Materia Book 1: A Survivalist's Guide

“We grab the tent and everything in it. It’s too big for us to fill, but it will protect some of the refugees from the weather. I would normally make my own, but there are too many of us, and not enough leather to go around. Down the road we find a caravan. It’s the large kind for the large “people” of wherever we are. There are even larger apes that clearly just attacked it and stole whatever it was carrying. The apes threaten us the animalist way. There are too many of them, and they are clearly violent, so we have to take the long way around into the forest. In the forest are more of the large beasts. Clearly herbivores, and they don’t mind our particular company. We follow with them into the tropical forest. After a few hours of uneventful travel, we find civilization. I never thought I would be happy to find a town, but here we are. I sure I can drop off these refugees and crazy people and be on my merry way. Unfortunately its a city of the giant folk, and they don’t speak out language. There is in fact a refugee camp of more recognizable races in it. They also arrived randomly from the forest and wound up here. Supposedly they all also died before their arrival. The likelihood that I somehow survived is seemingly dwindling, but no time to consider that now. We try our luck at getting in the city, but without the ability to speak, the guards simply motion for us to join the refugees. The glowy lady and buckethead try to talk their way in with similar results. I scout around the city itself to get a lay of the land. The other side is blocked by a wide river, which does have a ferry you can cross, but we dont have money and cant speak to them anyways so thats a dead end for now. The glowy lady and bucket do convince someone inside to read them a book, but they fall asleep when they are supposed to be learning. Not a good showing of us being competent. The next day we have nothing to do, and nowhere to go. Jack contemplates joining one of the farms to earn coin and slowly learn their language, but thats a plan that would take months if not years to accomplish anything. Instead I do what I normally do. I hunt. There are some of the beasts nearby, these are armored with a mace for a tail. They are big, but probably not impossible if we surround them. The mystery lizardfolk lady opts to stay behind, something about morals of killing defenceless animals. Sure lady, peace with nature is great and all, but starving to death because of it is dumb. We go without her, I’m sure we will be fine. We will not be fine. The creature swings it’s tail club quite fast, and it packs a wallop. Easily enough to crush someones ribs with a good hit. I take a decent hit and get winded for a second, but I’m willful enough to just stand up and keep fighting. When I get up I see the other lizardfolk, Scaly Hide his name, take a hit straight to the chest and not get up. It’s fine, as long as he is alive we can help him recover. We keep wailing on the beast until it dies from the many wounds it took. We check up on the kid and… fuck. He’s gone. I probably should have tried to get to know him better. He was one of the only ones that was eager to do stuff, and also wasn’t crazy. I feel partially responsible, it was my idea to kill this thing, I didn’t know it would be so strong, I don’t know shit about this place. Scaley Hide learned the hard way. Fuck.”