Mdoc otis search

So, two of my favorite activities are storytelling and videogames. And when I like a videogame enough sometimes I'll write a story about it. I've been playing C:DDA for several years now but never in all that time have I actually gotten very far in it -- usually I die within the first few days or after the first serious life-threatening situation I encounter. With this in mind I decided to structure my most recent playthrough around avoiding conflict as much as possible, and to suit this intention I decided to RP an underdog character who would have no choice but to behave realistically in order to survive. It was actually quite successful, despite numerous setbacks, and at the end I realized the events had enough narrative potential on their own to form into a coherent story without actually having to change that much at all. I'm sharing the first chapter here and if people are interested I'll continue to share any future chapters I write about this playthrough. If I do continue I'll be sure to include more screenshots and future entries will (hopefully) be better structured.
The story follows a 16-year-old boy named Otis ("Oats") three years after the Cataclysm and only a week after his father's death, alone for the first time ever and struggling to survive long enough to find the 'new home' his father always spoke of. The story modifies details a little bit to fit the narrative but the priority is still accurately representing the real events of my playthrough. The mods I'm using are Classic Zombies Only, No Hope, and Deadly Zombie Virus. Loot is decreased, monster spawn is increased, and NPCs are also greatly increased. For traits I gave my character wayfarer, nomad, frail, near-sighted, bad-tempered, and fast-metabolism, with positive traits like light-step to make stealthy approaches more viable and high-adrenaline to give me a better chance at escaping bad situations. On Day 1 I used debug to give him a shopping cart, a handgun, a town map, binoculars, Mp3, and... probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. In character I said that these items were inherited from his father. My goal with the playthrough as a whole was to have a character that, for both in-character and game mechanic reasons, cannot settle down in one place for too long and thus has no choice but to go on a crazy odyssey adventure to find his new home.
IF you manage to read all of this, let me know what you think! I'm not really expecting anyone to because it's a lot and I mostly wrote it for personal entertainment/practice, but if I do manage to hook you into reading all the way to the end then that'll be a big win on my part. Either way I hope you enjoy!
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Otis woke in the cold grey morningtime beside an empty fireplace and knew it was time to move on. ‘I’ll starve to death if I stay here,’ he thought. ‘And this is not my home.’
The hunting lodge was a spacious building with a fake ‘Southwestern’ flare; Broad red-patterned rugs and wooden vigas, a stags head mounted above the staircase and on the wall a tacky, tasteless photo of a Native American man gazing longingly out at the open plains. Otis rose off the couch with a blanket wrapped around his head like a cloak and packed his few belongings back into the cart. His books and comics, the handgun that kept him safe while he slept. Before he left he said goodbye to his roommates, the ravens who’d shared the lodge with him the last four days. They fluttered about from room to room and kept him company at night, and because they were his only friends in the world he did not mind that they shat in his shopping cart. “Take care of yourselves.” He told them. He would have fed them, too, if he had any food. But of late the ravens were eating far better than he was anyways.
Otis opened the double doors and was greeted with a rush of cold air that made his glasses fog up. Outside the lodge the snow was all-encompassing, blanketing the landscape as far as the eye could see. A wind blowing off the icy river was making the trees whisper and sway, clumps of powdery snow falling in showers off their boughs. Otis started forward and dragged the shopping cart along behind him, the wheels leaving slushy tracks in the snow as he went. Beneath the snow the road was only a suggestion, near indistinguishable from the dirt and grass to either side, but that didn’t matter. The snowy bridge was within eyesight past the small trees that lined the river and today Otis would finally cross.
He could still hear his father saying, “It’ll be better once we’re across. There’s nothing for us here.” “The storm can’t last much longer. We’ll get to the other side and find someplace to stay, and then before you know it it’ll be spring. Just a little bit longer buddy, I promise.”
But the storm did last. The snows kept coming and the fires died and the food dwindled. And then the dead man in the basement who wasn’t really dead and the nightmare that came true. ”Cross the river,” his father had told him, through the fever and pain. ”Winter’s almost done. You can find it. You can get home.” So Otis had left that house and those bodies behind with all his father’s possession in tow. The shopping cart and its contents. Binoculars. His Mp3. A map and a pistol. But no map on Earth could tell him where ‘home’ was anymore, and by the time he left his father behind the pistol’s 17-round-clip only had 16 bullets left in it.
The day was cold even with a blanket but atleast the snow had stopped. The whole world had that crystalline feeling that comes right after a storm, the snow yet undisturbed by animals and wildlife. Past the powerlines the dark figure of a fire-watch tower was outlined against the bright grey sky, standing squat and watchful over the treetops. The bridge grew closer with each step, rusty supports looming above a river choked with snow and ice. Otis was staring at the distant land on the other side of it when he heard the first voice. There across the sparkling white field, five strangers. Clubs and backpacks, breaths misting in the air. Otis froze in surprise but by the time he’d even registered their existence they were already coming for him.
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“Oh, no. No no no no no.” Otis pushed the cart back, turned it around. The strangers cursing, shouting threats. Faint, but getting louder. One man was pointing a rifle but his line of sight was poor. ’He won’t shoot from back there,’ Otis knew, but still he ducked and veered right, seeking cover in an incline dotted with snowy trees. He felt the sudden shift from asphalt to dirt as the wheels rocked against a stone and nearly sent the whole thing tipping. He grabbed it with both hands to keep it upright and forced the cart further up the hill, the blanket dragging wet and forgotten in the snow, bushes scratching at his legs. But no sooner had the cart stabilized than its right wheel caught on a root hidden in the underbrush. Leave it! Some part of him was screaming, but if he left the cart he would have nothing and then he would be dead anyways. “Please,” he whispered in breathless protest with another unsuccessful tug. It nearly tipped over again and then there was a man rushing forward, already halfway up the slope, so close Otis could hear his heavy breathing and see the sweat on his face, the snow clinging to his fur hat. Otis looked at the spiked bat in his hands and then at the cart and even as he was thinking ’Just go!’ he was yanking on the handle harder than ever and suddenly it was free, he was running, the cart dragging awkwardly behind him. He shot one last look over his shoulder at the man mounting the slope and the second one coming up behind him and then turned back and ran as fast as he could.
It wasn’t until he was well away from the strangers that Otis realized he was crying.
He didn’t stop looking over his shoulder for several hours after that. Raiders were in many ways worse than the infected, but unlike the infected they still needed food and warmth and shelter. They would not come looking for him. Not in this weather. He pulled his cart along the road until he came upon a rural home, dark frosted window sticking out below the snow-covered roof. Past the turned-over trash bins and overgrown yard, the interior might have been idyllic; two plates, forks, knives atop a pleasant tablecloth. But the flowers at the center of the table were dead, the plates bare. In the kitchen the fridge revealed nothing but spoiled leftovers and an abominable smell. There were cockroaches in the sink. It seemed to him that he knew this place, atleast what it used to be, though he’d never been inside of it. Down the hall a master bedroom for two parents. Perhaps the father used to play outdated music on the Mp3 when he was cooking breakfast in the morning. And the room across from it… Otis’ feet carried him forward, past the cart dripping snowmelt from it’s wheels, though he knew well that some doors were better left closed. He only had to turn the handle and the wind did the rest, whistling in through a gaping hole in the roof and yanking the door hard against the wall. Inside was a child’s bedroom, a boy’s. A childsize dresser and a turned-over toy box. The twin bed was bare except for scattered drifts of snow resting on the wet mattress. Otis thought that maybe there was another room adjacent, a sister the boy used to tease. A father who used to play music… But no. There was no third room. That was a different father. A different boy.
‘Those memories won’t help you here. Focus.’
Focus. No food. What else? None of the clothes remaining in the closet fit him, but cutting a hole in a pair of socks with one of the kitchen knives gave him some homemade gloves that would serve until he found something better. Batteries in a drawer. A lighter and some cigarettes, a copper pot. No food. No food. He put the batteries in the Mp3 his father had given him, but he had no intention to ever listen to his music again. Music brought memories, and memories could bring nothing but pain.
BANG!
Otis flinched. A noise from outside, the door of a snowy wooden shed. BANG! Something, maybe an animal, more likely an infected, was trapped on the other side of it.. One, or multiple. Even one of them could take half a dozen rounds to the chest and keep coming until the blood loss dropped them. And even then, the sound, the raiders… No. Not a chance I can take. Not even with nightfall coming. BANG! Otis hastily packed his things, placing his handgun within reach on the top of the basket. There has to be somewhere else. Just for the night.
By the time he pulled his cart out the front door and back into the snow the sun was hanging dangerously low over the horizon, visible only by the muffled light that shone through the grey clouds. The world got only colder as he continued along the road, twice stopping to search car wrecks and once lingering a while in the backseat to eat a protein bar he found. In the distance the firetower was looming taller. It would take him about a day to reach it, but if he made it through the night and set out in the morning it would be a decent place to rest and get his bearings. Just before sundown, as he was dreading the prospect of being caught in the dark without shelter, Otis came upon a pair of snow-speckled tents standing in a clearing by the road. One of them had been torn open, the fabric swaying with the breeze, and around the campsite was a perimeter trench filled with snow and wooden spikes. ‘Occupied,’ Otis thought grimly. ‘Atleast at one time.’ No one was putting that much effort into a campsite unless they meant to stay a while. Normally he would have steered well clear of it, just in case, but now it seemed abandoned and the only likely shelter he would find. He released the cart and set his blanket in the basket, grimacing at the sudden cold. He picked the handgun up and held it the way his father showed him, then walking forward up to the ditches… “Hello?” He called.
Inside the tent something stirred. The tent pegs shifted and snow fell in powder off the folds. Through the hole in the fabric a dead man emerged, tall and muscular but withered by death, cracked lips peeling back in a yellow snarl. It’s khaki pants were spattered with mud and it’s t-shirt was torn open at the breast revealing a horrifically bruised torso. Otis thrust the gun out in front of him and stepped back, pointer finger stiff and cold where it extended from the sock-glove and hovered above the trigger guard. For a moment they were both as still as the air around them. Neither of them were breathing. The dead man regarded Otis with lifeless eyes, empty but for the hunger, then it let out a sound that was something between a moan and a howl and rushed forward, taking two long uncoordinated steps before throwing itself right into the trench and landing on it’s own wooden spike.
Otis lowered his gun and breathed a sigh of relief, a light curl of mist that rose into the air in front of his face. He might have even laughed but then the dead man got up again, blackened fingers groping for purchase in the dirt and the snow as it pulled itself up the snowy slope. The wooden spike had pierced through the zombies upper thigh and was protruding grotesquely out from just above it’s groin, the sharpened point black with gore. Otis squeezed the trigger suddenly and the gun rocked in his hand with a blast far louder than he expected it to be. The bullet whizzed harmlessly past the zombie and cut a clean hole in the side of the tent. Otis’ ears were ringing. The zombie got to it’s feet. ‘Breathe!’ Otis reminded himself. He stepped back. Already the dead man was up and coming at him again, dark blood dribbling out of the wound in it’s thigh and leaving a red trail behind it in the snow. Otis took a breath, let it out evenly. The next shot blasted a hole through the zombie’s exposed chest but it was undeterred. Another bullet opened it’s belly but by then it was already too close. It swung wildly at Otis, roaring furiously, but he ducked and backed away, nearly stumbling over the cart in his attempt to put it between them. The creature roared and thrashed, and it was all Otis could do to shove the cart forward in an attempt to drive the zombie off balance, scattering books and clothes and cooking utensils into the snow. That bought him some time and he backed away, feet moving quickly over one another. The zombie rushed forward once more and he shot it once then twice. The last one sent it sprawling and he shot it one more time as it fell, stepping forward ready to shoot it a final time if it moved again. It did not. Otis stepped carefully around the body. It’s wounds were steaming where the hot blood met cold air. Otis took a breath. How many bullets was that? He gave the body a final nudge with the toe of his boot then, satisfied that it was really dead, picked up his cart and moved on to explore the camp. The firepit was half buried in snow and one of the tents was torn open, but the other seemed good enough to stay in. He found a quiver of wooden arrows in it and took them with him because they looked cool. He pulled his cart into the tent with him, zipped up the door, and spread his wet and muddy blanket out along the uneven ground. ‘One more cold night,’ he thought. ‘And then the firetower, and then the river, and then…’ And then what? Spring, summer, day after day more of the same?
“I can’t do this without you,” Otis whispered abruptly. There was no reply.
He did not remember falling asleep, but when he awoke it was to the sound of footsteps in the snow outside. The night was still dark, the wind cold as ice and howling through the trees. The sound again. Was it footsteps, or just an animal? Otis slowly pulled the handgun out from under his blanket and pointed it at the door of the tent. Quiet. More footsteps. ‘They’ll break in here any second,’ he thought, shivering as much from fear as from the cold. ‘Tear down the tent and beat me to death with their bats.’ But they did not come. The wind continued to howl as the hours passed and eventually dawn illuminated the world. When finally Otis summoned up the courage to unzip the tent he found the snow undisturbed.
The firewatch tower was closer by then. He could get there before sundown and use it as a vantage point to find another bridge to cross over. There would be a fireplace there, or if not that atleast dry blankets, maybe some food. By the time he set out in the morning the ache in his stomach and head had faded and he found himself with renewed energy. A familiar feeling. Otis had learned years ago that it was the numbness, more than the hunger, that told him he was starving to death. ‘If I can use this energy to find food, I might be okay.’
But if not…
He spent the better part of the day walking, twice being forced to drag his cart off-road through the woods to avoid packs of wandering infected. Once a light flurry started and he considered finding somewhere to wait it out, but it ended as quickly as it appeared and Otis marched through it. Though the pain in his belly had disappeared, food was heavy on his mind. Foods he would eat and foods he had eaten. Hot foods, cold foods. Peanut butter sandwiches. He thought about his most recent meal, the pickles and cheese spread that’d been the last of his father’s supply, but the memory tasted like sadness and Otis didn’t like pickles, so instead he thought about someone else eating. Surely someone somewhere was eating something. Canned soup, or cereal, or those MREs with skittles in them.
'That’s good,’ Otis decided, tightening the blanket around his head. 'I’m happy for them.’
The sun had nearly set and Otis was shivering by the time he reached the firetower. His legs had a cold ache to them, the kind that seeped into his very bones. His eyelids were heavy but in the cold there was no danger of falling asleep. He first noticed the corpse pit as he was dragging his shopping cart into the clearing. There was no smell -- it must have been downwind from him -- but he could see the flies buzzing in masses around the heap. Otis wrinkled his nose and pushed the cart forward. A raven flew over his head with a strand of red meat in it’s beak and then a shotgun fired and the rest of the ravens took to the sky screaming. Otis dropped the blanket and froze suddenly in confusion, head darting side to side, hand reaching uncertainly for this pistol. RUN, IDIOT! So he stumbled and grabbed the cart and ran back into the woods. 'In the tower,’ he thought, raising a hand against the branches whipping his face. ‘Stupid, stupid, of course they’d be in the tower! They could have been watching you from there this whole stupid time!’
He did not return to the road this time but instead kept to the cover of the treeline. Behind him the outline of the firetower had become an ominous thing where once it was a promise of rest. Above, the clouds were a dull grey carpet across the sky, but that carpet parted in places to reveal the stars and the gibbous moon. The whole world seemed brighter for the snow that layered the ground but Otis was colder than he’d ever been before. He came upon a roofless structure in a swamp beneath the reeds and cattails, only three walls and those barely standing, and climbed inside without hesitation, huddling in the rubble against one wall for shelter from the wind. 'The blanket,’ he thought, despairing. He was shivering so hard it hurt. ‘A fire…’ He dare not risk it, not with the shadow of the tower looming still so close. And yet the threat of hypothermia loomed even closer. Perhaps that was the choice, then. Freeze to death tonight or get hunted down tomorrow.
‘They say the last few seconds before you die of hypothermia feel surprisingly warm,’ Otis thought. He couldn’t remember where he read that.
But even as he was resigning himself to a warm death his frozen fingers were groping in his backpack. For what? The matches rattled viciously in their box as he removed it from the bag and set it in the wet rubble beside him. Fire. He needed tinder. A stack of looseleaf paper he used to color on not so long ago. He crumbled it together and stuck it in a gap in the rubble on which he lay. When he opened the matchbox his hand jerked and matches scattered into the crevices. He picked one up carefully and struck it against the side where it sparked and then broke. Otis groped blindly for another, struck it, and set it to the paper. The glow of fire illuminated his face but only for a second before it crumbled into ash. Otis groaned and rolled over. ‘It’s too cold,’ he thought. ‘I’m sorry, dad. I tried. I don’t know how to get home.’
And then the memories were coming, sure as snowfall, and Otis could not stop them. There curled in the darkness he found himself thinking of those nights with his father. Roasting beans over the fire, or when there weren’t beans, pine nuts, or cattails. "They’re good for something year-round," his father would say, throwing some stalks on the growing fire. "As long as you’ve got cattails you’ve got four of the five bare necessities. That’s not so bad for nature’s hotdog plant, right?" The good times that were bad and the bad times that were good. Three years of barely scraping by and yet he’d return to it in an instant.
He lay there all night waiting to die, somewhere halfway between sleep and consciousness, between life and death. He did not remember falling asleep, if he even slept at all, but when his eyes opened the sun was out. The clouds had parted and though snow still layered the ground it was gleaming brilliantly in the light. Otis’ joints were stiff when he arose. There were tears on his face. But though nothing outside had changed, suddenly there was a sense of confidence present. There was food to be had. He was not going to die here. And when he ventured out of the structure into the light he saw it was true; cattails in the snow, shifting gently in the morning breeze. Nature’s hotdog plant.
Otis spent the entire morning gathering as many as he could, pulling roots from the cold mud and shallow puddles. Rhizomes his father had called them. The first one Otis gathered he could not help but eat; stripping off the muddy outer layer with a steak knife the way his father used to and pulling apart a strand to chew on while he worked. By afternoon he had more cattails than he could count and had settled on a small cabin in which to stay the night. He covered the windows and lit a fire, and for the next several hours he boiled cattails and drank snowmelt, listening to old nostalgic music through the tangled earbuds of his Mp3. When he was done he made himself sit down at the table, load his moderate serving onto a plate, and eat it with a fork and a knife, alone beneath the dormant lightbulbs of a low-hanging ceiling fan while the wind whispered outside.
Otis stayed in that cabin for several days, foraging in the surrounding wilderness for cattails and other edible plants, drinking snowmelt out of a gallon jug, and one day when he stepped outside he found the snow was gone. Spring had come.
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(Not included in the story: a wildly successful but equally unexciting raid on a nearby gunshow, resulting in the CB and brass catcher shown in the pic.)