Star Trek: Foothold - To Relieve Paine

For The Sake of Companionship

The fire crackled quietly, billowing smoke that was marginally less noxious than the city burning all around, and warming the area almost enough to be pleasant. The area nearby had been cleared of invaders—though they certainly ran rampant off in the distance—and the area immediately around Paine's camp had a sullen, slightly bruised and melancholy ambiance. It felt of a place where great trauma had been inflicted, and though it was now still, still suffered from the shock. Cold pervaded everything, quiet staunched the sense of danger, calming the intensity of the earlier aura of panic, but no sense of peace or restfulness made sleep seem appealing. Whoever had written this program was an artist.

Paine sat on a low bench, arms draped over her knees while fiddling idly with a leather bracelet she'd taken from one of the Geists, contemplating what she'd learned. After conquering the Garm in the Plaza she'd decided that backtracking briefly would let her regroup, given the difficulty she could expect to see ramping past the scenario's sub-boss. She had taken some time to ensure she would not be interrupted while setting up her camp, and then had called for the system window to start looking into the parts of the experience she was probably missing through not reading the manual.

Among the various insights into shortcuts for using special enhancements provided by the program's system overlay—like shouting command words, imbuing gestures, or configuring logic for automatic triggers that would allow her to do things like use special abilities and effects—the game provided access to a Callout skill, which worked on an algorithm based on the floor, environment, and circumstance to potentially get the attention of non-hostile system entities to be helpful. Given that unless she had joined the tutorial with others from the crew to begin with it wouldn't be easy to get another actual player in to help her move forward with the scenario, she'd decided to give it a try.

Across from her, sharing the fire, huddled together for warmth was a small family of non-player characters that had stumbled on her camp after she'd triggered the Callout effect, which was now on a six-hour cooldown. The group was made up of three Asiatic humans, probably Koreans given the scenario, but the distinction was an assumption for Paine, since she'd never been very good at placing people from their ancestral roots on planet Earth: too many people shared her complexion and did not share her origins. There was a man huddled closely with a young child, obviously father and son, and while Paine would have taken the third to be the mother, she has cleared her of that notion when introducing them.

"I am Yeong-Ja Park, and this is my brother Jeong, and my nephew Ji-Yeong. We have been surviving since the Tower opened mostly on scraps those Pulgasari leave behind. They seem too stupid to hoard anything, or pick over remains for valuables, and though it shames me that we have persisted by scavenging corpses of our neighbors— and of those who came to rescue us, but failed."

As she spoke, the other two simply huddled together, cowering and muttering comforts and platitudes. Clearly Yeong-Ja was the stronger character, and intended for Paine to interact with most directly. She wondered how much detail would go into it if she chose to push the boundaries of what the program presented, and do something ridiculous like invest in the child or attack the survivors, but she knew from previous experience that she struggled with pushing outside the bounds of these scenarios in any way that might be considered amoral, at least for its own sake. Since the program was arbitrary and unfamiliar to her anyway, she decided she'd roll with much of what it presented as a default until she had a reason to do otherwise.

"I am not from around here," Paine started, speaking to Yeong-Ja, "which I guess might show. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened here, and anything you know about what's going on near the Tower?"

The smaller woman looked uncomfortably in the direction of her family, and stood up to confer quietly with her brother. She rummaged through her pack, pulling some canned food out to give to them both, and a granola bar she tucked into the young boy's hands. When Paine had set up the camp earlier, she'd picked an alcove which could be defended from attacks relatively easily, and would be hard to ambush. When the other survivors had arrived in response to her Callout she had first noticed them picking their way through the trash, looking for scraps while the woman stood watch armed with a piece of haggard looking metal which had once been a pedestrian road sign, bent and wrapped in cloth so she could swing it like a crude axe. Upon inviting them in to the shelter they had arranged one of the alcoves of rubble such that it was sheltered by a tarp—disguising it to look like a natural slump of the debris—and this is where the other two were ushered to settle in for the night, out of earshot.