Maybe there was a journal. At the very least the books someone kept always told you something about them.
The books had no common theme. The shelves held everything from history books, to dictionaries (useless when auto-translated), to technical manuals and academic texts, to novels. There was also, in fact, a journal. Leather-bound, elementally-proofed (if you had the knack of sensing such things) and badly weathered. Koa opened it to a random page in the middle and his eyes fell upon a familiar name in the jagged scrawl of Jesse's hand.
Met with Voclain. Skin still crawling.
Bastard made it clear he'd kill Breeze if it happens again.
I could probably take him. But I don't know.
Not safe enough, too risky, too many problems.
What happens after I turn the fucking mayor to ash?
Nothing good. That's for fucking certain.
Told him okay, but stay the fuck away from my family.
We'll keep our distance. Tense fucking status quo it is.
Fuck this prick. Hope he chokes on his own cock.
Feel sorry for his kid though.
He made a beeline to the desk and hopped up on the chair, hoping to glean some information from the notes scattered across its top.
A combination of barely-legible handwriting, esoteric shorthand, unknown subject matter, and fevered scribblings and corrections made it hard to tell what any of this was actually about. Some of the notes appeared to be little more than shopping lists and to-do lists, and seemed entirely ordinary, besides the amount of whiskey to be purchased. One note was a list of names, many of which had been aggressively struck-through.
One of the intact names was "Gerome".
Another was "Voclain".
Without remark, she picked through the room's many things, trying her best to form an estimate of just how long this room had been sealed.
Without inhabitants to generate loose fur and dust, it was mostly the
staleness of the environment that told of its years of disuse. If Prim were attentive enough, she might notice that the walls of this room were less sun-bleached than those of the living room.
He shot a look at the liquor bottles in the cabinet, too. Anything worth salvaging that'd still be good?
Go on, Dave. Drink this guy's whiskey. He'd want you to have it.
He walked up to the corkboard to examine it. If Stranger had been investigating something to do with this supremacist group, that was probably the place to look.
It would take Dave some time to really study the messy, scattered apparatus of Jesse's information organisation system, such as it was. But even at a glance, he could glean that there was a rough sketch of a map with a route plotted through Blaguarro and further on until Magna City, a collection of articles about everything from caravan routes between Landsverd and the frontier to how to safely forage in the regions between, and a list of towns and places along the coast. Here was a plan to head
east.
Some stray pins still held tiny scraps of paper, indicating that some elements of the whole had been taken down.
