The Gaming Outpost

This picks up the game for James Marsh from Of James and John.

You awaken with your head above water. Your clothes are drenched, your the water in your hair drips down your face, but you are face up and able to draw in the humid warm stench.

–M. J. Young

The stuff that you are wearing is pretty wet–because you are slouched in about eighteen inches of water, your back against the root of a tree, probably a cedar from the look of it. Anything you were not wearing is dry enough, sitting on the ground next to the tree, but the landscape is one of narrow bits of land and stagnant pools of water, with a canopy of trees overhead–a swamp, by just about any measure.

–M. J. Young

Although you cannot see the sun, you deduce from the play of light and shadows that it is to your right, and so strike out to your left.

The landscape does not really lend itself to walking in a straight line. The bits of land are barely more than humps of soil around the trees, but most of the trees grow from the floor of the pools. It is something labyrinthine–the ground wandering through the pools, the pools twisting around the ground, neither of them running continuously in any straight line. It is impossible to walk without either leaping over gaps between the islands or wading through the stagnant water; it would be equally impossible to bring even a coracle through without portaging over land or going under root masses.

The ground is soft and untraveled. In some places your foot sinks deeper than you’d like even on the dry ground.

So besides setting off in the direction opposite the sun, how are you managing this travel?

–M. J. Young

It is slow and tiring, and within a few hours you realize that the light is fading.

–M. J. Young

You’ve seen nothing but the marshy ground, although in the fading light you do find a larger than average chunk of marshy ground built up between a few trees–it’s probably ten feet long by five feet wide, although irregular in shape, slightly depressed in the center but still above the water line. Will that suffice?

–M. J. Young

What are you wearing?

–M. J. Young

Yeah, that was the question, really. Are you wearing short or long sleeves, short or long legs, what kind of shoes, with or without socks, any other covering such as jacket, hat, whatever. Also, did you change from what you were wearing during the day to similar but clean/dry clothes for the night?

–M. J. Young

Yeah, you’re going to be eaten by mosquitoes in those clothes and this environment. The little vampiric bloodsuckers start working on you just as the light shifts from sunlight to dusk.

–M. J. Young