NOVEL SIMPLE Ch-2-Shipwreck and Shelter
When I start to come too again, I hear the sound of crashing waves, creaking wood, and seagulls overhead. As the rest of my senses start to come online, I can smell the overwhelming scent of salt water and the faint lingering smell of decay that rapidly fades away.
Before I open my eyes, I can feel sand beneath me, dried onto my skin, and trying to get past the fluff in my ears. There is also the feeling of a new and fluffy appendage filled with sand sitting between my legs as I lay face down on what I am assuming is a beach.
Finally, opening my eyes, I see the fading first lights of dawn as the atmosphere finishes, turning into a light shade of blue. Off in the distance, I begin to hear the rustling of leaves as the sounds near me get stronger, while my sense of touch seems to be getting more refined by the second.
My eyesight was far sharper than it was before my untimely meeting with the goddess Elinaria, which allowed me to see much further and with greater detail than I would have been able to in my past life.
Breaking free from my hyper-focused and absentmind state, I get up and look around to see where I ended up.
The first thing that caught my eye was a large set of objects behind and to the left side of me. Turning around, I saw the wreckage of an old-time age of sail ship that looked to have been recently destroyed.
It was lying there with some rope and rigging across the side of the wreck and down on the beach as I saw a few boards break loose and fall to the sand below. The paint on a few parts of it was still fresh. However, the bodies of the crew are nothing but skeletons, baring the captain leaning up against a small broken section of the hull of his ship buried into the sand.
When I focus on him, I am able to hear the faint arrhythmic beat of his heart as it soon stops, and his body rapidly starts to decay into a skeleton, resulting in a burst of the same decay smell from earlier that nearly knocks me off my feet with its intensity.
Taking a few seconds to re-orient myself, I noticed that the process had reached its completion while the captain's clothes and other items remained alongside a faint blue marble in his chest.
Curious, I walk over to him, but when I make it halfway there, the marble in the captain's ribcage flashes with light, and a ghostly version of the captain is left standing next to his corpse.
The captain then looks around until he sees me. He then points at me and begins to shout," You! You are the one who did this to me! You are the one who did this to my crew and ship! Now face heaven's wrath and- "Whatever he was going to say next went unheard as thunder cracked overhead and lightning struck him, leaving nothing in its wake.
After the lightning struck the ghostly apparition, the captain's skeleton fell apart, collapsing into a pile of bones. Most of his clothes dissolved as well, leaving behind a white linen shirt, brown linen pants, and his tricorn that had a large feather in it.
Seeing the clothes reminded me that there were none in the character creator. However, now that I was paying attention, I could feel that I was wearing something.
Looking down, I saw that I was wearing a white one-piece dress with thin shoulder straps and no sleeves. There are no shoes either, but there is a complete set of undergarments beneath the dress.
I had to admit that this dress looked good on the new me, but I am not entirely comfortable wearing one, especially since this is my first time wearing one after over twenty years of my past life. So I took the old captain's clothes and attempted to wear them even though they were not made to fit me.
It took me a while to figure out the best way to change my clothes, but in the end, I am now wearing a pair of brown pants with the hems rolled up, and a piece of hempen rope as a belt, as well as a white shirt with the sleeves cut short. For some reason, I thought that the standard height from Earth would be the same here.
Oh well, on the bright side, I now know how my retractable claws work.
Exiting my little moment of reverie, I look at the captain's skeleton once more and decide to take the hat and the blue marble that strangely remained. Stuffing the marble in my new pockets and the tricorn on my head, which muffles the sounds of the world even though it is still clearer than what I could hear as a human, I go and search the wreckage for supplies.
Walking around to the largest part of the wreckage, which looked like the front half or third of the ship, I was able to see that the bottom deck was sealed off, and only the middle deck and top deck were open. Something about the way the bottom deck was sealed off did not look natural, but I could not figure out what.
Anyway, after about twenty minutes to half an hour, I find my way onto the exposed middle deck of the ship. The light in this section is very poor because of the lack of light sources and the surprising lack of holes in the ship. However, this did not affect me that much because one of the small, unmentioned benefits of my race is enhanced lowlight vision. This allowed me to move about without losing my footing on the severely slanted floors of the wrecked ship.
Walking in, I angle my feet to give myself more support in the ship and begin to explore.
The deck that I am on seems to be the crew quarters, with various personal belongings and hammocks strung about the place. It is only when I reach a door that I find anything that looks to be of value.
A large backpack with various straps on the sides leans against the wall next to the door, seemingly waiting for me to take it, which I, of course, oblige.
Now equipped with a backpack to store any new things I may find, I open the door to find a store room on the other side. This room appeared to be a storeroom filled with many weapons, tools, and, most importantly, food!
Rushing in, I stock up on some dried rations, a polished metal pick, a polished metal flat-headed axe, and a sturdy-looking five-inch-long fixed-blade survival knife.
Looking around for anything else that seems necessary and that I would be willing to carry, I find nothing of importance, so I decided to leave the room, heading up the wall that the door was on until I encounter the stairway that heads deeper into the ship.
Going down the stairs on a whim, I find out why this part of the ship survived to reach the shore.
Piled in a haphazard manner, in the bow of the ship is a large amount of metal, exposing a large and intricate circle in the middle of the floor made out of small finely carved runes.
There was nothing else down here besides these two things, so I put a bookmark on this for later, then went back upstairs and opened a new door. There, I found a floor-to-celling hole in the side of the ship, spanning the entire room and exposing the top deck with some of the rising coming through it.
Everything in the room seemed to have been ripped out, so I tested the strength of the rigging to see if it was secure and strong enough to climb on. When I confirmed that the ropes were strong enough to hold my weight, I climbed onto the top deck and surveyed the area around me.
The top deck has a large burned area where it looks like something impacted, a couple of tied-down crates, and the fallen mast, but nothing else. From my vantage point, the sun can be seen reaching its peak and ready to begin its descent.
Seeing that time progressing faster than I was expecting it to, I begin my journey back out of the ship to the ground, taking one of the hammocks along the way.
Once outside of the ship, I begin to salvage for pieces of the hull or deck that I can repurpose into a shelter or for firewood. I ended up finding a few pieces of metal I could use for the shelter as well, making the process of building one for tonight easier.
After I found everything I needed, I hauled it back to the broken part of the ship the captain was leaning on, as it was almost as tall as me and would make for a good starting point for my shelter.
Moving the skeleton of the captain off to the side, I started to build my temporary shelter by hoisting up a part of the hull at a ninety-degree angle to the part of the ship that was already standing upright, trying to get the new section to balance.
After I got the hull section to temporarily stand in place, I grabbed one of the pieces of metal I found earlier and placed it to support the two new shelter walls. When I did, I saw the new section of wall start moving, so I grabbed it and tried to pull it back to its balance point.
Learning my lesson from the last time, I held onto the wall this time as I grabbed my new flat-headed axe to begin hammering the metal into place. Once the metal seemed secured, I let go of the wall and stepped back, watching to see if the new wall would collapse or not.
Once I saw that the wall did not move, I repeated this same set of actions with a piece of the deck placed parallel to the section hull I had just erected. Only this time, I made sure not to make the same mistakes. Next, I took a few of the random boards that I found when scavenging the beach earlier and created a cross brace between the new walls using some more scrap pieces of metal.
I then spread a portion of the sail that I found caught on one of the smaller pieces of wreckage over the top of the structure and nailed it in place with a few random pieces of metal.
All this metal in an old-time shipment seemed weird, but from what I saw at the bottom of the ship, they were most likely transporting a lot of metal this time.
Walking inside the new structure, I strung up my hammock and tested it to ensure it could hold my weight.
After having a little difficulty sitting on the hammock, I get back up again and walk out of my new shelter. I then take the rest of the random planks of wood I have found and attempt to start a fire by striking the side of my axe with what I hope to be a flint rock. I acquired this rock inside the ship near what looked to be a castiron stove inside a makeshift kitchen.
It took me attempting a couple dozen times before I got lucky, and the fire lit up in a blaze quicker than I thought possible before it settled down into a quiet campfire.
Looking toward the sky, I found that the sun was finishing its arc across the sky and setting on the horizon.
Taking this as my queue, I walked into the little shanty shack I built and began to eat a portion of the rations that I found while preparing myself to check the system for the first time.