughly-hewn rock wall.

"So, is this going to be our billet for a while, or are we moving on as soon as we charge up your droid and get some rest?" he asks.

(Pick One)
>"Yeah, this may be our best bet for now. Grab the shovel from outside and help me with this cave-in over here."
>"I want to check out the Western Valley before putting down stakes, we could find some more stuff out there that'll help us."

>>6248586
>"Yeah, this may be our best bet for now. Grab the shovel from outside and help me with this cave-in over here."

I think this is a pretty good spot. Of course, food won't be easy to start setting up, but i think nearly no matter what, we will have some form of problem in some aspect no matter where we go.

Personally, i think one of the biggest boons of the cave, is that it could easily work as the start of a castle-like structure that has a bunker in the back. with some love and effort, this would be a great starting place to project power from.


also, on the Arma thing. I personally don't really vibe with it, but if you want to try it out QM you are welcome to.

>>6248586
>"Yeah, this may be our best bet for now. Grab the shovel from outside and help me with this cave-in over here."
No harm in checking out the west valley later, though.

>>6248632
>also, on the Arma thing. I personally don't really vibe with it, but if you want to try it out QM you are welcome to.

Yeah, we'll see. I don't know either. The idea sprung from an original idea I had many moons ago to host a "campaign" that alternated between a TTRPG setting and custom ArmA 3 missions, but I don't know enough autists that own the game to make that work and it would be much too complicated for a novice game-runner like myself.

>>6248586
>"Yeah, this may be our best bet for now. Grab the shovel from outside and help me with this cave-in over here."
Mines are top tier defensible
Giant bugs can be handled

>>6248586
>>"Yeah, this may be our best bet for now. Grab the shovel from outside and help me with this cave-in over here."

>>6248632
>>6248659
>>6248740
>>6248888
The vote is unanimous so far and the hitler quads seal it!
We're setting up in the Abandoned Mine.

Should have taken the crossbow. It's a perfect weapon for a stealthy paranoid fuck.
The civil war gang grows, now we only need an upbeat UN drone operator girlwho did a little too much warcrimes and had to be shipped off earth and an old glowie to complete the set.
>>6248740
Surely, the giant bugs aren't canon for this particular future.

>>6248920

>>6249181
>Should have taken the crossbow. It's a perfect weapon for a stealthy paranoid fuck.
Take a look back at 3/6 of last update. Stanley snatched it. Every member of the party can now have a weapon of some sort.

>>6249181
>Surely, the giant bugs aren't canon for this particular future.
This takes place during the first wave of human interstellar colonization, millennia before the typical Rimworld game's start date of 5500. By that year, the world we currently inhabit could have become a Glitterworld, or have been depopulated for ages.

>>6248586
>"Yeah, this may be our best bet for now. Grab the shovel from outside and help me with this cave-in over here."

That doesn't mean we abandon the west or the drop pods, but lets improve here immediately, then we can develop cannibal traits later as our efforts at farming fail.

[1/5]
This was only the third time you had been in an abandoned mine, the previous two times having occurred during your service in the Second Civil War. Mines were useful places to hide from airborne observation, pursuit, and excellent places to hide supplies. The hills of Appalachia had been dug into to extract their wealth for centuries, and the locations of many entrances had been lost to time and vague description. They weren't without their dangers, though. Collapses, bad air, flammable gases, and becoming hopelessly lost or trapped were all anecdotes that passed to you from neighboring units in your operational area, and your natural anxiety served you well when spelunking and sheltering during those times of strife back on Earth. The first order of business was the collapsed passage near the entryway. It had looked somewhat suspicious to you initially, but the "bathroom" setup and the other signs of a recent, non-mining-related presence here had escalated the pile of collapsed rock and debris to the top of your list.

It was easy enough to excavate in itself. The hard part was carrying the resulting rock back outside. If there had ever been a minecart system in here, it had long been stripped out. You couldn't find any ore chutes, bucket lines, or other means of easily extracting the results of your labor. That left Brayson and yourself alternating between loosening and dragging out piles of rock with a mattock, and the other painstakingly shovelling the resulting debris from the floor of the passageway and physically carrying it outside, where you quickly plan out a future slit trench and earthwork to defend the entranceway.

The more the kid and yourself dug, the more you could catch glimpses of the other side. The passageway continued for several more feet, ending with a steel door in a wooden doorway. There was also another void leading off towards the right, but you couldn't see much more. Curiosity alone couldn't sustain you and Brayson was starting to look cranky, so you two broke for lunch. Brayson's addition brought the food situation into focus, the consumption of which having doubled. As the pair of you sit on crates outside and enjoy centuries-old survival fare enhanced with bland Hotep jerky and local berries, you briefly take stock of your food and water situation.

The rations by themselves will last you another week all alone. Neither of you having been farmers or gardeners back on Earth, you have no idea where to plant the seed potatoes, or how long they take to grow, but confidence is high that you two will be able to get -something- out of the effort. Unless the inhabitants of the Ruined Homestead were ethically against it, these potatoes were likely genetically modified to be productive and hardy, like most crops were on the Earth you left behind. Man, what you'd give for some proper Southern barbecue right now.

>>6252324
[2/5]
The kid and yourself were munching away, yourself deep in thought about the food situation, silently resolving to begin hunting and gathering as soon as possible, when your lunch was interrupted by something off in the far distance. A faint popping noise, like a firework going off from the next town over. It started slowly, was shortly followed by a sudden wave of pops and cracks, and then settled into a steady rhythm. It was distant gunfire, the sounds of a battle carried far by the wind towards your mountain hideout. The kid and yourself grabbed your muskets and rushed up the road to the vista above the pile of mine tailings.
Neither of you could see any sign of the action, only hear it. It was miles to the northwest. You used to pride yourself on being able to tell what sort of weapon was firing by the sound of its' discharge, but all you can determine is that a very large group of people with a schizophrenic array of firearms is burning powder at a prodigious rate. There might be a mortar going off somewhere in all of that too, you couldn't quite tell... Was that a bugle? Jesus.

Brayson pipes up from behind you. "Reb, try that radio you mentioned."

"Shit, good idea." Your radio equipment had been far from your mind ever since your last attempt to make contact, days ago.

You return with the handheld a moment later and start scanning through the frequency range until coming upon promising-sounding radio chatter.

"-to my front is falling back, should I reposition? Over." a voice said in English with the distinct accent of the First Colonists, with scattered rifle fire evident in the background. They were broadcasting completely in the clear with no encryption.
"Squadron Leader to Troop C, understand, your contacts are running. Mount up and support Troop A to your North, but avoid that fucking treeline! Troop A reported a machine gunner. Over." an older voice responds. You recognized that voice. It's the same person who swore at you last time you scanned the radio.
A third voice suddenly breaks in, shouting to be heard above the cacophony of noise surrounding him. "This is Reebeck from A to Squadron Lead! Hassel is dead and Parson has an arrow in his chest, I'm sending them back on a horse, over!"

>>6252325
[3/5]
The two of you follow along with the narrative as it comes to a close a quarter-hour later, the distant popping and cracking now becoming sporadic. You glean from the communications that the skirmish was between a mounted group of First Colonists and a significant group of Hoteps, a few of which were much better equipped than the archaic bunch that Brayson and yourself encountered previously. The First Colonists had gotten the better of their opponents in the end but had taken casualties, especially at the outset, due to having been ambushed while mounted.

Brayson looks up at you with curiosity. "Why aren't we trying to go out and find these guys?" You recount the radio exchange you had with the unknown officer days prior and the abuse previously laid out. This leads to an argument between the two of you. The kid was too eager to go out right at this moment to pop up in front of people in combat that heavily outgun and outnumber you two and hope they didn't decide you two were worth a bullet. He did make a good point in this exchange, though. You couldn't be hermits forever, even back during the war you had to come out of the mountains and back into civilization occasionally.

The issue drops for the moment as you two return to your work in the mine. On the way back inside, you check on Allie as she charges beside the entrance. A small light on the side of her head blinks orange. Still charging. You'll let her get up to maximum while the generator holds out.
The pile of rock that obscured the path towards the mysterious storerooms continues to diminish, enough so that the kid was able to wiggle through the gap between the collapse and the ceiling of the passage. You watch the bottoms of his feet disappear into the darkness.

You see occasional glimpses of light from Brayson's flashlight and hear him struggle with a metal door. Rummaging. Footsteps. More rummaging. Then silence, for an entire minute.

"DUDE, STANLEY! THERE'S TONS OF SHIT IN HERE!" he shouts through the collapse. You pick up the shovel and work feverishly to widen the gap.

"What do you see? What's in there?" you ask between shovelfuls of broken rock. The response comes quickly, a long metal object clatters through the gap towards you.
You pick it up from the ground in total astonishment.

>>6252326
[4/5]
My God, a gun. A proper gun. Magazine-fed, modern-ish ergonomics, rifled. You could cry. You wipe a greasy layer of cosmoline off of the side of the receiver and read the marks stamped on it. Haven Island Arsenal, AR-10, 7.62x51mm The selector switch only has settings for "Safe" and "Fire", meaning it was semi-automatic only. Placing the weapon gingerly on the ground, you dive upwards into the gap and struggle through the passage, coming to rest on the other side next to the kid as he stacks two more identical rifles besides the remains of the collapse. There are two rooms in this section, both reinforced with wood timbering. The kid rushes back into the room on the right, the one that he first opened. You look inside.

Crates, both opened and unopened. Boxes, scattered pieces of uniform, webbing, load-bearing gear, canisters full of both water and fuel, and other military paraphernalia. The last people to use this mine were soldiers, and likely caused the collapse you dug through in order to seal away their supplies. You whoop loudly in celebration, the sound carrying across the entire network of tunnels. The kid enthusiastically joins in. You double-back towards the yet-unopened room. A locked metal door stands in your way. You kick it several times until it gives in, causing dust to cascade from the doorway and be brushed around by currents of air. You cough several times as it clears, and peer into the room.
An electric cook-stove, a bench, scattered personal items, lockers, beds. You actually do cry. You are greeted with a glimpse of cramped, soldierly heaven. This was their living quarters.

In that moment it didn't matter where they were, who they were, or if they were still alive, this was your base now.

Six AR-10s, dozens of magazines, and around a thousand rounds of ammunition. Uniforms and gear. An actual living arrangement. Fortune had turned significantly in your favor, which only stimulates your paranoia. Something was going to happen to drag you back down, the voice in the back of your head was screaming it.

>>6252327
[5/5]
Brayson and yourself spend the rest of the day settling in. Laying momentarily in the first bed you've inhabited in over seven hundred years, your thoughts return to the current issues. There was still much to be done.
Food was running low, what you found in the storeroom had gone bad.
The distant battle had raised the question of trying to make contact with the First Colonists (or anybody that isn't a Hotep) once again.
Fuel for the generator was sufficient for now, but a source for more will need to be found.
With much to lose, establishing defenses had become a high priority.
Exploration of the area was also not complete.
Allie should be fully-charged by now, meaning that you had a third member to either defend the homefront or aid in whichever project you decided on next.

You make a decision.
(Pick One)
>Hunting and Gathering.
>Planting the Potatoes.
>Fiddle with the Radio. (Requires only one colonist, select additional option.)
>Establish Defenses.
>Explore the Western Valley. (Who goes, who stays?)
>(Write in.)

>>6252329
>Fiddle with the Radio. (Requires only one colonist, select additional option.)
>Establish Defenses.
We’ll fiddle with the radio. I don’t trust Brayson not to give away our position or anything yet after some of his previous comments.

>>6252346
Support on this. Hopefully we can at least assess how friendly they are.
On food I think we could start with hunting and gathering to extend the preserved meals. I believe Allie was also a cook?

>>6252358
>I believe Allie was also a cook?
Being originally a domestic android, cooking is absolutely something she can do.

>>6252346
>>6252329
+1 support this idea. Seems decent. As long as we prioritise food next.

>>6252346
+1

>>6252329
>>6252346
Support. Does this mean that the rock rubble is removed/cleaned from the base and deposited outside as defensive cover?

>>6252329
>Planting the Potatoes.
Do this early since they take time to grow and can’t be rushed

>>6252327
>>6252329
Okay so

>>6252346
+1
I also have some simple Misc suggestions I wanna add

>Check what kind of fuel the generator uses
The fuel type can dramatically change the ease of access we might have to it. Ethanol fuel would be simple to ferment but would also make it food and time-sensitive.

>Check if the shitting hole has anything left in it. If it does, and it is dry, get firewood and start a fire down in the poop hole. If it is wet, get Allie to shovel it out (As cleanly as possible) to a place with sunlight away from the base (then disinfect Allie) and then start a fire in the poop hole.
The reason is, that anyone who lived here before likely had a gut microbiome that neither Brayson nor Stanly is used to. The fire is to disinfect the hole and the poop within it so it might be used as fertilizer without poisoning either of our colonists with parasites or other nasty things since we'll likely have to use colonist shit as our starting fertilizer.

>Ask Brayson if he has any diseases of a sexual nature or otherwise. Anything we should know of, as well as blood type if a crisis was to happen.

>Ask Allie as a secondary objective to record the movement of the sun to determine this planet's length of day. If night falls while she is active, record through the night the patterns of stars and use star maps from Earth to get a rough estimate of how far away and in which direction we are compared to Earth.
We should at least check if we actually are on the planet that Stanley and Brayson signed up to colonize.

>Look at the Military gear in the mineshaft to see if there is any propaganda that might tell us anything about the previous owners.

also pic is how i imagine the mine tunnels

[1/5]
Despite the fact that it was nothing but a smelly abandoned army cot, you found yourself almost falling asleep. You rise once again with the desire to get some more tasks completed while there was still daylight to enjoy and a lack of people trying to kill you. That latter part was always your concern, though with so much more to lose, it became your primary concern. Emerging from the mine, you see Brayson resting against a rock near Allie's crate. Just who you needed to see. Beckoning the kid to follow you, you relay your plans for a basic defensive work in front of the mine's entrance and a series of points for both observation and shooting along the entire face of the mountain. This was a Neo-Confederate in his natural environment, a rocky mountain upon which to nestle, dig, and riddle with foxholes, traps, tripwires, tunnels, and then dare the entirety of Hell or the United Nations to dig him out. Brayson had caught your enthusiasm for the task at hand until it was implied that he would be embarking upon this task alone. Dispelling this notion, you return to Allie's travel case.

Fully charged, a solid green light. You shut down the generator to stretch out the limited amount of fuel you have left. Previously, after some mutual speculation, sniffing, and even a brief taste, the kid and yourself confirmed that it ran on some sort of backwoods biofuel. That would've been fantastic had you a high-capacity still and several acres of corn, but this meant somebody out here was making it, and therefore, you could source it.

You activate Allie for the first time in a few days, and she rises with the same graceful motion as ever.

"Good Morning, Allie."

"Good Morning, sir. I currently have seventy-one hours, fifty-seven minutes, and forty seconds of charge at the average usage rate." she recites.

You smile. Three whole-ass days. The times of two-hour bursts and waiting around for her to charge are, for now, over. Brayson let out a long whistle. Back on Earth, personal androids would cost an entire year's pay for a working man, and work had became harder and harder to find in the forgotten corners of the American continent when every diner, grocery store, and entry-level job was steadily being taken up by mechanical labor. Most androids were very basic models that were so deep in the uncanny valley you'd have to dig seventy feet to find the human resemblance, but aftermarket packages and robo-modding became popular enough over the past decade that androids like Allie could just about pass for a regular person, at a slight distance. You walk her to the site of the future trench, indicate some basic dimensions, and she gets to work, her metallic hands doggy-paddling the rocky dirt aside at a quick, mechanical pace.

>>6256182
[2/5]
The kid joins in, dragging one of the two metal ore skips sitting nearby into a more defensible spot before beginning to shovel dirt and stones within it. When asked by Brayson what you were to be doing during all of this, you withdraw the handheld radio from your belt.

"You.. may be right. I'll try and make contact with the group we heard fighting earlier." you say hesitantly. Brayson nods with a blooming smile, only slightly stifled by your follow-up. "We're not heading out there yet! Just talking."

You drag a chair in front of Allie's box and turn the radio on. The frequency was still set from when you heard the battle earlier, but silence and faint static was all you heard. After a few tentative "Hello?"s, you recognize it as abandoned. Walking absentmindedly out from the rocky cut of the mine's entrance towards the open vista along the cliffside road, you patiently scan the airwaves for signs of humanity. An hour passes by with no ambient chatter to eavesdrop upon. The risk of being found out through radio-triangulation was being drowned out in your mind by the frustration from a lack of results. Passivity was getting you nowhere. You go through the breadth of the frequency range once more, this time speaking, waiting, repeating, and moving up the range to try again. The sun dips to the horizon's edge before you finally get a response.

"Last callsign, please identify yourself." A young woman's voice crackles from the speaker, speaking with a First Colonist accent. You wonder if you'll ever make contact with another fellow expedition member at this rate. You pause before responding, debating internally how to present yourself to this unknown party.
"I'm taking shelter in an abandoned homestead at the end of a road, there are angry tribesmen everywhere." you reply evasively, recalling the Ruined Homestead off to the northeast.
A moment later, the voice responds. "You're the Thirdwavers that Captain Parks yelled at, aren't you?" You sigh. Perhaps the accent gave you away.

"Yeah. I've been out here fighting the Hoteps for over a week, now. I could really use some information." you say, slightly deflated.

"I need you to tune your radio to the following frequency..." the voice states, and you quickly comply, turning your radio's knob.

"What do you know?" she asks. "Absolutely nothing. What happened to the rest of the colonists from my expedition?"

"Your uhh... ship was destroyed. Years ago. Every year around springtime some wreckage and a handful of sleeper pods comes down, a lot of it lands far away in enemy territory, or in the ocean. I'm so sorry." she replies

"What destroyed it? Was it you people?" you return. "No! I mean... uhh... I don't think so? It happened back during the start of the Arrival War... Hold on." she stammers.
She returns to the conversation a moment later, sounding as if she was reciting passages from a book.

>>6256185
[3/5]
You're treated to a brief history of human civilization on the planet, which you now know as Rockwell. The First Colonists had landed just over a century ago, as soon as the terraforming parameters were within range for human life. They established a centralized colony around what they called Arcadia City, right in the middle of the planet's only Pangaea-esque continent, then spreading themselves wide across the land and its' handful of large outlying islands. The colonists were all Whites from various nations, primarily wishing to establish an ethnocolony free of the everpresent racial tensions on Earth.

You vaguely remember hearing about this colony expedition, it having left seven years before you had. Its departure was marked with significant tension from both within and without. Unsurprisingly, selling an eclectic mix of right-wing dissidents and white separatists a colony ship was not a popular move.
The departure of this ship was the catalyzing moment for a similar mission comprised of militant Black nationalists, Pan-Africanists, and left-wing groups to do the same, except instead of building their own paradise among the stars, they swore to take theirs from the evil white flighters.

Considerable space aboard a standard Colony Ship was intended for the automated terraforming equipment that would turn a sufficiently-spinning rock in the habitability zone of a star's orbit into a proper home for humans. The Hotep Mission of Interstellar Security, being what would later be termed a "claim jumper mission" after the practice from the old California Gold Rush days instead used the volume and tonnage for weapons, ammunition, uniforms, rations, and all the other equipment needed to sustain armed men on a military campaign. They arrived at Rockwell sixty years after the First Colonists did, and their assault upon Arcadia City sparked the Arrival War, sometime during which a deployed hunter-killer satellite belonging to one of the sides fired upon a third colony ship, yours, which then broke up in orbit. The mention of your expedition was little more than a footnote in the history book she was reading from.

Heavy fighting and the destruction of the planet's only developed industrial complex caused both sides to technologically backslide as decades of low-intensity racial warfare drew onward. The First Colonists, Rockwellers, had decided to retreat to several enclaves both on the continent and the islands surrounding it, while the Hoteps, now fractured between two major groups, the Army of New Afrika and the Twelve Tribes, expanded and exploited the majority of the mainland and the infrastructure left behind by the Rockwellers they killed along the way. The enclave of Rockwellers closest to you was considered one of the most developed. Haven Island, which had been making efforts to reclaim parts of the continent for settlers from the now-crowded island refuge.

>>6256186
[4/5]
The young woman's name was Marie, and she lived and worked in a fort full of soldiers from Haven Island.
This was a lot to take in all at once, but gave some much-needed context to the fighting going on in the area, and enunciated just how lucky Brayson and yourself were just to be alive at all. You confirmed that the fort, Fort Campbell, was somewhere to the West, though likely within a two-day journey at most given the limited range of your handheld radio. You were still conflicted about paying them a visit despite Marie's accomodating demeanor, she reluctantly confirmed that some Rockwellers, chiefly among them their Captain, blamed "Thirdwavers" like yourself for leading the Hoteps to Rockwell, the resulting loss of Arcadia City, and the friends and family lost during the decades of warfare that followed.

To add the proverbial Rock to the existing Hard Place, Fort Campbell was probably the only place in the region you'd be able to trade, let alone find somebody else that wouldn't try to kill you on sight. Most of this area was deemed a Red Zone, occupied by the enemy and unfit for colonization until they were eliminated. Trading with the other side was a non-starter if you weren't black, Marie said. You came into this world wearing white skin, a uniform that you couldn't take off. In the eyes of the Hoteps, that placed you definitively on the side of the Rockwellers, no matter if the Rockwellers accepted you as one of their own or not.

More war. More fighting. You were tired. Before signing off with Marie, you ask about the flying drone from a week prior. She answered with confusion, surveillance drones hadn't been seen used by either side in at least a decade. This response unsettled you deeply, but it could be something she wasn't cleared to know.

You march solemnly up the road back to the mine as the sun disappears under the horizon. Brayson sat atop a mining skip filled with rocks at the centerpoint of the new barricade as you relayed the fruits of your conversation through the twilight hour. His position changed little from the one he held before, he didn't see himself living in this mine for the rest of his life and wished to see civilization again. You both return to the darkened mine with Allie in the lead providing light as you settled into the living quarters. There would be no dinner tonight, food was running too low to eat more than one meal per day. You smother the hunger pangs in indifference as you remember another old saying. "When your belly is empty, your brains can rest." Allie would keep watch outside throughout the entire night with one of the AR-10s from the storage room in hand. You cover yourself in a pile of abandoned uniforms and turn over to sleep.

>>6256187
[5/5]
The next day began fitfully, your cot being too tempting to leave. You were lured with breakfast, the only meal you'd be eating today. Allie gingerly placed a heated MRE and a small handful of berries in your lap. Brayson remarked upon the convenience of having a robotic servant from his cot as he received the same. Today was the day you needed to sort out your food situation. You were down to a couple pounds of Hotep jerky, thirteen MREs, and another generous handful of berries. Food-related ideas perforated your mind as your immediate hunger subsided. The Mine's Workshop had the means to hammer out some basic bowls, pots, pans, and cooking utensils out of the existing metal stock with which to aid in Allie's preparation of meals. While a cheeseburger wasn't in your immediate future, a nice stew or a stir-fry certainly could be. That just left the decision of how exactly to secure your future supply of edibles.

The seed potatoes were sitting in the storage room alongside the abandoned military equipment. Brayson and yourself could scout out a small holler down the mountain in order to plant them, but neither of you are experienced farmers or gardeners and there are many unknowns involved. Alternatively, you could give up on the farming idea and have Allie simply prepare them for eating in order to stretch your existing rations for a few extra days.

You have weapons and ammunition. O-ho boy do you have weapons and ammunition. You have the means to hunt for a very long time, unless a future firefight depletes your supply. There is some game in the area, mainly small, but also some larger animals like boars and deer. The exertion involved with dragging a substantial haul of meat back up the mountain and gunfire alerting the local tribals to your location were the downsides you noted, the latter could be neutralized by using the Crossbow, but you were not confident in your abilities with it at present. It'll take additional time and practice to go that route.

Fort Campbell stood as the dark horse option. A large number of soldiers meant a large amount of food, and bartering or work-for-food arrangements were as old as human civilization. The Captain of the fort's disdain for Thirdwavers like yourself and entering a still-uncertain situation in which you were outmanned and outgunned were still significant fears you had, but you were nonetheless warming to the idea of making proper contact eventually, if not right now.

After a moment's ponderance, you come to a decision.

(Pick One)
>Fetch Brayson and find a spot to plant the seed potatoes.
>Order Allie to prepare and cook the seed potatoes.
>Organize a hunting trip. (Who goes, who stays?)
>Plan a trip to Fort Campbell. (Who goes, who stays?)
>Something else... (Write-In)

>>6256190
>Fetch Brayson and find a spot to plant the seed potatoes.

>>6256190
>>Fetch Brayson and find a spot to plant the seed potatoes.
These first, hunt can be second.

>>6256190
>>Fetch Brayson and find a spot to plant the seed potatoes.

>>6256190
>Fetch Brayson and find a spot to plant the seed potatoes.

>>6256190
>Organize a hunting trip.
>Stanley and Brayson go, Allie will stay
To transport the carcass back to the mountain mine we are going to need two people and Allie is needed to guard our camp supplies.

No RimQuest update this week, we'll be back next Tuesday to see how our burgeoning potato plantation plays out!

>>6259306
I'll be waiting QM, godspeed

Wellp, my modlist has already started breaking due to mod devs pre-updating for 1.6 and we've just reached page 10. We'll probably have to call it here for now. Thread 2 will occur after Odyssey releases and I can tard wrangle together a comprehensive enough set of mods on the other side of 1.6 to keep things true to my vision (and hopefully not waste the time I spent building the next major locations in the story).

Thanks for reading, guys! I've learned a lot and had a bunch of fun putting this together and I'm excited to see how our colony develops, how we interact with the ongoing war, where we explore next, and who else joins us along the way.

If you need to reach me in the meantime, I'm on the /qst/ pisscord.

>>6265091
Thanks, QM. Hope to see part 2 soon.

>>6265091
Best of luck for your endeavors. What do you think of the new DLC coming out?

>>6265125
Fairly excited, mainly for multithreading and performance improvements, the worldgen additions being a close second. Space will be neat to have in vanilla, but I already had SoS.