The Hills Outside of Town

You are in the Hills Outside of Town.

You are scared.

What's the local ecology?

all birds. birds of various sizes, shapes and colors.

>An unreasonable amount of Newts.

Dreary farmland. A shitton of corn. Biodiversity: minimal.

The undead.

There is mold and rotting plant life, and things are generally just a mess.

The farmers in the town cut down the Hill Swamps to plant a monoculture of corn. Turns out they shouldn't have done that, because they disturbed ... A BUNCH OF DEAD PEOPLE! They didn't want to deal with all the undead wandering around, so they abandoned their fields. The swamp water started seeping back in, and all the corn died and is now rotting and growing mold. Then a bunch of newts started colonizing the area. The only living things aside from the newts and mold are birds that eat the newts. Some of those birds look pretty cool, they're the only things that aren't exactly the same everywhere in the swamp. Hey look, that bird looks big enough to eat you! And it's looking at you kind of funny!

Why would anyone ever come up here?

Because you're tired of life.

Let the bird consume you.

You've studied weird birds for years. You had a dream where you built an invention that let you become a bird and then ate it. Maybe you really did or maybe you're crazy.

Your assistant accompanying you certainly thinks the latter.

Yeah youre really into ornithology

You can't help your obsession with birds considering the damnable things have haunted your dreams since childhood.

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Spoiler Everyone except Dragon Fogel seems to be in agreement here

You've been dreaming of birds since ... you don't know ... sometime when you were a kid maybe? The dreams started to get really bad around puberty. You would lie awake at night just wishing you could be a bird.

Sometime later you became an ornithologist. Unfortunately you're not an inventor, this whole CRAPPY LIFE that DOESN'T LET YOU BECOME A BIRD just drags on and on, and once you had that wonderful dream, the best one, where you really did become a bird, you built something that let you do it and ate it, but in real life whenever you look at a pile of gears it's just a pile of gears and it won't be anything else.

But now this CRAPPY LIFE that DOESN'T LET YOU BECOME A BIRD is starting to be the most bearable that it's ever been, because this godforsaken whatever this crap place is Hills Outside of Town is filled with the craziest birds you've ever seen.

Like that big bird over there. It's totally crazy! You're terrified of it, but you feel so much longing. You walk towards this bird, giant and colorful, feeling it was your destiny somehow to come here, and you don't know or care what will happen, you just keep walking.

***

You are the assistant.

This crazy ornithologist hired you to come out here. Now he's walking towards a terrifying giant bird. "No!" you yell, but he doesn't seem to hear. The bird swivels its head, looks directly at him, and snaps him up.

What do you do?

Go in after him.

poke the bird in the eyes

Punch it in the gut! You must protect your mentor at all costs, or else your last chance to get out of this crazy place will be gone! If he dies, then so does your degree in biology!

This is like the 5th time this has happened this week!

Time to get out the lasso and bird spray.

> Get out of there, pronto. At least you still got paid, right?

No! You can't let him just die! You run towards the bird with a stick and start stabbing towards its eyes. It shrieks like this:

bird 1

You are terrified! You duck to the ground and cover your head. After a few minutes, you look up. The bird is gone.

Now you are alone in the Hill Swamps without Ornithologist Guy. It would be easy to find the way back to town, because there are no trees blocking there view, but there is so much mist and rain that you can't see more than forty feet or so in front of you.

Do you even have any camping gear or anything like that?

Thank goodness you caught it all on video!

A compass that thinks its a gyroscope.

you are carrying a pack full of birdseed for your now deceased boss... it's useless and quite heavy

No ... no camping gear, nothing useful, just stuff you were carrying for your boss. Well, the compass would be useful, if only the needle wasn't constantly spinning instead of pointing West.

Aside from this you have a video camera mounted on your hat ... it recorded the bird eating your boss and subsequent events. You also have a giant bag of birdseed.

Now that your boss is gone the birdseed won't be of much use, and it's heavy, so you dump it. You start walking through the wet and rotting vegetation in some unknown direction.

After hours of this its getting dark and you still have no idea where you are. You've seen more birds and newts, but your area of visibility is even less. Also the slopes of these hills make no sense. You're constantly walking uphill and downhill, and sometimes the water's flowing uphill.

Look out for any wandering cannibals.

dig a hole to procure clean water, find some sort of shelter/dry ground to sleep on

float up the river