Nobody's Memories
Chapter 7 - Taking Stock & Exposition
My week in the world of the Witcher had certainly been an interesting one, if not productive. Oh yes, oh so productive. For starters, I not only actually knew where I was - one bandit camp had finally, finally had a map that I had stolen and asked them as to our location on before slaughtering them. Of course, I had hit my head in anger after realizing that I could interrogate the bandits before slaughtering them a la batman style, also known as making them literally shit themselves in terror to get the info I wanted and then dropping them off a bridge. Into definitely Drowner infested waters. While they were tied up in sun-dried Buckthorn, for my personal amusement.
...I never said I had to interrogate them kindly or morally.
The total sum of my reaped knowledge hadn't been very large, or exceptionally well-detailed, but it had been large enough to matter. Some of it I had already known, but it had been nice to get a confirmation on - the northern kingdoms current state, the fact that the landmass where everything took place on was simply called 'The Continent'... I could bash their creativity, but humans weren't exactly the most creative bunch where I came from either. "Earth"... really. I mean, at least the people of The Continent had the excuse of being a medieval-aged society on a deathworld! Have we really not managed to come up with a better name? I had even goddamned gotten the planets name, Llarguibas (No wonder it was never brought up in a book or game...) and even though it sounded like a man's death gargles it was probably better than just pointing to the ground and naming your planet earth!
...huh, looking back, I think that it might actually have been that bandits death gargles that he gave me instead of an answer. He... kind of had a razor in his throat, didn't he? Ah well, I digress.
Besides the hastily scribbled information on the general state of the world, which had indeed confirmed that whenever I was in-setting it was during the third Witcher game, I had learned something valuable. I mean, the piles of corpses, battlefields, and hung people who were probably killed because they held valuable property had told me such, but more confirmation was nice. No, bad solstice, stop getting off track! I finally learned my location. It was...
... just a bit south of the area the game had tenuously defined as 'White Orchard', and definitely off the games map. Better than expected, and not the worst thing to happen. I had pinned up a large map taken from particularly well-established bandits close to a well-traveled route on a table in the center of my loot chamber, and using pretty much everything I could, had marked down locations of interest in the surrounding area. Blue marked bandit camps, white marked looted camps, those two pebbles were places of power, wood splinters marked guarded treasures, so forth and so on to mark everything I could remember there being on the game's map, a few markers of my own design added in. A well-rounded conquest, but now I was using it to plot out the course of my adventures.
Oh yes, my Lootcave. I had a Lootcave now and I loved it.
It had always been my lootcave, of course. But at first it simply been a literal cave in a semi-hidden location in a high-up, hard-to-reach place I had decided to dump all the crap I 'reprimanded' from bandits to, rolling up their tents and shoving literally everything they owned into a pile or two and having it appear here, clattering down from the rough ceiling and clattering to the floor in a disorganized mess.
That had been night one.
Sometime afterwards, perhaps after going back to the mostly fine and uneaten corpses of the absolute sea of monsters I had killed a few days prior and sending everything of value from them – heads, eyes, brains, feathers, scales, skin, etc… - onto the pile that I realized what a mess the room was, and how little space I had. My solution to the problem on day two?
FALCON PUNCH!
More accurately, punch everything until the walls had been smoothed, the ceiling raised and domed, and I had made row after row of shelves within the largest section of the cavern. I had precariously organized everything for the next several hours, separating furniture and several tables aside, making everything as space-sensitive as possible. I had a section for everything from the most precious of gemstones to sacks of crowns. The various tents had found their home rolled up on the lowest shelves.
In essence, what I had done to create the area I was storing everything I owned in was bang the walls until they had reached a certain degree of smoothness and depth. Like what someone did to get rid of a dent in a car's bumper. Maybe. I… I wasn't very well versed in car maintenance. I knew there were problems, like durability and consistency and such, but I hadn't seemed to encounter any problems….
The shelves themselves had been the product of my literally punching through several feet and stone and dragging the arm across the wall, repeating the process as many times as necessary.
Work done once more, I had set out for the day, stealing away more and more monster parts, visiting a few villages before setting out at night to once more blindly rob bandits.
Over the next three days of constant looting and failed village-visiting, each with an increasing worry over the fact that I hadn't been sought by anything and while waiting to return to each village after my first visit, I had renovated. Smoothed out the rest of the cavern, added stairs, a few carpets to brighten the place up, stolen coal braziers from an abandoned castle to literally brighten the place up, and generally speaking? I made the place look like an actually decent place to live. I had caved in the single entrance before making a smaller exit for the cats who constantly followed me around, appreciating the entire place, just yesterday.
Because here and now, looking at the place again? It was a work of art. Mostly. Look, point is I was surprised to have even made it.
A constantly turning and sloping downwards chamber at first, the loot chamber – the first room one came across – had alcoves full of boxes, bins and items of interests, more stuff piled high yet not quite restricting access to shelves. Tables were pushed together and placed at odd places, the largest one at the center containing my map I was currently looking over, the others containing varying letters and items I had tried examining myself. Several contained weapons I had layed out to get a better view of in the torchlight, the torches themselves hung between shelves.
A small, open-air stairway descended into several varying chambers, each one lowering, yet no less important. One was claimed by cats, and I had done my best to accommodate them, trying to make it a mini cat-paradise. One was simply full of chairs for relaxation; another had bookshelves claimed from abandoned homes, full of varying books. I hadn't read most of them, but the few books I had claimed for myself in my travels were either fictional, or of magical content. The few not fitting that discussion had shared titles with objects from the games, and thusly I had taken them for a comparison.
All decked out with curtains hung precariously with repurposed chains from armor to the ceiling, several carpets, and a painting of a crying clown from a weird, weird young boy's bedroom in the abandoned manor I had raided.
….No really, that kid gave even me pause because of the crap I found in his room. He was into things so questionable I both hadn't even heard of them before and I was vaguely certain he was the reason monsters had ransacked the place to begin with. Just…. So much white goo. So many summoning circles.
Shaking my head to remove myself from so disturbing a thought track, I got back to the map. My current plans… were a bit limited, yes, but not the worst. Continue recording everything I had taken in my book, record everything of interest in it as well, keep on trying to establish a friendly image with the villagers, try to get to a city to commission a weapon that wouldn't break just because of a mixture of strength applied and weapon misuse, perhaps even find a tutor – those were my plans. Maybe try to give the Bloody Baron some life tips, get him and his life back on the right track. He was an actually good leader when he wasn't a shit father or drunk off his ass, and did care for his family. When he was… y'know, beating them because he was drunk off his ass. I could try to find the Heart of this World… I couldn't do anything to it, but still.
That, and kill the Three Crones of the Woods.
Seriously, I needed to do that. Like, do that now. Mostly because they probably knew I existed by now and could easily be responsible for the fact monsters hadn't attacked me in a while, and wanted to kill me either because they knew what I was, or because they thought I was interesting. Mostly, though?
Fuck the Crones. Seriously.