Ah, the infinite pleasures of living in a world overrun by the undead: lack of sleep, constantly worrying about the lives of one's friends (both the intelligent who can never stay in one place for too long, and the stubborn who will stay put in the face of an approaching horde), trying to devise alternatives to flying overhead and swinging your broadsword like a lunatic... shall I go on? There's lots more.
Not that isn't initially rather gratifying to see a row of zombie heads fly at one's swordstroke, or work on a series of trebuchets with one's (absolutely brilliant) engineer badger friends, but it would be rather satisfying to see some impact as a result of one's work. We destroy dozens every day - perhaps even hundreds, especially with the trebuchets - but it doesn't seem to faze them in the slightest. Quite the contrary, actually: despite our greatest efforts, they just keep coming. More and more of them, pouring over the countryside like ants. We keep them at bay, but we can't stop their numbers increasing and piling.
It would help very much if we knew where they came from. All we currently know is that they came from a northeasterly direction, beyond the meadow, and have been sweeping the countryside for about six weeks now. No real motive except a craving for flesh - particularly brains. No real physical capacity - it's a wonder how they can keep those limbs moving at all. Ridiculously easy to decimate - even the rabbits have been participating in the defense. The rabbits!! Indeed, the things are so fragile that the last good storm nearly did a week's worth of work for us in one night. It would have been the end of it...but then more came. And more after that.
Thus far the eagles have found nothing to give us the slightest hint of where they come from, except that they all proceed from a small wooded area, too small to really be called a wood, some miles beyond the meadow. They reported that when they tried to go deeper to investigate further, they were "repelled." By what, they couldn't say. My alter ego suggests a force field; I personally have no alternative suggestion.
Until such time as we can get to the root of the situation, Rory Badger proposes two options for keeping them at bay. 1) Build a wall across the meadow, or 2) create a ravine with their rudimentary explosives (yes, explosives. Pure, mad geniuses, those badgers...). For the past few weeks we've been constructing small, crude versions of the first idea. They usually hold for the first few days - and then such a huge pileup accumulates on the other side that the freaks come climbing up, and it's that much more wood wasted.
The woods around us are thick, lush and resplendent in botanical glory, it is true; we have absolutely no want of wood. But at the moment, these woods really are the only thing keeping them back: not the trebuchets, not our crude attempts at walls, and most certainly not my lunatic sword-swinging. And at that, they're still pressing on and getting through.
So basically, our defense tactics have come down to this: we either go for the wall idea in full force, using all the wood at our disposal and thereby sacrificing our only real defense for one that could potentially take weeks to properly complete, leaving us somewhat vulnerable for those weeks; or we go for the ravine idea, thereby sacrificing all our explosives in what could quite easily go terribly awry, and, even should it work, would only pose as a temporary solution...just like the wall.
And in the meantime...they still keep coming.
We'll be officially deciding on what to do tomorrow. After that, I'll be flying with the eagles, just to see for myself what this "repelling force" is all about. Force field...hum. We shall see.
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