Day 1

On Day 1 I came onto the shore as if born out of seafoam, all beauty and glow, as Aphrodite was my name – ha, ha, all diaries should better start out as a joke to have even the slightest chance of not ending as one. So no, that's not exactly true, nor could it ever be true in such a place as Eulora, where everything is dirty, murky, bloody and at best primitive in the most disgusting and demeaning possible meaning of such a word. So let me start again:

On the first day, I crawled on my knees barely making it onto Eulora's shore, my eyes burnt by the sun, my skin lashed a thousand times by treacherous waves and my brains boiling under the unforgiving sun. Still, I was breathing, I was feeling the hard, abrasive sand of the beach under my feet and I had therefore won my chance to live. A slight and elusive chance, granted, but a chance nevertheless, and chances were just about everything I had left, since upon inspection I could not even find any memories I could call my own, let alone any concrete objects or possessions.

To that sliver of a chance, I soon added a name and I made that to be Foxy Foxster. Given the circumstances, it was surely better than Aphrodite and it increased the full total sum of my possessions to two abstract notions. I think that was not too bad for such a painful and deliberately down-to-sand beginning. Still, names and chances do not a life nor a full belly make and therefore I just started walking (or should I say limping?) around. It turns out I had already messed up even the most basic of calculations, since I should have added both curiosity and growing pains to my list of possessions. Give the woman a slight chance at life and she adds names, pains, curiosity and deliberately bad Maths to it in no time, even on a deserted island, such as Eulora.

Just a few steps ahead, I came upon the first proof that Eulora was not exactly deserted: there, on the scorching sand right in front of my eyes stood a woman looking exactly like me. Her name was Sir Reginald Greyhawk and she spoke mainly nonsense, but she did it in style, with certainty and looking you straight in the eye. Besides the nonsense, she also gave out restoring bottles of booze, so overall a relatively good start to life on an island I suppose.

Marching ahead past Sir Reginald and onto a bit of grass, I came to an odd structure going by the name of Lady Voyna’s Lean-to. Nothing of interest there really, but it served as a good landmark, so I drew it on my mental map and then turned right from there, walking parallel to the shore. I didn’t have to walk too far before coming to a few trees where I found Chicken Scribblings. Those things can’t be described in words for what they truly are, but the important thing to remember is that they are your first mentors on this island: read them and you’ll learn Tinkering, a most useful skill.

I kept walking then in the same direction, parallel to the shore and for quite a long time until I got to a place where the shore came down very low between two sand hills on either side. There, at the bottom, cradled between the two sand-buttocks of the shore lay a bottle of Smelly Murky Something and by this time I could not care less about murkiness or smelliness or even somethingness so I just plain and simply drank it all. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the murkiness in the bottle actually cleared my head a little or so it said and then and there I remembered the most basic things of them all: how to explore by looking, digging and generally poking around. A most useful skill when you have none other.

There, on the sandy shores of Eulora I waited and waited for another Smelly Murky Something to come to me, for my thirst of knowledge was great and the bottles were small. And I admired quietly the blue moon rising, after which I drew a line in the sand and stepped over it and into a new day...

Category: Eulora

Comments feed: RSS 2.0