ROLEPLAY

Folially 24, 3rd AC 2619

Things are starting to get clearer about our departure. Once we are ready, we leave again in two days. We will be accompanied again, but this time not by Kickan. This one leaves again tomorrow towards the Fort, with another team member and some goods.

The one who will accompany us is Titus. A Fyros, who looks young, but seems to have the energy of a bedridden celiakos. I exaggerate. He is just young, in fact. It's apparently also due to the high altitude, everyone here seems a bit slower than elsewhere. I feel weak myself. I can see that Ru-Dun is chewing its food more slowly than usual, too. Azazor seems to be stooped as if after drinking three vials of ocyx essence. As if everything was going in slow-motion.
This Titus, then. Since we arrived, he followed us, looked at us with big eyes, then asked us questions. Then he asked us to come with us. He wants to leave the island, to move away, to find the Marauders. I heard that his father was one of them, but he never knew him, he grew up on the island. Azazor eventually gave in to his request with a " Well. But no foolery, right? Taking a Marauder's son along, what a big deal. I objected. Azazor probably thinks it will work out in our favor. What if the father betrayed them? Well, it must have been a long time ago, they'll have forgotten. Above all, he seems too inexperienced for such a journey. "Do you at least know how to hold a sword at the right end?" I asked. Supposedly, he trains every day, he told us. I didn't want to be too hard on him, but I don't think he's ever faced a kirosta, or anything of that size.

And he asked why we were traveling, if we too were going to join the Marauders.
I answered nothing more than "scientific trip", naturally taking out my axe to resharpen the blade. I don't like it, but it's true that arriving at our next destination with a homin from the Halt could be a good point for us. "Here is a fresh recruit, do with it what you will." Or not, who knows. We'll have to adapt very quickly to the reception they'll give us.

So it's decided, he will travel with us to Cloudy Cliff Diplomatic Outpost. Discreetly I asked Kickan if he knew him, if we could trust him. Here, he told me, no one has any reason to want us dead, as long as we don't cause a catastrophe. I understood this while drinking a baba with him and the Matis we met earlier. Incidentally, the baba is slightly better here than at the Fort, but it's still more bland and insipid than the lightest byrh.

They told us a lot of things about the Halt. The inhabitants here are descendants of the Rangers of Atys, who settled here. At the beginning, now several generations ago. In order to guide the refugees, to offer them a break on the way to the New Lands. That we already knew. Many have left, but some have chosen to settle, and the Halt has quickly turned into a small town. "They don't lack anything here," Coccio, the Matis, explains to me. Few predators, some javings in the north, at most, enough game, a rather generous forest, a lake. The homins hunt armadai, too. So that's it, the bones and hides that are used to build the houses. Azazor asked how, and if he could attend a hunt, but the next one is not scheduled for a month. There is a large hole, a trap, somewhere in the southeast of the island. Homins imitate the animal's cry, or its predator's, and lure it to the trap. When they succeed in making it collapse, it is killed with a pike by the hunters, then butchered on the spot. It will not be able to get out of the trap in one piece anyway. The hunt for the armadai requires many homins, and sometimes gives rise to a great party. Its meat is very fortifying and invigorating, the main source of energy for them. By the way, Cuccio offered us two large bags filled with this dried meat, for the continuation of our trip.

No one is really Ranger here anymore, or part of the guild, now. One of the only ones who could claim to join them is Kickan, like a few others of his temperament. But he is satisfied with his work between the Fort and the Halt. And as he told us: if he didn't do it, who would? Real Rangers regularly pass through here, and are admired and welcomed as heroes, as life outside the island is so harsh. But if many young people dream of joining them, few actually do. As Coccio says, when you are born here, life is so quiet that you don't need to go running around the world... Kickan joked something like: "Coccio, you are telling that to two Fyros who just traveled half of the Oflovak Road! What do you think? That you're going to convince them to settle here?"
So, Titus' case is quite rare. It was triggered when, as a child, he learned that his father was a former Marauder. By the way, the homin in question had died during an armadai hunt, after slipping and falling into the trap. The animal, in panic, crushed him with its paw, a rare but fatal accident.

But then, we asked, "On the island, neither Rangers nor Marauders, how can they remain so carefree? Marauders in the New Lands are at war with the Nations. What would they do if Marauders here tried to invade the island?" From what I understood from Coccio's explanation, that would be of no interest, to anyone. Marauders are as welcome here as any homin, out of loyalty to the Ranger tradition. The physical capacities are less, for those who are not born there, so they don't stay very long, they soon feel too weak. Just like us. And there is nothing to fight here: no kitins, no Powers, no Nations, and a popular organization. The job of the Island Council is to ensure that these traditions are respected, and to administer the city in consultation with everyone. Coccio is elected with five others for a few years of Jena, and will leave his place in two years. "Maybe to Kickan," he said with a smile. "He would do a good job." To which Kickan replied sarcastically that he was not old enough, like him, for such a task. "The Council? Stuff for bedridden!" he said. "Not as much as back home in the Desert," I added.
"Getting back to the marauders... We know how to quell the troublemakers," Coccio tells me. "Usually they behave well. It even happened in the past that some of them settled on the island, which is very frowned upon among them." Just like it will upon us: he warns us that we will be very unwelcome among the Marauders. But, the fact that we are traveling with a homin from here will maybe be helpful, and if we bring some goods, too.

Besides their benevolence, Azazor and I thought we saw in our hosts a kind of insouciance regarding the problems of the world, and above all, we were stunned by this lack of curiosity, this total absence of the thirst for knowledge that inhabits us. We looked at each other, and kept our mouths shut. As if for the first time in a long time, we understood each other.