Homestead Survival

<25 September 2024, Sage's Retreat, ????>
[Greg Ard]
Greg used Full Lung almost automatically now as his eyes opened from his hibernation-esk slumber. He felt his lungs fill with all his body needed to sustain itself for nearly an hour. He immediately opened his status.

"Hundred percent, I guess it's time to do it." Greg says to himself. He stands up from his lotus position and spends a couple of minutes stretching. He walks to the lip of the cave and stares down. The mouth of the cave that he had called home for the last nearly two months was near the top of what had once been Mount Everest.

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He leaned out and looked down. For nearly seven hundred feet, or at least what Greg estimated was seven hundred feet, the side of the mountain went down nearly vertically. Then it sloped gradually down for at least ten miles. Then the mountain disappeared into the clouds.

He checked his status once more, making sure that his revive was at one hundred percent. It was, and he thought about what he was about to do. He walked back to the farthest wall from the entrance of the cave and ran in place for a moment, then he recast Full Lung and took off at a dead sprint.

He hit the edge of the cave mouth and pushed with all of his strength. He launched out of the cave, and for a moment continued traveling, then gravity seemed to take hold, and he slammed downward. Greg grit his teeth and closed his eyes, hearing the sound of air rushing past for what seemed like an eternity.

The last thing he heard was a dull thump, then his consciousness was trapped in a black box with a blue screen floating in front of him.

<25 September 2024, Desert of the Gournat, C>
[Allan Brill]
Allan was furious. They had driven him out here in this forsaken desert, handed him some water and food, and then literally tossed him into the dirt. Now he was running. This accursed desert was a trap. It looked like a desert, but it was a pool for massive worms that would eat you if you let them.

At this moment, one such worm was behind Allan, moving at a slow, steady pace that made Allan jog slowly to stay ahead. Allan took a swig of the water that he had and kept running. "Fuck! What do I do?"

For the next hour, he just keeps running, until finally a large round rock, maybe fifty feet across, appears in the distance. Allan lets out a sobbing breath, unable to stop and cry in joy. He pushed on and kept on breathing in sharp, gasping breaths. Finally, he scrambled onto the rock. For the next fifteen minutes, he just lay there sobbing and breathing before finally taking a deep breath and letting out a scream of pure rage.

As he continued to rage, he stood and began to throw a fit. Finally, he fell to his knees, sobbing. "Its not my fault!"

He fell asleep and woke with the sun the next day. He looked around and saw no sign of the worms and took off, heading farther inland. As he trekked through the desert, he figured out a plan. "I just have to find another person, or maybe a town, then I can figure things out from there. Just have to keep going."

With that thought, he heard the rumble of the worms behind him and started jogging once more. "Just have to survive this blasted desert first."