January 30, 1372


When you are ready, you continue on your trek, this time climbing over the rusting vehicles, rather than attempting to wade through the mire. It is slow, hard work to travel in this fashion, and after an hour or so you are all nevertheless covered in muddy goo. It turns into a long and dreary day. While you have endured hotter weather back on your own native worlds, the humidity here seems particularily oppressive. The fighters in their armour are especially uncomfortable. All about you buzz swarms of small biting insects, distracting and irritating you constantly.

All around you the marshes have stretched endlesssly, it seems, into the mistly distance. It has been an endless succession of pools, ponds, and polluted meres, choked with strange weeds and waterborne plants, with rushes and grasses growing about their edges. Between them the sodden ground is cut and eroded by noisome, brackish streams. Along their banks a few trees and coarse bushes struggle to grow. All looks unhealthy.

Perhaps fortunately for you, you have seen little in the way of wildlife. Apart from the insects, all you have seen were occasional small froglike creatures which jump into the nearby ponds as you pass, as well as the odd vulture flying over slowly, looking you over and speculating as to whether it might get a fresh meal of carrion soon.

Nevertheless, the miles have passed. Finally, you stop and camp in the back of a large enclosed box on wheels. The night is uneventful.


next day...

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