RE: Trailer Trash Special pt 5 (Patreon)

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    Lvl 16 Tabitha Moore

    HP   6/280

    STR 30 INT 64

    DEX 44 WIS 35

    CON 26 CHA 40

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    Leaving the wolf carcass behind, Tabitha followed the unexpectedly skittish guardsman inside the palisade wall.

   The staked tips of the wooden fence here stood at a somewhat unimpressive height, just a foot or so taller than she was, and stepping inside, the entire settlement of Mure could be seen. There was a strange sensation of discontinuity as several different impressions of the town grappled with one another all at once. Between the memories of Tabi and the intelligence of Tabitha, everything was simultaneously familiar and foreign to her. Every aspect and detail within Mure became incredibly interesting and bore further inspection now, because all of these commonplace things Tabi had taken for granted as ordinary and normal now had to be examined within the additional context of Tabitha’s experience and understanding.

    Yeah, this is… just a lot to take in, Tabitha thought to herself, feeling faint.

    Having played tourist before at the recreation of the pioneer colony in Jamestown, Virginia, some of Mure’s design was recognizable to Tabitha at a glance. Across from her in the distance, Mure began as a triangular fort occupying the highest ground available, it’s interior large enough to crowd in perhaps a dozen homestead structures. Rounded half-tower bulwarks occupied each corner there, and the jagged heights of original  palisade wall had been erected some twelve feet tall. Afterwards—presumably once a foothold in the region had been secured—that first triangle of perimeter wall had been expanded outwards to form Mure’s current shape of an enormous oblong pentagon, with the uneven new trapezoid of area sporting palisade only half as high, and exterior watchtowers rather than defensive bulwarks at the corners.

    In Tabi’s perspective, Mure was an enormous, sprawling bastion of human civilization—but, it was also the only town the girl had ever known. To Tabitha, Mure’s overall size was maybe comparable to the campus of a community college, and the deforested fields within the outer wall seemed more the size of hobby farms rather than the horizon-to-horizon agricultural areas she’d seen back in her world. Unlike her recollection of historic Jamestown, there were no farm plots or even gardens within the inner wall—all of the agriculture was segregated outside the town proper between the inner wall and the gigantic area of the outer boundary wall.

    I can see the logic in prioritizing the safety of your population over crops... but at the same time, it seems pretty blaisé of them to put all of their foodstuffs at higher risk, Tabitha thought, trying to keep from swaying on her feet as her head continued to swim. After all, what good is a defensive wall if everyone inside starves? Maybe their granaries or storehouses are just sufficient enough for them to weather the loss of a harvest or two? Developmental circumstances between worlds may be just too different for me to grasp all the nuances right now.

    Within the inner wall, Mure was a clustered jumble of single-story straw roofs, each varying wildly in both height and footprint size and none conforming to the clean lines of traditional city streets. On the contrary—line of sight seemed to be intentionally broken up into a zigzag pattern of interlocking corners.

    In fact, these kinda resemble world war one trenches, Tabitha couldn’t help but survey the path with interest as she trailed after the guardsman. Each avenue between buildings was dug out almost a meter down, with the excavated material then packed up into a thick berm against the base of every structure. These street furrows were lined with blackened timber that tapered down at steep inclines to a footpath at the bottom, only broad enough for two to walk abreast. Human settlement seems to be synonymous with fortification in a world as dangerous as this one.

    No direct approaches that would allow an invader to quickly penetrate deep into the city—and any monstrous beast forcibly entering will quickly be cornered, because these streets consist of nothing BUT corners. The thatched roofs and rough log structures still seemed like an incredible fire hazard to her modern sensibilities, but no firebreaks were apparent. Most of the exposed wood has been slathered with tar or pitch or some kind of sealant—maybe it’s fire-retardant? Or, more likely everything just burns and that’s how it is.

    Okay, okay, STOP, Tabitha absentmindedly touched her free hand to her forehead. This is a lot. This is a lot, right now.

    She was hurting and exhausted and wanted to just wander after this guard without thinking too hard, but her recently increased intelligence stat felt like the intense stimulation of an extreme caffeine boost. It wasn’t overly pleasant, and whether she liked it or not her mind was racing in every direction all at once. The sensation hadn’t been as irritating during the long walk back, likely because she’d still somewhat been in shock. Now that she was here in Mure seeing everything, she was just overwhelmed with observations and ideas and speculation and wanted to sit down and try to digest it all for an hour or two.

    It was a lot less stressful having a lower intelligence stat, I think.

    “Don’t dawdle, now,” the guardsman warned with an impatient frown. “Move on, girl, move on.”

    “Uhhh—yeah,” Tabitha raised her eyebrows at him in a helpless expression. “Yep. Movin’.”

    Still clasping one of her hands against the back of her neck, Tabitha gave him a half-shrug that sent searing pain radiating outwards from her wound and tried to trudge along after him a little faster. She felt completely drained, however, and it really didn’t seem like her pace increased despite putting in more effort. Right now, only her somewhat agitated interest in her strange surroundings felt like it was keeping her alert.

    Based on film depictions of medieval towns, Tabitha had been expecting the palette here to consist of only earthy brown tones, but the interior of Mure had a surprising amount of colors and contrasts. Spaces between the blackened logs were certainly plastered between with mud, but that mud wasn’t left bare to the elements. Instead, tufts of moss were packed tight into the joints, some greyish and dead but much of it remaining green and vibrant. Entrance alcoves were lined with stone, the doors themselves were painted in reds and oranges, and the timber trench-lining leading up to a door was carved into tall steps.

    I’m probably strong enough to open a door all by myself, now! Tabitha realized with a strange rush of excitement. Tabi couldn’t, and wasn’t allowed to anyways.

    Doors here were not lightweight planed wood or built with convenience in mind at all—they were solid, heavy affairs constructed on a purely defensive premise. Generally an adult man would have to lift up the hatch from where it rested in the frame with both hands and then struggle to swivel it outwards. Any entrance alcove was a precarious perch several steep steps above street level, large enough for only one to stand in, and often several of the mossy crevices between lumber in the alcove doubled as murderholes a spear shaft could be shoved through. Because of their weight, doors weren’t any kind of a structural weak point, either—battering down a door would require taking down the wall with it, which was fine if you didn’t mind the entire roof on that side of the building then immediately collapsing into you.

    To an extent, the accepted common sense here borders on paranoia, Tabitha deduced as she warily sorted through Tabi’s memories.

    Though Tabi had spent her entire childhood in the confines of Mure’s walls, much of the layout was completely unknown to her. This wasn’t a happy place where townsfolk would welcome you inside and smile on as you smashed their barrels and clay pots in casual search of valuables. Families were tightly-knit and kept to themselves here, and if you weren’t the immediate offspring or cousins of a homestead or it’s neighboring structure, everyone was suspicious of or hostile to your presence. Children were already cruel to begin with, and the gangs of low-level youths pent up inside Mure here were eager to look for any excuse to beat each other. Boys and girls with unwashed shoulder-length hair were clad in filthy tunics and seemed to be watching from every intersection they passed. None of the staring faces sparked any recognition, because back then before, Tabi had never raised her head to meet their eyes.

    For an orphan like me, solitude is safety, Tabitha recalled. That’s the mentality that had me venturing outside the walls and into the forest, at least.

    “Hurry up, then,” the guard insisted again, seeming unsettled that she hadn’t immediately leapt forward and hurried to obey his instruction. “Move your—”

     “Actually,” Tabitha stumbled to a halt, her vision growing alarmingly fuzzy around the edges. “Think I’m done, sorry. Can’t make it any further. Probably gonna just lie down and die here, if that’s okay? Cool? Cool. Okay.”

    Her Tabi perception of cultural norms told her that the way she was speaking and the arrangement of words she used didn’t parse correctly here, but Tabitha honestly didn’t care, right now—a migraine was coming on, she was lightheaded from so much blood loss, she was in a magical fantasy world with game status menus, and she was way too fucking tired to trek on the rest of the way to wherever this guy was trying to take her. There was a well-rounded gravity to the situation and circumstances here that made everything seem very real, but it wasn’t her real, it wasn’t her reality, and she was just about done with all of it.

    To her surprise, the guard simply stepped over, climbed up the stair cut into the trench wall, and furiously pounded a fist on the nearest wooden door. An inquisitive voice Tabitha couldn’t quite make out sounded from within, to which the guard promptly answered.

    “Adger Bancroft, guardsman—open up your house, there’s a problem here.”

    With a good deal of knocking about, the heavy wooden door shuddered, shifted in place, and then slowly opened, revealing a dour peasant woman. She was short, a dress tunic and kirtle hung from her lean frame, and her hair was wrapped in cloth as was appropriate for an adult woman, but beyond that her age was impossible for Tabitha to determine.

    “This young girl… has serious injuries,” the guardsman said in a halting, somewhat exasperated voice. He could not be troubled to introduce Tabitha, or even explain the situation. “Woman, provide her whatever aid you can.”

    Oh. Oh, great. GREAT. Yeah, I should’ve seen this coming, I guess. What the fuck else was ever even going to happen.

    Mure was just a frontier settlement, a simple collection of homesteads with a wall partitioning it off from the surrounding farm plots. There was no hospital or inn or chuch or tavern. Tabi already knew this, but assembling what Tabi knew into useful information still took Tabitha some time, and her hopeful imagination had been setting her up for disappointment this whole time. She wasn’t ever going to be brought before a white-bearded local cleric, who would recite a solemn benediction and lay healing hands upon her. There was no anime-esque guild tavern, where a swarthy adventurer or handsome captain of the guard or something would examine her wound with veteran eyes, clean it up, and then bind it with expert care.

    This serf woman here was a housewife, neither related to someone important nor some village authority in regard to medicine. She was simply nearby. Tabitha’s nervous jitters were allayed only by the biting pain and the sheer fucking unbelievable ridiculousness of it all. The woman stared at her with unfriendly eyes for an uncomfortable amount of time, then waved her forward. The steps up into the place were steeper than they looked, Tabitha was unsteady on her feet, and—more than anything—she just wanted this stupid fantastical nightmare to be over with.

    The deeply frowning woman bid Tabitha to kneel down inside the entryway so that she could have a gander at this red-headed mess of dying orphan that had been unceremoniously dumped on her.

    Filthy hands tugged Tabitha’s matted hair out of the way and then probed at the stinging bite wound along the back of her neck. Without saying a word, the serf woman then skirted around her grain basket and quern stone over to where herbs were hanging up to dry. One of the many rather small flowering sprigs with dull, ashen petals was tugged down, and then the woman popped it into her mouth and masticated it into a chewy mess. There was no charming antiquated alchemical apparatus or anything quaint like a mortar and pestle, and the woman wasn’t going to put it in her grindstone, either—she scooped the gunky plant matter out of her mouth after a moment with dirty fingers and then applied it to the perforated skin.

    Tabitha couldn’t help but flinch with both disgust and indignation at the ungentle contact, because Tabi recognized the plant.

    I could have fucking done that myself! That’s not medicine or herbalism or healing or anything, that’s simple gray mullein! Tabitha seethed as the woman pushed and pressed at the back of her neck. Gray mullein—a bitter weed you can mash up into a somewhat sticky paste! It’s not even THAT sticky! Filler material, they use it to help clump up food so that grain rations don’t just crumble apart! Literally not valuable enough for even a no-one like Tabi to bother picking up out there. Just tromped through endless fucking knee-high swathes of the shit when I was on my way out of the wilderness!

    Forcibly swallowing down her anger, Tabitha just glared past her ill-fitting boots at a floor of the hovel, which seemed to consist of straw threshing liberally decorated with soot and tramped-in dirt from outside. The peasant lady was digging with her thumbs, now, and Tabitha winced but didn’t swear as she took in her surroundings with a hateful stare. The interior of the place was a mess, and in more modern times she might have guessed it was a burnt-out ruin for the way smoke had blackened the walls and ceiling. It was a lopsided square room built around a fire pit, with ash and char liberally scattered about the straw threshing in dirty piles. Two grimy naked children crouched in the corner on top of what may have been a cot or bedding of some sort, watching Tabitha with interest.

    “Go on then, go on,” the woman shooed her away with a swat, apparently done. “Go on, out. Out.”

    Tabitha’s health had ticked down again during her ‘treatment,’ from six to five. Something felt different now, however, and focusing inward as she stumbled her way out of the hovel Tabitha discovered that the numerical representation of her health had gone from its alarming red hue to the normal color of all of the rest of the status text. She could intuit that it meant her injury had stopped bleeding or stabilized in some way, but it still fucking  hurt, and she remained absolutely livid.

    “Stand fast right there and wait,” the waiting guard ordered Tabitha, apparently satisfied that she was now neither a threat nor well enough to run off somewhere on her own. “I’ll return with Lyndon—he’ll know what to do with you.”

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/// 2,585 some words for starters. Don't know what to tell you guys, I literally make this stuff up as I go. I guess that's really all I ever do, but sometimes it definitely feels more out there than other times. I have a literal ton more of this written out now, but it may take me a bit to rewrite it from these rambling infodumps into something more coherent.