Critical Role & Sagas of Sundry - Episode 5: New Haven | We're Alive: Frontier | Season 1

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

The survivors encounter a stranger with an unknown past on the way to the Livingston community. Based on the hit We’re Alive podcast, Ivan Van Norman leads a game of survival for a group of players on a mission through the infected undead-ridden midwest. Want to go deeper into the world of We’re Alive? Check out the complete We’re Alive saga here: www.werealive.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As you walk in, you actually hear as a door just, boom, kicks down as a large man with wild hair and a beard and a plaid jacket on comes out into the middle of the streets. What the fuck is that? There's them back, but we did. What was once a prosperous river trade in Mississippi is now the front line. The eastern states supply the river states. And what's left to the UA live out their meager day. He's self-policing. What is the West hiding?

Nobody really knows for sure. But we're alive. And this is the new frontier. Okay, so you see a man pull himself out, wielding an axe? Hatchet. Hatchet. As he sits and joins us at the table.

Welcome, sir. Yeah. I'm not so welcome yet. I'm firing a warning shot. Oh. Ah, phew. Warning. Not close to him. Right.

Stay put. That's the weakest way I possibly could have said that. Stay put! Motherfucker! I stand still as a bullet moves past. I don't move at all. Blink as the water goes down, a couple beats pass. I ain't moving.

What's your name? Kent. What's yours? Ray. All right, Ray. Don't want to join in here? I can't say. You're at the cross. Crow's Nests, what's going?

No, I mean, we can hear you saying that stuff. They are still at the back, I mean, you're all in the rail driver. Janie's in the conductor's seat. All right, and the semi truck is off the rails. Okay, all right, so I stop, the rail driver, and I hop down, I'm still by the rail driver. Yeah.

Good company or bad company. Can't decide yet. A live company. Looks like you guys made a lot of noise out here. Can I try to stealth and move around and flank behind him? I'm not trying to get very close to him, but I want to stay out of his eye line. Yeah, make a stealth right now. Okay.

And would you do me a favor? Do a spot listen. Roll it and see what's up. Okay. Is there a specific reason why you wanted to block this railway? I came to this town for a reason, but I don't know if I'm willing to tell you that yet, because you haven't told me why you. Why you are here. Oh, I just passing her.

Okay. We're on the railroad. Can I start to walk forward? I'm gonna start to walk forward to test her. I wouldn't do it. I'm gonna keep walking. Hands, hand shown, no weapons. Just walking forward, open hands.

I'm gonna spray far in front of him. Okay, you spray in front. Whoa, whoa, Ray, Ray. Wait, whoa, Ray. Kent. It's gonna get him to stop. All right, I stop. Got my attention now.

I kind of give you a little, I'm listening now. Okay. Listen, Ray, I think it's fine. We just need to talk to the guy. So go talk to him, but let's keep him on his toes and let's keep his hands up. We're headed to the Livingston community. How about that?

Makes two of us. Four, five of us. You don't see me yet. Makes two of us. Why are you headed there? I told you, I'm looking for somebody. Are you traveling on foot? No, and I'm gonna peer around to see if my car is still intact

since the big building. Boom. Oh no. Well, I was. A little bit of irritation in the eyes. Well, I was. Hands still up, so you can tell it's starting to get to him a little bit. He's like, well, you guys just rolled into my house,

knocked over my car, and shot some bullets at me. All right, so I creep up behind him and I say, why did you block our path? And I'm gonna kind of look up, hearing the voice. And I'm gonna not look back, I'm just gonna say, because there's 100,000 souls out there and they all got vendettas. Put that on a pillow.

Are we allowed to have a more emo guy than me? Is that a thing? He just woke up. He just woke up. He's very out of us. I'm sorry. Actually, Ray genuinely starts laughing. I'm gonna pull my rifle back.

I'm gonna pull my AK-47 back. I'm gonna climb down. and I'm gonna hop out there. You're gonna be like, you are one crazy motherfucker. What? I'm gonna walk right up to this guy. My name's Ray. Ken, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. This is a perfect cue to start having the roads start to rumble as area around you starts to kind of kips. And at first you thought maybe the building was shifting and moving again, but you just hear a, just like something just as if someone just dropped like a 20 ton weight onto the ground, and it just shifted like a minor tremor,

like a tiny earth-co- Like the building went down? No, the building didn't go down. But it's about to. Well, no, you didn't see the building shift at all. It definitely sounded like something collapsed for sure. What you got in there? Well, Levin, no, I just got here last night,

but I don't think it's safe. I don't think it is either. How fast can we get those cables off? Um, like. Just, just, just. to not too long, it's just unhooking. At fact, at this point, if you wanted to, you could just take bolt cutters and just clip them if you wanted to.

That's exactly what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do it, it's off the tax, right? It's off the back. You crimped them, so you're gonna have to just bolt cut, just the crimpers off, you know, just to hold into it. But you can keep the length. Oh, and Kent, your small friend can come too. Hmm.

So Kent's gonna look up to the building tops to kind of his eyes kind of go over the horizon and he sees kind of like something kind of dart off, and it kind of flies down on top of the light post right there. It's a falcon. It's a red, red falcon, red feathered falcon. I look at you and I nod very approvingly. We have two.

You gotta be shitting me. This is got fun. That's yours? Yeah. They're pretty easy to catch, harder to feed. Oh, rats. Maybe we can have this conversation out of the range. Sounds good.

I got a couple of things inside the building. My hands are still up. If you let me, you want to come with me, we'll go get him. I don't know that anyone wants to go in that building, but we gotta go fast, whatever happens. He's mentioning the MP5 that I have with the stock, the extended stock.

Yeah, if you want to go in there and get it, now's the time. Basically, run inside. And as you start to run inside, you can actually see on the far side of the building, you can see a sinkhole is opened up. Just a collapsed sinkhole, right, not too far from where the lamp post

where your falcon is currently perched at the moment. You can see parts of the concrete, as well as the asphalt road, just collapsed in on itself. And now there's just a giant crater that's kind of living amidst the part of that crossroads. On this side of things, you basically seeing through this tree, you basically to see the sinkhole right in front of you.

Because the front door that Kent came out of is essentially right there. This whole confrontation went down, basically right next to this giant garbage truck. All right. I put my hand on Kent's shoulder and say, wait, sometimes they come from below. And all seems to inquire for the moment. Guys, hurry up. I gotta get inside.

I have a gun and something else. Great, go get it. Fast. Are you with him? No, Ray's with him. Yeah. So, Rayth, are you standing outside while he's going inside? Yeah, I mean, I can see the rail driver from here, right? Absolutely. It's only like 10 feet behind you.

Okay. All right, he goes, I'll stand guard. Be quicker we leave you. All right, so then I'm gonna get up and run over towards where the corner was with a little burlack sap that I put my hat on. I'm gonna grab the MP5, and I'm gonna grab something really small in my hand.

Go grab your MP5. Grab the MP5 first. Is it in the big one or not? I think it's in the big one. Yeah. We don't know what that is. We don't know good. That'll do. Oh, geez.

All right. It's kind of nice to have an automatic weapon an automatic weapon in the apocalypse, isn't it? Yeah. He's gonna pull one other small little thing, and he's almost gonna see, he can know that Rayth's eyes are on him. So he's gonna look as he grabs it and let Rayth know that it's not anything

dangerous or volatile like a grenade. You can see it's not big, but he catches a little bit of the tail and looks like a little action figure. Kent is very protective about it. And he looks and he just puts in his pocket and he goes on, grabs a gun and walks out. Right, so now Kent's back out

with Rayth at the moment. All right. As you guys continue to come out, you can start to hear sounds something. Let's get this thing going. As you can start to see, infected, beginning to pour out of that sinkhole. As dust and gravel again to be poured away.

And actually, the first one you see seems to be an incredibly large man and his hands are like the size of dinner plates as he's moving away piles of dirt as he pushes his head out, as he pulls himself out of the sinkhole. Let's put intent on. Watch out for bangs on the other side of the wall.

I know. All right, so Ray, you're shooting? Yep. I am getting this rolling. We're going, we're leaving. Right. And then, Rayth? I'm gonna pull out my bow and try to take a shot.

I want to them if I can. Closest one, I guess. Banding. Panic? I guess I'll keep the door open towards them. Right. So that there's an opening so as we move. Great.

They can jump in. Assist, you're just helping him get in? Yeah, helping him get in. Okay. And Kent. I'm gonna be flanking with Raith also, and since my gun is already out, all loaded and ready to fire if I have a clear shot.

Firing. Oh, yeah. You guys are, she's back at the... Yeah, everyone else seems to be inside. Okay, I'm on the side of the truck. So I'm behind you basically. I got her. Side by side.

Me. Ray, who's shooting, you can take your speed dice and your damaged dice. Jenny, no role for you. You're getting everything up and moving. Ray, if you know what to do for your bow shot. Band-aid, nothing in particular. Kent, if you'd like to hold with a trigger, you can make a composure check right. composure check right now. Well done.

You have the most composure. You have frozen worthy. Superposure. So for this purpose, since that's a reaction, I'll essentially allow you to do your speed whenever you want it next round. So it means if you want to go at the top of the round or the end of the round, up to you whenever you want to fire this thing.

Okay. All right? Roll them up. Oof. All right, speed dice explode, yes? Yes, they do. That's a sad, sad thing. 11. All right.

Loof. All right, so Ray, you're the first one up. Five degrees of success. Yeah, I was gonna say. Well, you've got that whole group at this point. You can fire into it. So how would you like to resolve your degrees of success? Um, I think I want, how do I want to take out more or massively that one guy?

That's up to you. It is up to me, isn't it? Mm-hmm. My hands are too small. Depletion is 10, 15, 15, 20. 24. Okay, I'm so good.

You're good. Just gonna. Just gonna. Just gonna. So you unload. So you're up there and you're just, tut-da-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tut-tut. You're kind of just putting stuff in there and you down,

you down one of them for sure. Like one of them just claps down, one of the front lines. I don't like her hair. Yeah. So she just clabbers. A couple of them seem to just, you know, just kind of like looking around them as their bullets are kind of coming around them as they move back up and start to paw themselves forward more. So they will be the ones that go next. All right. He's a little slower, at least.

Excellent. Resolved? And now, Wraith. All right. So I had two degrees of failure. Okay. But I'd like to try to spend two confidence points and narrate basically me just having a, normal. So just roll one dice, as if you had one degree of success because it's minimum. Yeah. Okay.

Nary it for me. Which is enough for a hit. So yeah, it takes Ray some time to get his bow ready. And you see he, his hand is wet from the rain, and so is the arrow. And so he's trying to, just starting to pull it back, and you see he drops it, and the arrow just falls to the ground. Right. And then without a second of hesitation, he wipes his hand on his cloak and then pulls around and

pulls out another one in fires. Great. You'll do it, and because that was awesomely narrated, I'll just have it be two depletion points, because you drop that arrow instead. Okay. All right. So here's my one damage die. Five.

Excellent. Not great, but. So you took it, I mean, he took an arrow in the shoulder, for sure. One of them just, as it basically hit straight into it, and you want, because it kind of like bends over. You've also. Maybe the white hair one, because I don't like competition.

Yeah. Yes. And not only did you do damage to it, but I'm gonna add speed to it, for the next round because it is injured. You've injured it for sure. Great, now that we're back at the top of the round again, so I'm looking for intense. You can go whenever you want.

Got it. I think first, now that he's watched, one go down and another one take an arrow, I'm going to tap Wraith on the shoulder and move to the left towards the Mercedes-Benzh car. So I'm going to move away from this. I'm going to run behind the bus. Yeah, move your mini.

Go for it. So I see them coming here and you took one out. I'm going to tap you on the shoulder. to signal the here. I'm going to try and go over here. So that probably behind this car, I'm going to run over there. So that I have an open, I can still see

a blocked shot of these, but I have a clear shot from where I'm at. Okay. Perfect. Okay. And when would you like to go? Do you want to do that at the top of the round? That'll add a one? I'm going to do that at the top of the round

to make sure that no shit happens before I go. So if he taps me, I don't know if he's part of the next round, but if he taps me on the shoulder, I'm going to be backing away towards the, the rail driver. Yeah, it's all part of it. Absolutely. I see kind of this happening and I'm like,

Oye, why aren't you running to the rail driver? Get in! Oh, where is the rail driver? He doesn't know that. I don't know that. Oh, my bad. So do you see where the back of that garbage truck is? Yes.

The rail driver is right at the end of that. Kent sees that in this kind of panicked, had a moment of like, he's so used to being alone, you know what I'm saying, that he kind of like ran over to the car, thinking it was the safe spot. then look behind him and started backing up like, look. You're going the wrong way. And in that moment, let's say his eyes kind of like went off to the horizon.

He's still looking for somebody. Maybe it was a last ditch effort. He was looking to see if there was anyone there. He didn't see it. And I'm only getting away with this much movement because of the composure check before, because I waited the whole round. So while he was fiddling with the bow,

I could have been making my way over there. When the shot went off is when I saw it. And then when we start retreating back. So we'll get to that. So basically, as you come around the same, side to where that garbage truck is, may I suggest that maybe you end right where the end of the garbage truck is.

I will remove the main. He's still got line of sight on the big guy. And that's one of those, you're attempting to run towards it and Band-Aid weighs his hand. This is what I do. And you catch yourself and you stop as you get right to where that garbage truck is. Now do me a favor, make a spot, listen, check.

Just right now, this is a reaction. This is a moment right here. 55. So spot listen is that, so that's two degrees of failure. Okay, let me hear everyone's intent, and then I'll lay out this information. I'm shooting again. Shooting. Ray?

I'm looking very, I mean, I'm not going to do it willy-nilly, but I want to try to get back to the rail driver as quickly as possible. Back up and shoot? But I'm also, I'm worried about, like, I'm keeping an eye on my peripherals to stuff doesn't come out from behind the edge of the building or the back of the garbage truck. because I mean, there might be something in that garbage truck. Right. So then Jenny's basically you've got this thing moving. I'm just ready to move. I don't want to ditch anymore.

Yeah, but like we've got to get, once again, slowly moving and, I mean, not fast enough that you guys can't out, you know, jump up line. But like, get on. So I see the confusion and the stuff that's happening and I'm like, it's not registering with him. I'm thinking he's panicking. So I'm going to go out there and physically be like, Grab him.

This way. Okay. I'd like you to make a spot listen. Spot listen? Yes, please. Okay. 35. Two degrees of success. Ray, okay.

This is what's gonna happen. Ray, you're still shooting out from the bottom. Rayth. Getting back to the rail driver is my biggest priority. Then just take two speed dice and that'll get you into the rail driver. Okay. And then you're shooting and then Band-Aid and Kent are there.

So here's what I'm gonna tell you now that you're both next to where this garbage truck is. Band-aid, as you kind of are getting Kent together for a moment, you accidentally hit basically the bottom of this garbage truck as you come around taking some superficial damage. You basically cut yourself as you come across because this thing, cocoo, cocoo comes down

as it spills out. And Band-Aid, you look down to basically see like a human rat nest of small items and pieces. And when I mean human, I mean like rags and dirty clothes. things that were used for insulation. For human scale. Small pieces of food like snack bars and MREs and items. It just looks like just discarded human waste,

not like fecal matter, but just waste, trash, as it pours out from the garbage truck. And it's clearly, whatever the garbage it was in there is actually not in there, but this stuff, at first you think it's just trash as it comes out, but then it's clear that someone made a little nest inside of this place. And what's very interesting,

is you actually see a bunch of small toys come out, as well as a little girl's doll that spills out, that's missing an arm. My eyes go wide, a little bit, kind of like, you know, like half there it was all along, half shocked. We gotta go, what is this? We don't have time for this.

You do, I'm tooting, we don't. And I'm gonna pull back towards the real driver. All right. And then, let me just make a quick check. Okay, fair enough. You guys grab Kent and you start pulling everybody back into the rail driver and just roll your speed dice and you can roll your damages while too.

This is why I don't do it. The crapsway always turns out better. Sorry. Failures? That's two degrees of failure. All right. But I also have my four competence points. So I'm gonna turn into those to make this just disappear.

Disappear. All right. So you don't get as much of a burst as you did beforehand, as unfortunately, or fortunate for me, as is that the garbage truck kind of provides a lot of cover for these creatures as they come around on the left side left side of the building, more where Kent and Band-Aid are as they're coming around. What was you for you to speak?

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Canadian new vehicle total registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Two dice. And then you two. Actually, at this point, everybody's barreled into the rail driver at this stage, right? I'm a seven for my speed dice. Oh, you're seven? Okay, you've gone at the same time, which means you have gone before everybody else.

So as you, all five of you, just rush into the rail driver, you watch as several of the creatures basically come around to the side of the garbage truck, just barreling maybe 10, 15 feet away from where you are before you slam the door right alongside of you. And we can take the minis off because you're in the rail driver now at this point. And Jenny, I'm assuming as soon as they're in,

throttle, full open. Open her up. With Cole. With Cole. With Cole. Oh gosh. Okay, so it lurches all of you. forward, everyone make balance checks.

I'm sorry, guys. Nope, you're doing the right thing. I'm careful on the ground, I care if I'm in the driver. We don't know if these are more runners. Okay. Cool. All right, let's dish him out. Four degrees of failure.

Four of failure, foray. I have a 39 in balance, and I rolled a 48. 48, so. Mostly interested in degrees of success. So it's one. Three degrees. One degree of failure. One degree of failure. You need three failures?

Three fails. Okay. Three fails and rath? I have two failures. Oh, the failures all around. This happens so fast. You all moved a little bit. It was fine.

All right, how would you like to resolve your degrees of failure? Okay, I had two degrees of failure. So I got to the back of the rail driver. Yes. And I managed to start to jump and get my first foot in, and that's when it took off, and it lurched. So my weight goes out from under me, but I have so much forward momentum that I slide.

Yes. And then as I'm sliding, my combat knife sheet, which is at my waist, gets flipped up on the lip of the edge of the rail driver and falls out of the rail driver. Okay, so we're ditching the combat knife and rom-prone. That's absolutely worth two degrees of failure. Failure at the wrong time. That's two, Bill.

All right, great. Jenny. All right, three degrees of failure. So when I open this throttle way too quickly, one of my toolkits spills over. and one of my just most valuable tools is slipping and falling into one of the cracks. And I panic and I let go with the throttle for a moment to see if I can reach it and I can't. It slips, it's gone. And I grab the throttle again and just try and compose myself, but I've lost a very important tool.

I will, so you would like to just maybe reduce your toolkit from a times two to a times one? Yeah. So let's do that. I also would like to make a suggestion that maybe it took a little bit of superficial damage on you as it fell off and maybe be banged you against the hip or something like that. So let's take four damage dice, or four damage against your threshold. Yes.

Four damage against your threshold. And I think that's worth all three. So right now she just, she has some superficial damage. All right, Band-aid, you're fine. Yeah, I watched Ray Biffitt. I did a cool slide, okay. Cool slide. It was so helpful.

I'm gonna trade in my last two competence points to take away two degrees of failure. All right. So as it jerks forward, my feet slip, and I brace myself like this. Yeah. Guns out, like it's down this way, and I'm dangling for a little bit before

I can find my way back. Right, that's worth one. Okay, then I'm gonna slip down a couple of, slip down a couple of runs, hit my chin before I grab. All right, take four. Okay. That'll, that'll make, that'll make you bite your

tongue. I'm not a dentist. My tongue's too sharp anyway. So that's worth another one. Great. That was a perfect example of how to resolve degrees of failure, everybody. Kent. I have one degree of failure.

As I'm running into the back of the train with Wraith, I was scratched myself on the garbage truck earlier. Was that my arm or my leg? Where'd you like it to be? I wanted it to be like my hip, honestly, because I was running by and I kind of caught it on the bumper. Great. I'm going to say that when I jump into the train, I leave it. train, I lean up against the side on that damaged hit.

And with that and the force of the train, I just smash against the wall and fall in my ass. So I'm just sitting right on my butt, you know, okay, but sitting down where both just kind of plopped, plop down. Yeah, that's great. You're prone. That hurt, but everything's fine. Okay. Okay. So you're all, basically, on the floor. And then I'm gonna look over at the driver and be like,

give her a good little nod. Sorry. Nice driving, gutter. So as the rail driver scrapes along the side of this semi-truck leaving just rakes of cuts and scratches all across it, and you can hear the metal on metal blinding as it's basically coming out of it, stop,

going off into the rails in the early part of the morning. You watch is essentially the infected, moving at a much slower pace than what you saw. The prairie dogs further kind of just, you're looking up as much as they can as you slowly lose them in the distance and they don't attempt to make any kind of pursuit whatsoever. I'm gonna get up and kind of look out

one of the gunflap windows almost desperately like and watching the town go by as if you just saw something very valuable pass. And then I'm gonna look to you and I'm gonna look at Band-Aid and I'm gonna ask him, did you see that? The stuff? The trash? In the trash truck? Yeah. But I'll tell you what I was there for him.

I was looking for somebody, like I said, and I was looking for the person whose items those did belong to. Was it... was it a kid? Fortunately, I was. Do you think they're still there? Yeah. But do I think we can save her? I saw something enter that truck last night when I was looking. It looked human size.

I thought you said it was one of them. That's what I thought at the time. All right, we can all talk about this as I patch up your injuries. I saw you guys biff it pretty badly. And you're bleeding from the mouth. Yeah, it's just my chin. It's no big deal.

All right, everybody sit down. Jenny, you okay? I hurt my hip pretty bad. All right, I'll get to you in a minute. So as you're looking forward, you're continuing to kind of drive along endless plains. It's still mostly grasslands.

You've actually intersected with the Missouri River. So as you're starting to move across, you can actually see as the Missouri, which is to your right, it's now kind of bending and is now coming alongside the rails. And now you are officially running along the Missouri on this Missouri River Runner route. How do you guys feel about stopping this rail driver

so I can fix the back properly. Maybe some of you can go hunt, get some food, we're running low. Yeah, and you're the bus. Go for it. Okay. Sounds good to me. Break.

But gently, gently. Gently. Great. So that's not a problem. You basically pull out in the middle of nothing. But you can hear a very, very rampant Missouri River because of the storm last night. You can actually see that the water level

is significantly higher than it was. You can see it's running really fast. But it would be a beautiful scenic route if you were just driving a regular train along this side. I call Crowsnest. Okay, but. No, I'm just like, I call it, I'm joking, go. I'm gonna fix your.

I thought you just did. I have to roll. Yeah, we gotta roll it up. But luckily, we're inside the rail driver, and so my, So my first aid kit is a times two, which makes my bonus plus 18 to my 72, so I have a 98.

So don't roll 100. Yeah. 90th, oh. So I have at least, no, that's, one degree of success. So it's totally fine. And, and, and. Dude, is this thing gonna scar?

Is that what you're doing? I can take one depletion point and it adds another degree of your injury. So it takes that off. Your four points. All right, Rayth, you next. Where are you hurt? I am uninjured.

Are you sure? I saw you take a tumble. I lost my knife. Aw, buddy, I'm sorry. Okay. Next. Can't fix souls, but. Oh, Jesus.

But my hips a little damaged. Take a look at that. Yeah, go ahead and, uh. I don't want to laugh at you. I can't fix souls for my hips a little hurt. Go ahead. I'm gonna unbutton my pants and just drop trowl and just I pull it down a little bit.

You know, it's just really just cold compress. This is just bruised at that point, but you did actually take damage, right? Superficial damage. I did take four points of superficial damage, yes. Three degrees of success, so I'm gonna patch you up with a cold compress. Second depletion, please. A little kiss. Just kidding, ugh.

Help me out. Yes, it does. Hey, Jenny, what's up? Oh, I just, I hit my hip pretty hard. What is it with you guys? Hips. Hips. All right, drop, I guess.

And you took four points of damage? Yes. Okay. I can patch that up pretty. There's a lot of band-aids. Yeah. Two degrees of success. Take them, though.

Take whatever was on there. So basically, you used up a whole lot of the simple, you know, kind of, the antiseptics for the wipes and the wipes and a lot of the simple kind of stuff that's easy to resupply, but a lot of it's just kind of out of there at this stage. I'm gonna try and get out. Are the doors open yet on the rail car?

Yeah, I'm like starting to hop over to the back to bust out like a welding. As he's, if he fixes me first and Ray, then as he's fixing her, I'm gonna walk out of like modesty while she gets patched up and just kind of look to the horizon like I'm looking, for my falcon. Look at that chivalry isn't dead. It's sweet.

You can, well, do you see the falcon? I don't see the falcon, but I know that it's gonna take a while because we went two to three miles up the Missouri. So I'm going to kind of take a couple strolls in the same direction we just came down the tracks, not far at all away from the railroad, keeping my eyes open, just kind of looking to the heavens.

Watching, watching to see if you can see it. Exactly. Great. Yeah, Jay, Yeah, Jenny, this thing is banged up. Like it's actually to the point of now that you're taking the time and there's no rain and you're clearly looking at it, there's a lot of it that's barely holding on. You can actually see that one of the train wheels

that's where a tire is theoretically on the motor home, one of the train wheels is actually bent really badly. Well, I wanna start fixing that wheel immediately. That's the priority. So here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna have to probably pull some spare parts. This thing's banged up. And it's definitely gonna take some time to put it together.

But you have time at this point. And you looking at this based on your skill, I could tell you that it's gonna take about, maybe about 10 hours. By herself or with help? With help, she could probably knock an hour or two off of that, you know? And what time is it? Like 8 a.m.

You know, pretty early. So we could, in theory, be on the road again by six o'clock at night. That's plenty of time to get some food, go hunting. Retrieve a falcon? Yes. Do you some hunting, Ray? Yes, I have one other thing I need to attend to first,

but I'll set up traps and check on them. Great, cool. So let me see how well that does. Do I need speed ice for this to tell me how long it takes, or just to just Tell me. Speeds mostly against Root. Okay. So I got this one degree of success. Which is great.

Yeah. So and then, so the 30 to cash that out is, it doesn't have to cash that out. We still have this one. You still got it, great. Then I'm only gonna make you pay the 30 to get the spare parts, okay? So I mark off 30, I only have 15.

No, from the, oh, from our total. Yeah, okay, gotcha, all right, great. Yeah, so, Rayth, you have one degree of success to work with, do you wanna tell me the story of what you're doing out there while you're doing the traps? Yeah, so yeah, he walks out and he looks like there's something just like seriously on his mind, and he's kind of like just really confused about it. But then he goes and he places these sort of like small, like bear jaw sort of trap things,

but to catch like small game. So he does those, he sets a perimeter of those, and then he goes back to the rail driver and starts digging through his backpack. And he pulls out what looks like a record, like a vinyl album. but it's like a very elaborate sort of package with embossed foil and like crazy graphics and stuff on the outside of it. And he pulls it open and inside there's a broken vinyl record that looks like it's maybe, it's not totally there out of the whole circle.

It's missing like some shards. And then he pulls out like in a very elaborate booklet. It's the same size as the album. It's a lyric book, right? Yeah, well, lyric and art book, basically. And so he starts turning through it and he looks, And the first page he turns to shows what looks like a decrepit sort of creature, silhouetted by the sun, like screaming.

Yeah. And then he turns the page again, and there are a bunch of other pictures of destruction. There's a picture of a city, but there's a helicopter in the side of a building, like stuck in the side of this burning building. Right. And then he looks even more and more disturbed. And then he tries to kind of calm himself down a little bit. And then you read the lyrics on one of the songs that you've...

listen to over and over again, in fact, you were in part in writing it. Yeah. And you realize that on the song The Serpent's Tongue is a bunch of words that you remember hearing from a certain woman and a certain arch town. Yeah. That is starting to just, you knew it reminded you of something, but now it's there staring right in front of you. So then he kind of stumbles back of it and drops the booklet a little bit. And you see it falls open to another page

is a photo of the band. And there are a bunch of other people in the band, but there are obviously two people who look kind of like Rafe in the center of the picture. And one of them looks a little younger, and then there's one that looks a little more confident and like muscular. Great.

And then are you putting it away? Yeah, he seems really shaking. He gathers himself and closes up the booklet and starts stashing everything back and puts it back in the bag and kind of looks around nervously. And Jenny, I think you would have seen this, at least part of at least him putting it away. Hey, you got those traps set?

Yeah, yeah, they'll be ready. No point checking now. Okay, what is this? Oh, that's an album from a band I was in before all this. You were in a band? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were coming to the U.S. for our first tour when... when the fall happened.

What do you play? Guitar. I did. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. You seem shaken. It's not like you.

It's thought important to be a very long day. I'm going to go check on the traps. How much longer until the rail driver is? The rail driver is fixed. Yeah, probably this evening, around six. Okay, good. Jenny was just coming in to get parts at the moment, but now you've got them.

Do you want to go fishing? We're right near the river. Yeah, sure. I've got a big knife. That's useful. Well, I think we have some fishing poles. The survival kit would at least give you wire, or like a line. And a fishing hook, you will not have a pole. I'll go find a stick. I'll tell you what.

I'll have your back, you do the fishing. It's not my favorite thing. Okay. You know I just wanna talk, right? Now that you've just said that, I had a sense about it, but I wanna check in with this duder before we leave. It's like, hey.

I'm outside looking for the falcon. I'm walking on the tracks, and he's kind of looking at this in his hand, and he keeps looking at it. And he smells it, and he holds it again. He looks up, he just kind of stares at this guy. He sees a little moon. A falcon comes down, because he's wearing a good canvas jacket. He kind of pulls it over his hand a little bit so it doesn't scratch him, because he never

knows where the falcons men, doesn't know if it's scratched and infected. Claws could be dirty. So it lands, the first thing he does is he checks the claws, clean, no blood, no flesh. Looks good. Pulls, digs his hand in his pocket, pulls out a little scraps, rotten meat's been sitting in there for a few days. Gives it to him, the falcon. lovingly. It's been starving, it's been raining,

it's really hungry. He eats it, right? He gives a little pet, walks back in, since you guys are into the rail cart, kind of with the falcon on his hand. And, uh, look at you. Yeah. And I go, his name's Max.

Max. But I call him friend. Oh. Just kidding, he can be dinner too. Kind of as a joke, right? He's glabper. Ah! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Yeah! Only I get to kill him, though. Oh.

Fair point. Hey, how... Because I was gonna head out to hit that. You're okay after whatever you saw it back there, right? I'm gonna kind of like push the Falcon who's gonna, instinctively, since we're in the sleeper car, flutter up the ladder to the crow's nest, kind of sit right, literally in the bird's nest, ironically. So it stays inside? Okay. So, kind of...

kind of stayed inside, and I'll look over you if you say it. And I say, it won't hurt anybody. If you say so. Must I tell him to. Oh. So then I'm going to look back at you and be like, I'm on a mission looking for somebody real special. She was real special. Not to me, but to somebody.

And this special person happens to carry something on her that's really special to me. I'm going to let you be as vague as you want to be, but anytime you need more help, you let us know. And she's gonna catch him stuff in this in his pocket and just kind of turns away. And as she sees that, the color kind of drains out of her face. And she goes, let's go. Oh. And I bust out.

Okay. I did want to kind of, as we kind of set up a line, I guess I'm the only one fishing, actually. You came with a gun in a night. I'm watching. Okay. Listen, I know we've had to deal. with some stuff already and it's different than what we've had to deal with in the past.

I didn't know that you had medical capabilities and you've done well to keep it secret so far and if there's one piece of kind of advice that I could offer you is just to keep it secret. It's a valuable commodity out here and people will just use you for band-aids. What you did back there. I want you to know I don't know if I was okay with it or not? I want you to know that I was okay with it and I don't know how I feel about that. There. Oh. Oh.

Did I catch a fish or is that construction? Yeah. That's the weirdest fish. It's like that's the weirdest fish noise I've ever heard. It's a fucking lawnmower. We're supposed to be the reel, but I forgot you had, didn't have a real. So you have a stick. So you have a stick.

No, made that sound? I pull it in. I pull it in. Oh, God. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna slump it. I'm gonna thump it with my. I'm gonna beat it today.

So you do like fishing? No, I just don't like them flopping around like that. Hit it again. Stop. It's a nice, good size trout. Like, wait a minute. Now that's a trout. You've got some perishable food.

You have to prepare it. Otherwise, it'll go bad in a couple of days. So. As you start getting in the evening, Jenny, you've taken time to basically take some of the old sheet metal and just make a bestful bumper that you possibly can. In fact, I would even fathom that since this thing

curled the metal up together, you're probably able to just re-curl it back down and then just take some of the welding equipment and just repatch it back up, essentially. It's not nearly as good as what it was when it was first done, but it's there. And then with a lot of effort, because you have to jack up this giant piece of machinery,

you're able to go in there and pull out one of the wheels and reapply it. You guys get done right around six o'clockish or so, you know, towards the end of the day. What was the result of my traps? Oh, your traps yielded not a whole lot, but you did manage to catch a couple of errant squirrels that are just, you don't need to hear

It's good. As they're coming around, maybe one of them got by its leg and it's running around so you quickly just kill it and clean it. Maybe one just got caught around the neck and so it was pretty quick for it. Yeah, but small game. So yeah, Rayth brings those two squirrels back to the camp

and you can see that he's much more composed now. Like he seems like he's, you know, his usual self. And he goes, I brought dinner. Oh, did you? I think you brought dinner. Who's the Woods Boy now? It's Band-Aid. Don't get cocky.

Great. Oh, for a record, the kitchen is actually in the conductor's situation because it would be using the steam power in order to use to cook. So, you know. How very gender appropriate in the 1940s. I actually had my own preparation for squirrels.

Fantastic, you knock yourself out. So as you guys are cooking inside of the conductors You can start to smell the smell of cooked fish and a small game, kind of starting to fill it. And not cigarettes. So much more interesting and appetizing than just the MRE packets and dried rations that a lot of you have been eating as part of this trip.

And so this fresh perishable food is just cascading an aroma that is just delightful before Jenny starts to get the train back on the road. At this point, Jenny and Miss Ray, like you both make spot list checks. We're not listening. I have two degrees of success. Two degrees of success.

Four degrees of failure. Actually, I'll just take them out because you're remaining really. Ray, you, as you're kind of in the conductor's area, talking to Jenny, kind of getting caught up on what's going there, you start to see underneath where the compartments were Band-Aid first pulled out that container.

That was right there, and you just see something move. Something underneath the compartment. Yes. So if this is the full set of the rail driver bits, there's a lot of small compartments and kind of open areas that's underneath where all the instruments lay out in front of you. And there was originally a box where Asher's stuff was.

Like this bit. About that big. But you can tell that there's something hiding underneath. Size concept of what this thing is? You just see movement moving around, yes. I have my kookery on me, because I've been using it to cook with. I grab Jenny's arm and I look, I...

Man, I can really go for a game of blackjack right now. Jenny. Jenny, shut up! What? And as you both look down, you can see a pair of wide, of wide doe eyes staring at you from underneath the compartment as you see a rag colored young girl just underneath the instruments at the moment.

And she is doing everything she can to try to just get as far away from you. But you could tell she stirred because the smell of the food just got her excited. Okay, okay, okay, hey, hey, hey, I'm putting this down. I'm putting this down. We're good. Look, it's down.

No one's gonna hurt you. Nothing on my hands, besides a lot of dirt. Hey. I'm gonna come out and have some of this fish I cooked at, no? You can tell as you're kind of looking down at her and she pulls her hand away from your outstretched arm, that she's just a little too big for this compartment, and you can kind of see her legs doing everything they can

to cramp up underneath there. Okay, honey, listen to me. Listen to me. I know that you think that it's safer down there than it is up here, But I promise you, if you come up here, I'm not gonna let anything happen to you. You wait for a while, and it takes some time, minutes, before you can kind of see she does this very bendy,

almost contortionist kind of movement as she's able to kind of twist herself around so that her head is closer to where the entrance of the compartment that she fell into in, and she just peers her head out. She doesn't come out yet. She's just right there. She's emaciated enough that you could tell

that she could be 10, but she could be anywhere from 10 to 14 at this point. She's just sticking bones at this stage. Hey, Jenny, give me a little of that fish on this. Did you put it out with the hand? She just snatches it as much as she can and just starts woofing it down as quickly as she possibly can, keeping her eyes on you literally the entire time.

You watch as she just kind of curled. back into where she's safely compartmentalized. You can also see at this point kind of how she got there. There's a service compartment that was just on the flip side. You can see it's barely big enough of a hatch, but you can see that it was popped open at one point. So she probably crawled out from underneath the train. So she got in from the underside of the train?

So there's a way in from the underside of the train. Yeah, now you know. From the previous city when we were stopped when we met Kent. Yeah. Okay. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer.

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Stink check. Okay, I got three degrees of success. Okay, you grabbed her hand as she grabbed her last piece and you have a hold on her, and she just starts screaming as loud as she can. It's okay, it's okay. Jenny? I'm worried because I actually don't know if this girl could be infected. Yeah, I'm going, I'm going.

Jenny just burst through into the main sleeper car. I have my sword out. No. We got a stowaway. A stowaway? Yeah, some girl. Where? She's in the cab.

Kent, I run right over to it. Immediately, I open the door my eyes. Go wide. Don't let her bite you. She's a biter. Is she infected? No, just a biter. Does she recognize his voice?

She's not processing a lot of this information right now. She's still just kind of trying to rest herself as she's holding things around. So she can see him over my shoulder. She looks and she kind of, look, look, look. Hey, hey. Hey, hey. Hey, you know how long it took me to find this?

You know how long it took me to find you in a long time, Sarah? Body just relaxes a little bit as her arms go down, and she just passes out. McRaele her head, leaned it in with you. First thing you're going to do is tell me who this little one is before I even let go with her. All right. Blood kind of can't get a real solemn look on his face as these cards are getting called out. Still got this, and he kind of nestles it next to her. Sarah knew my family before this whole world died.

Many years ago I had what a lot of people have, a wife, a son. See, I lost my boy four years ago. We lost his mom two years before that. You see, a fire in the war took my boy, but death took my girl. No infection, no nothing. Just death. It reminds you when you think you got it all planned out,

land out, the world says, nah. That town we stopped back in, that's where we're from. I've been looking for this girl for a while. Because this girl, she lost it all too. You grab Sarah's head, and she is unconscious at this point, whether just from pure adrenaline or relief, and as you carry her, I'm assuming maybe putting her into one of the sleeping cots.

Yeah, I'm putting her in a sleeper card. I'll start examining her right away. She's emaciated. Mm-hmm. dehydrated. She's dirty and she may even have some mange going on at the moment. I have basic first aid, I think.

Right. But at this point, like, she's not barring, and it takes some time to clean off her limbs enough to be able to inspect for anything. This girl's clearly been living in trash. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For God knows how long.

But as far as you can tell, she seems clear. Okay, and I saw her eyes, right? Totally. Clear. Okay, I'd like to use the first aid kit and just apply basic necessities. Yeah, use a depletion on it,

you don't have to make a roll, it's just a saline bag and part of it. So I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna make you, force you a roll on that. Yeah. Meanwhile, Jenny, Raith, we got an entryway under that cab. Can we seal that up maybe? I don't know if we want to. What if we need it?

To get out or in? I mean, it's pretty secretive to get out. And Jenny, you would actually know about this hatch because it is literally a secret escape hatch. Yeah, I think we should keep it. And we don't think any infected can get in there because a little girl did. I mean, infected can be little girls too. They can be small. What if we figure out a way that we can open it from the inside, but no one can get in from the out? me out. Okay. Yeah, I'll see what I can do. As you, uh...

Before you do that, or as soon as you're done with that, when was the last time you got some sleep? That's what I thought. Mm-hmm. How far ahead can we see? You're not, I mean, it's still evening, like I said, six o'clock. And, um, you know, it's getting to be dusk, But as far as you see, it's pretty clear driving ahead. You guys have covered maybe 50 miles at this point easily, even just in the time that it took to get food. While it's still enough light out that we can see ahead, how about we let him take the reins?

You've been showing him everything, right? How much time do I need to spend on Sarah? Oh, 15, 20 minutes. Okay. Yeah. And Jenny, just to clarify, because I have been keeping track. Rayth and Jenny have, well, Rayth, much more so, less so than Jenny,

but Jenny's been up for three days. Yeah. Yes, so at this point, anything more is just gonna be straight exhaustion, but you haven't been exerting yourself physically very much. I do have early bird as well and healthy. Like, I do have those as well. Which is why-

Why you've been so good for three days. Cool, I'm gonna pass out. Yeah. Yeah, I'll take over. Yeah. to put my hand on her shoulder, I'm gonna look at him, and I'm gonna look at her, and just nod like, I got this.

Are you driving? Sorry. No, no, yeah, I'll drive, like to drive. To drive? I think you meant to take care of her. Because I'm the most rested. What's your driving skill? I mean, I know you got a semi, but we gotta train.

What do I gotta do? Can't be too hard if it's on a rail. Yeah. I can show you the ropes. Well, you get some sleep. I'm gonna let you take care of it. I'm a conductor now. Come on.

Deputy conductor. Deputy. So you're driving through the night while she sleeps. Well, at least for a little bit while we still have. We'll let him set it up and then maybe like we'll take shifts and all, okay. So while eating and sleeping and driving and teaching occur, it takes a couple of hours. In fact, at this point, you're driving through the night. It starts to get late enough to where you would have to make a choice of whether to turn on the lights or not.

or stop for the evening. According to the map, where are we? Where are we? You are just outside of New Haven. Since they're asleep and it's just us, I'm gonna make a call. I'm gonna say we're gonna shut off the lights and we're gonna stop here and we're gonna rest

and start again in the morning. Right. That's not a bad idea, but someone, so much to stay up. You and I slept a little bit, I can stay up and keep watch. Okay. I'm gonna go.

and slightly through the sleeper cabin up to the bird's nest. And I'm gonna let the falcon go out for the night, in the night to hunt. Mm-hmm. And then I'm gonna just sit there and chill. Get some sleep if you want some. No, that's not what I'm worried about. I just slept.

Um, I gotta ask you this question directly, and I need you to forgive me for how direct I'm gonna be. I know you got some demons inside you from what you've seen. And we all do, believe me. We all do. That little girl's safe with you, right? I've been looking for ever a long time. Because if you harm a hair on her head,

I will kill you and I will not think twice about it. You guys wake up to an early dawn at the start of a day. It is despicably quiet, but you can still hear the river running rampantly to the left of you, just due north. And overall, the night pretty much left the entire area relatively undisturbed. So, toot-toot. Don't pull it. Ah, yes.

Don't pull it. Don't pull it. Okay. All right, I start. After a good six hours of sleep. You know? Wood in the firebox. Get that boiler heated up.

All right. As soon as I feel it moving, I check on the girl. Still out cold. Awesome. Head up to check on him in the crow's nest. How you doing up there? Smells like cigarettes. Doing good. Doing good.

You want to come down for a break? Yeah. All right, we'll switch it up. I'll wake up and, oh, we're moving. Do you need your bird? Max is already here. And the falcon kind of sticks his head through the little crow's nest.

Oh, that's a neat trick. Yeah. You should get together with your bird calls. Bring some more. Chitlin's out and I give them a little something and then I hand you one. I take it. Give it to him. Oh. You were going to eat it. You don't want to eat that stuff. You do not want to eat the stuff. You don't want to eat that. You don't want to eat that. You don't want to eat that, but.

Yeah, it smells like rancid meat. Yeah, I'll give it to it. The Falcon's going to sniff your finger a little bit and then kind of like peck at it. Like, oh, he likes you. Oh, good. That's it liking me. He, he? Yeah. You don't like many people, but he does like food. I put it out. You can see the expression in Kent's eyes for that moment. Like every time he talks about the falcon, he kind of goes away, and he's like, he kind of has a little smile, like, chuckling, as if you would be petting a dog.

He thought was cute. Ray is looking at you, and he just looks so jealous. At this point, you can actually see as the falcon, it's like, you can see as the wind kind of starts ruffling its feathers a little bit as the rail driver is starting to pick up speed. Yeah, it. Takes it.

Bounce. Bounce. Bounces out the, and you can see a little bit of it. It's definitely keeping pace. Can we make a check on fuel? Yeah. Going banded as you go back to

into the conductor's area to inspect the kind of fuel case, you can tell that you're running relatively low. Like you've got maybe about a third left, to maybe cover another 50 miles or so. But you're on, way more than halfway done. And you've burnt through a third of the coal as well too. Oh, you also burnt through some of the coal

when you got out, because you fired it out of the gate to get out of the area. So as you continue to drive forward for, unless you tell me otherwise, another hour or so, you actually start to get into an area where you can clearly kind of see the skyline of New Haven approaching you. And you can see very similar to the town

in which you found Kenton and even Eureka. Eureka was a little farther away from the rail line, but here you are essentially driving right through the town. You know, with the river alongside of you, you can actually see a couple of large silos that seemed to be adjacent to the rail line, and you can see a large two-story kind of city hall township

that kind of seems to be close. And as you begin to get closer, you actually see a lot of people people who seem to be coming out and are looking down the rail line towards where you're at. And they just, you could just kind of, at this point it's so far away, you're just seeing a bunch of people and they're all just kind of waving their hands. Some of them are putting hands back down as they lift them up. But you can see a whole lot of people just kind of staring down the rail line at you. Uh, I slow down. Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?

Yeah, they don't look infected. Are we sure, Rath, you looking through? Because they, it doesn't matter. They still could be dangerous, even if they're not infected. I know, I know. I cocked my weapon and agree with Rath. And I'm still on the rifle. Who's, go ahead.

Well, Kent, you're from a relatively close area. Do you know anything about this town? This town isn't going to hurt us, for the most part, to my knowledge. Most of the people here are scavengers that made it from Eureka and moved up. Well, just to be safe, let's stop on our way out of town. So on the edge of leaving. We're gonna have to give them some warning. I don't think they're gonna like as barely-

They're not gonna get off the tracks, you don't think? Well. I don't know that that's, yeah. We're gonna cause more enemies if we just barrel through something that hasn't been used in a while. There's a clearing past the main square. We might be able to lose when things clear up, see if it's safe there.

I'd say we stop before there and make peace and see if we can pass through. Okay. So as you start to look down the street, you can actually see that a lot of what was previously, and this is kind of the interesting part, I talked to how there's no trees in this area. It's because you're actually seeing a lot of stumps.

You're actually seeing a lot of harvested wood at this stage where it's a lot of logging and clearing. That's been done at this point. Goodish news. And as you get closer, you can kind of see what it appears to be like a slaw to the right of you, just right before the river. So it's like a logging community?

It's a logging community. Well, I'm slowing way down. Slow on way down, great. And you come across the line and you can see that there is a large kind of ramshackle residential kind of buildings, not unlike what you saw in St. Louis with a lot of repurposed residential stations. And then you can see actually a large island

that has rail that comes along the route of it. It's where like the track diverts, and then it comes back in. and you can see like a small township with large slats, kind of like the old forts that you remember from the frontier, in which they've taken large trees and basically made the wall out of it. And that is a large part of what is coming along the side of the river that is to the north of you or the right side of the rail line.

And people have come out, and there's a large bridge that's like a gangway that's coming from that part of the wall line leading to the other side of the rails into like the residential township a bit. So yeah you can see they're all on the train, they're all on the gangway looking at you. So and you're slowing down to what? I'm, I mean I'm crawling at this point. You all want to stop, right? At this point we need to. That's the general consensus. Okay. All right. All right, so we're stopping. So as you come across the gangway, You maybe go underneath it as steam just psh as you hear it like just hits as it comes to a stop. And some of the people are parol coughing as they get out of the way of the gangway.

And you watch as a fairly large group of people, 20, 30 people are just waiting, just peering outside. You can see that there's a couple of men who are now taking that group of people and just like shoving them back on side of the gates. you can see that they're heavily armed, at least with long rifles and pistols, as they're basically pushing people back inside. You can hear kind of a scattering of voices like, what are you doing?

You don't know who these people are. Get inside, quickly, what? Just stand down. It looks like, it looks like something from the safe zone. And it's muffled because you can just hear it barely through the outside of your rail driver. Jenny, what do you wanna do? I'm up here.

Well, let's talk. Let's talk to them. I mean, we're here, we've stopped. I want to, I want to throw open the door, and I want to say, I am Asher Emerson Stern the Third. You all kind of waved. This is my rail, right, what is it, rail driver? Okay, you watch as one man who comes in like,

who the hell are you? Asher, Asher Emerson, Yeah, no, I got that. Okay. I'm here to make a trade deal for the company. I, you can kind of see he's kind of like moving his first across this thing. It's like, okay, let's back up a second. Mm-hmm.

First of all, are any of you infected? No. Did you, did you come from inside the UA? We sure did. Holy shit, guys. The UA made it out fucking West. Haza! And you watch, everyone kind of throws their hands up, like,

like, ooh. Oh, bandage. Yes. Whoa. Yeah, the UA's here, yes. Does that mean we can go to the east side? Yeah, that means we can, there's a fucking train out here. Now, no, we've gotta cut a deal for the company.

All right, you watch is like, all right, well, come on inside. None of you, all right? We just so you know, we do have to make sure that we check. I hope you don't mind. We need to actually inspect anyone for bites. Absolutely. Or blood or anything.

So you watch as you have a couple of officials come out from the small town of New Haven, and they basically, for all intensive purposes, just not like do a full strip search, but they're pulling everything down. I mean, Ray starts taking all off his clothes and just dropping them at a heat next to him. He's just standing there glaring at them while they all waiting to be examined. I'm leaning down with Stingray next to Sarah to make sure that, you know, they realize that there's a child there, you know, who's still. unconscious.

And you can definitely see that a couple of the people are like, oh God, and you look around and he's like, is she fine? Who is this? And he's like, medic, come on out. Someone get a doctor here. Looks like we have a sick child. And you see as like a man who appears to be kind of waddling

more than walking out as he kind of comes out. He's got a long coat up with a little bit of a baseball cap coming down as he kind of comes out and goes, oh, sick. How can I see her? Oh, God, she's just a child. Oh my, where did you find her? She's with us. She's with you.

She looks, have you been feeding her? God, she looks like she's near death. She's important to me. So you're gonna make sure she doesn't get anywhere close to death. I'm gonna roll persuade. Well, that's fair. Like, you wanna persuade them to it. Let's roll against it.

In the trough. In the trough. That was a good ball. That was a good rule. It was a 20 something. It was a 20 something. Thirty-six and my persuade is, uh, uh, 48, so one degree of success. That's my job.

This is what I do, Mr. Sounds good. Mr. Kent. Kent. Excellent. Are you the father, Kent? Not the father.

She's not the mother, but this girl is really important to us. That's fair. Again, she looks like she hasn't been fed for weeks. Got any food, that might be elsewhere. All right, fine. I can understand. I'm not getting out of you what I need yet, but here, she kind of scoops the child up.

One of us is going with her. I'll go. And he basically waddles out through the back as you follow along, because he's mostly focused on this at the moment. Go for it. So, he's the first one in as Kent comes in, but you are greeted by at least a couple of men

who appeared to be healthy, strapping, physically fit individuals who all seem to be like on the verge of cautious and excited to see you but even just the the phrase the UA and the fact that like someone's coming out here is is getting them all fairly hopeful for something so it's like come on come on inside yes take me to your most important person I must negotiate you sure you got this I got it all right mr. Stearns mr. Stearns the third sir I'm just going to come with you make sure you're okay all right

but this is my personal bodyguard, I guess. He guesses. I have money. Right, right, okay. Now, if you don't mind, I know you're all fairly new here, and trust me, we're very excited to talk to people who are on the east side of the river, but I hope you understand we have rules here.

Yes. We have a quartermaster who can take your weapons, bladed and shot, and we'd like you to leave them here, but I assure you we have a full guard safety, our walls are some of the best. Well, Stern Industries, are definitely looking for infrastructure, so you're A.O.K. in my book.

Right. Here's my gun. Uh, thank you. Just deliver it to the quartermaster if you can. And you can see there's a gentleman who is wheeling out an old cart that is, well, clearly is just a place where you could just unload everything onto it. Wait, if we stay on the rail driver,

we get to keep our weapons. If we're like, oh, we're gonna hang back. Yes. That's an option? Yeah, we're hanging back. We're staying in the rail driver. No, good. No, by going back?

Absolutely. So you're exchanging the AK back for your 30-od-6? And you're gonna be putting that in there? Take very good care of her. So as you clang down all the metal and firearms, pulling the clips out, sliding them back so that there's no bullets in the barrel, you basically leave them all there as a timid young man

who appears to, his job is to push the cart out and to push them back in. basically escorts you with all of your weapons into the town of New Haven. Now, New Haven may as well be an island that's fortified with this long timber wall. It's a pretty slick piece of infrastructure. The fact that these trees are anywhere

from 15 to 20 feet tall, you know. And the township itself seems to have been originally like a visitor's center. It's now been converting. it into an entire community. So you can see there's some smaller buildings, some larger buildings, the community center being kind of the biggest. You can actually see that they've made a makeshift clock tower

that's standing on a bunch of also reinforced logs. In fact, everything that is new in this area is essentially built with new lumper. So there's a lot of log cabin type of buildings that are around here. And as you walk in, you can see a large medic that I described earlier who now has a couple of aides and he's given the girl as they're all basically walking straight towards one of the larger buildings that's out in the middle of this township. And at this point you watch it's like a man who clearly looks like he was just woken up as he kind of comes out and he's got a shirt that he's literally just finishing button up as his as his dress shirt is still untucked and his pants are messy as he comes and goes,

I'm sorry. I'm told that there's someone from Stern Industries? Yep, Asher Emerson Stern, the third. I'm the mayor of our little township here of New Haven. Oh, good. Welcome. Thank you. You have to apologize.

We really don't get, what the hell is that anyway? Oh, well, that is a rail driver from Stern Industries. Right. We're setting up a new trade route, and your beautiful town happens to be along the way. Holy shit. I know, right? They're reopening the rail line?

Yeah, the Missouri River Runner. Say that three times fast. I'm sorry, there's a lot of information to process. I understand. Do you have someplace private? We could talk and maybe negotiate some of the deals. Yeah, no. We can go into my...

Yeah, we can go into my... He escorts you kind of in, are you, Ray, you're still hanging out. We're hanging out on the road driver. So Ray is you kind of escort, uh, escort, uh, band name. You get it deep here, but. As you basically walk in through into this part, you kind of see as you go into one of the log cabins,

and it just stinks of fish. So, uh, Ash Ramerson Stern, the third. He watches, he pulls out. out like a sniffer of amber liquid as he pops open the top and pours to glasses like this. So, as you alluded a little earlier, what does the UA want to do with our little town? Well, basically, we just wanna go right through it.

You kind of built around the railroad, which I might remind you is UA property. The railroad is UA property. Oh, sure it is. At what point did it become UA property? When we built the rail driver. Ah, yes, the first law of reacquisition. Cheers.

Cheers. Cheers, that's right, as he takes a small sip from his brandy. I just kind of look at it. Yeah, well, there's this thing you should probably know. We... Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder, what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up?

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because we're not in the UA. As you know, we're out in the middle of the frontier, so we don't really have interest in any claim that you Easterners may have over our little township, including the rail line. Yeah, and I totally understand that. I'm hearing what you're saying, but I just want to make sure that you know

how beneficial this is for both of us. As that moment, you actually hear as the door just slams open, as a tall woman with deeply braided, pulled-back dreadlocks, just kind of bursts in and she goes, What the fuck is a bunch of Yankees doing on this side? And you see it's a tall woman who just is just built like a freaking Amazon as she just come in and goes, What the fuck are you doing in here?

I'm Asher Emerson Sturd the third. Germain, why in the hell are you letting Yankees inside of New Haven? I thought that's the whole point of us coming out here was to get away from these assholes. Listen, we don't want to cause any trouble. We could just be on our way. You caused trouble the moment you walked right into New Haven. For all we know, Germain, he's got hundreds of infected that are barreling down on the other side of him. Absolutely.

Absolutely not. All right, all right. All right. Marion, it's okay. Yes, there is a good chance that these guys have come from the UA, and I think we've confirmed that at this point. But we didn't see any infected come along, and did you see that thing?

It looks like an armored death machine. Like, Marion, just let me talk to him, all right? If there's anything that comes up that you, as Miss Head of Security, needs to know, I will brief you, but we'll talk about this tonight. about this tonight. Fine, you fucking go to bed with a bunch of UA bastards and I'll be the one that has to pull your ass out in the morning.

He'll have to take me out to dinner first. Yeah, fuck you as she just walks out the door and slams the door behind her. Actually, do you have any explosives inside of that thing? We might. Oh, make you deal. Mm-hmm. Come here with me.

As he comes out through the door, you can kind of see that he's got a bit of a determination you can see that there's a purpose here now. As he walks you up to the far side, the river side of the township, you walk up a flight of several switchback stairs as you come up to the fishing platform, which looks a lot like a docking pier, actually. It was hard to see it beforehand because the bend in the river

didn't really allow you to kind of see it because it was coming inward. And you look out and you can see that this part of the river is just huge. In fact, as you come up to it, you can actually see a lot of the waters pressing up against the wood at this point, and it's severely flooded.

And he looks down and goes, see all that water? It's not supposed to be there. Ah. We have a little bit of a problem. And if you can help us with it, and you can help make our town a little more safe, I think I can probably negotiate.

negotiate on your behalf in order to make a better deal. If you can take care of that, and he points downriver towards where the Missouri leads into the Mississippi, the direction that you've been coming up from, and you can see a large dam. That just kind of seems to be stuck right in the middle of the river, and you can see that it's raised the water level up significantly. They just finished it a few days ago,

and now the water is just, building up and my city is gonna flood here very soon, unless that's taken care of. Just to get a clear picture, are we talking about beavers? It's never beavers. You think beavers built that? I don't get out much.

Here, hey, hey, hey, Johnson, Johnson, here, give me your binoculars. And he hands him to you, go, just take a look, just take a look real quick. All right. As you peer through the binoculars, you look out, into the dam and you can see several like crawling infected that are just crawling across and you can see

as they're pulling flotsam and various elements and they're just shoving it deeply into the dam as much as they can and you can see them almost like vomiting a little bit as they a little bit of spittle comes out and they're just patching it against parts making mortar for the dam. The infected are building structures? We don't have anything to blow it

And I've already sent out a team to try to see what they can do for it. And they didn't come back. Oh. So, blow this damn, you can have your route. I tell you what, Jermaine, Stern Industries has your back. Great. Well, it's nice to hear that someone in the UA gives a shit for once. So nice talking to you, Asher Emerson Stern III as he walks down the switch back. I'll head back to the rail driver.

The rail driver. Join you. Yeah. Are we out at your shot? Are we out of your shot? You're all back in the rail driver, so sure. Band-aid, I got a hand it to you, honey. I didn't think you had something like that in you,

but I bowed down to your superior bullshitting technique. Thank you. We're going to be able to pass through, and we'll get our fuel, but they've got a problem with infected building a dam in the river and potentially flooding them out. Also, it seems like they're swimmers, and so once the water line gets high enough

over the wall, they'll be able to breach it. So I told them we would help take care of it. Kent returns from seeing Sarah, right? Right, yeah, so at this point, you've confirmed that Sarah is in good care. The doctors hand me, or the doctor, the town surgeon, hands me a pouch of kind of her belongings because they put her in a, they had a gown.

Right. Put her in a gown, and he hands me the belongings, and he sees the other group, his heads back to the rail car so he doesn't miss out on anything and kind of just stuffs away her belongings, walks in and he kinda, I show it to you. Oh, Sarah. She's fine, I got her stuff,

but she may have to stay here for a while. Well, we might be here for a while, so. Do they have any coal? They don't have any coal, but they've got a lot of lumber. Well, if they wanna get rid of this dam, if they wanna, it's either give me a lot of your ammo so I can use that gunpowder. or they can deal with swimming infected.

So we'll- Let's talk that conversation with them. Well, we'll kind of flash forward this conversation and you going back out to talk to Tremaine about it. He thinks the idea is great, but they can't give up all their ammo either. So you can barter and bribe with him a little bit to kind of find out how much you need to give

versus how much he can give. Sure. So let's go. Yes. Yes. Dang. Three degrees of success. Four degrees of success.

I got an eight. Blasphra. I rolled an eight. Dang it, I rolled a 16th. So here's what's gonna happen. You got three, and I got four. We're essentially gonna cancel each other out, granting me one degree of success in this situation.

So he will provide some. Call it 40% of the ammo, all right? than you guys have to cover the other 60. 45. 45, fine. Barter. So to get any reasonable amount of explosion that you would want to separate and maybe send

the damn downstream enough to just break it up, you'd be sacrificing all of your small cartridges, all of your heavy shotgun shells. And you wouldn't be spending all of your intermediate cartridges, but you'd be spending all of the 30-a-a-sox six as well, too. How close is this dam to the community? I mean, can we snip some of these things from a safe distance?

Can we- You could snipe them even from the fishing lookout? Can we try to kill off this type of infected? I don't know that that's a, I mean, there's more where they came from. That's not what the deal was. Yeah. They want the dam gone. I have a question.

Is there, can we spend any of our, just all survival, whatever, any extra points to figuring out another solution? Yeah. So if you wanted to spend gestalt in order to apply some practical skills, or practical experience into this, you just have to be a little specific with me on how, where, and why this practical knowledge

would come into it. You want to spend some? I mean, I'm fine spending, I mean, whatever it takes to figure out a solution that doesn't leave us completely screwed over with our AMA. What I'll offer is for three Gestalt points. which would be like three years of practical knowledge that would apply to Lucky Jenny.

I think I have something for you. That would help if you're willing to spend. Yes. You're already a structural engineer and stuff. Yeah. That makes sense. I didn't get any explosives in our thing. Yeah, absolutely.

So Jenny, I'm basically giving you a gestalt skill of local knowledge. Okay. All right. You've been around a lot. And there's actually a guy that you remember back in St. Louis, who was kind of a bit of a drifter. And you heard he was out from west. And he had mentioned something about a township. All right? He didn't expressively name-drop New Haven or anything.

But he had talked about a little bit of a river town that fits this description a little bit. And over cards, you had basically just talked about the area a little bit, you know. And he had mentioned before that before the war, north of the river, there was a couple salt mines that were north in the mountains across the river as well, too. And that gave you a little bit of a light bulb and that, well, if there's a mine, mine's of dynamite. Right? And it might be a bit of a hike to get over the river and then go explore these salt mines. but if there's gonna be any explosives, it would be in something like that.

All right. I've just finished telling you all of that. Okay. Excellent. We're gonna go check it out. Oh. Hmm. What if we also bring along some people from the town,

if they're willing to. I think that's a wonderful idea. 50-50 this. As you walk back into New Haven and you go back to Germain's study, you watch as he's sitting there still arguing with Marion. a little bit as you pops and goes, ah. All right, Asher, what's it gonna be?

You have yourself a deal. See, Mary, I told you, they can be assholes, but hey, at least these ones need something from us, so they can be assholes with a purpose. So cool. Every asshole has one. So you're gonna blow the dam. Well, we have a few steps that we're going to take

in order to make that happen. Okay, go on. So, our crack engineer from Stern Industries has mentioned that there were some salt mines nearby. You wanna go to the mines? Well, we're hoping to find some leftover dynamite or supplies that may have been left there. Oof, um, I mean, I guess that makes sense.

Unfortunately, we don't really know the area very well, so we're gonna take a team of your people as well. He looks to Marion, and Marion looks to him. If anyone's gonna go, it's me, all right? Because I'm not letting these kids out of the sight. And more importantly, we don't really have, and actually this is Jermaine going to us. Yes, Marion, you can.

And to be fair, we don't really have another option at this point. So just go with them and just don't get fucking killed, okay? Yeah, no, I got it. Listen, Stern Industries is happy to have you. She didn't even wait for you to finish that moment as she just walks out through the door. That's fair. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets?

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