Who: Kiley and Chase Where: Heading towards I32 When: Early afternoon (DAY 38)
Chase really didn't have any delusions that it would stay that way, but the house didn't really seem so bad. Old, outdated, and cramped, but better now that there was heat and electricity. The added bonus was that he and Kiley had one up on everyone else in the fact that they'd already been sharing a room for months now. Sure, it was smaller, and they had to share a bathroom, and Chase was pretty sure that the walls were thinner than they'd been at the other house, but it wasn't really so bad. Their room was a little bigger than the ones downstairs, and felt a little more tucked away than the rest of the rooms in the house. The only things that really bothered him were not having a lock on the door, not having Minion in the room all the time, and that creepy hole in the floor. The first thing was just something they were going to have to live with for now, and if he needed to make traps again he had all the tools to do it at least. He could keep Minion in the room if he wanted to, but it felt wrong considering there was so much in the house that was specifically made for feline use, and having him cooped up wasn't fair. The last thing, the hole, was a pretty easy fix so far too. All it really took was stuffing one of the thousand sofa pillows in the house over it and positioning the dresser in such a way that they didn't have to look at it without it blocking entry to the closet. Out of sight, out of mind. Maybe. Hopefully.
Being outside was at least nicer today than it had been the day before yesterday. The ground was still damp, but as long as the sun was out it felt warm enough to trek around in just a thick hoodie. He stuffed a second set of clothes into his mostly empty backpack, just in case, and tucked his multitool into his pocket. It had been a while, but he found himself tucking the hammer from his toolset into the familiar spot on his belt, even though he was pretty sure he wasn't going to need it. He didn't know if anyone noticed that Kiley wasn't limping around as they gathered water bottles and a little food for their walk after feeding a chatty Minion, miraculously cured from her wounded ankle the day before, but he also didn't really care, aside from the fact that it was still funny as hell. As long as they didn't run into Scotty it would probably be fine.
As far as their destination, Chase went with his experience. In any self-respecting open world videogame, there was always a treasure set along a landmark of some kind, usually near a natural path, even if it was somewhere out of the way. To him, that marks the area of land where the branches of the river joined. It was also one of the furthest points on the map, but resolved that if either of them wanted to turn back they would.
The first thing he did was to find Kiley a walking stick that matched his own, then went about figuring which direction from the house they needed to go in to get to their goal. About twenty minutes in he wondered if maybe he shouldn't have brought one of the first aid kits, just in case. About an hour in he wondered if Kiley had brought condoms. Not that he was thinking about sex when they had a task to do. Or, at least, he hadn't been. But that tree kind of looked like the one that they'd first done it against, right?
"I should've put the scout manual on the list," he said instead of thinking about it more. "Not that we knew what we'd be doing, but it had a lot of useful nature stuff." He remembered a bit, considering how many times he'd actually paged through the first book he'd ever claimed in Zenith, but diagrams of different plants really would have been nice. Or remembering more than just a few vague things about hypothermia, or what they could actually eat out here. "Like...learn how to navigate with moss, though...." He paused to edge partway around the nearest big tree, frowning thoughtfully as it appeared the whole trunk was covered pretty evenly with green. "....that might not actually be a thing. Or...maybe it's a certain kind of tree?"