Holdings · the Gladsea
What the town is, what it has, and who is holding it while you are away. Kept current as of the road to Dryrattle.
Four days ago this was a town with a dry tank and a spear militia. It is now the strongest thing standing between the salt flats and the Long Road, and everyone on that road knows it.
All-female infantry · predator blades · training their own replacements
Made official on the fourth day. They carry the best steel in the arsenal and they ride out with the missionaries, which is the only reason the missionaries come back. They are already training more Sisters, on the stated grounds of growing their capacity to serve their emperors and empresses. Nobody asked them to do that.
Honour guard · Vanguard service rifles · first off, first to clear ground
These are the ones who folded their hands and raised them in the crater while the rifles were laid out. Six or seven hours after being handed a weapon they had tighter groupings, better posture and faster reloads, corrected in the street by their own, promptly and harshly. They hang off the sides of the lead wagon like a boarding team, three arms holding on and three holding weapons.
Missionaries · bicycles · cakes · one large weapon per saddle
They leave in clean white shirts and black ties, waving, carrying cakes the town packed for them. Strapped to the back of each saddle is something considerably larger than a sidearm, for putting down resistance. Their instruction is not open to interpretation: bring back conversions, or bring back bones.
Auditors · enforcement · answerable only to Humble Beginnings
Raised the morning he could hold a thought. They turn people upside down to see what falls out, a process complicated by the fact that half the town does not wear trousers. On the first sweep they went through one hundred and ten skittermanders and recovered eight bones. Most were stuck in feet or matted into fur. Some came out of the skittermanders. He considers that distinction irrelevant.
Children · one cantrip each · Shield
The ones who set things alight without meaning to, who read a passage aloud and cause a problem, and who are usually sent away for it. Raven went looking and found twelve. She taught them one thing, and she chose the one that keeps them alive rather than the one that makes them useful. They have not been given weapons. That was deliberate.
You went out with two hug rigs and two doof wagons. You came back with three and three, plus extra bikes and two more spree balls. Every rig came home wearing fold-down plates cut from worm chitin, light for their strength, which shield the crew and drop away to let the doof out louder.
Fortifications went up out of car bodies and rubble, funnelling anything hostile into the road mouth rather than the open ground. Guard towers over the approach. Tunnels that surface behind an attacker instead of in front of them. A weapons shipment came down from the Cutlass and tripled what the town can put in the field.
Anybody who assaults Hollowbone now loses everything they bring.
The worm salvage took the count from eighteen hundred bones to over two thousand eight hundred, before the chitin, the drums of mucus that turned out to be an excellent degreaser, and the hollowed spines that turned out to be instruments.
Since Humble Beginnings started writing procedures down, roughly a third more comes in than used to. He can hold a thought for longer than anyone else here. Where there is focus there is structure, and where there is structure there are procedures that can be taught.
We are Flick. And we are here to help.