May 23, 2017

PC 471: The Chaos Village — Part 1

* Author : M.K. Hutchins

* Narrator : Heath Miller

* Host : Graeme Dunlop

* Audio Producer : Pria Wood

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PC 471: The Chaos Village — Part 1 is a PodCastle original.

Rated PG

The Chaos Village — Part 1

By M.K. Hutchins

The ground under Rob’s feet shifted from sand to jagged shale and back again. The mountains folded into valleys, then spiked into cliffs. The green clouds turned into triangles and tried to stab him in the back, but crumpled and fell off.

Rob turned another page in his notebook, skimming his research notes. Thanks to the natural Order present in all humans, his own body and the things he held didn’t randomly transform in the Chaos. But despite pages and pages of lovely charts and neatly-labeled columns, he couldn’t say much more about Chaos than that.

Plenty of people died in the Chaos, but he’d already logged two years—approximately four hundred and thirteen hours—of wandering through it with only paper cuts to show for it.Did Chaos cause harm based on your thoughts? Your fears? Only your thoughts and fears specific to being, presently, in the Chaos?

Given the subjective nature of thoughts and fears, he’d need a large data set to draw any accurate conclusions. Perhaps larger than he could collect in his lifetime. But it was up to him to unravel these mysteries—he’d never met anyone else interested in collecting data on the Chaos.

The ground changed again, this time to hard-packed dirt sprinkled with tough grasses. Rob’s pace quickened over the easy terrain, until a quavering voice shouted out, “M-Mother! Some young man just walked into the village!”

Rob stopped and looked up from his notebook. The Chaos didn’t imitate humans. In fact, on page forty-four in his notebook he had a list of seventy-two things he’d never seen in the Chaos, which included oceans, rivers, geography stable for more than two hours, and angry octagons. Though, of course, the absence of evidence in his data didn’t prove anything; it was possible he simply hadn’t experienced the counter-example yet.

He pursed his lips. In addition to the shocked young woman still gaping at him and a middle-aged woman yelling for help, thirty-two mud-dome houses stood before him. A small, central spring ran into what he guessed was a cistern opening. Rob turned to a blank page and took notes. The midday sun glared off his silvery, graphite words.

The daughter—eighteen or nineteen, around his age—and her mother both had short, black hair and wore dresses woven from coarse fibers. Probably from some local, wild plant. Tiny streaks of glistening black ran through the otherwise tawny fabric. Was that human hair? What a clever use of a local resource. In any case, the fabric lacked the neatness one would expect from domesticated, deity-Ordered fibers. This couldn’t be the Confederate Ithena, then—they had a Goddess of Sheep, which allowed for carding, spinning, and weaving wool.

Oddly, he saw no evidence of any deity. No neatly cultivated fields. No metals. No advanced wood-working. Just wild plants and mud buildings. Perhaps their deity held sovereignty over something more subtle. Rob, after all, came from a village where the only deity was Ogynan, God of Freezing. It made for excellent cellars and painful winters. This place looked even poorer than home, though. The young woman, her mother, and the four scowling men heading toward him all went barefoot. Perhaps they had no trade established with the nearby civilizations?

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