“Mother fucker!” I exclaimed, kicking out with my other leg hard enough to dislodge it. It was light enough to be briefly airborne before colliding with a chair. A quick look down revealed it had taken a chunk of flesh with it. “Little shit!” I swore and swung the walking stick around one-handed. It had just started moving towards me again when I completed my blow and launched it across the room and into a wall. A moment of clarity came over me. I was reacting, not acting. I took a breath to pull myself together, and I started casting
I stood there panting, looking down at the corpse. It had taken me three more casts and at least twice as many whacks with the stick before the thing had stopped moving. I hit it with two more spells, and the system only knows how many whacks, before the realisation that it was dead, finally penetrated my head. In reflection, after that first attack, it hadn’t been able to get near me again. I had been able to dodge it easily enough, and the length of the walking stick acting like a quarterstaff gave me enough range that if I had been paying more attention in here, I wouldn’t be feeling my own blood around my foot.
I had stood on guard for several moments, expecting another rat to jump out at me, but nothing did. My beating heart had slowed down to its more normal rhythm. My mana pool and stamina pool had both fully recovered. My health pool was still missing a quarter of its total, but considering I’m pretty sure that first bite took a third of it, I could live with that. I looked down at my shin, expecting to see a bloody mess, trying to remember what I could of first aid when it came to more than scrapes and splinters. I was surprised to see it was almost fully scabbed over. It was throbbing and stinging, something chronic, but it looked like something I had done days ago, not minutes. All that talk about implants earlier, Nanite healing maybe?
“Right,” I said to myself. “I’ve kicked down the door, defeated the monster, now to loot the room!” I bent down to the rat, on guard in case it was just playing dead, and poked it. “Loot?” I tried asking out loud. Nothing happened.
I stepped away from the dead body, put my back against a wall where I could see most of the room. I pulled up the interface, friends, and selected the chat I had with Jacobs.
‘Aenara…: How do I loot corpses?’ I sent to him. About thirty seconds later, I got back:
‘Jacobs…: Humanoids, you have to strip them yourself, beasts, you have to butcher. No easy loot for you, be-atch! Gotta earn dem spoils!’ I responded with a short clip of me beating the dead rat with my stick.
The disappointing lack of loot aside, I started a more careful exploration of the inside of the manor house. The signage on the reception desk implied this was the South Harmony Institute for Furthering Technology, which was quite a mouthful and helped to explain why Francis has simply referred to it as the Institute. The reception desk was directly in front of the doors, and a seating area made up of some wicker chairs facing a wicker table sat under the windows flanking the doors. Open doorways led from the reception area to the rooms left and right of it. I could see a closed door behind the reception desk, and closed double doors on either side of it leading deeper into the building. While the room was dusty, it seemed like a relatively recent sort of dust, not ‘untouched for untold ages’ sort of dust. It made me think the McCoys had spent time cleaning, and I was entering their home.
Following the left-hand rule, I crossed through to the doorway on the left. Stick at the ready. It was a library. The walls were lined with bookshelves made from a dark, solid-looking wood. There were empty places in the room that I imagine once held chairs. Now, though only a single wicker chair sat beneath one of the windows, a pile of books and the remains of a burnt-down candle sat on a small table next to it. I picked up one of the books, and there was a bookmark about a third of the way through. I carefully opened it to that page.
‘... in today's meeting, it was decided that South Harmony would be the best of the isles to locate the new Institute. Between the geothermals below the island, the rare minerals located nearby, and its proximity to the ocean currents that have gotten the Oceanographers so excited, it really is a no-brainer… Fortunately, Kevin noticed the same problem I did and insisted that the new institute should be called the Institute for Further Technology and Engineering, to differentiate between ourselves and the lesser institutes, which are merely there to teach these things and not push them to new heights… Christoph and Demi jumped on the additional prestige this would bring. Quentin, I think, did realise what we had noticed, but didn’t care…No one said anything, though, when I rearranged the minutes to imply we made the decision to add further to the name, before we made the decision on South Harmony…’
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Someone’s diary from when the ancients first came to this island? Interesting. I was tempted to sit down and read some more, but I resisted; I returned the book to the pile. Now is not the time to get lost in reading…I have a house to explore and loot to find. In the far corner was another door. The small metal plaque on the door simply said ‘Librarian.’ It wasn’t locked when I tried to open it.
Inside was a small office. Light entered through the large glass window overlooking the path to the graveyard. Bookshelves covered the entirety of one wall, opposite them, some metal filing cabinets. A large office desk filled the space below the window, giving plenty of illumination to anyone working at it. Someone had repurposed the room into a small workshop. There were a variety of tools covering various surfaces, books had been moved from bookshelves and were piled up in the far corner, the space they once occupied now containing small boxes of screws, nuts, bolts and other various fastenings in a variety of sizes. There were also a few piles of broken parts, which implied someone had scavenged bits and pieces from where they could to repair what was left. On the desk, it looked like someone was in the process of rebuilding an executive's office chair, having refurnished the leather with what scraps they could, giving it an almost patchwork quality.
I returned to reception and crossed over to the far side. From the faded paint lines, someone had removed the doors from the doorway. Whatever the room had been originally, it had been repurposed into a dining room. There were only two places set at the table, but it was large enough to seat twenty with ease. The quality of the chairs didn’t quite match that of the table. There was a sideboard the length of the room in a wood matching the table, and a smaller cabinet in the corner matching the chairs. The one in the corner was open, and I could see dishes like those in the set places. This made me think the table might have been originally here, and the chairs added later.
I pushed open the door in the corner, wincing slightly when the hinges creaked. It opened into a decent-sized kitchen. The two windows shine light down onto a metal sink, counters surrounding an island kitchen surface of the same shiny material. An out-of-place stone woodburning oven was set under an extractor hood, with an even more out-of-place giant rat staring right at me. I didn’t give this one a chance to bite me. I released the prepared
At a whim, I tried the taps, nothing initially, then some bangs from the pipes, and brackish water splashed out. It spluttered a few times. Fired out in bursts, but the longer I left it running, the smoother it got. It was brown at the moment and leaving a bit of a mess, but maybe give it a few minutes, and I might have a source of water. The kitchen might have once contained food, but the perishables, if not eaten, had rotted away long ago. Any dry goods seemed to have been eaten by the rats. I certainly didn’t feel confident eating anything left in here. There was a walk-in freezer, but it wasn’t cold and just as empty as the pantry next to it. By the time I had finished my exploration of the kitchen, the water seemed to be flowing out smoothly and clean. I tried a little with a cup from the window ledge, it seemed fine, so I refilled my water flask.
A door on the other side of the kitchen led to a corridor headed left into the back of the house, a door to my right led outside, and another directly opposite. I pushed open that door to see a room filled with sheet-covered furniture stacked on top of each other. My instincts screamed storeroom, another screamed hidden rat-sized hiding places. I let the door swing shut with a resounding thud.
The corridor opened up into a large room. To my left were the two double doors, which I think were the other side of the ones in reception. Between them was a single door into the reception desk area. The area was filled with mid chest high office cubicles and spread from behind reception to the outer wall on the same side as the library. A few had been cleared and even had chairs in them; one had a lot of notes written in a tight, spidery handwriting I couldn’t understand. Most seemed to have been used by whoever was staying here for storage. One cubicle was filled with spare office chairs. Another of boxes. Yet another with an assortment of what might have been pens. A cubicle-based stock management system.
A heavy reinforced metal door led to the room in the final corner. The tools scattered around and the damage to the walls surrounding the door suggested there were many previous failed attempts to access it. A locked door mystery? I tried pushing, and unsurprisingly, the door didn’t budge. A numpad next to it got no response. I needed to restore power, maybe?
The only remaining feature of the room was the large staircase leading up at the back of the house. It reached up halfway to the next floor before splitting into two flights, going to the left and to the right.