[IC] Surviving the Tide - a 1x1 apocalyptic survival roleplay

[Partisan]

Lutwig opened his eyes, even though he knew he should still be asleep. The time was.. somewhere between 7 and 8 he reckoned, but he didn't have a watch so he couldn't possibly know. Turning over on his other side, slowly, as to not make any noise and wake Leeam, he looked out the window. The sight was remarkably beautiful for such a torn world. Outside the ocean stretched, with the tops of skyscrapers sticking out here and there. Ruins of an ancient world that is not so ancient, he thought to himself. He should really go back to sleep and get some more rest before they headed off again, but somehow he couldn't sleep. It had been like that the past week and was likely to continue on. Possibly forever, but hopefully not. “Leeam, you up yet?” Lutwig said as he sat himself upright. He had had it with the waiting. Without waiting for an answer he got up and started rummaging through his backpack, grabbing the bottle of water and taking a sip. After that he would place the backpack back on the humid floor and get up. Lutwig leaned onto the window, taking a whiff of the air of the sea, salty and somewhat nice. After he gave Leeam some time to get up, he'd turn around and face towards their 'encampment' which more or less consisted of two sleepingbags and two backpacks. “What's the plan for today? We could use some more food. But on the other hand, I did see a broken down ship floating between this flat and the next. Maybe we can get down onto it, if we find a way.” He looked at Leeam with a questioning look on his face, one that spelled out that it was up to him what to do, and to lead the way. Giving Leeam some more time to properly wake up and to come up with an answer, Lutwig started packing his bag again. He rolled up the sleepingbag carefully and attached it back to the backpack. Complaining, to himself mostly, but spoken out loud he said, “I should get rid of this ugly, broken down bag.. replace it with a dufflebag or something. This thing sucks.” He grit his teeth a bit, obviously annoyed with the backpack. After packing it, finally, he walked back to the window and took another look down below, eyeing the ship that was still floating around there. As he looked back up to the skyscraper right across from the flat they were in, he noticed two shadows moving in the officeblock directly ahead of them. Intrigued, he kept watching, not giving a word or anything to Leeam to notify him. The two shadows moved into the appartment block now, but were still invisible because of the wall blocking vision on them. Without realizing, Lutwig dropped his stance a bit and tried to hide a bit at the edge of the window, still paying attention to the two shadows. Slowly the two shadows moved towards the balcony area and showed themselves. It was a woman, dressed in rugged, torn clothes, with a man who was wearing slightly more appropiate clothing for the situation. Now that they had shown themselves, Lutwig blew some air through his two front teeth letting out a slight whistle. A warning signal that he and Leeam had used before. Extending his arm behind him without looking, he beckoned for Leeam to take a look and see what he could make of it.

[Buglet]

Leeam's eyes opened slowly to the sound of a familiar voice nearby. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and licked the dried saliva from around his lips, trying his best to remind himself of his consciousness - so far his efforts were futile; and he was still very much involved in the dreamworld, plagued by visions of life, blossom, and prosperity. For a good few moments Lutwig may aswell have been talking to a brick wall, as no response was to be had from Leeam other than a faint mumble and an occasional shift of posture on his sleeping mat. The troubled man, irritated faintly by the spikiness of his short beard on his hand, longed to plunge himself back into the realm of unconscious sleep. Just an hour more, please, he begged in silence. The warning whistle, however, dragged him out of comfort and into a state of controlled, rehearsed panic and fear. He jolted himself into a sitting position as if being propelled by an invisible force and quickly rest his eyes on Lutwig, who stood cautiously by the window. "What is it?" he asked, all memories of his pastoral sleep gone in a flash. Without waiting for an answer he joined Lutwig, his eyes creeping over the windowsill. The two souls that Leeam found himself looking at were so apparent that it shocked him. There they stood, a couple of drowned rats as desperate as Lutwig and he. For a brief moment he felt a wave of pity wash over him, but it was gone as quickly as it came. "Stay quiet," he warned, "and keep an eye on them. If they want to get to us they're going to have to swim." With that, he turned away and swiftly packed away his things, preparing himself for another day of travel. He had suspected that they would come across other survivors here, somewhere that used to be so dense with life, and worried little for the danger that may be so imminent. No longer than a couple of minutes had passed when he put the final of his belongings in his bag. He strapped the roll-matt on tightly and buckled the opening of the pack together, swinging a strap over his shoulder as he returned to the window. The two survivors across the flooded road were still very much in view, rummaging through kitchen drawers and cabinets. "They look lost - desperate," he said. "Have they any weapons?"

[Partisan]

“I honestly can't tell. Maybe they are just travellers like us?” Well, Lutwig said that but he didn't really believe it. The way the man was dressed it was possible, but the woman looked like she had been living in a place that still acted like it was pre-apocalypse. Lutwig slowly backed away once Leeam had packed his bag and put it on his back -- Lutwig took this as a hint that it was time to leave. Reaching his own bag he quickly swung it around his arm and onto his back as well. Once he had done so he quickly moved back to the window and tapped Leeam's shoulder, signalling he was ready. Taking a final glare he could see another shadow slowly creeping in behind the two. The shadow was small, child-like, and moved slowly and even a bit sluggish at times. It's movements were careful however. “Leeam, look.” he said as he pointed out the small shadow. “A kid.” He couldn't of been more wrong and within a split second the shadow went from small to big, revealing a man that was crouching earlier, giving his shadow the childlike shape. A command was spit from his lips to the two figures. “Drop your weapons, now!” The man and woman turned around, raising their hands. They were obviously scared, the woman slowly backing off towards the man to get together with him. Lutwig grabbed Leeams shoulder and nodded towards the exit. They couldn't help even if they wanted to, but frankly Lutwig wasn't willing to risk it. “The gun is empty. Who still has working guns nowadays? They'll be fine.” The number of people that did was staggeringly low. Then again, they weren't in America where everybody and their mom could buy a gun. The guns you would see here sometimes would be low caliber handguns, police used handguns and hunting rifles and shotguns. Maybe some lucky sod got his hands on a military grade weapon after the apocalypse started. Lutwig made his way to the exit, staying somewhat low to avoid being spotted by the people across the gap. He went out the door, into a large, humid hallway with rotten carpet and rotten floorboards under that. Atleast one advantage of camping in this type of environment was that you could generally find some form of maggot in the rotten parts of a house. It was a nice addition to a can of food. Not that Lutwig preferred to eat maggots over a can of something more decent. Lutwig creeped his way across the hallway, dodging holes and weakspots in the floor as he passed them, heading for the stairwell so that they could go up, onto the roof and across a wooden beam to solid ground on the hill - or 'beach' as they should call it now. Once he went through the course, he felt relieved that he was finally touching some actual ground again. There was just something nice about dirt under your boots that he couldn't describe. Looking behind him to see if Leeam followed, he noticed that the man was still yelling orders at the man and woman in the other flat. A small lull in his orders gave Lutwig reason to keep walking, though the lull was then broken by a gunshot. A scream followed, loud crying by a woman and muffled coughs amplified by the surrounding silence and the acoustics of the flat they were in. Lutwig looked at Leeam with a concerned face, somewhat concerned about what just happened. Guess the gun was loaded after all.

[Buglet]

There was nothing to be said once the echo of the gunshot had dissipated across the sunken city. Having repeated itself four times after the initial shot, each bang quieter than the last as the sound waves bounced off of water and glass and brick, the echoes served as reminders to Leeam - with each gunshot, the next is quieter, and quieter, and quieter until eventually, he thought, the last gunshot would be so quiet - so remote and so lonely - that there would be none left to hear it, and so the last gun will have been fired by the last hand, and the last life will leave in the same fashion as the rest. "You don't suppose he saw us, do you?" asked Leeam, glazing his eyes over the tops of buildings that fought through the water's surface. To him it was paradoxical, listening to the waves while looking at towers of office blocks and residential flats - it was something that he'd never become accustomed to, and his nightmares sometimes became as simple as the sound of ripples breaking against what should have been a sandy beach. In the direction they had just came from - west - was the city, stretching out for a mile or two ahead of them. The water here had not risen high enough to bar access around the ruins of civilisation and, when the water was clear enough, the ground could be seen a few metres below the water's surface - cars, street lamps, handbags, buses, bodies, and bones. The water had swallowed that, and it was still after the rest. To the north and south were a few hundred metres of marshes with varying depths of water - unpredictable by any means; in some places the water would be shallow enough to stand a coin in, where as in others it was deep enough to fully submerge a small house. As was the trend, Leeam found, on the outskirts of towns and cities - grass hills where the water was soaked up to form swamp-like areas of wasteland, a no-mans-land between the wilderness and what was left of the city. Leeam regarded Lutwig with a raise of the eyebrows, tucking has hands underneath the straps of his backpack to keep them from getting cold. He briefly toyed with the idea of returning to the flats: "A gun, Lutwig," he argued. "Can you imagine how useful such a thing would be? I can barely kill a rabbit with this thing." by which he meant his air rifle. But, eventually, he realised that it would not be a safe action to make, going up against a man with murderous capabilities. And to the East, away from the city, lay the wilderness - the snow, the plains, the tropics, the forests, the fields empty and desolate, and the roads narrow and overgrown. To travel in that direction is so take a step into the darkness and plunging yourself into the unknown where death was met with gritted teeth and a solitary sigh of sadness. Survival was not possible for longer than a few months in the wilderness for there is a certain predicate of the modern man that requires him to be sheltered abundantly - leaves cannot keep out the cold and a fire cannot keep in the heat. To spend time and effort constructing some sort of living for yourself in the bush is to confine yourself to that area, which can only spell death. With sea levels rising and bloodgangs wandering the best odds for survival is not to shelter for extended periods of time, but instead to travel. In this case, the only direction of travel that seemed possible for Lutwig and his companion was into the heart of the wasteland before them

~ ~ ~

Footprints followed as the two apocalyptic pilgrims traveled the plain of a world without rule. Behind them the sunken city lay, a few miles away by now and out of sight. Their surroundings had been replaced by a sloped forest - to their right the ground inclined every so slightly to a peak a hundred or so metres away, and to their left a valley gathered water. Bare trees that thought it was winter stood in packs around them like hungry wolves, watching them. A road, no wider than a man is tall, navigated the slopes and passed them only a little ways down the hill, cutting through the trees in its twisted journey. The road concealed itself behind the hill they were traversing with slow pace. Leeam was going to speak - he had had something on his mind recently that wouldn't stop gnawing in his head - when the faint rumble of a vehicle could be heard on the road ahead. It was moving towards them, and if Leeam and Lutwig did not move the vehicle's occupants would only have to cast their eyes up the slope as they drove past to see two black against white figures staring back. "Do you hear that?" asked Leeam as if necessary.