Chương 27: Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Camp Investigation Part II

Hollis climbed down from the tower in the burning tree with the diary in hand. He found Royle much where he had left him, doing a perimeter sweep of the camp, listening for danger.

"It's weird," Royle said.

"There are some deer about forty yards upwind, but other than that, there's not a lot of big animal life here. Jaq doesn't sense any predators other than a few snakes, and a fox or two." Hollis thought for a moment. His theory that the campfire moss had a repelling ability had yet to be disproven.

"Maybe the fire is self-selecting. Creatures smart enough to realize the fire is harmless can take refuge here, but the predators stay away where the prey is easier. That's not to mention that in the game, lighting a campfire would keep away monsters that would otherwise be absolutely unstoppable. Could just be that. Some inherent magic of fire?" Royle listened intently.

"We might have to ask Old Mae." Hollis agreed, though if their indicators weren't telling them anything, none of those who grew up in the Outer Islands might know.

"Found a journal," he said.

"Do you want me to read it to you?"

"Just the first few words and the indicator will show me the rest." So Hollis belted out a few lines and waited for Royle to finish reading on his own. Meanwhile, he stared down at the two bodies, contemplating what must be done next.

"And that," Royle said, "is why prophecy uses the Storytelling skill." Technically, it could use other skills too depending on the context, such as Navigation, Tracking, or even Shielding, but it was usually a storyteller's art, right along with deception and showmanship.

"Do they think Olivia is going to bring them to heaven or something?" Hollis asked.

"I've never seen them imply that before." The woman who wrote the journal entry seemed to think she would get a second chance at life or something similar when Olivia came through on her promise.

"I think Olivia made a lot of promises," Royle said.

"The folks here see whatever they want in those stories." There were many tales of her deeds, even just in the Tutorial zone of Beckett's Sound. Hollis had learned about the battles she had fought through the centuries just from filler NPC dialogue.

"Wait a second," Royle said.

"You turned the game down, then you went back years later. Did you ever look her up? What's her last name? Gordon? Olivia Gordon?" Hollis laughed.

"You know how I was telling you people talked about the game on message boards online? Well, once it became a creepypasta, a meme, basically, people did look into it. Turns out, there are hundreds of women named Olivia Gordon alive and plenty dead too. Problem is, if Olivia Gordon existed, she never did anything in our world that singled her out. Not that I could find." That news hit Royle hard from the looks of it.

He had once expressed to Hollis an expectation that people would be mystified by his and others' mass disappearance. When it turned out that no one had connected the missing people, the disappointment was palpable. Here he was again, finding out that such a central figure in the mythology he had unwittingly ensnared himself in was no more notable than himself.

"Funny thing is, for all the talk of Return to Periapt, I didn't find many people who were telling the truth about having played the game. One who did posted a screenshot of the attribution section that comes up right before the main screen. He got maybe forty views. Most of the attention went to stuff that didn't seem real to me. Flashy, creepy stuff." Royle furrowed his brow.

"Attribution section?"

"You know, the section about The Oliviad," Hollis answered. Royle nodded. The section was simple. Hollis had it memorized.

"This computer game is based on The Oliviad: Field Notes and Folk Stories from a World Not Here."" The Oliviad," Royle said slowly.

"You find out about that?" Hollis shook his head.

"Too much noise. It was impossible to sort through all the stories and rumors. Sure, I saw a picture of the book, or what someone said was the book. People went online trying to get the truth out and accidentally caused a tidal wave of copycats and fanfiction."

"Like what?" Royle asked.

"People take the concept and make their own versions. Stories of Periapt that have nothing to do with the real one. You can't believe a fraction of what's out there." Royle didn't say anything at first. He had a habit of keeping his attention on what was happening in the distance, Hollis noted. He turned his head, like he was honing in on sounds that only he could hear.

"What if you believed it all?" he eventually asked.

"What if all the stories are true?"

"Then Return to Periapt is not the only cursed game and this is not the only time this has happened," Hollis said. There were stories from all over the world. The men talked in part because they were interested, and in part because they wanted to avoid the bodies under the moss. Eventually, they couldn't put it off any longer. Hollis approached the mounds that appeared to be flaming ash sculpted into the rough shape of two people.

"It appears they died together, more or less," he dictated. Now that he knew Royle's indicator needed jump-starting, he tried to describe everything at least once.

"One lies on top of the other, wrapped in the second's left arm. The right arm appears to be missing." He pulled out his knife and grabbed a nearby stick. Willo was grotesquely fascinated with the process and flew right above Hollis' head, shining his spotlight into the dark crevices in the moss. His inspector was pinging with messages from his Investigation skill, which was working to buff his Medicine and Archaeology skills.

"The bodies underneath the moss are decayed too much to get a lot of good information," he said.

"The one on top appears to be a male of average height. A Kazier, most likely." The indicator had told him the skeleton's sex right after he peeled off the top layer of moss and was greeted by a skeleton. Both Archaeology and Medicine told him one after the other.

"How do you know he's a Kazier?" Royle asked.

"He was wearing a Vancouver Grizzlies jersey," Hollis said.

"And something tore right through the middle. Bet that was the cause of death. Looks like a large puncture wound, not a slash." His Medicine skill, even with help from Investigation, was not providing him with the greatest detail. Luckily, the bodies before him were not killed in a particularly mysterious fashion. One was stabbed in the gut with a large weapon and died before he let go of the hatchet in his hand. The other bled out from a severed arm, with other injuries to the soft tissue possible.

Willo's Spotlight ability made even the darkest recesses bright and visible. Hollis almost wished that wasn't the case. He relayed his findings to Royle.

"So it was something that could cut off an arm and stab a guy through the torso," Royle said.

"Plenty of legends about things that could do that." Hollis stood and got some distance from the remains.

"It doesn't make sense," he said.

"Which part?" Royle asked.

"Why are the bodies still here?" he asked.

"I don't see any other mounds of campfire moss that could cover a body. Something tore through these buildings looking for prey. The person that wrote the journal appeared to have been dragged out through a busted door or something dramatic like that. I don't see any evidence of predation on these two." Royle nodded.

"Predators should have eaten them or at least dragged the bodies around. Scavengers can spread a corpse over miles." These bodies lay exactly where they perished. The campfire moss had covered them and grown as they decomposed. None of that made sense. Even if the fog scared away animals, it was clear whatever the fog carried hungered all the same. Hollis walked back around and examined the remains a bit more. He lifted both corpses a bit and revealed a secret third corpse. [Naturalism lvl. 6] You see the skeletal remains of a Ravine Digger Armadillo. Minerals accumulate in its armor-like skin. It takes on the appearance of the rocks in its habitat. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

"I'm guessing this was a bonded creature," Hollis said.

"An armadillo. Its armor has bits of aquamarine in it." The animal didn't have a mark on it. Its cause of death was likely the bond it shared with a human. When they died, it died. Willo shone down under the corpses at the creature. Hollis wondered how much the lightning bug understood. He assumed the answer was everything. Hollis lowered the bodies back down, unsatisfied.

"What was that noise?" Royle asked. Hollis paused, listening. His hand was on his sidearm.

"I don't hear anything."

"There's a metallic sound every time you take a step," Royle said.

"I've been hearing it for a while. Are you walking on something?" Hollis looked down. He was standing in a substantial padding of campfire moss. He rocked up and down.

"That's it," Royle said.

"What's the noise?" Hollis heard nothing, but he knew enough to cut out a section of the moss and peel it up from the ground next to the bodies. After he had torn up the fiery carpet, he found a treasure of shiny objects buried in dirt and detritus. He bent down and picked one up. It was a round tin, about the size of a container of pomade. In fact, it could have been a container of pomade. Once, it had a painted coat on the exterior, but now, Hollis couldn't read it.

He had to sift through a dozen or so of the cans to find one that still had writing on it. Fabro's Fine Fire Starter, the text said. It had been a little red can, mass-manufactured for ease of survival.

"You won't believe what this is," he said.

"How about you tell me and we'll find out," Royle said.

"It's starter," he said.

"Like in the game." Royle paused for a moment as he remembered.

"For crafting torches and campfires. Yeah. Haven't seen that here." Players got five cans of it when they started the game. It couldn't be bought, sold, or traded. It was an item designed for the Beckett's Sound Tutorial section. Royle laughed.

"I can't believe it was real. Is any of it still good?"

"No, most of these are empty. Most don't even have lids on them." He sifted through the cans. As he pulled up more moss, he found more of the tins around the bodies. Finally, he found one that was heavy enough he thought there might be some left inside. With a pop, he opened the tin. Inside, a black, gritty wax or grease could be found in a large unused chunk. It took him a moment to realize something odd had happened. Or rather, something normal had not happened.

"Are you getting anything about this on the indicator?" he asked.

"Not a word," Royle said.

"Not even in Bushcraft." That meant this was very rare knowledge in the Outer Islands, a concept that seemed quite unlikely to Hollis. He looked around at the false fire engulfing the camp. An idea had been brewing in his mind, and he was ready to talk about it.

"I wonder what the ingredients to Fabro's Fine Fire Starter are," he said.

"Clearly, there's some kind of petroleum jelly, grease, or wax base here, but it's gritty too." He walked the canister over to Royle for him to feel it for a moment. Hollis continued to piece the evidence together into a coherent narrative.

"We have a section of the forest where the fog apparently doesn't go," he said.

"Two bodies not eaten by predators surrounded by these empty starter cans. I think I know what happened here. I'm thinking that campfire moss was a secret ingredient of starter. That's where it came from." Royle thought about this for a moment.

"But starter makes real fire. That was actually a pretty important part of the whole thing."

"Okay, who's to say campfire moss can't make real fire too?" Hollis asked.

"I smell burning wood. Even if the fire isn't real, something, somewhere is burning. One of the dried-out logs I collected the moss from definitely looked burnt." There was only one way to know for sure. He grabbed a stick and walked over to one of the woody grapevine fountains. He took a bit of his remaining dried moss and stuck it on the end of the stick. It wasn't much, but he only needed to feel for heat.

"Experiment number one," he said as he gave Breath to the dried moss. It ignited, but after a few seconds of producing a small flame, Hollis concluded it was only an illusion.

"I'm guessing that was a failure?" Royle said.

"Give me a second," he said. Clearly, the moss liked its illusion more than an actual flame, but that didn't mean it didn't have the adaptation. It was also possible he was wrong and that some other ingredient in the starter caused the real fire. He concentrated, took the other end of the stick, and rubbed a bit of the remaining starter onto it. It stuck easily. He used a leaf to spread it around. With the smallest suggestion of Breath, the starter ignited, not into an illusion, but into real flame.

It was beginning to appear that the piles of opened fire starter no one knew about right at the epicenter of a fiery moss forest might not have been a coincidence. He took a deep breath as he plunged the starter into the small stream of water. It didn't go out. He lifted the stick closer to his face and realized it was no longer warm. As if to emphasize this, Willo flew by and copied the flame illusion. The real fire had gone out in the water, but the false fire remained. He relayed this to Royle.

"Just tell me what's going on when you figure it out," the horseman said. Hollis thought for a moment and then… he turned the stick back over. The little fleck of dried moss was still stuck to the end, though it teased coming off. He breathed into it, focusing on what he was trying to do, and suddenly, the little fleck ignited into a flame about the size a match might create. He stuck his hand close and felt the heat.

Quickly, he put the fire under the water, but, unlike with the starter, there was no false flame remaining on the end, in part because the water washed away the dried moss.

"I've got it," he said. Royle waited.

"It's about how the magic system works here," Hollis said.

"Illusions use Storytelling or Signaling. Real fire uses Bushcraft or Marksmanship, whatever you need the fire for. You have to choose what you're doing, or else you might not get what you were after. Whoever crafted the starter found a way to make it activate both at the same time, probably to make the flame brighter; I don't know. But I do know what happened here, more or less." Hollis walked back over to the bonfire in the center of the camp.

"The fog came that night, and it covered the sky. It filled the forest. The explorers who had come here because of that prophecy… at some point, they realized the fog wasn't spreading anywhere near the torches. What made those torches special?"

"They were made with starter," Royle said.

"That's right," Hollis said.

"In fact, I bet it was those torches right along here. They thought the enemy would burn the place to the ground, so they used starter to light the place using false fire instead of the real stuff." He quickly demonstrated that starter could be used for its illusion properties alone by relighting the other end of the stick with Breath. Royle considered this.

"That assumes they knew starter could make false fire."

"Wouldn't they know? They would have figured it out anytime they tried to douse a starter-made torch or campfire with water. I bet they did know. That's why all these starter tins are empty. They covered themselves with it when the fog enveloped them to try to keep danger away. They didn't succeed. Maybe they were already injured; I can't say, but that would explain why their bodies weren't eaten. They were covered in false fire.

"Then, after they died and the fog faded, the campfire moss in the starter began to grow and grow. I mean, could you imagine a better environment for it? Plenty of shade to prevent drying out, a constant water supply. The moss grew out of the starter and took over the forest in every direction… The explorers were sent here with warnings of a forest on fire, and that's what they created." The indicator came alight with rapid-fire text. Your keen investigative skills are coming along nicely.

Burning with curiosity, you trekked into the fiery forest of Beckett's Sound and uncovered a years-old prophecy that ended in the tragic death of several explorers, but also resulted in a flaming sanctuary that keeps the deadly fog at bay. Having uncovered a small bit of the buried past, your curiosity has been satisfied for now. [Folklore lvl. 3] → [Folklore lvl. 4], [Archaeology lvl. 3] → [Archaeology lvl. 4], [Taxonomy lvl. 3] → [Taxonomy lvl. 4] Hollis relayed the confirmation of his findings to his companion.

"That's nice to know, but I don't think we should stick around," Royle said.

"'Cause all this fake fire might not stay that way." The two men walked back the way they came, with Hollis keeping an eye out for a rabbitine he might catch. While he hunted, he examined his new skill levels. It sounded almost right, but being awarded for both Folklore and Archaeology was strange. Should he read into that? Archaeology might have covered much of his investigation. He could see it flashing along with Investigation as he searched the camp and examined the skeletal remains.

Taxonomy was clearly related to his insights with the campfire moss and its dual abilities of fire and illusion. Folklore, though? The story he had uncovered wasn't knowledge passed down from the old days before the continent was abandoned. At least most of it wasn't. Why would he get points for Folklore specifically? The only explanation was that something in his discovery was related to one of those old stories.

As he had learned with the bone worms, Archaeology was academic and Folklore more traditional knowledge. Was it the campfire moss that had folklore? Or the starter? Neither appeared on the indicator. It was an easy enough question to answer.

"Tell me about campfire moss and starter," he whispered. [Folklore lvl. 4] Where you grew up, the drinking age was the age you could afford to buy a pint. Thompson Sr. paid you well enough to buy something thin and watered down from the time you were young. You used to love the stories the sailors and explorers would tell of their adventures getting closer and closer to the abandoned continent. Some boasted of having actually seen the glimmer of the lighthouse at Beckett's Sound.

The braggarts were always easy enough to separate from the true adventurers, those with coin and scars and powerful pacts with creatures of the sea that could guard their ships even in treacherous waters. Tales of high adventure, though, were not the only stories that spread among the barflies and passerthroughs, no. Pubs have their own traditions of storytelling that your grandmother would not speak of, for she told traditional stories and conveyed old wives' tales.

This place was where you went to learn legends of a different sort. Ancient conspiracies, now that was a genre you craved. After all, even your ancestors, having fled the continent, didn't have the full story of what had happened there in those days after the dragon stopped chasing the sun. The conspiracy theorists and fibbers claimed to, though; credit to them. They had many stories.

One night, you found an ancient and self-important man who made his money selling textiles but spent his night spinning a different kind of yarn. He gathered you close and even let you buy him a drink. There he told you a rumor passed down from laborer to laborer, father to son, prisoner to prisoner, and then to him. A story of the fall.

"The secret rulers knew the world was ending years before it did," he said.

"They hoarded supplies and survival gear for themselves. Good stuff, high quality. The kind of things you and I will never lay eyes on. They didn't want the common riffraff surviving what was coming. They built giant compounds into the earth, the sea, even the sky. Filled them with treasure and planned to let the whole thing blow over. They would emerge as the heirs to the continent even more than they already were."

"These rulers, then, they must still be there on the continent," you said with a grin.

"Legend says when they saw what was coming, what they had done, they packed up their things and fled before anyone else. They say those secret compounds are still hidden, guarded by the dangers of the west. You're a youngun. When they open up the routes back to the continent, you might just barter passage and find one of them hoards for yourself." You laughed and drank and dreamed of seeing adventures in your lifetime that were worthy of the tales you heard in that pub.

Hollis considered the tins in his pack, one filled with what remained of the starter and the other with dried flakes of campfire moss. All of a sudden, the history of Fabro's Fine Fire Starter seemed a bit more complicated.