We Aren't Alone
Who: Jasper and a couple of NPCs Where: On the edge of the desert When: Late morning What: A Finding (sort of) Rating: PG (for language)
Jasper was never so glad to be out of a desert as she was five minutes ago. Oh, it was still hot, there wasn't any question of that, but there was more moisture in the air, undoubtedly due to the fact there was more vegetation on the ground, and it continued getting thicker as she went on. In fact, Jasper was pretty sure she'd get back to camp within the next couple of days, and she thought she might take her time about it because she had a pretty nasty sunburn. Huzzah for deserts. She loved them, except somewhere closer to the opposite of love.
But she was out of it! There was definitely an increased amount of grass plants, like that sweetgrind stuff, growing, and single or stands of trees littered the landscape. Jasper was heading towards one such singular tree, the closest one, in the hopes of finding fruit that wasn't more damn melon or cactus.
Instead, she smelt wet rot and metallic blood, which was completely different from dry rot, but they were both pretty nasty. And Jasper looked up at the sky and wondered exactly what kind of deity took sadistic joy in leaving corpses across her path, whether they were animal, human, or just plain fucking weird. With a sigh, and figuring maybe some kind of scavenger could be caught and gutted and eaten, Jasper headed that way.
The problem was that there was a distinct lack of corpses around the single tree. There were definitely splashes of blood, scratches in the dirt - a lot of somethings were fighting here. And, the most telling - what used to be a camp fire, a broken stone knife, and what looked like some beads scattered around. Walking around the tree, she figured out why whoever it was wasn't in the tree - there was a branch on the ground with a fresh break. The tree was a spindly thing, without many branches. This one must've broke with the weight of a person, or a couple of persons, on it.
A sound, in the tree, made Jasper look up into the branches. Maybe there was still something up there that could be potential food.
It turned out to be something that had Jasper blinking. If she'd been drinking something, she would've spat it out and choked. But there were definitely two children up there. A little girl, and what was probably a boy, but they all looked kind of the same at that age, huddled up on what promptly appeared to be Jasper to be the thinnest, most dangerous branch in the universe.
"Hola! Can you get down?" Jasper called up. The girl shook her head, and Jasper swore to herself. "Um, okay, where's your mu..." Oh, right, mum was probably scattered around her in liquid format. If it was laughers, which it probably was, that was not a good question to ask. "Okay, I'm going to come up there and help you down, but I can only take one of you at a time or I'll probably fall, so I'll take the little one first."
"His name's Corbie." The girl said, with a bit of a lisp. The light was just right for Jasper to notice she was missing a tooth, and wondered if that was normal for a kid that age. Weren't they supposed to lose teeth at like, age twelve or something? And this one looked five, maybe six years old. Well, Thorne could fret over that.
"Okay, I'm going to take, um, Corbie first. Then I'll go back up for you, okay?" Jasper called. The girl was nodding.
Carefully, Jasper climbed the tree - it was hard without the handholds that climber trees provided, but entirely possible. The little boy, Jasper could see that now, was maybe three years old. The girl looked exhausted - she might've even been younger than seven. But it wasn't the age, right? It was the mileage. And if climbing up was hard, it was twice as hard climbing down one handed, with the other wrapped around what was basically a heavy baby.
Jasper set the kid down on the ground and told him to stick around. Fairly sure they could follow orders at that age (her sister would've laughed hysterically at her for that assumption), Jasper pryed him off her leg and went back up the tree for the girl, who she didn't know the name of yet. They were definitely siblings. They both had gold skin, and brown eyes. While the boy's hair was a little darker, the girl's hair was sun-streaked blond. They both had freckles speckling their bare arms and faces, too. And they were wearing almost identical sleevless leather vests and pants. Someone who had died on the ground (probably) knew how to tan leather. Mourning the loss of such important knowledge, she repeated the climbing down the tree trick, and hesitated. Then she shrugged. There was nothing here to bury, and just a few beads to save. The kids clung to each other, looking very lost and very alone.
Jasper rubbed the back of her neck. "Okay, um, I'm Jasper. I'm going to meet some people - they should be nearby, and we could get there tomorrow, maybe, if you want to come." Not that the kids had much of a choice, right? The girl looked around and looked ready to cry, and the boy had stuffed a thumb in his mouth. Jasper noticed the girl had a necklace made of bits of wire and junker beads made out of bits and pieces - a lot like the random stuff you'd find in a pesk nest - around her neck. "Look, just... come on. Let's get going. Here, I can carry the little." And she reached down and picked up the boy, and started walking, slowing down once she realized the girl couldn't really keep up. Shorter legs.