Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Echos of an Empty Empire

As she saw things, Alice had a few options. 

The one she liked the least was to simply stay put. 

The city she’d found had quite a few survival essentials. Plenty of wood to burn, freshwater to drink, and shelter to sleep in. The only problem would be food, and there might be an intact storeroom somewhere in the city which would solve that issue as well. With all the basics covered, she could feasibly shelter in place for however long it took for other people to find the city and provide an avenue of rescue. There was no telling how long, exactly, that would take, and the idea of being stuck in a single place for weeks or months really seemed frustrating. 

There was also another consideration. 

Taking into account the changed Alaskan landscape, the new plant-life, all the strange ruins, the glowing water and mutating wildlife, there was always the chance that somehow Alice had been thrown into some other version of Earth. Weren’t there books about that sort of thing? She didn’t know how likely it’d be, but there was always the chance. If she had stumbled into some weird alternate reality, there likely wouldn’t be any sort of rescue party. She’d be on her own. 

Plus, there was always the risk that she’d find out what had happened to the city’s previous inhabitants, firsthand. 

The second option would be to spend some time in the city, figuring out what she could about its past while gathering up a good number of supplies. Then, when she was ready, Alice would set out and follow the coastline to the south-east. Even with the changed Alaskan terrain, that course should take her into warmer waters and a better situation food-wise. She probably wouldn’t be able to avoid a northern winter, journeying south, but it would put her in a better situation to survive one. There was also the chance of stumbling across living communities along the way. She refused to believe that only ruins remained, whether of the world she knew or the changed one around her. 

Walking the whole way also sounded really painful, so Alice was also going to take the time to try and find a sea-worthy boat. Ruins or no, the city was also obviously a port. There were going to be boats. She just needed to find a usable one. It’d be a massive advantage to her survival chances. She could also find hunting gear in the city, or make some for herself at the very least. There were only twelve shots left in the pistol. Twelve shots which wouldn’t do anything against an armored bear. Though, unless the people who built the medieval-looking city also manufactured anti-tank rifles, there wasn’t much she’d be able to do against one of those. Run at it with a spear? That was simply begging to become dinner.

 

Alice was leaning towards following through on the second option. 

It just wasn’t in her nature to sit around and wait for a rescue that might never come. Better to continue onward, blazing her own trail. 

Plus, following the coastline on a boat would allow her to avoid all the bears. Though…hopefully mutated killer whales weren’t a thing. Avoiding one danger just to fall prey to a larger one didn’t seem like a particularly great idea. 

 

For the moment, however, Alice pushed aside all future plans and focused on getting herself situated within the city. All the buildings were perfectly intact, which made it easy to simply claim the top floor of a three-story home. Helpfully, it even came with firewood pre-arranged, a full stack of good, dried wedges resting next to a small fireplace—which was oddly constructed. It seemed like every familiar element she saw in the city’s architecture ended up counterbalanced by something utterly out of left field. In this particular case, the fireplace wasn’t the traditional arch of bricks over a square chimney. Nor was it set into a wall. 

No, this fireplace was in the center of the floor, in a round ring of stone bricks. Overhead, a metal funnel took care of the smoke, though it was an odd, blue-ish color. She didn’t know what sort of metal it was made of, and didn’t particularly care. The point was, putting a fireplace in the middle of the room was a really odd design choice. It would be much simpler to put it in a wall, and it’d take up less space as well. 

The only way it’d make sense is if it were a cultural thing, something the people in the city had gone out of their way to preserve.

Regardless, it was interesting building a fire in the middle of a room, and it did light the whole place fairly evenly. Alice heated one of her two remaining ration packs over the fire, well aware that being warm wouldn’t do much to help the taste. Apparently, making the nutritional, compact bricks of various food-stuffs into something edible was a second-hand concern. A distant second-hand concern. 

But food was food, and she felt better after eating. 

It did feel a bit like she’d traded her water issues for food ones, though. A single ration pack left. 

Thankfully, she wasn’t going to drop dead of starvation within the week. She could probably go two weeks before things got dicey. That was a decent amount of time, at the very least, and it’d allow her to search the city for preserved store-rooms first. Otherwise, it’d be time to chance the forest, hoping that none of the wildlife ended up killing her in one way or another. 

Alice foresaw many, many nuts and berries in her future. Hopefully, avoiding the bright ones would allow her to circumvent a painful death by poison. 

Sighing, she lay back against a stone wall. There were a bunch of low benches surrounding the fireplace, suggesting a communal aspect to its placement, but Alice just wanted to rest her back for a while. Eyeing the rest of the room, she observed the culture on display. The stone bricks weren’t bare—there were still textiles hanging from the walls as insulation and art, depicting stylized animals in the form of faces, wings, and side profiles. Bold and simply geometric patterns repeated themselves on the woven canvas, accentuated with beads and sewn-on stitch-work.

It was a really familiar sight. 

Well, familiar in the way that she’d seen similar artwork before in the Anchorage heritage center. In the traditional Native American sections, where examples of various cultures had been preserved. And yet, here she sat, in a city proudly made out of the motifs of her Athabascan people. Were the ruins from a version of reality where her people managed to build an empire or something? Last she checked, her father’s side of the family hadn’t been capable of building entire cities out of stone and wood, the tightly packed streets evidence of a once-thriving community of peoples. 

The situation Alice was in just kept getting weirder and weirder. 

At least the fire had heated the room really nicely. Maybe there was also a way to take a bath somewhere nearby? Everyone enjoyed cleanliness, there had to be something, and Alice had been rolling around in the dirt and leaves for the past few days. She was filthy, and very much wanted to go to sleep clean. 

Groaning, she pushed herself upright and mentally marked the location of her ‘house’, stepping out. Interestingly, there weren’t any internal stairs in the building she’d chosen, just long flights of stone steps on the outside leading to the second and third floors. Maybe it’d been the older equivalent of an apartment house? Or maybe the fireplace had taken up too much space and displaced the stairs to the outside of the house. It seemed like it’d be somewhat inefficient, however. Especially in winter, when the stairs could be buried in snow. Alice guessed that she might not have the cultural understanding to comprehend some of the design choices on display in the city.

She checked some of the other buildings nearby and couldn’t find any sort of tub to wash up in. Sighing, she set off for the waterfront, figuring that maybe the people who’d lived in the city had simply washed up in the ocean. It looked like her hair might have to wait for modern conveniences, and settle for being brushed out by her field-comb at the moment. Trying to wash hair in salt water wasn’t a recipe for a good time. Not in the slightest. At least she found a rag which could be used to actually wash off all the dirt in one of the empty houses. Many of the buildings also held a great number of perfectly intact articles of clothing. Many of the examples she’d found presented as a bizarre continuation of Athabascan heritage, made up of many layers of leather or, rarely, woven cloth. They certainly looked warm, and left Alice wondering why the previous owners hadn’t taken any of the clothing with them. 

What had caused all the residents of the city to leave with just the clothing on their backs? That is, if they were even able to leave in the first place. What disaster had struck the people who mirrored one of her own cultures?

All the clothes she found looked ready to wear. Finding a couple in her own sizes shouldn’t be much hardship, and it’d give her something else to wear. The clothes she’d set out with had steadily gotten grimier. They’d need to be washed as well, sooner rather than later. 

 

The city’s waterfront proved promising. Low, large buildings dotted the shoreline, acting as the city’s warehouse analogues. There were a few small boats resting along the shoreline, out of the water. Some looked like traditional dugout canoes with large, pointed prows, bright geometric designs, and animal iconography painted on the sides. Other ships looked like a bastardization of viking longboats, done up in Native Alaskan style. 

All of them looked to be in good condition. 

As for the larger ships—well, there were still a couple tied to long logs sticking out of the water. These had an even greater resemblance to viking ships, but were too large for a single person to use on their own. It was a bit of a shame. Alice had gone through a bit of a viking phase when she’d been younger, and looking at all the wide-hulled ships had that part of her salivating again. 

A gravel path led from the waterfront and into the ocean itself. Probably to facilitate ship launches, though Alice had a different goal in mind. Quickly shucking off clothing, she gingerly stepped towards the water. 

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It ended up being cold. Of course it was. Despite the sun beaming down on it all day long, it was still Alaska. It left her shivering while rubbing at bare skin with the rag she’d found. It only took a few minutes for Alice to finish; she wasn’t even going to attempt messing with her hair and just focused on washing off everything else. 

She shook off the water and hurriedly started pulling on clothes again, teeth clattering and gooseflesh rising on her skin. Of course, this got the clothes a bit wet, but they’d dry off soon enough. 

A handful of minutes of walking saw her back in front of the fire she’d set, happily enjoying the warmth. It was nice and toasty, and left her feeling a touch sleepy. The room only had a single small window, tightly shuttered with carefully fitted wooden blinds. The dancing firelight was the only thing illuminating the room.

Smiling for once, Alice unrolled her sleeping back atop a number of rugs, happily falling to sleep with the warmth of a fire against her face, food in her stomach, and water in easy reach. 

 

Her good mood carried over to the soul-space, her little seed giving off a light that just screamed contentment. Alice looked over at the storm clouds surrounding her soul, which were just overwhelmingly present. Like they’d always been there. Or would outlast her own soul. 

She didn’t care much for the feeling.

The sprout emerging from the top of her seed had grown a little. Two leaves had unfurled inside the thick membrane, stretching it slightly. Idly, Alice wondered if the small plant took shape from her subconscious or some sort of outside mechanism. Divine blood felt like roots crawling under her skin—which had then manifested in the walls of her soul-space—and now there was a plant growing out of her soul. Was that simply how her soul expressed itself? Through plants? 

It was interesting, if nothing else. It would be exciting to watch the growth of her soul, even if the purpose or benefits of it were still unknown. Alice could guess, sure, but there wasn’t a way to know how good those guesses might be. She was treading entirely unfamiliar ground.

Inside the membrane, Zeus’s energies were still being changed to something more palatable. The parts of her soul which had once been dyed a very slight light blue had now swung the other way, colored a faint bronzy yellow. In time, Alice knew it would darken into a shade like that of tree-bark, continuing the plant analogies. It would also strengthen the ideals of Dignity, Hubris, Guile, and Innovation inside her identity, aligning her core self more closely to them, molding her personality around them over the course of years. 

The idea of changing so fundamentally scared her, sure. But it was better than letting Zeus call the shots, than having his influence be the one to change her. And besides, everyone changed. It was a fundamental part of life. She just got the rare chance to know what she was changing into. To direct the change before it happened. Not everyone got that choice. 

Outside her slowly changing soul, everything was the same. Zeus’s soul was startlingly unchanging for being made up of a bunch of storm clouds. Alice suspected that there might be a core behind all the clouds, something solid which was anchoring everything else and contained his identity. She’d seen mountains once, just barely visible through briefly parted clouds. 

Briefly, she entertained forming an avatar to interact with him inside the soul-space. She’d been able to punch him in the face last time, and a repeat performance would be extremely gratifying. Especially after the frustration of not finding Anchorage. 

Alice decided against it, though. 

Best not to draw his attention to the soul-space and possibly alert him to the alterations she’d made. With an absent thought, she appeared next to the wall and touched it. 

Immediately, she was dropped into actual sleep. 

Alice woke up the next day with an appetite for exploration.

Many of the buildings in the city were just houses or shops, sometimes both. The type of shop varied greatly, and Alice enjoyed walking in and not knowing what to expect. Some carried a great number of delicately carved beads and worked-wood. Others had a variety of tools and implements on display, and maybe a forge around back. There were tons of interesting things to find and a staggering amount of culture hiding around every nook and cranny. 

There was an armory of sorts near the center of the city, full of simple metal swords, spears designed for either throwing or stabbing, and racks full of pristine bows next to woven baskets full of arrows. Unexpectedly, it wasn’t fortified or protected in the slightest, and appeared no different from the buildings around it, architecturally. It’d only drawn her attention in the first place because of the carved figures with bows in their hands dancing over the structure’s doorway. 

It just seemed somewhat…irresponsible, letting anyone come in and take up arms. 

Then again, while they all seemed to be in good condition, none of them were guns. The amount of harm a person could do with a spear or sword was much smaller than what she could accomplish with just a pistol. 

Still, Alice grabbed a bow and a basket of arrows on the way out, figuring that she’d run out of bullets eventually. She also grabbed a spear and a sword, carrying them back to her temporary home. Because she might also run out of arrows. Or lose a bunch while practicing. 

As promised, she also went house to house, pulling out clothes and keeping a selection of the best fitting ones. While the fashion itself varied a little depending on whatever individual had made or worn the clothes, most of the general shapes involved were the same. 

There was an outer layer, like an oversized hooded tunic or parka, often lined with fur on the inside. The outside ended up decorated with stitch-work and beads, and she personally preferred the ones with plants and flowers embroidered along the leather surface. Some of the parkas were thinner than others, more suited for the spring and summer months, while others had been clearly designed for fall and winter. 

There were thinner under-tunics designed for wear under the parkas, made out of a soft, almost delicate leather. There were dresses made out of the same material, and Alice made sure to keep some of the ones that fit her somewhat small frame. 

Leather and fur trousers also joined her spoils, along with a few pairs of moccasins. In one case, the moccasins were even sewn onto the trousers, which would be helpful in combating the cold. 

 

Finally, one of her biggest issues was solved while looking for clothes. 

Alice found the city’s granary. 

She didn’t know which grain, exactly, filled the bags stacked up in a small, inoffensive warehouse. Or what to do with it. But it was a good sign; a sign that there was food to be found in the city, even if most of her cursory looks hadn’t drawn anything up yet. 

She was still holding out hope that whole meals could be found somewhere in the city. Or that she could find all the ingredients needed to cook up something simple, like a sandwich, or flatbread. Having just grain available left her at somewhat of a loss. 

 

The city was starting to feel welcoming, despite its emptiness.

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