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aef6e4.jpg
Gale Song
aef6e4
>>1077457
>"I NEED YOUR MIRROR!"
>>1077458
>rolled 9, 1
>>1077477
>rolled 1
The hand mirror is tossed, fumbled, goes skittering off across the floor, and shatters when somebody steps on it.
>>1077350
>rolled 18
Waffles snatches up the broken pieces, stuffs them into the fabricator and gets to work. Mere minutes later, mirror is back together good as new, though you'll need to be extra careful until the glass finishes cooling off.
Plastic from the dismembered picnic table turns out to be easy to work with, so the fabber can straightforwardly print air masks at a rate of one per hour if somebody's willing to do a bit of manual assembly.
Air tanks are trickier - the iron has impurities which make it structurally untrustworthy, and those internal recyclers allowing larger models to be so efficient need specialized catalysts. Simplest option is to just slice up existing pipe into segments like sausage links, weld a cap on one end and a valve on the other, then layer armor-silk socks and shrink-wrap over the outside. Fabber could do two of those per hour, 0.5lb each and holding ten minutes of air, but you'd also be tying up a lot of computing power to run the spinneret, and unless somebody can catch fish or something first, need to be sacrificing a ration pack per tank for protein. How many?
'Mia,' the irritatingly bubbly scout-assistant AI, pops up onsceen as her cartoonified mecha-dunkelosteus avatar.
"It looks like you're running a spiral-pattern search! Would you like help with that?"
There's a long list of things she can autonomously identify, ranked by training confidence: everything from particular synthetic dyes, to vegetation, to unexploded ordnance, and a three-position selector for each, Mark / Ignore / Avoid.
'Mark' means you expect that feature to be associated with what you're looking for, such as the color of some clothing a missing person was last seen wearing. Mia will call your attention to significant concentrations of such things, and take extra care examining the vicinity of even minor traces.
'Avoid' means you expect it to be anti-correlated with what you're looking for, or dangerous. For example, when exploring hostile territory, setting avoid-flags for gunmetal and the color of enemy uniforms would (hopefully) cause scout bots to flee from patrolling guards, rather than bumbling into them and getting shot down.
Anything left at the default 'ignore' will still be recorded by whichever scouts Mia is managing, but without any special influence on immediate behavior, and first to be cut by lossy compression when storage capacity or bandwidth are scarce.
Out of the hundred square miles closest to your current position, looks like 35 are water (depending on how you count sandy banks and wetlands), of which about 90% is the lake where you landed.
On dry ground, scattered patches of purple-black thorny underbrush, adding up to about 15 square miles but none more than an acre or two each - oddly extending in almost zebra-stripe patterns parallel to contour lines, rather than oval clumps as might be expected to result from opportunistic growth - with a few thin tufts of familiar green grass only at the tops of the tallest hills.
Another 39 square miles of low ground cover, initially mistaken for bare loamy soil, on closer inspection turns out to be thick mats of fungal material. Vaguely similar in color and texture to stale bread, but hellkitchen testing soon reveals severe toxicity, less nutritional potential than a lye-infused peat bog, and it might even spontaneously burst into flame if allowed to dry out in a warm, oxygen-rich atmosphere.
Ten square miles of steep ravines radiate from the lake like spiderweb fractures around a bullet hole. In some places, rocky cliffs loom taller than the ATV is long, impassable by any remotely conventional wheeled vehicle. Even in the relatively smooth areas between, more often than not slopes are steep enough to pose a serious risk of rolling over if you drive too fast, steer wrong, or mishandle tire pressure and ballast tanks.
Accordingly, sight lines on shore or in nearby valleys are inconveniently short, while circling the lake far enough out to hit significant hilltops seems likely to be an exhausting navigational ordeal. Three more-feasible routes present themselves:
First, a small river feeds into the lake, and drains back out the other side, wide and shallow and straight enough to permit driving along the bottom almost as easily (though not quite as quickly) as if on an actual road. About 25 miles upstream there's a waterfall with possible cave entrance, and a brief flicker of UV light was spotted near there. Close to the noise floor, didn't repeat, but assuming it wasn't just a glitch... that might indicate some sort of high-voltage electrical discharge.
Similar distance downstream, the small river merges with a slightly larger watercourse.
Perpendicular to those, and only about two miles from the lakeshore, there's a contiguous square mile of seemingly abandoned cityscape. Grid-pattern streets, lot of bare concrete and prefab raised-seam roofs. Nothing above two stories tall. No significant perimeter defenses. Uncollected trash, windblown debris, and structural decay consistent with maintenance stoppage somewhere in the range of days to months ago - definitely less than a year, given how much of that cheap paint is still relatively intact - but no obvious signs of violence or hasty evacuation. No appreciable heat or acoustic signatures besides the weather, and what you brought with you. No bodies, live or otherwise... at least, none out in the open, or near uncovered windows. One wifi ping, very weak, returns an uncompressed grayscale bitmap of the biohazard trefoil, followed by a few megabytes of what might be plain text. The text is either garbled, or in a language or encoding-format variant unknown to your database.
One 12-mile-wide hex now has an adequate first-pass map. Everybody gets 100 xp; 3900 more needed to reach 4th level.
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