Burning Plains, Pt 2

The floorboards creak and squeak as you step into the dark, abandoned farmhouse. Besides your footsteps, the entire place is eerily silent. All your ESP can catch are mice skittering into the corners and disappearing into the crevices.

Everything looks completely gray to you, not just because of your cat-like night vision, but because everything around you has worn down considerably. The paint on the ceiling is dry, cracked, and chipped in many spots. Flakes of it break off and fall down, even as you continue down the main hallway. Old wallpaper curls down from the walls, as their glue dries and hardens and loses their stickiness. 

Anything made of wood - furniture, floor, baseboards, doors - all have dried and withered considerably. They've lost whatever luster they once owned, and are little more than dull brown slabs at this point in time. Beyond the overall decay, there's a layer of dust on everything that further obfuscates their color.

All this makes you feel as though you're walking through an old black and white film. It's beautiful, but eerie.

The more you walk through the house, you see more and more signs of people having been here. There are numerous shoe and boot tracks throughout the dusty floor which shows a considerable amount of traffic going in and out over the years.

And judging by how some portions of the hallway walls have been gouged and scratched, at least some of the people going through here were heavily geared. Or they were carrying out large, unwieldy objects such as furniture and whatnot.

When you glance into the numerous rooms as you pass by them, you see even more evidence of looting and scavenging. Any drawers or shelves or chests or boxes or cabinets have been thoroughly picked through, with all kinds of household detritus scattered on the floor as a result. 

The sitting room has been especially picked through. Most of the chairs inside have been flipped over, or onto their sides. The coffee table has been tossed to the side carelessly, and the carpet underneath it has been lifted up and folded over.

Looks like someone had taken an axe to the wooden floor and chopped down into it - they've done a significant amount of damage to the floor. But when you peek down into the hole, there's about a 10 cm gap between the floor and the concrete beneath. 

There's a spot in the concrete between thick beams - it has been scratched and damaged somewhat by that same wood axe, it seems. You can only guess that someone wanted to get beneath the floorboards, possibly in search of something valuable, but only to find nothing.

You step into a small office library opposite the sitting room simply because you're incredibly curious about it. Of course, the desk in the middle has been picked clean and many of the books have been pulled off the shelves themselves. They're littered all over the place carelessly - clearly whoever went through them was looking for something other than books. A safe with valuables, perhaps.

You can't help but pick up one of the myriad books off the floor and flip through its pages for a few seconds. Looks like it's some kind of adventure fiction featuring teen boys. It's pretty uninteresting to you, but you respectfully stow it away on one of the shelves rather than simply dropping it back down on the ground.

Although you step back out to continue your exploration, you make a mental note to come back down and rifle through the books later. You might find something you could use in there.

There's a door set into the middle of the hall which seems to lead down into the cellar. Though you're intrigued, you keep following the hallway until it opens up into a kitchen area.

Like most of the rest of the house, the kitchen has been upturned and picked through with absolute diligence. Every single container from drawers to bread boxes have been opened up and emptied. The pantry in the corner has been thoroughly cleaned out, with only empty cans and bottles and food packaging strewn about on the floor inside.

The fridge has been emptied of everything except some moldy mass growing in one of the vegetable bins. You decide to leave it alone, like many others before you have.

Beyond just the food in the pantry, much of the utensils and kitchen tools have been taken - forks, knives, spoons, and so on. Even regular cooking utensils such as spatulas and mixing bowls are just straight up gone. The only thing that most looters have left here are the larger appliances such as stand mixers and pressure cookers.

And those have been mostly opened up and picked apart for their internal mechanisms. The stand mixer in particular has been opened up all the way, with all its guts showing. As far as you can tell, someone took it apart just to get to the motor inside. Well, at least as far as you can tell. It's not like you're an expert in anything mechanical.

Once you realize there's nothing here for you to pick through, you head up the stairs to the bedrooms. The floorboards creak ominously as you ascend, as though the old wood under your feet are complaining about being used after so many years of disuse.

The top floor is surprisingly carpeted, though it's long since matted down. All manner of muddy and dirty footprints go back and forth through the rooms, revealing nothing has been spared from scrutiny. You hope there's something you can find here that many others have overlooked.

But it's fine if you don't - you're really mostly here so you can rest away from the sun.

There's four doors splitting off from the hallway - two of them are smaller bedrooms of about equal size. They're decorated for both a boy and a girl, both of whom seem to be about the same age. Their rooms are an absolute mess as they too have been picked through and picked clean. Their closets have been raided, and their desks have been cleaned out.

Clearly whoever has gone through here hasn't found much use in their things, and left most of it in here. At least, as far as you can tell. All manner of clothes, books, magazines, pens, pencils, papers, and so on are scattered all over the floor. Even their walls are still decorated with band or movie posters, school pennants, photographs, and more. It seems none of that has been taken down or stolen.

And you probably won't find anything in either of these two rooms as well so you head towards the other two rooms.

One turns out to be a bathroom, which someone has rudely used after the apocalypse happened. Without running water, the toilet has become… something rather more unmentionable. So you shut its door and ignore the whole bathroom altogether.

Then you pass through the open double doors into the master bedroom, which is also in massive disarray. The mattress has been lifted up off the bed and is leaning against one of the walls. The bed frame itself has been broken slightly and opened up, as though someone was trying to get something underneath it.

The walk-in closet and adjoining bathroom have been picked relatively clean as well, though their floors are littered with old clothes and towels and what have you. Most things with deep pockets have been taken off their hangars and have had their pockets visibly turned inside-out.

Whoever was in here was absolutely desperate to find anything of value. Though you suppose you're here doing the exact same thing, so you can't exactly judge anyone's actions.

Stepping back out, you see a massively long chest of drawers facing the foot of the bed. All its drawers have been pulled open, with most of their contents strewn about the place. You grab one arbitrarily and pull it out all the way. 

For some reason, you're reminded of your Old Coin and how you found it - by poking and prodding in a place few expect. At first you think that perhaps there's something underneath the drawer, so you tip whatever few contents it has to the floor so you can get a look.

Sadly, there's nothing under there. But as you line up the drawer to put it back, you note that the drawer beneath it has a much thicker backplate - perhaps about 8 cm. A quick glance at all the other drawers reveal that their backplates are only about one cm thick at the most.

So you pull that one out and set it atop the chest of drawers itself. You tinker with it for only a few moments before you realize that it's obviously a false back and open it up with relative ease.

The top plate literally slides away to the side, allowing you to dig into the hidden compartment at the back of the drawer. Inside are a couple stacks of cash, which is totally useless to you.

There's also a relatively well-maintained pistol which is loaded with a full magazine. There are two other magazines in the hidden stash, as well as a full box of ammunition. You stow all those away in your backpack in the hopes of trading them off at some point in the future.

Finally, there's a small keyring in the corner with only two keys attached to it. One is clearly an official postal service mailbox key while the other appears to be an unmarked, nondescript high security key. The second key doesn't have teeth like normal keys you've seen, but have odd grooves and divots on the inside instead. Some modern car keys look a bit like this, though this one is far more complex than those by a wide margin.

Seeing that makes you realize that perhaps this house does have a few secrets to uncover, something that all other prior scavengers have missed.

Since you're pretty much done up here, you head back downstairs to the hallway and come to the door down towards the cellar. A deep anxiety washes over you as you open up the door itself, or rather as you peer into the pitch darkness below. 

Even your amped up night vision has trouble making out anything down there. From where you're standing, it's basically a murky and inky soup past the first few steps.

Although a Scan shows nothing down there except mice, you're still absolutely nervous to go down there. You do your best to shake off your fear - you've beaten Stone Crags and an Insane Chimera and a Shadow Sweeper. There's nothing down there that could possibly be as dangerous as them.

You take slow, trepidatious steps down even as you convince yourself that what you're feeling is a normal human thing. Everyone is kind of afraid of the dark unknown, and it goes against your very nature to willingly wade into it. Even if you know that there's nothing there even remotely terrifying.

You push your ESP to its limits just so you can better sense what's down here, and only by doing so can you tell what's around you. Although your vision is a blurry mess, you can see with much more certainty. Or at least, you can see the edges and outlines of things.

Your hearing has also ramped up significantly, and can hear your own footsteps bounce off nearby surfaces. 

And it seems most of the basement has been cleared up a bit. Or rather, everything has been pushed to the sides. Numerous shelves have been literally dragged over to the walls carelessly - some are partially leaning over and against each other. Whatever was on them has been tossed over into numerous piles closeby.

Most tellingly, a number of workbenches and tables have been turned on their sides, then faced towards the far wall. When you study the tables, you note that they've been reinforced with sheets of scrap metal which have been pock-marked and punctured by bullets.

When you turn to study the wall that the tables are facing, you realize that there's actually some kind of thick heavy door in the middle there. All manner of hammers and picks are strewn about the door, many of them broken and bent.

The door itself seems to be marred by some damage; you have to feel around it to be sure. But it looks like someone - or a lot of someones - truly wanted in. Of course, they never even got close. As far as you can tell, all they could manage to do was make superficial dents on the door's surface.

Your fingers slide over the door lightly, at first around the edges to scour for damage, then closer towards the center along both sides. You eventually find a handle around waist-high, though it hardly budges. And of course, you also find a lock under a sliding metal panel just above it.

When you insert the key you found upstairs, you find that it not only glides in smoothly, but it turns readily too.