Ludeon Forums

Scenario played: Donald Trump (https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=730433626).
Difficulty: Random Randy Rough on icesheet.

Brief summary of scenario:
After 4 years of presidency, Trump had saved the world by building a wall around Mexico, telling everyone that he loves China, bombing the middle east until it was a crater and then banning the muslim refugees who fled the destruction. Knowing that his work was done he launched himself into space to find another world to save.

Your faction will be a colony.
Start with 1 person.
He will be between 66 and 70 years old.
Starting character will have the traits beautiful and too smart.
Start with:
- meals, steel, components and wood.
- Silver x1000000 and some gold
- Glitterworld medicine
- Assault rifle

(https://i.imgur.com/15XRYb7.png)

Narrator: This screenshot comes 2 years after the crashland. I'm writing this story now, 2 years later, with the hope that the story will eventually catch up to current gameplay. Trump certainly didn't start with such good stats. In particular, he was a poor grower and a much weaker constructor and miner. His "too smart" trait has helped him level-up his skills tremendously over the last 2 years.

This is my first story. I aim to upload something new every day or two until I catch up to the current storyline. If the pictures end up deleted after a few months, you can head to https://www.rimworld-stories.com/ (https://www.rimworld-stories.com/) and search for donald trump to see the full story.

I would love to hear feedback. Thank you for letting me share my amazing Donald Trump story with you.

Lights are whirling, buzzers are beeping, the temperature is rising and somewhere, there is the hissing noise of depressurisation as Trump's ship tears itself apart in a maelstrom of destruction.

This is what happens when you buy a ship with components made in China, Trump thought.

He was stuffing any essentials he could find like food into his crashpod. Other essentials include an assault rifle, a hairbrush and a million silver. With little time to lose, Trump hits the eject button and steers the pod to the only inhabitable settlement within sight. It looks like it's on ice sheet in hilly regions. Looks cold.

(https://i.imgur.com/Phwdnck.png)


Caption: Average temperature -20.7 C (-5 F). Growing period – never.

Trump misses the settlement with his crashpod, landing westwards by 2 hexes. He was meant to start with 1 000 000 silver but the spawn radius permitted only a maximum of about 250 000 silver – the rest we'll chalk up to having burnt up on atmospheric entry.

Trump's first thought was to pick up all the silver and food, march into the nearest town and get voted for presidency there, but he quickly realised he could only carry 10 000 silver at most, less if he were to pack food and a gun. He wasn't convinced he would ever be able to find his remaining silver again in these god-forsaken mountains if he walked off now with just a fraction of it. It was also very very cold and he had no warm clothing. A trip would have to wait. Instead, he spots an old building made of limestone walls, carved into the side of a mountain. The place is not too shabby, a 7x7 with tiled floors. All it needed was a door and you could survive the night here.

Looking around for building materials, Trump counts around 500 steel and 500 wood, but by far the most abundant material in the vicinity would be silver. So the door is made from silver. As are the beds, the tables, the chairs and any future walls. Money may not be everything... but on the rimworld, it is.

Shoddy silver bed? Deconstruct! Remake! I refuse to sleep in anything less than a normal quality bed. I am too beautiful for a reason and I am smart enough to know that quality makes a difference.

Lillica. As told by Donald.

I no longer remember how Lillica joined us. Lillica is 17 and female. Maybe that's the reason why I accepted. Lillica is pleasant to talk to and knows a thing or two about medicine. She constantly says no to my romantic advances, but I'm sure she'll come around one day. Who else is there? AmIright?

Lillica seems to know where the town is that I was trying to crash into but spending every day with Lillica has changed my mind. It's not so bad out here, starting a new colony. I can tell she thinks I'm beautiful and smart. The beauty of me is that I'm very rich. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjWfSZT1obA&feature=youtu.be&list=PL_riiXlQI1v36sd0rDgdGGdlB_3zyurtM) She accepts I'm boss and does what I say. I could learn to like life out here. We sleep in separate beds but within arms reach – for warmth. We sleep next to the electric stove, which is next to the butcher table which is next to the steel table and steel chairs. It's a little cramped, but it saves on heaters.

We have more silver than we know what to do with. Lillica suggests that she heads into town and see what she can buy. I'm not sure how comfortable I am letting a young lady like her hike into town on her own, but it's really cold here and we need warmer clothing. We could do with better weapons as well if the tales of raiders that Lillica tells me hold any truth. We could probably do with more food and essentials as well. The food will run out soon and we are a long way from being self-sufficient.

Lillica convinces me that the trip to town will take 4 hours, tops. She packs her bags, with a day's worth of food and as much silver as she can carry.

She leaves in the morning but fails to return by nightfall. I worry for her... and for myself. I spend a lonely night alone, pondering how many more lonely nights there will be for me.

Lillica's first (of many) shopping trips

Lillica, age 17. Notable skills social 6. Medicine 3 (burning passion / double flame).

It was cold. I had a t-shirt and pants and had to move quickly in order to keep my heat up. I got lost and the trip took longer – much longer – than I had anticipated. By the time I arrived, my fingers were blue, my ears were numb and my toes... I didn't even want to look at my toes.

The citizens have called their town "Politician's Municipality." Donald may like it here; I think he said he was a politician, or something like that. He also said he owned businesses. Plural. But out here on the rim, he's a nobody, just like everybody else. He may fit into this town though if he's a people person. But large towns are not for me.

They welcome me with a hot drink and the usual social chit chat. I don't enjoy it, but I have a job to do and so I trade the usual greetings before talking trading the goods.

I prioritise food and warmth, followed by security.

I walk away with 2 muffalos, hundreds of slices of raw meat, rice, potatoes, some meals, 2 assault rifles, a steel mace, a few parkas for the winter, all their components and a wooden grand sculpture of Fernand I just couldn't take my eyes off. Fernand is a celebrity where I came from. I think his gorgeous physique in our kitchen will really brighten things up. It'll brighten up my mood, that's for sure, heh heh.

Buddha. As told by Donald.

(https://i.imgur.com/E1Iv2qv.png)

Caption: This is Buddha 2 years down the line. He started with cooking 6, artistic 11 and shooting 13 I think. He's my favourite pawn because of his optimist and steadfast traits – very useful traits in a cold place with no food in my opinion.

I no longer remember how Buddha joined us. I could ask him but then he'll think I'm dumb or something. I'm not stupid, you know. I'm 71 years old, I'm smart, I know things. But sometimes when you know a lot of things you just forget some things. Doesn't make you not smart.

Buddha's a young space marine. We've all forgotten his real name. He's Buddha to us. He always sees the positive side of life and takes insults with a smile to his face. He's a dumbass though – say shoot and he'll shoot, say haul and he'll haul – no questions asked. He spends all day cooking and hauling. It's meditative for him or something. We're all here freezing our asses off and complaining of the thread count in our clothing and he's humming a tune and grateful for the dead man's vest he's wearing that saved his life allegedly.

One day, we're sick of living in cramped quarters. I think there's 5 of us by now or something and we're all still packed in the one massive room that houses a kitchen, a dining room and a communal bedroom all in the original 7x7 room. The snoring is driving me mad. So we vote to all get separate rooms. As leader, I get the first separate bedroom. I also install the grand statue of Fernand in there to celebrate. Remember the statue that Lillica got from that town? It's BEAUTIFUL. The man there reminds me of my younger self. His pose shows confidence and power. His physique is magnificent. I can see why Lillica likes it – he looks just like me.

(https://i.imgur.com/bPGItaT.png)

When we started building rooms, we agreed that we'd all get a private room each. But then we run out of space or energy to dig more rooms so Buddha here volunteers to keep sleeping in the kitchen-diningroom-bedroom. Says it's closer to the stove so he can keep cooking right up till bedtime – efficiency or something. Fine by me. It's his call. If he wants to be disturbed in the middle of the night as 5 people go take a piss outside or wake for an early breakfast, that's his business. Less digging for me.

Buddha is a champion. Nothing gets him down. Dead bodies? Oh Buuu-dhaaa, where aRRRRRRRe you? Tough as nails but dumb as a doorknob. The world is made up of Buddhas but they need a leader, you understand? That's where I come in. A leader.

Buddha

I miss birds. Back on my homeworld, birds would sing and you'd know it was morning. This place ain't so bad but it could do with more birds. I've got the living room all to myself now – smells like breakfast all day and makes it easy for me to cook. I love cooking for people.

There ain't much ingredients to work with. Alpaca meat, bought by Lillica that time. Cat meat, also bought by Lillica. Wolf meat. You get the idea. If we're lucky, Donald lets me use some potatoes or rice in our diet, but he usually points to the meat and says use that first since it will go off. Makes sense. He's a good leader. Firm, but sensible. And he's smart. He knows what he's doing.

I spend my day cooking mainly. Sometimes I milk the muffalos. As an ex-marine, if they need stuff moved, I move it too. Donald tried to show me how to grow some rice but that didn't work out so good. I tried to build a chair but it came out wobbly so Donald got me to take it apart again. Not sure what happened there – I got 60 silver and stuck them together to make a chair then when I took it apart there was only 40 or so left. Donald gave me a look like he thought I pocketed 20 silver or something but really, I think I was just as confused as him.

Lillica looked nice today. She'd just washed her hair and it was hanging out drying around her shoulders and it gleamed in the living room light as she ate a dinner with a potato I snuck in just for her. She gave me a smile and it's a smile I'll remember forever.

The Wall. As told by Donald.

I built a wall. All around our base. We didn't have time to make it out of slate. Those raiders are greedy and they know about the money by now. So we had to build it fast. So I built my wall out of silver.

It was the greatest wall ever built. The greatest. I mean, China had a wall but it wasn't like this. This wall cost 15 000 silver and was 100% silver. I placed doors here and there so we could get in and out. We did it real good. Top notch quality.

I left an entrance at the north, riddled with invisible traps. People are dumb. I tell you and I tell you right now. People. Are. Dumb. I mean, who goes to the trouble of making this huge wall only to leave a tiny hole for you to walk in to? It's trapped! Of course it's trapped. But I tell you, people are dumb. And the raiders are the dumbest of all. Time and time again, they keep walking into the trap. There are so many deadfall traps there they barely even get past it all. Silver deadfall traps, mind you. And if they do... if they do get past the traps, we shoot them dead.

Lillica

I really enjoy shopping. It's just cold air with me and my muffalos trudging off to the nearest town. The first trip was the hardest but I've since got a nice thick alpaca parka that keeps me warm. Unfortunately, summer is ending and the colder weather will make it harder.

I don't remember whose idea it was but somebody suggested building a comms station to trade with passing orbital ships and to communicate by radio with nearby settlements. It's proved to be a life-saver. Literally.

We're swimming in cash here. Donald keeps complaining it's not enough, but it's more cash than I ever thought I'd see in a lifetime. I mean, we got so much of this stuff we're building walls out of it. I mean WALLS. Of Silver. We're rich. I never thought I'd be this rich. We can afford anything. There's even a megascreen television I bought on my last trip that's just sitting in storage because we don't have room to set it up. We don't actually need to work another day in our lives. We just need a comms station to spend our cash. No idea why Donald didn't get us to build one earlier.

So on the first day we get the comms station working, Donald gets me to call out to anybody nearby and then starts sending them gifts of silver! He says he wants to entice them to begin trade with us but he's just handing out thousands of free silver. Do they want to come to trade with us? You bet they do. They're practically drooling to come trade with us. With that, he shuts off the comms station and smiles. Says our supply problems are done.

He's right. The traders come and they keep coming. When they stop coming, he gets me to call them again and with some more bribes they come again. He's a charmer, he is. Says they're coming for my sweet voice but we both know that it's his money that's drawing them in. We buy food, parkas, cloth, weapons, steel, components and other necessities. But then we notice we're getting low on silver. Well, we're not poor, we still have tens of thousands, but we start having to budget – no more freebies. The trade caravans slow down until eventually, we find we can no longer afford to buy luxuries, and later we can't even afford food. But that's later. We really did stretch out the last of our money for essentials like food.

We stopped making walls of silver that day. We didn't take down any walls though. Donald's bedroom walls were made of silver. I think that's the real reason why we didn't pass the rule to take down the walls. This man does like his silver. Someone asked him how come he was the only one to get bedroom walls of silver whilst the rest of us got bedroom slate walls. In Donald's defense, we did agree to build his room first and we built everything out of silver at that time. By the time we built the other rooms, we had realised we were starting to get short on silver and so we started mining slate instead.

So I defend him sometimes and there's a lot to admire of our leader. But the more I see of Donald, the more I don't like. I mean, he saved my life. I'm going to be forever grateful for that and if a smile of mine can make his day I'm happy to give it. But he took my statue for his bedroom. I mean, that was my statue. I carried that back home all the way in the freezing cold. Fernand means something to me. I always thought I was going to marry Fernand one day. I mean, those were just teenage dreams but still, he didn't have to take my statue.

I'm ashamed to say it, but I cried the day he took Fernand into his room. I mean, it's a stupid statue. But it's my statue. Buddha held me as I cried that day. I don't think he gets it but he said some nice words. Pointed out that we owed Donald our lives and that if we could help prevent Donald from getting moody we should – the least we could do for the man, I guess. And it's his money and all. Said he'd carve me another some day. Buddha really does have a talent for art. He made me this snowman last week and I could tell he was trying to make it look like me. Even got the female anatomy right but he tried to make it all modest and stuff under the snowman parka. It was cute.

Running a colony with money. As told by Donald.

I loved my previous life. I had so many things going. I like to work, but this is actually more work. I somehow thought it would be easier. I mean, running a colony is hard work. I mean, I knew it would be hard but this is hard. I like to work, but this is actually more work. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1fCD9V0Jw4)

Money makes life easier. Lots of people out there will tell you life is not about money. But out here on the Rim, let me tell you. Money is survival. Where would you get all your parkas from if not money? You'd have to make it yourself. Where would you get all the cloth and fur from? You'd have to either kill an awful lot of animals for it – and there are no animals here – or grow it yourself, which involves a massive investment in cotton farming. Money is the shortcut to surviving here on the Rim.

Let me ask you another question. Where would you get your weapons from? Everyone and everything out here on the icesheet Rim is tough as nails. You have to be tough to survive. So if all your enemies have guns, and you don't have a gun, what do you think's going to happen? Again, money is the answer. You buy your guns.

And what if someone gets depressed? I mean, life out here isn't a theme park ride. I see my people working hard and we live, but we're not happy. Again, the answer is money. You buy some beer from a trader and lock it up. When someone looks a little down, you drape your arm around their shoulder and you say, "Son. You look like you could use a beer." Then you give 'em the keys and ask 'em to help themselves to a bottle. It might seem like a waste of resources to you, but trust me, it's good. Economically good, I mean. If he or she goes and gets depressed, because you have to be politically correct these days, if he or she goes and gets depressed, then he or she loses out on productivity and then he or she becomes a liability to the colony – all eating and no work, you know?

This political correctness is killing me. It's killing me. You can't talk like this and sound natural. So you know what? I'm just going to say him when I think him and she when I'm thinking of a she. It's simple. He is a he and she is a her. Agreed?

A bunch of huskies appeared one day. No idea where they came from. Probably got separated from their masters who are still out there somewhere in the cold. But the huskies made it to our base one morning. Now, Buddha looks at those huskies and gets all teary and wants to make pets out of all of them. Sure he can milk a muffalo but he doesn't know the first thing about animals. Does he know how much a husky eats? No. Neither do I. Do I want to find out? No. And neither should he.

On the other hand, you get someone like Lillica who wonders how much she can sell the huskies for or how much meat is on a husky. Now that's more like it but it's still not the big picture. I see the huskies and I see the big picture. I'll tell you why?

They're target practice. Yes. Target practice. Then medicine practice. Then target practice and medicine practice again until they become food. You think I'm cruel. But you're not living on an icesheet in a god-forsaken Rimworld. Out here, you learn to survive or you die. Simple as that.

*************************
Author's note: Lillica with a burning passion (double flame) for medicine, started with a skill of 3. Practiced her skills on 5 huskies and several arctic wolves over several seasons and improved to a skill of 8. Donald eventually got too lazy to walk back and forth from the garden to the hospital just to fire a few shots at the huskies. He made Lillica practice her mace on the huskies as soon as she finished healing them, then made her patch them up again immediately after. Hitting the huskies then patching them up, hitting them and patching them up again, over and over and them eating their remains when they finally died. May God forgive me for what I made Lillica do to those huskies. I know Lillica didn't enjoy it, and neither did I.
*************************

These are awesome! First time in a long time I've read something about Trump that made me smile instead of frown...

Thanks Fluffy. I actually use one of your mods - stack merger. There was a funny story I was debating writing about regarding stack merger, Trump and stockpiles of silver. He did walk around for hours rearranging the silver in his stockpile. From my perspective, he looked a little too obsessive. I didn't end up writing it since not everyone would know what stack merger was.

Thanks for your mod and the feedback.

I'm going to try to keep these little stories coming once every few days. I'm going to experiment with new styles. To anybody reading this, please let me know what works and what doesn't.

Hunger. As told by Buddha.

I've never seen the horrors of war, though I've trained for it. Never had to kill anyone until I joined up with here. I killed my first man here. I tell myself it was me or him and I have friends to protect. But did we really have to eat him?

It started before we got the comms stations up and running. We had hundreds of slabs of meat we just kept on the ice outside. They were frozen most of the time. Certainly, whenever we checked they were frozen. What we didn't realise was that during the day, for a short period, they thawed and after a whole summer, they had rotted. There was literally tens of thousands of silver worth of meat we had traded for. All rotten.

Donald went mad. He blamed me, he blamed Lillica, he blamed everyone. We were all hungry. We'd look at our remaining food, then distract ourselves with other jobs until our hunger could stand no more then we'd pounce on a meal and gobble it up so fast and look at the next meal, fighting our basic urges to just open it and eat more. We'd sent Lillica to town to buy more food but it was snowing hard and she was late coming back. We were praying every hour for her to return.

When she did come back, she looked haggard. It was clear she hadn't had much food either. Said the food the town had was meagre and she had eaten most of it on the way back. She brought back with her only one meal for her efforts and you could tell it was an effort for her not to have eaten it herself.

We put the meal on the shelf with the plan to divide it amongst the five of us at dinner but it was gone by dinner time. Nobody knew what happened to it. Obviously one of us had eaten it but nobody was owning up. Donald went berserk. He kicked the door and stormed out. We didn't see him for a few days. Olga and Chris were the other two who were with us by then and they went for a walk. Lillica's face could have been made from stone. She'd just risked life and limb to get this meal and someone had gone and eaten it for themselves. I couldn't imagine what she was going through.

I held her in my arms and took her to sit in a corridor. Sitting in the kitchen just made us too hungry. She smelled dirty, of sweat and unwashed muffalo. You could feel her bones beneath her parka and she was skinnier than when I had first joined. She asked me who I thought took the meal. I shrugged. "One of the other three," I replied, "Not you."

Lillica then asked me, "How do you know I didn't take it?"

I laughed. I said that of the five of us, she is the only one who couldn't have taken it. Told her that not only was she the sweetest thing on this Rimworld, but that if she wanted to have the meal to herself, she could have eaten it before returning home and none of us would have known, yet here she is, sitting here, hungry, just like the rest of us.

She nodded, then quietly produced a potato from her pocket. She whispered something but I didn't hear her. The blood in my ears pounded with a hunger I never knew I could possess. I saw the potato with a keener vision than I had ever seen any other potato. To this day, I remember exactly what that potato looked like. It was brown with a small patch of skin peeled away on the side. The eyes of the potato stared unblinking at me, appraising me in as much depth as I was appraising it. It's lumpy-shaped irregularity was an ugly disguise for the mouth-watering starch it hid inside its brown skin. I had never seen anything so beautiful. My stomach made an involuntary growl and my vision blurred slightly as I reached to touch it, my mind playing tricks on me making me fear that it was an optical illusion. But it was real. The skin was smooth and I savoured every bump of its beady eyes as my fingers ran across it like a lost lover.

From far away I hear Lillica's voice, "I didn't steal the meal. This potato is my potato." Her voice was soft. Her story held so much emotion I didn't know how to comfort her. She went on to tell me how she tripped and almost lost her life on the way back from town. She only had a small bag of potatoes from town but she dropped them all as she scrambled to regain her balance under the snow that suddenly gave way beneath her. The terrain was treacherous and the potatoes bounced all the way to the bottom of a ravine. One potato was stuck on the ledge only half way down the ravine. Lillica risked her life to rescue that potato but was unable to get the rest. She didn't want to tell the group because she felt ashamed of having lost the sack of potatoes. She was hungry and tired and wasn't concentrating so she didn't realise how close to the edge she was. She blames herself. But this potato meant something to her.

She told me she loved me and that she wanted to share the potato with me. If I hadn't been able to admit to myself that I loved her before, I certainly felt like I loved her then. Or maybe I was just in love with the potato. I proposed to her on the spot. She said yes. We should have spent more time talking about love but to tell the truth, we were both just thinking about potato. We were too afraid to cook it so we halved it and ate it raw, right there in the corridoor.

Raw potato had never tasted so delicious, or so shameful. We never told the others about it.

Cannibalism. As told by Lillica.

I love Buddha and I can tell he loves me too. The way he cooks for me and sometimes sneaks an extra potato for me. I can tell he makes my meals pretty too. It's funny, when food becomes a scarcity, something in the human psychology makes everything in life revolve around food. I remember hearing someone tell me about a study they did once where people in a war situation had undergone starvation for two years. Upon the end of the war, after conditions improved, many of them went into food-related industries like chefs or waitressing. Their period of starvation seemed to have altered their psychology and affected their very lives in a way that even they didn't notice.

I wonder if that's why I feel I love Buddha. Because he's the chef.

It makes me cheap to think that I'm like that. Buddha is a nice man, and the only one around here who's my age. And even if he wasn't the only one, he'd probably still make me smile. I really admire how he just holds up even in the face of adversity. He knows he is the backbone of this group. Donald may be the leader but when the going gets tough, Buddha always volunteers for the hard jobs.

He proposed to me that day and I said yes. He's never brought it up again and I don't know why. I tell myself that it's because life on the Rim is so hard and full of all its busy moments that we just never get time together alone. Just a quick hello here or there, playing horseshoes together sometimes and that's it. But he never talks about the proposal and I don't know why. His smile does it for me though. I like it when he cooks and makes a heart-shaped potato just for me.

Not that we have any food at the moment.

Chris first brought it up. Ever since Donald started on the garden, not letting any of us touch it, Chris has taken over building things. Chris is a practical, no nonsense mechanic whom we bought from a slaver and he's grateful that he's no longer treated as a slave, though he sometimes jokes that he works twice as hard since he's joined us. He appreciates what he's got though. Sometimes as I walk past his room I see him stroking his silver bed, like he can't believe he's sleeping on silver.

Chris first brought up cannibalism.

We'd just fought off 3 raiders and their bodies were still frozen out there. We hadn't had time to bury them, yet and part of me wonders if Donald de-prioritised burial in case it came to this. Donald has a contingency plan for everything. Comes from being leader, I suppose. So when we found ourselves starving, Chris suggested a plan B, which Donald claims was his idea first but he didn't voice it first. I like to think that I put up a bit more resistance than most, but in reality, I think it was a unanimous decision. When you're starving and hungry, any meat is meat. Olga in fact ate the meat raw. She was puking afterwards and I'm sure she regretted it, but it just goes to show that when you're starving, you're starving.

Buddha as usual, volunteered for the ugly job. He stripped the dead, carried it to the butcher's table and cut it up for us. The rest of us busied ourselves elsewhere but I doubt any of us were concentrating on what we were doing. We made Buddha butcher the human, then cut the meat into strips, then we forced my Buddha to cook that meat into a meal that the rest of us could imagine was something other than human.

We broke him. We broke my Buddha and it's all my fault. He still wakes up in the night screaming and sobbing. Sometimes he apologises to nobody, or to everybody. I hold him in my arms and tell him he did it for us, for our survival and that he should be proud but it only seems to make him worse. He tells me that the corpse's eyes still stare at him in his dreams, accusing him of murder, accusing him of butchering him up like an animal. He says the smell of cooked human flesh is seared into his nostrils forever and that God will never let him into heaven.

Nothing I say makes him feel better. He's my Buddha and I love him. In my opinion, he saved our lives and he's never forgiven himself since. My Buddha. My rock and pillar. I hope one day you can forgive yourself.

Maybe one day you will propose to me again without food as an incentive and mean it.

Self-sufficient food source. As told by Donald.

When the meat all rotted away I knew we had a problem. A big one. Nobody else saw it but I did. Money couldn't keep buying food. Soon, everybody was going to run out of food. Now, when that happens, do you want to be the person holding the money or holding the food?

Let me tell you. You wanna be the one holding the food.

At the same time that Buddha was doing his bit in cutting up corpses, I was doing the hard work finding a place to grow food. It's the only way to be self-sufficient in food. And we needed food. Bad. We needed food bad.

It's not easy on an ice sheet, you know? You have to dig and dig until you find dirt. More often, you find ice instead and then you've just wasted your time. You then have the problem of sunlight. Yeah. The sun's not bright enough to grow plants here, so I've got this little gizmo here called a sunlamp. Two problems with the sunlamp. One, it needs a heck of a lot of power to run and two, it's only bright enough for a small patch of crops. So you have to find a patch of dirt somewhere that's large enough to fit within your sunlamp and then you also have to build yourself some power source. You also need the temperature to be warmer than what it is outside so you need a lot of heaters. And a reliable power source for them so the plants don't accidentally freeze. If they freeze, that's all your good work gone Kablooie. You understand? Kablooie, right out the window.

Here's what it will look like when it's finished.


(https://i.imgur.com/KGOeNRe.png)

It's hard work. First you've got to mine the steel. Then build the power stations. You can't connect it to the colony's existing power lines because if a short circuit happens, trust me, you'll wish you had different sources of power for your plants. After mining steel and using that to build the power stations and batteries, you'll need to lay the cable to the garden patch, wall up the garden patch, double insulate it, install heaters and a sunlamp, then grow. You gotta position the sunlamp so you get as many plants growing as possible. I managed to squeeze an 80% efficiency out of that. 80% efficiency. That's top notch. I then squeezed even more efficiency by installing hydroponics. It's good work. Real good work. I can see it in the others' eyes. They know good work when they see it.

Finally, you plant the crops. It's gonna be rice. They grow faster than potatoes or corn or strawberries or near anything else. And we need food fast.

The guys I'm with are swell but none of us have ever mined a rock in our lives or planted a seed ever. Still, I know how it's meant to be done and I go and do the hard work. It's not hard. You get a pick and you hit the steel. You get a shovel and you dig. I can't believe I'm teaching them how to do this.

Finally it's done. We have food. They look at me and I can tell they're grateful. I've saved their bacon. All we have to do is wait for the rice to grow, then I'm going to have to show them how to harvest it.

*****************************************
Narrator's note: Donald had a mining skill of 4 but was still the best at mining out of all 5 pawns. He also had a growing skill of 3 and was also the best at growing. I found it frustrating but quite funny that Donald got to do all the hard labour.
*****************************************

Bionics. As told by Lillica.

Donald is our best doctor, but he got shot up in his arm real bad. He's moody all the time. Buddha tells me that intellectuals like Donald always get depressed and now that Donald can't use his hands properly, he's even worse.

We have a bionic arm I bought early on and it's just sitting there. I've told him I can try to fix it on him but he keeps looking at me like I'm some little girl and that I can't do it. I mean, he's probably right. I have no idea how to fit it on but it comes with like instructions, doesn't it? They make these things user friendly these days and the unit even talks you through the procedure.

But then, Donald's a thinker and it's his arm, so I guess he just wants to be cautious.

One day, he snaps. Says he just can't take the pain anymore and wants to die. He does this often so we just let him go wander outside for a while, usually a day or two and then we go find him, drag him back to hospital and I feed him. He often insists that he only wants me to feed him when he's like this. The others give us dirty looks but I ignore them. He's like a father to me - a father to our whole colony even.

After one such session he asks me what I know about wake-up. It's a drug I know. Some people are addicted to it. Me? I've sworn off drugs. I don't touch the stuff. He tells me that some doctors take this before they do their surgeries. Says it helps them with their reaction time and perception. He wants me to fix his arm – to give him a bionic arm – but only after I've taken some wake-up.

I don't know how I feel about this. I mean, I was in a coma most of my childhood and I've had all sorts of drugs pump through my body. I don't want any more. But this is a man I love like my father. He's literally saved my life more than once over the last few months. His arm is banged up because he was shooting to cover me. We're a team and I really want to help him out.

I've had a lot of practice with medicine. I recall all the grueling hours that Donald insisted I spend patching up those huskies. Donald had always been our doctor until his arm started hurting. He made me practice on huskies saying that one day I would be a better doctor than him because of his arm. He always said the only reason I'd be this colony's doctor would be because of his arm, not because I would ever be better than him because of my skill in medicine, or that he might be incapacitated in a fight, but because of his arm. But I wonder now if he was so insistent on the huskies training just for this moment – this moment of surgery for his bionic arm.

In the end, I do it. I owe Donald my life, and if we're to survive on this Rimworld, we need to do it as a team. We wait for a passing trader to come and we buy one unit of wake up. The kick hits me like nothing I've ever known before and pow-wow I install his bionic arm. I remember feeling so good I wanted to do his leg too.

With his bionic arm doing wheelies in the air, he is clearly the better doctor, but only for a few days and then BANG! Another raid another injury on his other arm and I'm the better doctor again. We'll talk more about this raid in the next chapter. It's a long story and involves a new guy, Owl. But if we fast forward a bit, Donald gets grumpy with the pain in his other arm. He want both arms bionic since the first was so good. We wait for another trader. A few months later, we find a suitable bionic for Donald. We had no wake-up this time but I aced the operation anyway. Donald now has two bionic arms. And he's in a good mood these days.

Owl

They call me Owl because I prefer to be up at night.

(https://i.imgur.com/ElrmoNa.png)

I wasn't born, but rather, grown in a vat to be a soldier. I don't like people much, though I've had more than my fair share of women. One of the advantages to being vat-grown I suppose – you're just born looking the way others want you to look. I've taken drugs all my life. At first, to boost combat. Later, for fun and kicks.

After the war was lost, I disappeared into deep space and spent most of my adult life mining on remote asteroids. Met a girl I fell for who gave me the clap after she cheated on me with my bunkmate. I did 'em both in then made a run for it. The escape pod landed me in this s***hole and I walked and walked until I saw the lights of this lousy colony, if you can call it a colony.

They just got six people. A nice comfy colony with me as number seven.

They took me in and didn't ask much. Can I handle myself in a fight? Yes. Do I know how to swing a pick? Yes. Good, you're in. A bit too trusting if you ask me but they must be desperate. Their food situation is poor but mine is worse. They said they have a garden that's coming along nicely, which is a laugh. The day after I come, solar flare and they lose everything. They had been counting on that garden patch with no plan B. They tell me it's been a year since Donald started this pissass colony. They took me in and didn't ask much. Can I handle myself in a fight? Yes. Do I know how to swing a pick? Yes. Good, you're in. A bit too trusting if you ask me but they must be desperate. Their food situation is poor but mine is worse. They said they have a garden that's coming along nicely, which is a laugh. The day after I come, solar flare and they lose everything. They had been counting on that garden patch with no plan B. They tell me it's been a year since Donald started this pissass colony. He runs a tight ship and boasts no deaths so far on this frigid wasteland.

I can see myself staying here a while as long as they get a better food situation. They have a fort with double thick walls surrounding the base. The inner walls are made of silver and the outer of slate. Don't ask. They have a lousy trap at the north end of the wall where they think raiders will be dumb enough to just walk in and they've peppered the entrance with silver traps, like they're hunting werewolves or something. Donald's rigged up some pretty decent gun turrets pointed at this opening and runs them on a separate electricity supply with backup batteries. He has 2 separate gardens rigged up to yet again different electricity supplies. One of the gardens looks older, with poorer construction, potatoes growing in the dirt and housed within a building. The other one looks newer, twice as big, hidden under the mountains, stabler temperatures, hydroponics-driven, has a variety of plants including food and medicines, a hell of a lot closer to the base so you don't have to walk so far to harvest them. I'd say they smartened up a little after their first year out here. The way they tell it, a bunch of sappers blew a hole in their little garden a while back, setting fire and cold to their potatoes, which is why they're behind on schedule with their food and why they started a second garden under the mountains closer to home.

They'd run out of space to live and Buddha lives in the kitchen. Buddha's one of those rookies who's never seen a day of war. Saw him get all teary once recounting how he had to cut up some bloke here on the rim. He's not a bad guy and he cooks a mean stew but he's no soldier.

I shack up my first night in the kitchen with Buddha as bunkmate and the next day I'm digging us both bedrooms. They slate up my walls and smooth out the floors. I get a wooden door which seems to be rare in this colony. They seem to have used silver for almost everything else. I would have been fine with a slate door but Donald here seems to run everything on efficiency, like we're all machines or something, and the blueprints they have for wooden doors open faster than slate doors.

So I get the wooden door. For efficiency.

Solar flare. As told by Buddha.

There's seven of us now. Our newest member is Owl. He's a no nonsense hardcore soldier of few words. You can tell he's battle-hardened, like some of the veterans back in my army days. He'll have a few good stories to share one day. I'll just let him get settled first.

We're bunkmates the first night out in the kitchen. He snores like a trooper and I ask him if others have ever complained. Says he prefers to stay up at night so it's rarely an issue. He's clearly tired now from his trek but he makes it clear we won't be bunkmates much longer. I gave him his nickname right then by the way. Grumpy owl in my head. But out loud, just Owl.

So morning comes and Owl gets up and eats his breakfast with no complaints. You could tell he was a starving man with the way he ate it all, in military precision leaving nothing to waste. Not that any of us leave anything to waste, but you could tell he always ate like this. He's not a bad guy. Starts his first day in our colony by asking me if I wanted my own bedroom. I mean, I don't mind the living room, but it's seven of us now and we need more chairs and a bigger space for the table. We've got a shelf now that takes up a bit of room too and it does get noisy sometimes with people walking through. Guess I'm saying that it's starting to feel like it's no longer my room. So it's nice he's asking me. The others had offered me a room earlier and I said no back then when it wasn't so busy and I think they just haven't thought about it again. So, I mean, it was nice that he asked is all.

So Owl digs him and me new rooms next to each other. Slate walls, smoothed floors and a vent between us that Donald insisted on in case one of our heaters stopped working in winter.

The day after Owl arrives, we get hit by this thing called a solar flare. Out of the blue, all our electronics go cuckoo. I don't pretend to understand it, but it's not a solar panel problem or a short circuit or a battery problem, it's just this mega world-wide electricity problem from the sun or something. Funny thing is, we don't got much sun here so it don't make sense.

So everyone's worried about the plants. The heaters are dead without power and the plants will freeze. We could harvest them now but there's only a few potatoes, hardly worth the effort. Donald thinks the solar flare will pass in a few hours and that the insulation should hold until then. Keeps saying he built it with top-notch quality, with triple or even quadruple insulation. He votes to do nothing. Says the garden under the mountain should hold even better since the temperature there is more stable. But you can tell he's worried about the garden outside. It's a mile away so it'll take a while to get there and it only has a thin man-made roof.

So we sit and wait and the temperatures drop. The plants seem to hold even as the temperatures plummet to zero. Then the first plant dies and it's like a chain reaction – they all die in quick succession so fast we can barely even reach them in time. Donald chucks a spaz (http://www.slang-dictionary.org/Australian-Slang/Chuck_a_spaz) again. He races there and yells for us all to come. None of us know the first thing about growing plants. Food has been such an important thing that Donald's taken to growing and harvesting the potatoes all by himself. When we get there, there's just a few bushels of potatoes left. Donald's spitting curses about our mothers and we all just pull the plants up. No trick to it – it's just this mad race to get the food. At the end there ain't much potato to go around between the seven of us. I think all of us were surprised by how quick the plants could die. Like, how healthy they look one minute and then the next they're just frozen solid and dead. I mean, I'm cold and frozen but I don't die just from a few minutes out in the cold. These potatoes make no sense.

We decide we should harvest the hydroponics in case they die too. So we trudge along to the hydroponics under the mountain and they're gone. The plants are all gone. Every single one. There's nothing to harvest at all.

I refuse to believe this is the end. So we sit down and talk options. We can ration the meals out. That will last us two days. We can call a trader – no money. We could tear down some silver walls and call a trader -  they'd take too long. We could send a caravan into the nearest town – no money, takes too long and they're out of food apparently, and I won't let Lillica go alone in this weather. Someone suggested the buried corpses but I don't think anyone really wants to do that. Owl puts our Muffalos as an option.

Lillica looks at Owl, incredulous, "Cashmere? You can't kill Cashmere!"

(https://imgur.com/gallery/MzfzOX7)
I back her up saying we've given Cashmere a name so she's one of us.

Owl looks at me like I'm an idiot or something and then looks to Donald. I get worried. Surely Donald won't make us slaughter Cashmere. I quickly chime in, "She gives us milk. We need the milk."

Donald agrees and explains to Owl, "We also need Muffalo wool. Last winter was tough with just the cloth parkas. Cloth parkas weren't warm enough."

You could see it in Owl's eyes though. He'd do Cashmere in for a full belly. We would have to protect Cashmere from Owl. I'd protect Cashmere from Owl. I won't let him do it.

Hey Shayame,

Just wanted to let you know this is a very interesting Rimworld story! Well written with interesting characters. Keep up the good work.

Thanks Talesin.

I haven't played much recently. Anyway, here's another leg of the story I completed a while ago. It's a 7-part saga that will be released in 7 different posts over several days.

Thanks for all the positive comments. I'll try to release a new post every few days.

-Shaya

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 1. As told by Owl.

***********************************************
Recap – cast of characters:
Donald Trump: Starting character with beautiful and too smart. Best pawn in the colony in construction, mining, medicine and growing skills. Decent with a gun. Has a bionic arm.
Lillica: 18 year old girl with a passion for medicine and decent social skills. Reads emotions well.
Buddha: 22 year old space marine who has never seen war. Sanguine and stoic, he never breaks. Well, almost never. He cooks all day and carves sculptures in his spare time.
Olga: A 42 year old woman, though she looks much younger. Very athletic. She's our fastest runner. Does the hauling.
Chris: 53 year old man. Mechanic by trade. Researches and constructs.
Lillith: 29 year old high baroness. She's been with us a while but you haven't heard about her much. Researches and constructs, much like Chris.
Owl: 27 year old ex-soldier. He's new to the group. He sleeps in the day and is most active at night.
Muffalos: We have 2 Muffalos. One is called Cashmere. She's cute.

Recent notable events:
Owl arrived recently and the following day, solar flare. The crops died. We're low on food. It's been a few days now. We're almost out. We should have harvested the potatoes when we could. It wouldn't have been much, but it may have given us an extra few days.
***********************************************


My name is Owl. I'm up at night digging stuff and I don't know why. Food is the problem, not steel. But they reckon they want more hydroponics, to store up for the future and you need steel for hydroponics.

They sent a call for traders in the end. No idea when they might come and if they do, we'll ask them to help themselves to some of our walls as payment for their food.

It has been a few days. Buddha has run out of potatoes to cook and from the looks of it he doesn't usually do anything except cook. Cashmere's looking more and more appetising to me. It'd be easy too – I plan to do it tonight and get a head start to the nearby town while everyone else is still asleep. It's evening and Buddha looks like he's bored. I call him a lazy sock and ask him to head out south to help me haul some steel back to base.

My plan with Cashmere becomes obsolete. Everything changes after this trip.

We set out together and he starts talking about food and hunger. Keeps saying he ain't never going to butcher anyone again. He looks like he could use some talking to but I've never been good at that, so I just walk faster. He keeps dragging his feet through the snow and I'm like a mile ahead of him by now. He may be a dumbass but even he can follow the footprints I'm leaving.

I'm trudging my way back home with an armload full of steel when I pass him by. He looks all kinds of mopey. Thought he was called Buddha for a reason. What boomrat's crawled up his ass and died? I point him towards the steel a half mile away and tell him to hurry up and get his load.

The air is crisp, the wind quiet. I follow our footsteps back to the wall surrounding our base. Suddenly I hear a scream. Buddha's scream. He's about a mile behind waving at me and running as fast as you possibly can through thigh-deep snow. Behind him I see a pack of a dozen arctic wolves, maybe more, encircling him. I have no idea where the wolves came from. If they weren't moving, I wouldn't even be able to tell them apart from the soft snow of their surrounds. Buddha stops screaming, he puts all his energy into running but the wolves are in their natural environment. They glide on the snow like a fish in the water. Buddha's done and you can tell he knows it. He's looking for cover but there's none in the flat white of the fresh snow. The wolves close in quick. There's nothing I can do. My SMG does not have the range.

I save myself. I open the slate doors and walk through. Looking back, I see Buddha turn around and open fire at point blank range. He gets off 2 shots... then falls under the pack. There are no further gunshots. I stand there in the safety of my doorway for a few more seconds studying the pack's behaviour. They don't behave like any carnivores I've ever known. They're just walking around the corpse now, not even eating it. Like they just killed Buddha for sport. One of them is even starting to wander off and is showing no signs of coming back.

Suddenly Buddha stands up. He's groggy. He just stands there staring the wrong way at the horizon. The closest wolf takes two running strides and pounces on him, knocking him down again. Idiot.

Buddha doesn't get up again. The pack continues its strange behaviour of just wandering around. I watch for a while longer then close the door.

RIP Buhda. Are you playing with any mods like Combat Extended? You might have had a little more luck with the wolves.

Great read though, I like the subtle snarkiness at times aimed at Rimworld's mechanics.

I'm addicted.

Keep the story coming!

Thanks for the positive feedback Vivalas and WalkingProblem. I do use mods, but the mods I use do not enable me to do anything that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do manually. Said another way, the mods I use don't change the game in any fundamental way. Examples of mods I use would be Hand Me That Brick, cooks can refuel, stack merger, etc.

Onwards with the 7 part story, and thank you to my readers who are keeping tabs on Donald. :)

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 2. As told by Lillica.

We're all sitting around the table savouring the last of our meal. Yes. Singular. Meal. A small portion has been set aside for Buddha and Owl. There's no more food. We better hope those trade caravans come soon.

We're all still hungry. I had a quarter of a half of a potato and a tiny piece of meat the size of my thumb. It didn't make me any less hungry – if anything, the meal made the hunger worse.

It was Chris who brought up cannibalism again. Don't get me wrong, he's usually a swell guy, with a no-nonsense attitude, a mechanic by trade and he gets things done. Donald is the boss but Chris is the brains. Chris is the one who built our freezer after all that meat spoiled. Chris is the one who rigged electricity up to all our doors so they open smoothly. He doesn't just do the research, he builds the stuff himself. Chris found a way to tap into all those geysers we see around the place and managed to get a steady source of electricity coming from them for our plants. Right now, he's working at making better quality medicines for us.

But he thinks with his stomach. I don't think he enjoys eating people, but he'll do it. He goes on about how scientifically, it's the best meat for us since it's already all humanised. Says that we're hung up on eating humans due to culture but that some cultures do it all the time as a way of honoring the dead. Says that the dead people certainly don't care since they're already dead and we are hesitant to do it not out of respect for the dead but because of our own psychological conditioning.

I get what he's saying but... cannibalism? Surely we can't go there again. Maybe we can just wait for the traders.

Chris seems to have some support from Olga. Says he's going to go dig up the graves. The graves are at our north wall, near our trapped entrance. Most of the bodies there are old. Chris seems to think he'll be able to find some usable meat given the frozen conditions outside. Says he'll share and that we'll thank him for it later. He grabs the spade, then him and Olga are gone.

Donald has been strangely quiet about this. He's dangerous when he's in this state, ready to snap. You'd think he'd feel guilty or bad about the potatoes freezing but he doesn't act like it. Keeps blaming others for not having gotten there fast enough when he said we needed to act fast and harvest it. Keeps saying he's going to have to teach everyone how to plant and harvest crops from now on. Says he's going to have to teach us how to jog faster to and how to obey orders quicker.

Buddha says he's seen leaders in the army crack this same way. Buddha says that's how leaders or guys, or especially leader guys, show guilt and that he'll come round. I don't agree. I think Donald sometimes sees us as extensions in a machine he's built.

The door opens, the wind howls, both Owl and the cold come in. "Shut the door." Donald says to him, "Your food's on the table."

Owl taps Donald on the shoulder, turning him around to look him in the eye. "Buddha's gone."

My heart lurches. The meat I ate feels like it wants to come up again. Owl is so casual about it but I can tell it's bad news. Buddha. My Buddha. What happened? Donald is slower on the uptake. He looks at Owl and says, "Gone where?"

Owl stares down at Donald. "No. Gone. He's done. Pack of wolves got him out in the snow."

My world feels like it has collapsed. My mouth wants to scream but the scream can't find its way out of my head. It feels like my head is imploding in a roaring inferno. My breath can't come fast enough. My vision blurs and the darkness creeps in.

Buddha... My Buddha.

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 3. As told by Chris.


(https://i.imgur.com/YMQeh70.png)


My name is Chris. I'm a decent mechanic. I like to tinker with things and make things work. I joined this colony as a slave but as soon as the slavers rounded the corner, Donald looked me in the eye, unlocked the manacles and said to me, "You are a free man." I will forever be grateful.

Donald is rich. You can tell the man was born to wealth. He paid for me like the cost was nothing and then freed me like it meant nothing. The colony's got walls made of silver and I sleep on a silver bed. For breakfast I eat at a silver table and sit on a polished silver chair. They've got the best gadgets and tools here. Anything they can't make, they buy. They always go for quality. They want for nothing here except warmth and food. It seems even some things money can't buy.
(https://i.imgur.com/jolFkHs.png)

Caption: Our 7x7 living room. Silver butcher's table in the bottom left, stove in the top right, silver dining table and chairs in the bottom right. The silver statue was bought early on from a trader. It's not the famous Fernand statue that was talked about earlier – Fernand currently sits in Trumps bedroom. The coloured floors are just our drop points for food and ingredients.

I joined them a year after Donald started this colony. Donald had been doing most of the jobs and they say they bought me from the slaver to take over the construction side of things whilst Donald started on the garden. I don't think they knew at the time that they were getting an engineer. I think I've spent more time on inventing things than building things. I've certainly learned a lot over the last year.

I've changed a lot too.

Hunger changes a man. When your stomach acids are dissolving you from the inside out, you can become desperate. No one jokes about it, but I can tell they think I'm a cannibal. I'm not. I just do what needs to be done to survive. Sometimes I think they deliberately don't bring up the topic until we're all starving, waiting for me to be the first to voice it because they know I will. They're all thinking it. I can tell. They leave sentences half finished, look at me sideways when talking, just waiting for me to bring up the word so they can absolve themselves from the guilt of having said the C-word first.

I don't want to be the Cannibal again. The others look at me funny like it's my fault. They put their guilt and shame onto me and I don't like it. We all ate human meat. WE ALL ATE IT. It's not my fault. We ate it, and then we drowned ourselves in alcohol to forget.

So I bring up the topic of cannibalism. Again. I say we have graves full of dead bodies, buried in the ice. They'll still be frozen. We can eat a little, just enough to get by until the traders come. This time, no one looks at me. No one says no. Olga even seems to perk up a little.

I leave with Olga. We head north to the burial grounds. On our way out, we wave to Owl. He's just setting down some steel in our dropzone. He waves back from a distance and continues unloading his steel. Buddha should be around somewhere as well. I think of the two portions of dinner we left them. We had divided the last meal 7 ways and the portions all looked equal, but after finishing our portions, the remaining 2 for Buddha and Owl somehow looked bigger than what we had. Donald had to put it away because nobody was doing anything other than look and salivate over the portions, which wasn't doing us any good.

It's funny. When you're tired and hungry you don't remember things as well as you should. Neither Olga nor I knew where the most recently dead were buried, so we just start digging. We dig and we dig and we dig.

In hindsight, I could have dug more smartly. Instead, I dug the earliest graves – the ones that were a year old, from before I even arrived, hoping to eat the earlier ones and leave the fresher ones for a later emergency. It made sense at the time, but the corpses Olga and I dug out were dessicated. Rotten bones with nothing else. It was disheartening. I felt some of my humanity slip away. Olga wandered off, said she couldn't do it anymore. I tried slapping her to snap her out of her haze but she seemed intent on throwing herself into the wind and screaming. I left her. We needed food. I'd save us by finding food.

I remember thinking about food. I remember digging. A lot of digging.

I have no memory of what happened next. They say they found me collapsed, a day or two later, malnourished, exhausted and dehydrated. I don't remember digging more graves but it turns out I dug them all out in the end. I dug every single grave. Not a single intact corpse in all the graves I dug, apparently. I'd dug it all out, even the empty graves. The skeletons were lying, some in the grave, some outside the grave. It looked like I'd dragged one a hundred yards then dropped it and went back to dig another. I look back now at my handywork – all the rotten corpses, the fragile bones, the empty graves and I wonder... where did the fresh corpse go? There should have been at least one fresh corpse.

The horrifying thought plagues me at night. I dream I'm a wolf with teeth as sharp as knives. I rip the flesh from the bone. The dry juice of frozen blood dribbles out my mouth. Chunks of meat turn to ash in the fire of my mouth and I enjoy it. I wolf it down. And then I see a pair of eyes, sunken and accusing, and I wake up, sweating, my heart pounding and I tell myself, it's just a dream. I dreamt I was a wolf.

But deep down I wonder, before my blackout, did I eat one raw?

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 4. As told by Lillica.

Cold water splashed against my face. I was in the dining room, face down on the limestone tiled floor. You could tell it was the dining room – it's our only room with limestone tiles. Donald says it was the first room he found when he crashed, and it was already built, as if waiting for him.

Memory returned. BUDDHA! My Buddha.

I cried, big heaving sobs and wails that shredded my lungs from the inside out and squeezed my heart in pain. My Buddha is dead. Dead. And it's my fault. If I'd agreed with Chris to cut up a man then my Buddha would be standing right here cooking for me. Right now, he'd be cooking for me and arranging my meal to look like a cartoon-heart. He'd be smiling and whistling as he stood by the stove, cooking away while the rest of us chatted and ate. He'd look at me and pass a secret wink that only I'd see. My Buddha.

Wolves. It was wolves. Why did it have to be wolves?

Donald was shaking me and saying something. I just kept crying and crying. It didn't matter any more. My Buddha was dead. I'd never feel his lips or his kiss. I'd never feel his kind hands again. I'd never taste his potatoes. Our potatoes.

"Lilly! Snap out of it!" Donald's hand smacked me across the face shocking me back to reality. He never called me Lilly unless I was in trouble. And he had never hit me. "Buddha may still be alive. He may be alive. I need you Lilly. Lilly. Listen to me. I need you."

He was saying the same things over and over as if he'd said them all a hundred times before. Was he saying Buddha was alive? But... how?

My vision returned, I was sobbing and he saw that he had my attention. Owl was sitting at the table, quietly eating his meal, watching us. All of a sudden I felt angry at Owl. He and Buddha went to collect steel and now he returns without a scratch on him and my Buddha is dead. Not dead. Donald says he's not dead. I turn to Donald, a questioning look on my tear-streaked face.

"It was a manhunter pack, Lillica." Begins Donald. "Owl here says they knocked him down and didn't proceed to finish him off. The pack just wandered around afterwards. It's a manhunter pack. You know what this means."

I do. We'd seen this disease or whatever it was before. Animals would suddenly get violent and attack anything that was standing. But as soon as you lie down, they leave you alone. It can't be natural. Wolves would starve if they stopped attacking prey that fell down. Donald thought it was a disease, like alzheimers or something for animals, except contagious. If a manhunter pack got Buddha, they wouldn't kill him. They'd scratch him up, but when he's down, they'd leave him alone and go on to their next target.

But he may die from blood loss.

I bolted for the door.

Donald grabbed my arm. "Whoa whoa whoa, where are you going?"

I looked at him incredulously, "I'm going to get Buddha. He's bleeding. Didn't you get me to practice on all those puppies for just this moment?" I was angry, but I didn't care. He was stopping me from getting to my Buddha and Owl was just sitting there eating calmly.

"Lilly, I need you at the north trap. If this is a manhunter pack of a dozen or more, the turrets won't be enough. Owl will get Buddha."

His plan made no sense. Owl was eating dinner. Owl didn't save Buddha earlier – he just came home for dinner. Nobody cared about Buddha. Donald didn't care. Owl didn't care. Only I cared. I needed to save Buddha. I needed to save Buddha now. I broke free from his grasp, "Don't 'Lilly' me. I'm not a little girl. I'm going to save Buddha." And with that I ran out the door. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Donald say something to Owl.

The cold wind slapped me in the face, snow pelted me pushing me, forcing me back inside into the warmth and safety of our colony. It felt like the whole world was conspiring to keep me from Buddha. I felt deep within myself the strength to rebel. I screamed my pain into the wind and started running. From behind, I heard Owl's voice in the doorway, "You're going the wrong way."

I stopped. I had no idea what I was doing. Where was Buddha? Why was I running? Where was I running? I turned around. Owl was pointing south. There were fresh footprints leading to our southern doors. I turned south and ran.

I ran and ran and ran until my lungs burned with cold. The southern walls had never seemed so far away. Behind me, I could hear Owl. We reached the wall and I moved to open the door. Owl's hand slammed the door close. I gave him a stare that promised death.

He towered above me. His face expressionless but his posture dominating. "Donald will never forgive me if we let the pack in through the south wall. You have no defences here. We save Buddha, but we save him carefully. We do it my way, Little Girl. We do it smart. And we do it safe. I'm not letting you out there until you agree."

He was strong. I was tugging at the door trying to open it with my whole weight and he was stopping me with just his one hand on the door. I had no choice. My head was screaming a maelstrom of jumbling thoughts, dominated by images of Buddha lying out there in the snow, bleeding pink over the white ground, breathing his last lungful of cold air but this man – no this Monster here – wouldn't let me out.

I almost lost it. I cried and I begged and I wailed. I felt rough hands grab my mouth. "Sshhhhh. The pack. They'll hear you."

I didn't care. So what if they heard me. Maybe I'll draw them away from Buddha. Maybe he'll get a chance to live. I cried and I tried to scream and I kicked and bit. I have never felt so powerless. I was almost there. Buddha was right outside that wall and I couldn't go and save him. I was utterly powerless. With his hands over my mouth, I couldn't even cry. I just sobbed. I sobbed in despair and leaked a mountain of tears that trickled down my face before my struggles flung them to freeze before they hit the snowy ground.

"Snap out of it, Lillica. Snap yourself out of it or I'll leave you and Buddha both here in the snow for the pack. I'm not going to leave Buddha out there to bleed. We can do this. We can save him. But we do it my way. Understand?"

I struggled some more but it was useless. He'd got me in some sort of army bear grip, pinning my arms uselessly with my legs flapping about in the air with no traction.

"Do you understand?"

I kept kicking around. Trying to unbalance him.

"We're wasting time. I need you to understand."

Rational thought slowly returned to me. Did he say he was going to try to save Buddha? Could we actually save Buddha together? Why won't he let me go? I slowed my movements and stopped struggling.

"Tell me you understand."

I nodded.

Slowly he removed his hand. I saw teethmarks in his gloves. Serves him right.

"Tell me you understand."

I understood nothing, but obligingly, I said, "I understand."

He flipped me around and knelt down to my eye level. "I'm going to open this door a crack and scout the area. Do not... DO NOT come out. Do you understand?"

I nodded.

"Tell me you understand." He commanded.

I looked in his eyes. "I understand." Inwardly I was anxious. We were going to save Buddha. Owl was going to help me save Buddha. He was still alive. I just knew it. I imagined I could still hear his heart beat somewhere out there. Buddha, hang in there. We're coming.

The silver door opened silently. There was a second door, a slate door. This one opened slowly. A crack was all we opened and we peered out.

I had no idea where to look. There were 1 or 2 moving shapes in the far distance, wolves I imagined, but I had no idea where Buddha was. I didn't have the best view. Owl was in the way.

After half a minute, Owl turns to look at me. "There's 3 or 4 wolves in the vicinity, all slowly moving north. The rest of the pack is already far up north, possibly at your turrets already. I'm worried about this one wolf hanging near him." Owl checks his gun and re holsters it.

Owl continues, "I'm going to sneak in and see if I can get Buddha. Hopefully, by the time I get close, that lone wolf will have decided to follow his pack. If not..." Owl pats his gun meaningfully. "If worse comes to worse and his friends come back for me, I'll either sprint back here to this door or I'll draw them off to those caves where I'll see if I can climb and get a height advantage and snipe them from there."

Owl looks at me with deep eyes. "I need you here, Lillica. You don't have a gun. If the wolves come for me and I lead the wolves to the caves, you need to save Buddha. I can take care of myself, but I won't be able to save Buddha and fend off the wolves. Do you understand?"

I nod my head.

"Tell me the plan, Lillica."

I look at him. It's a good plan. It'll work. It has to work. I say, "You go alone to Buddha and you'll carry him back here where I'll patch him up. If that wolf gives you trouble, you'll shoot the wolf. If the rest of the pack comes at you, you'll either come back here or hide in the caves. When the coast is clear, I'm the plan B for saving Buddha."

He nods at me and runs a hand through my hair. "Good girl. Stick to the plan." And with that, he's off.

As Owl attempts a stealthy sneak in thigh-deep snow, I look around and wish I had brought some medicine with me.

Your writing is so immersive... so good~ I'm so sad when I read about Lily crying for Buddha~

Thanks for the feedback, Walking Problem. Love your avatar. Here's more of the story. Hope you like it.

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 5. As told by Donald.

Everything is going wrong. It's very wrong. It's always hard to get good food but blame the solar flare this time. The food would have run out, sure, but we would have harvested a few potato plants early and then the remainder when they were fully grown. We would have had SO MANY potatoes we would have been swimming in potatoes.

But the solar flare got us. It got us bad. Those plants froze so fast my boys and ladies couldn't get to them fast enough. None of them knew how to cut a plant quick. They were all moving in inefficient ways. When you harvest plants. You do them in rows, you know. In rows, so that you don't have to backtrack and go over areas twice. I'm going to have to train them all to harvest. That was my mistake. I didn't delegate. I went and tried to do it all myself. When you're leader, there's too much to do. You always have to delegate.

Like now. Digging up graves. Can't be good but let Chris do it. He's keen on digging up bodies so let him do it. Pretend it's his idea if you need but as long as he gets the job done, it's all good. It's all about delegation.

Now Lillica is another problem. She's all hung up on that sweet kid Buddha. I need her on the front line with the turrets but it's clear that the heart wants what the heart wants. Oh, she thinks we don't know but we all know. She's got it bad for him.

When you're a leader you have to make the tough calls. Lillica will be a liability on the front lines. She's going to Buddha no matter what. So let her go. Then delegate. The little girl has no clue where Buddha is. She won't get far. Owl knows. So send Owl. Owl's dependable. You can tell he's solid. He's got marine written all over him. Says he's ex-army but it's in his blood. He'll follow orders. And he'll get the job done. So delegate.

"Save Buddha." That's all I said. And he nodded. We're men. I'm his commander. We understand each other.

So now I've got a dozen or more rabid wolves closing in and no idea how long they'll be. There should be enough power to keep the turrets running for 2 days if needed and we can always flick the switch off if the wolves are not coming. I go wake Lillith, our seventh member. We haven't talked much about Lillith and we don't need to. She's like some minor nobility or something. Good at research, knows a thing or two about building things, refuses to carry large objects – says it destroys her nails or something. Jesus.

We trudge up north and flick the switch to the turrets, they come to life and not a moment too soon. One of the wolves seems to have a headstart on the rest of the pack and is almost at the entrance. I spot Chris over near the graves digging 'em out and scream for him to come over. He doesn't seem to hear me over the top of the wind and snow. There's no time to get him. Olga is nowhere to be found. It'll be just me and Lillith and the turrets against the wolves then. Hope they come one at a time.

The first wolf gets stuck in some traps and never makes it through. The remainder of the pack come at us like savages. Despite the gunfire, Chris doesn't join us. He just keeps digging. I have a bionic left arm but my right gets mauled bad. Lillith doesn't fare much better, but we got 'em all. Fifteen wolves all in all by the end of the night.

It's morning by the time the last wolf falls. No idea where Olga and Chris are. The graves have all been dug up. I look at the empty graves and the littered corpses from afar. Not sure I want to get too close. I find it ironic. Olga and Chris go corpse-digging for food and the thought of cannibalism sends them off the deep end. Then a pack of wolves mauls Buddha maybe to death, then the wolves come and die on our doorstep, solving our food problem.

Just another of life's many lessons about patience and to control your emotions.

I sit down in the snow. I turned 70 earlier this year and I'm feeling it. I'm bleeding and Olga wants to get me to a hospital but I just want to sit down a moment. Overhead another satellite explodes. You'd think these events would be rare but they're surprisingly common out here on the Rim. I watch as the majority of the debris falls to an area just south of us. I remind myself to send Olga south to see if there's anything salvageable tomorrow.

WHAM.

Something falls right in front of me, almost in my lap, within arms reach even. If it fell a foot closer it would have smashed my head in. I look up, to make sure there isn't more. There isn't, and I surprise myself by not caring. It becomes one of those surreal moments where you just understand the meaning of life. A near-death experience. Survived famine, survived a manhunter wolf-pack while the rest of your colony is off who knows where. Saved everyone from being mauled to death, saved everyone from dying of hunger with god knows how much wolf-meat and then to die from aerial bombardment. You could almost laugh.

I turn the packet over. It's a packaged survival meal. I stare at it, and stare south where the majority of the satellite fragments landed, wondering how many more of these the gods had given us.

And then I laugh. I scream a laugh to the heavens. I've saved my colony. Killed the wolves, delivered meat to our doorstep and now found who knows how many survival meals. I did it. I did it all. From the bottom of my belly, all the anger, all the frustration and all the pain of the last few days wells up and comes out as laughter.

I've won. I did it. That's why I'm in charge.

YAY~!  :) :) :)

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 6: As told by Lillica.


I stand in the middle of seven bodies.

I'm officially a doctor. I have to be. I just have to be. If you told me a year ago that I'd be in charge of a hospital I would have laughed so hard my guts would have come up all over you. But here I am. Doctor Lillica, reporting to OR-1.

To my right, my Buddha lies asleep in a silver bed. Donald and Lillith are to my left in slate beds. Behind me, 4 arctic wolves are on the ground, bleeding out. My priority was always Buddha. He'd lost a lot of blood and I've used half our remaining glitterworld medicine on him. I don't care what Donald says, we can always buy more later.

Donald and Lillith aren't doing too well either. The most severe injury is Donald's gunshot wound to the right shoulder. Friendly fire from the turrets I presume. He'll be lucky to use that again. He's raving about bionics but now is not the time to put one in. Lillith has bite and claw marks all over her, as well as a gunshot wound to her right shoulder as well.

I've patched them all up as best I can. If Olga and Chris come in with injuries later, I'll patch them up too. Now it's time for the wolves.

They're all bleeding out. The nearest one is but a pup, she looks close to death. The others have a few hours, tops. If I use some medicine, even herbal medicine, I could save the pup. But we're running short on medicine and I don't intend to save a single one of these wretched wolves.

I move in quick and make a rapid assessment of her injuries. She's got multiple gunshot wounds to her torso, abdomen, face, pelvis and every limb. It's a wonder she's still alive. She's hemorrhaging everywhere I don't even know where to start. Despite my best efforts, without medicine, she's gone within the hour. I drag her out the door and toss her on the ice. Her body will keep longer that way.

Three more wolves. I tamponade their wounds in a rotating fashion, wolf 1, then wolf 2 then wolf 3, then go back and cycle between them, keeping them all alive simultaneously. I wear wristguards and gloves as well as a vest in case they bite but they're all too far out of it. I'm so tired, I can't see or think straight but I keep going.

Buddha. My Buddha.

My eyes are watering. I can't help it. These wolves hurt my Buddha. I imagine what it would be like, a dozen wolves, closing in on every angle, my Buddha running, crying to Owl for help and Owl just running, leaving my Buddha alone to be mauled by the pack. Did he fight back? Was it quick? Which of these wolves was it that chewed that chunk off his leg?

With a kind of crazed mania, I cut into a stomach to see if I can find my Buddha's leg. I find nothing, and I sew the animal back up. Then I turn to the next and do the same. Nothing. I turn to the third animal and also find nothing in its stomach. On an impulse, I try to harvest its liver. The animal dies and I don't bother sewing it up – I toss it unceremoniously out the door onto the ice where it skids a small distance, leaking blood and entrails before it stops.

Buddha's knee was hurt. It will probably heal fine but for a moment there I didn't know what to do with his knee.

I pick up my plasteel mace and break one of the wolf's knees. He doesn't even flinch. I then cut it open and study it, commiting all the tendons and ligaments to memory, flexing and unflexing the knee until I feel I understand where all the muscle groups attach to. Then I bandage it up.

I test my memory by smashing another knee on a different wolf. She wakes up and makes a weak effort to bite me. I smash her head in and she stops moving. I sit and watch as the life force dissapears from her eyes, imagining that those eyes could have been my Buddha's, out in the snow, bleeding out all alone. When the light is gone I resume my study of the wolf's knee.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I know I'm losing it. But these wolves hurt my Buddha. I will not let anyone hurt us ever again. I will be this colony's best doctor. I have to be.

It's like what Donald and all the rest always tell me. We do what we need to survive. These wolves will help me survive. I'll learn what I can from them before they die. They deserve it.

Arctic wolf manhunter pack and cannibalism, part 7: Epilogue. As told by Buddha.

I sit at the stove, cooking some rice. It's funny, when we butchered the 15 arctic foxes we thought we'd never run out of meat. There was mountains of the stuff. You know how long it lasted? Five days.

Olga found 30 packaged survival meals. That lasted us another 2 days. The math is wrong, but that's because we were raided soon after and now have a new recruit. Welcome to the colony, Flo. You never liked raiding anyway. You'll fit in well here. Not long after, Cassy comes along and begs for a meal. We're doing okay on the food-front and we didn't have the heart to say no. Welcome aboard, Cassy.

So now there's nine of us. Eleven if you count the Muffalo.

I'm so glad we kept Cashmere. We finally got a tailor's bench up and running. Chris made us some awesome muffalo parkas. There's not enough to go round, so some of us are still using the cloth parkas we bought from the traders early on. We experimented with foxskin parkas but they're not much better than cloth so we're keeping the foxskin for pants and shirts when those wear out.

I was worried for Lillica there for a bit. She wasn't herself for a while. I think she was really worried for me. She's more or less back to her usual self now, though some of her innocence seems to be gone. I hope it isn't gone for ever. Her smile and her eyes are still the brightest things in my day.

She's a great doctor now. I can't believe all the wolves left no scars on me. Whatever she used on me was fantastic. Donald and Lillith didn't fare so well. They both wake every day with shoulder pain. Donald eventually gets himself another bionic arm and we're hoping to one day get Lillith one as well.

Donald keeps telling it like he saved the world. In a way he did. But Lillith played a role that day too and he seems to downplay her part in things.

I owe Owl my life. We're both soldiers. He's got this harsh no nonsense exterior but war does that to people. I won't hold it against him.

I worry for Chris. He dug up 20 or more graves with Olga, though I think he did most of the digging. Sometimes I hear him screaming at night. I buried all the corpses again by the way. Just thought they were better underground than above ground, though in hind sight, I should probably have incinerated them.

I don't know what it is Lillica and I have. I remember I proposed to her, then there was the whole cannibalism episode. I was gone for 2 days, wandering around outside until Olga found me collapsed in a heap, exhausted. Then things got busy then there was this whole manhunter mess. We haven't really had a chance to talk. Romance on the rim just doesn't seem right. Nobody else is doing it. Maybe we shouldn't. It'll make the others awkward.

But then she sometimes gives me this smile and I get all confused again.

Donald's wife and brother. As told by the Narrator.

Rimworld tells the best stories sometimes.

On this occasion, a crashpod landed with Donald's wife. My first thought was, "WHAT?!?"

Then, "Cool!"

(https://i.imgur.com/eLTM1ZK.png)

She's a pretty decent pawn but incapable of dumb labour. I thought that was pretty accurate. The age was spookily accurate as well. She's rescued and joins. I immediately change her nickname to Melania.

This is great news for Donald. Donald's moods have always been challenging to handle. His 'too smart' trait leaves him more prone to depression and I've had a hard time trying bolster his mood, including scheduling extra joy time for him in the middle of the day, a better bedroom with silver walls, a better bedroom with the grand statue of Fernand, beer and so on.

You have one job, Melania. One job - you're gonna give Donald some lovin'.  ;) Turns out they only have +30 relations with each other, so that their opinion of each other provides only +3 happiness. You have one job, Melania, one job! Get to it.

So they get an immediate double bed and after a few days rekindle with "some lovin". I'm wearing a smile and I'm sure Donald is too.

A few days after Melania crashed, another crash pod survivor. This time, Donald's Brother. I didn't know Donald had a brother.

Donald's brother is the worst pawn I've ever seen. Incapable of dumb labour, incapable of smart labour, incapable of social, incapable of caring, incapable of artistic, incapable of firefighting, pyromaniac, abrasive. I left him to die in the snow. I knew Donald wouldn't be too happy about it, but figured the Melania "some lovin" buff would offset the depression at his brother's death.

(https://i.imgur.com/LGBZJyS.png)

I hover over the debuff from his brother's death. Sad for 25 days or so. Good on you, Donald.

That's it for me. Thank you all for reading this far. I've thoroughly enjoyed writing it but a new job now prevents me from writing more.

This is where I upgrade to a18.

Notable events that follow include a wedding between Buddha and Lilica, which everyone attends. By coincidence, Cashmere the Muffalo crashes the wedding and walks between bride and groom at the perfect time. Wish I caught that screenshot - Cashmere wasn't even invited!

As I said before, I've thoroughly enjoyed playing and writing this. Thank you for reading!

Man~~~~

You need to start a B18 new series on this~ =D

Yeah, and the real world Trump have 2 brother and 2 sister. The brother had passed away: "But the issue of addiction is also a deeply personal one for Trump. His older brother Freddy suffered from alcoholism, and died in 1981 at the young age of 43."

His brother "Fred" is the reason why himself and his children are all 100% hands off alcohol and drugs.

Story about Fred: http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a13098008/fred-trump-jr-addiction-history/

---

But yeah, you should really start recreate this story thingy in B18!

Interesting story, and well written. I particularly enjoyed how you included various perspectives.

I do however feel some of the characters could've been expanded upon.

An interesting and captivating read nonetheless.

Huh cool... let's just say this story is interesting I enjoy reading a engaging story especially got any tips for how to write my story to make it more engaging. Honestly any tips would be helpful it's about a withdrawal "spoiler he now lost his left arm"

Here's where you can find the story
https://ludeon.com/forums/index.php?topic=41419.0

These are awesome!

Keep up the good work.  ;)