Struck by Lightning

Crossing the Ice Sheet

Author's Notes:

This story has been inspired by the video game Rimworld. Rimworld is a survival strategy game that has the player handle a colony of survivors on a far-away planet. Over time the game's community has found solutions to any and all challenges the game would throw at them, so in order to feel even more challenged, different new approaches emerged, culminating in the "Naked Brutality Ice Sheet" start. 

The Ice Sheet is the toughest region the game has to offer, where temperatures alone will kill your colonists in minutes, nothing grows and the few animals that are there will hunt you instead of the other way around. The player's only colonist spawns there, entirely alone and literally naked. No resources, no clothes, no food.

To survive such odds, one must to resort to... unorthodox strategies. Ever so often a trade caravan will enter the ice sheet, somehow knowing of your existence and willing to supply you with wares. Naked as you are, you obviously cannot afford any, but you can - with trap and trickery - find alternative solutions to your gnawing hunger.

Watching some of the communities playthroughs of this specific challenge is what inspired this story. At first I wanted to stay very close to the source material and just recount a caravan's journey through the ice sheet, but over time the story left the confinement of the world of Rimworld and took on its very own and unique form. I hope you enjoy.

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In the quadrum of Aprimay, three corpses were found within the northern mountain range. Their possessions and clothing suggest that they used to be caravan folk. With one of them, a journal was found. Out of respect for the deceased, the investigating personell would usually not delve into private belongings, but the cover of the journal had been marked with a clear message before the owner finally succumbed to the mountain cold. "Read this when you find me."

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There is a myth among the caravan folk. Few will ever truthfully claim to know its origin, but it lives and thrives among our people, spreading through rumor and superstition. Anyone who has shared enough nights around the cramped caravan campfire knows what I speak of. The mad cannibal. I am writing this because I am afraid the myth has finally shed its deceitful shell of unsettling yet exciting campfire rumor and has become as real as flesh and bone. What I am saying is, I believe I have met them. And it is because of them that I will die here. So I hope that whoever eventually unearths my remains may find this and allow themselves the curiosity to read, to learn and to understand what exactly it is that happened to me. My time is limited, alas not as limited as I'd prefer. Finding myself stuck with the impossible decision between starvation and the endless cold, my days are numbered, though it is on me to decide that number. As cruel a fate as this is, it allows me the time to give you all that I have.

It seems to surprise people when they learn that handling a trade caravan is a terribly mundane task. Stories of ambushes, drawn out battles with bloodthirsty bandits or starved predators spread like wildfire, yet apart from the occasional illness or broken wheel, there are few things disrupting the peaceful dullness of riding with a caravan. In my years I have witnessed two ambushes and both were a few drugged-up lowlifes who on another day I may have regarded with empathy as poverty-stricken village kids. Believe me, there are few things exciting about endlessly traveling between settlements, exchanging goods for coin and heading back. It is quite boring, but also lonely. And I loved it. Constantly being on the road brings with it the strange quality of seeing so much of the world, while never actually arriving anywhere. In my time I must have seen close to 100 settlements, some grand and impressive, others shoddy and shaken and pitiful. None that ever connected with me. None that ever made me want to stay or care. I was happy in the small wagon with the other lonesome souls and the few pack animals out on the road. Coming from somewhere. Going towards something. Never actually being anywhere.