Rough Hunger
We finished the Garden Mischief Adventure last week, so welcome to a new adventure story!
If you’ve been around a while, you know I gain inspiration from just about anything. This most recent adventure sparked after a day I spent fasting. (This might seem like a weird thing to you, but I’m okay with that. I had some personal reasons for the fast.) Anyway, it’s been a while since I went without food for 24 hours and I was a bit surprised by how difficult it was for me. After missing the first two meals, I became distinctly aware of every discomfort in my body and it occurred to me just how motivating a need for food could be.
Of course, my mind continued with that idea, where the main character in an adventure is driven by the ache in his or her belly and by a world where food is difficult to come by no matter who you are.
Thus the following adventure was born. Let’s explore =)
Rough Hunger
Four men sit around a small fire with their legs outstretched in the dirt and their backs against mossy rocks that are padded with their bed rolls. They eat in silence, tearing chunks off the bones of two rabbits they roasted on spits.
They are not aware of your presences, where you lay hunkered beneath the large, glossy leaves of a young oak. Your stomach growls at the smell of roasted meat. Judging by how the men are devouring their dinners, there won’t be any rabbit left to steal by the time they bed down for the night.
But there might be some jerky or nuts in their bags. Not as tasty as fresh meat, but at the moment the ache in your belly doesn’t care if the food’s moldy so long as it’ll ease the clawing inside.
You wait, ignoring the ants crawling over your hands while the men finish off the rabbits and settle in to sleep for the night. Still you wait, even when the ants bite, welting your arms and neck, until the whistling, rattling snores of the group combine with the frogs and cicadas in the dark. Only then do you emerge, stepping heel to toe between a man with a braided beard and a man who covered his face with a stained Stetson.
The nearest bag sits just beyond the feet of Braided Beard. His boots are so worn that you can see the grubby end of his sock sticking out the leather toe. Your hope for nuts or jerky fades a bit at seeing how gaunt the man is beneath his shirt. If you paused long enough, you could probably count his ribs.
But hunger drives you to look inside the man’s bag anyway. You find an extra pair of socks that look surprisingly whole and a shirt wadded around something. Pulling out the shirt, you carefully unwrap it and stare in surprise.
Your stomach growls, disappointed.
The moonlight peeking through the oak leaves glitters off a ruby the size of your palm. Never in your life have you seen such a gem. At first you’re tempted to pocket the thing—out here in the Rough, it’s every person for himself—but there’s no way you can fence it for food without drawing more trouble than you can handle. Carefully wrapping it back up, you tuck the shirt and ruby away in the man’s bag and move on to Stetson’s bag where it rests beside his head.
As you move, it almost sounds like an animal bushes the leaves beyond the firelight but after waiting and holding your breath, nothing reveals itself. You open Stetson’s bag.
On the top rests a knife as long as your forearm. You pinch it between a thumb and forefinger and set it aside on the ground. Not many have such weapons in the Rough. The cities hoard weapons like their lives depend on them, never mind that they have stone walls keeping most of the animals at bay.
Below the knife is a folded shirt and a drawstring bag that makes your stomach grumble in hope. Your fingers have just closed around it when Stetson’s hand shoots out, capturing your ankle in one strong, long fingered hand.
A small cry escapes you as you tumble from your crouched position onto your backside.
Stetson lifts his hat to reveal a tattooed face with cold gray eyes. He growls, pushing to sit up while still holding your ankle.
You can’t let him wake everyone while he still holds you. There’s no way you’ll escape four against one. Your fingers close around the knife you set aside and you bring it up threateningly at the same time as you kick Stetson in the side.
He gives an umph and lets go but his cold eyes turn from merely surprised to angry and you know you’re in trouble.
You swing the knife warningly and scramble away only to find Braided Beard behind you. He grabs your shoulders.
You squirm but Braided Beard’s strong despite his gaunt form.
Something sails past your head and smacks into the man’s face. Before you realize what’s happening, another object catches him on the nose and blood starts flowing from his nostrils.
His grip weakens enough for you to break away. You duck under his raised arms and take off into the woods.
Sounds of pursuit follow but once you’re in the trees, your terror eases. This is your domain now. You dart through the trees and under vines until you see a familiar bowl in an oak. Spinning around the tree by grasping a low hanging branch, you stoop inside the hollow trunk and go still.
Hulking figures soon appear, wandering through the darkness, searching. Your breath rasps inordinately loud in your ears but you know the cicadas are drowning out the sound. Finally, the men leave, grumbling in frustration.
Still you don’t move. Someone tossed those rocks at Breaded Beard and you figure if you wait long enough, they’ll reveal themselves.
Sure enough, moments later a small form rounds the oak and tucks himself into the bowl of the tree with you. He’s so tiny that he barely takes up any space. You recognize his hollow face and bony frame. His name’s Howard but everyone you know simply calls him How because of all the questions he likes to ask.
Although you’ve worked with How before scavenging food, you weren’t aware he’s so good at throwing. In the darkness, you see his white teeth flash in a smile as he tosses a small stone on his palm.
“I did good, yeah?” he whispers.
A chuckle escapes you. “Yeah.”
The smile disappears and he leans closer. “Good enough to share whatever food you got?” he points at the drawstring bag still in your hand.
In the chaos, you didn’t mean to take it with you, but between clutching the knife and focusing on escaping, you forgot you held it in your other hand.
You fear whatever’s inside isn’t the food you both hope for but you nod and pull open the bag to look.
A blue gem sparkles in the dim light. You tip it out onto your palm and How gives a breathless whistle.
“You know what that is?” he asks.
You shake your head.
“See how it glows? It’s one of the new element-stones an inventor figured out in Darmont. You know about those? You know they usually come with a guidebook to explain how they work? What are we going to do with it?”
Your chest tightens at what you hold in your palm. You’ve heard of the element-stones but have never seen one. The cities struggled for food just like the Rough until about a year ago when the Darmont inventor discovered the stones. They create heat or water or grow food depending on which type of stone you use. With a grouping of the stones, you could create your own small harvest to live off of.
“This is probably a water-stone,” you speculate.
The boy’s grin flashes again. “Clean water’s hard to come by.”
Your mind continues to consider the situation. The men around the campfire probably stole the stones from one of the supposedly secure posts that runs between the cities, so you doubt they can report the theft, which means you have to watch out for the men themselves, but not any of the authorities from the cities.
Could they possibly have a green stone as well? Even though vegetation grows like a flood in the Rough, little of it is safe to eat.
But then, clean water is also precious. Do you cut your losses and take the treasure you already hold and hope you can figure out how to use it? Or do you steal from the men again in hopes of an instruction pamphlet or another stone?
“Let me think on it,” you tell How.
He nods and settles against your side to sleep while you tuck the stone away.
Do you…
Cut Your Losses?
or
Steal Again?
Thank you for joining in a whole new adventure! Leave your vote in the comments below and we’ll return next week to see how the story continues.
Blessings,
Jennifer
(For more of my stories, check out either my multi-ending Adventure book, The Adventure, or my YA Fantasy novel, Quaking Soul, here on my Website or on Amazon.)
