Chapter 7: Venturing Into the Village

Chapter 7: Venturing Into the Village

Jadis stood tall in the stone hut she’d repurposed to be her own personal fort, heads in the rafters of the thatched roof. It had taken some time, at least a few hours she guessed, but she’d managed to create halfway decent defenses, if she said so herself.

One Jadis had stayed in the house, using the old furniture to build up barriers in the windows. With the addition of extra wood from a couple of the other abandoned homes, she felt the piles of wood were heavy and solid enough to make any attempts at breaking through a real challenge. Nothing was nailed in place, since she lacked nails much less a hammer, but with larger pieces jammed against the walls and into the window frame, she was confident in their stability.

Her other body had transported the clay jars of preserved food from the cellar she’d found them in over to her new base. It was while she was making cautious trips back and forth from the two buildings that she noticed the effects of one limitation of her body doubling skill. When she was at both places at the same time, a pressure headache started to throb behind her temples. However, once she started walking back, the headache lessened until after a few minutes it was gone completely.

The skill had told her in its description that the further her two bodies were apart, the more mental strain she’d be under. She guessed that the throbbing headache was evidence of the strain. By her estimation, the distance between the two buildings was about a thousand feet, maybe fifteen hundred at most. That felt like plenty of space to work with if she needed to separate her selves, but she did want to test the limits of just how far she could actually go if she needed to.

“Testing can wait until I’ve got more important things in order,” she said aloud, dismissing any plan to experiment for the moment.

“Like dressing my wounds,” she agreed with herself.

Looking at herself, she chuckled a bit. Ironically, despite the name of her class, she was sure she’d never need to use another mirror ever again. With two independent sets of eyes, she could check herself over in a way no one else on Earth could. Maybe other people on Oros, but not Earth.

She examined the condition of both her bodies, eyes raking over her forms. Both were fairly banged up with scratches, cuts, and bruises on arms and legs, as well as a few places on her torso. With no true medical supplies, she had no way to properly sterilize or bind the more serious cuts, the worst of which had her worrying about infection. She had a makeshift solution, though.

When she’d finished carrying the jars back to the hut, Jadis had used the strength of both sets of arms to pry apart the lids of the two boxes she’d discovered under the beds. The wood cracked and shattered under her combined efforts, rendering the iron locks useless.

“Who needs a key when you’ve got guns like these?” She’d laughed, flexing one of her biceps at the time.

Inside the first box, she’d found a leather pouch with ninety silver coins inside it. Forty of them had been about the size of a quarter and had the image of an acorn on one side, some kind of fancy crest on the other. The crest had two axes crossed in front of a shield with a crown over the top. She could make out small symbols on the shield and words on both sides of the coins, but the letters were foreign to her and she had no clue what they said.

The other fifty coins had also had the crest on one side, but had a tree on the reverse side instead of an acorn. The coin was also a bit larger, closer to the size of a half-dollar coin. She guessed they were different denominations, but she would have to wait until she found some living folk to find out what the difference was and what they were worth.

The box had also had a small gold pin, a silver ring with a green stone set in it, and a flat piece of wood with what looked like a family portrait carved into the surface. The contents were clearly the treasures of the former owner of the building. She felt a twinge of guilt as she stared at the faces in the wooden portrait but shook her head clear of any sentiment. She couldn’t afford to leave potentially useful supplies behind out of some misguided sense of respect for someone that was likely long dead.

While the silver and gold were probably the most monetarily valuable things in the box, the true treasure in Jadis’ eyes was the last thing she’d found in the box: a steel flask.

Opening the flask, Jadis had taken a sniff and found that it was filled with a highly alcoholic drink, something as potent as vodka if she had to guess from the smell.

“Okay! Now I feel like I can break some demon skulls!” Jadis smiled, swinging the hammer-like weapons, testing their weight. “Not bad for a city girl, eh?”

“Not bad at all!” she grinned in response to her silly question, white teeth shining.

Heading out of her fort, Jadis decided she was ready to head a little further into the village proper. She’d found some good loot searching the outer huts, but she was certain there had to be more in the buildings that surrounded the stone temple. A village had to have had shops, right? Craftsmen? Smiths? Tailors? If she could find any places of business, she had high hopes of finding ever more useful tools and equipment.

Before she headed into the village, Jadis took a couple of empty jars to the water source she’d found and collected as much water as she could, drinking her fill and leaving the full jars in her hut. She didn’t want to have to go looking for water in the dark if she was gone longer than she intended.

Preparations complete, Jadis proceeded to the village, her walk slowing to a crawl as the village homes and clearing came into view.

She paused at the tree line, both sets of eyes watching the cobbled streets and open spaces for any signs of movement. Nothing stirred. With a deep breath, she crept her way towards the closest building, a larger stone structure with two stories.

Like every other building Jadis had come across so far, the structure’s windows were without glass and gaped wide, shutters either open or missing. There was no door on this side of the building, but Jadis still moved close and took a look through the windows.

A mass of splintered wood was all that greeted her. The interior looked ransacked, like a tornado had danced within. With how damaged everything looked, Jadis had no desire to try and sort through the mess. However, there was the second floor to check still. The first floor might be a wreck, but that didn’t mean the whole structure was a loss.

Putting aside the hammer one body carried, Jadis put her foot up on the sill of one window and boosted herself up, grabbing hold of the second story window and pulling herself up.

“For once I’m glad this place was built for little people,” Jadis mumbled as she climbed up and into the second floor window.

Unlike the first floor, the second was far less damaged, the furniture displaced but not shattered. She searched the rooms thoroughly, checking every drawer and under all the beds. Eventually, she had to admit defeat. There was nothing of value in the building.

“Maybe this place has already been looted?” She wondered. With all the drawers and boxes thrown open and askew, her assumption felt right. “I might not be the first to try and gather supplies here...”

Shrugging, Jadis made her way out of the building and rejoined her double. Just to be certain, she checked the perimeter of the building for any cellar doors and found none.

Moving on, Jadis followed the same pattern, checking the next four buildings for any useful resources with one body while the other waited outside, standing watch. None of them held anything that Jadis could even remotely call worthwhile. Three of the four had cellars, which had excited Jadis at the prospect of more hidden food stores, but all were disappointingly empty of anything but broken rubbish.

As Jadis moved to check the sixth building, a slight movement she almost missed caught her attention and she paused, ducking low behind a wobbly wooden fence between two buildings. Across the road, hanging from the partially exposed rafters of a thatched roof, a creature made of bone was slowly swinging back and forth.