Chapter 21: Loot Crates

The first major find of the afternoon was a tinderbox.

Jadis had never seen a tinderbox before, not in person. She almost didn’t recognize it for what it was and discarded the little metal box as unimportant. The metal box fit in the palm of her hand and had a removable lid. Inside were two compartments, one with an oddly shaped piece of metal and a gray stone in it, the other stuffed with some kind of fluffy lint. It was only when she absently tapped the metal piece and stone together that the realization came to her of the tool’s use.

“A fucking fire starter!” Jay crowed in delight.

“Sweet! I was not looking forward to trying to rub sticks together,” Dys called from outside the building.

Just as before, one of Jadis’ selves stayed on the outside of the building, keeping watch for any bone thieves that might be lurking nearby, while the other went inside and searched for useful tools or supplies. Doing two fairly different things at once made Jadis wonder if maybe she should have taken the Refracted Mind skill after all. She wasn’t struggling, but she was curious if she’d be better at keeping watch and searching at the same time if she had the skill.

There was no point in regrets, though, especially so quickly after she had made a decision. She’d revisit the skill once she hit level eleven.

The building held no more treasures for Jadis, valuable as it was, so she moved on. She’d checked three of the west side stone structures so far, finding little other than broken furniture and rotting debris. The old wood would probably make for good fuel for a fire, she thought, but other than that was of little use.

Her methodical search of the buildings went much faster when she wasn’t trying to be stealthy. While she didn’t go out of her way to make noise, she no longer skulked through the dwarf-sized homes and shops, worried about running into demons. She’d slain over a dozen now and was feeling more than capable of handling any she might run into at this point.

As the day progressed towards evening, Jadis found a few more items of interest. Another good steel knife with a sheath, this one larger than the others she’d found so far. The size felt more comfortable in her hand, at least. She also came across a large iron cauldron with little rust. If she could find something to cook, she was sure the black pot would be of great use. Finally, another large coil of rope, about the same length as the last one she’d found.

Nothing else of use was to be found in the buildings on the western side of the main road, but Jadis still had hope. The cobblestone road that branched off and headed westward had more stone structures to search. She was also certain that there had to be more outlier buildings on the west side, same as was on the east.

There was still light in the sky, so Jadis didn’t delay and dove right in to the dilapidated structures.

Disappointment was the main of what Jadis found for the rest of the search. Most buildings had cellars, many of them containing jars and crates that would have no doubt contained preserves and foodstuffs, but all of them were either empty or spoiled.

The one building on the offshoot road that did hold items of interest was a stable. There was no food, but a blacksmith’s anvil had been left on a wood block, along with a variety of tools. The anvil and tools didn’t look like they would be much use to her, but there were a fair number of horseshoes in different sizes. She took half a dozen of them, dropping them in her cauldron with the rest of her finds. She wasn’t exactly sure what she could do with them, but ideas were sparking in her brains.

With the prospect of going hungry looming over head while the sun edged ever closer to the peaks of the western mountains, Jay and Dys stood in the middle of the road, contemplating their options.

“Time to head back?” Dys asked, voice low, keeping her eyes to the empty houses around them. The evening shadows were long in valley and the nearly silent forest could be unnerving at times.

“We need haul all those bones to the cellar, still.” Jay pointed out. “Don’t need the demons reusing them.”

“Right,” Dys nodded. “We can continue the search tomorrow, I guess.”

Jay and Dys both turned to look up the road they had been searching along. All the buildings in the village proper had been gone over now and she felt certain she’d found everything that could be useful to her, either now or in the future. The road, however, continued in a curved path to the northwest, going up an incline towards the cliff face of the mountain that towered to the north. She didn’t have a good view, but from what Jadis could see, there were more buildings up the path, a cluster of them.

“Do we risk it?” Jay asked the question aloud that was bouncing around Jadis’ skulls.

Silence reigned between the two as a cold breeze ruffled their hair.

“Fuck it, I’m curious,” Dys finally broke the quiet and started marching up the road. “We’ve got time to take a quick look.”

“Yeah, what’s the worst that could happen?” Jay asked sardonically. She was tempting fate, perhaps, but she had found that things went more her way when she took bold action. She hoped the trend would continue.

The road curved upwards, turning what would have been a fairly steep hill into a manageable incline. She guessed it was for the sake of carts or wagons. She hadn’t seen any in the village, but she had found old wooden wheels in the stable, and a few more broken ones along the main road. The trees that lined the path were mostly small and young, the forest clearly having been cleared here years ago. A stack of cut pines rested on one spot near the top of the hill, each log pile more than twice Jadis’ height. The pile had served to block her vision of the building cluster, but as she approached along the curve of the road, she found she had a full view of the compound.

There were four large stone buildings and a fifth made of wood, the first she’d seen since coming to Oros. They were all single-story structures, but large and wide. They also had stone tile roofs, like the temple but unlike the rest of the buildings in the village.

Of far greater interest than the buildings was what lay beyond and to the side of them. As Jadis had walked up the path, she’d thought she’d heard the sound of running water and it turned out her ears had not deceived her. The top of the hill was dominated by a large pond, or small lake, Jadis wasn’t sure on what the qualifications were. A dam had been built on the south-western side of the pond and water was flowing over the top, creating a small stream that went down the hill and disappeared into the forest. Where the water for the pond came from was even more interesting.

A wide cave mouth yawned open at the base of the bare cliff face. The entrance was wide enough that Jadis was sure three buses could have driven in side by side with room to spare. The water came from within, not really flowing so much as just acting as an extension of the lake, stretching deep enough into the cave that Jadis couldn’t see where it ended. On the right of the water, the same side as the buildings were on, there was a wide path that had been clearly constructed by human, or dwarven she supposed, hands. Four of Jadis could walk shoulder to shoulder along the path without getting any feet wet.

“Mining camp?” Jay guessed, taking in the scenery.

“I guess so,” Dys tilted her head from side to side. “I guess that would explain why there’s a village out here in the middle of nowhere. Had to have some kind of export, right?”

“Certainly wasn’t farming. Or lumber since the trees aren’t all that disturbed.”

“Take a quick look?” Dys asked, already walking forward.

“I wonder what’s in the log cabin there,” Jay pointed. “It’s weird that there’d be one here when this is probably where they were getting all the stone from to build the rest of the village. Unless there’s a quarry around here somewhere and we just haven’t spotted it.”

Jay and Dys approached the wooden building first, as it was on the outer edge anyway. Somewhat excited to see what might be inside the oddly out of place cabin, Jadis’ mood plummeted upon checking inside.

The shuttered windows were all wide open and the two doors on either side of the rectangular structure were completely off their hinges, lying on the ground in the door frames. Inside were a series of basic bunk beds, all much too small for Jadis to fit. The mattresses were little more than moldering sacks stuffed with festering straw, not even worth a second look. There were wooden footlockers on the floor next to the beds, all opened or overturned and patently empty. Over all, the building had the look of a poor-man’s barracks that had been abandoned for years.

“Bummer,” Dys said, shaking her head.

“Yup,” Jay agreed, poking one of the bunks with her club, causing the straw-filled cloth to flop over and splatter on the floor in a soggy mess. “Maybe the other buildings will be more useful.”

The first two of the stone buildings had been workshops of some kind from what Jadis could tell and had been fairly well looted already. There was little inside that could be used, just old work tables, broken crates, and scattered tools either too rusty or too alien to Jadis’ knowledge to know what to do with. She found another anvil in one of the buildings though, and what looked like an old-fashioned forge, so she assumed it had been a smithy before the village was overrun by demons.

The third stone building was the largest and, if the large stacks of crates were any indication, had been a warehouse. Predicting this building would have the greatest chance of having something of use to her, Jadis took some extra time to search through the crates. Most were opened already, a pile of broken wood haphazardly tossed in one corner already from where previous looters had searched the stores.

The more Jadis looked through the crates, the further her hopes fell. The warehouse had been picked clean, little more than scraps left behind. The final wooden box, filled with nothing but cobwebs, left Jadis unreasonably despondent. She’d known it wasn’t likely she’d stumble upon a treasure trove of preserved foods here, but she’d still let her hopes rise higher than she probably should have. She was not looking forward to going to sleep without a dinner, waking up to no breakfast even less.

Turning to leave, the building, Jay ducked her head through the doorframe, stopped, and turned back.

The stone building was long and tall, clearly intended to hold a lot of storage. Jay was able to stand inside without worry of bumping her head, and only had to duck down a little when coming through the door. From outside, Dys could see that the roof was stone tiles. Looking up, all Jay could see was a wooden ceiling.

Was there a second story to the tall building? There shouldn’t be enough room for a full story, not from what her two sets of eyes were telling her, but Jadis suspected there might be an attic of sorts. During her search, Jay hadn’t seen any stairs or ladders, but she searched the ceiling again, this time just looking for openings.

Off in one corner, hardly visible due to the ever increasing dark of the late evening, Jadis spotted it. There was simple wooden hatch in the ceiling, large enough that Jay shouldn’t have much trouble climbing though. The panels blended in well with the rest of the ceiling. She dearly hoped that fact, coupled with how the door hatch was closed, meant no one had previously thought to search there.

The ceiling was not so tall that Jay couldn’t easily hop up, and with a little jump, she knocked the panel open and then grabbed the edges of the hole, pulling herself up to look inside.

The attic was nearly lightless and it took several minutes for Jay’s eyes to adjust. Eventually, though, her vision acclimated enough for her to see what the dark crawl space contained.

Twelve crates were stacked within, seemingly untouched. Eagerly, Jay pulled one that was close by to her and brought it down. Prying it open with the knife she’d found earlier, both Jay’s and Dys’ faces broke out in wide grins as she saw what was within.

“Hard tack!”

Boxes of hard, dense, square biscuits filled the crate. They’d all been sealed up with some kind of wax, none of the boxes Jay popped open looking spoiled or insect infested at all. She knew from the survival videos that she used to watch that the brick-like biscuits were extremely tough to eat but lasted for years if stored properly. Considering the size of the crate and how many boxes could fit inside, Jadis guessed that there had to be hundreds of these tough biscuits in just the one crate.

“Fuck yeah!” Both of Jadis’ bodies let out shouts of joy.

“I’ve never been so happy to see a cracker before,” Jay said, carrying the box out to set next to Dys.

“Now if we can just find some clam chowder, we’d be set,” Dys quipped, picking up one of the palm-sized bricks and giving it a quick test bite. “Ow! Hard as fuck, aren’t they?”

“Yeah, duh,” Jay said, hopping back up into the attic access hole to grab the rest of the crates. “That’s the name, right? ‘Hard’ tack?”

“Whatever,” Dys said, tossing the biscuit back into the box and closing it and the crate up. “Let’s get the rest of those crates checked quickly. We don’t have much time left before sundown.”

Pulling the rest of the crates down, Jadis found that four more of them were also filled with hard tack, ensuring she had a large supply of the stuff and no chance of starvation in the immediate future. There was enough of the edibles to probably last her for a few months, though she dearly hoped she wouldn’t have to rely on the dense cracker bricks for that long. She’d never had any before, but she knew it had a reputation for blandness.

Aside from the five crates of hard tack, three more had sealed clay jars that had not fared as well as the tack. Whatever had been in the jars had spoiled, the buildup of rotting gasses causing the seals to break or the clay to outright shatter. Those crates Jadis tossed aside, uninterested in in examining further. Two more crates held lots of little boxes inside of various shapes and colors. Opening a couple, Jadis found that they contained something that smelled an awful lot like tobacco, though the leaves were an odd red color. These crates Jadis also set aside, not being a smoker in her past life and not planning on taking the habit up in her current one.

The last two crates were filled with more jars, these ones smaller than the last but more numerous. Popping the seal on one, a golden treasure greeted Jadis inside.

“Is that…?” Dys trailed off outside as Jay stuck a finger in the little pot and pulled out a sticky dollop of sweet goodness that lit up her tastebuds the moment it touched her tongue.

“Mmph,” Jay said around her finger in her mouth, sucking it clean. “It absolutely is.”

“Honey,” they both said in unison, happiness coloring their voices.

“Time to take this stuff and run,” Dys said, joy bubbling up inside her chest.

“Agreed,” Jay said, packing the opened jar into the iron cauldron they’d been carrying around. “We can’t take it all, but let’s take a crate of the hard tack and a few jars of honey back with us. We can get the rest tomorrow.”

Taking her hard earned spoils, Jadis left the remaining crates of food in one corner of the warehouse where she thought it unlikely any bone demon would just happen to stumble on them and destroy the precious foodstuffs. Not a likely prospect, but Jadis felt like being a little cautious.

Turning to go, Jadis realized that there was still one last building she hadn’t checked. She didn’t have much time left in the day, not if she wanted to move all the bone thief remains to the cellar, but she figured it couldn’t hurt to take one last quick look.

Popping her head in, Dys quickly surmised that the last stone building had been another workshop of some kind, similarly looted just as the others had been. In the shadows of the interior, Jadis saw various wooden racks and tables but not much else. The dark was almost enough that she nearly missed the odd piece of cloth hanging from one of the windowless walls.

Curious, Dys set her load down and went inside, examining the cloth closer. Picking it up in her hands, she quickly realized that it wasn’t actually a cloth, but a fairly fine net hanging from some pegs in the wall.

“What would miners need with a net…?” Dys wondered aloud.

Like a lightning bolt an idea struck Jadis. Moving so fast she nearly knocked herself out getting out through the doorway, Dys ran outside and looked at the darkening waters of the small lake. Jay followed shortly behind, turning her gaze to the lake as well, seeking any sign of movement.

There, in the shallows, she saw them. Shadowy forms slipping through the water, dark and sleek, barely visible, but definitely there.

“Fish,” the two said in unison, voices soft with something akin to reverence.

“MEAT!” the two shouted moments later, with a lot less reverence in their voices.  

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