Oh ye, Xalt, FYI, but you've got a chunk of my post in yours.

[quote]At this point, the pair who'd gone to the farmlands in the south returned, and were equally stunned and confused by the unfolding events. As MacKinnon and Akitsugu's debate on the ownwership of the blacksmithing tools continued, Sheryl slid away from her husband and approached both Yingmei and 
Plenty to clean, plenty more to use! While the well itself didn’t look like it had been improved in any of the ways that anyone else said it would, working with broken things was basically just want MacKinnon did on a regular basis either way. Hand over hand, she reeled up the leaky bucket and upended its contents into the barrel as she forcefully injected her way into the conversation the others were having.

“Not abandoned,” MacKinnon called out. “There’d be a lot more trash here if it was; feels like everyone took their time packin’ everything up 'fore leaving. Oh, and I didn’t come across any graves either, so it’s probably not a sickness that did it. Maybe whatever they were here for just ran out, and they had no reason to stay?”

That was a possibility. There were no proper roads that she saw leading here, and MacKinnon had seen her fair share of mining towns that turned into ghost towns over the years. But there was a forest; couldn’t they have gone into lumberjacking? Or fishing? Or just regular farming? Why were people here anyways? Why did everyone other than herself decide to come here? Surely, not all of them were treasure hunters, right?

“Anyways, didja let the others know about the whole ‘buildings with burnable furniture bits yet’? Not seeing lotsa em here. And Wilma, c’mon over! I’ll show you how to clean things up!”.

"Seems we've got our first local spat. The red-headed foreigner boy there claims that girl stole some tools of his. What a mess." The woman explained, making a lisght nod towards the male red-head.[/quote]