Sam did not know exactly what to do. She vaguely believed random things she'd seen on TV. She vaguely knew that TV is a goddamn liar and will get you and your family killed. She hoped she might be able to help people.
She was staring at a woman who was dying. [UNNAMED WOMAN]'s health bar continued to drop.
"WHAT THE FUCK?!"
Suddenly the dying woman might as well have been labeled like the greeter to Fantasy Village One in a Nintendo RPG. "Welcome to Dying Meadows, Adventurer.", says [UNNAMED WOMAN]. Sam started something that might well have resembled CPR. She tilted the woman's head back, pinched her nose, and breathed in her mouth a few times. Then she started heel-stomping the woman's chest like she was the villain in an anti-abortion film trying to shove Jesus himself back up into Mary's esophagus.
Sam heard... Sam felt things break. Turns out, it's not uncommon for ribs to break during CPR. Sam got kind of lucky to not learn that it's also not uncommon for people giving CPR to get a gift of fresh, dying-person vomit delivered mouth to mouth. Sam was very unlucky to learn that CPR has a success rate of 5 to 10 percent with trained professionals.
Her name was Karen. She wasn't a Karen. She was divorced with no kids. She had two cats. She just went to work every day at an auto parts store. She knew how to change wiper blades and batteries. She wasn't the first person to die because of The Event. She wouldn't be the last.
Sam stared at the black health bar in shock. Even in her stunned state, she rocked backward when it was replaced by "LOOTABLE CORPSE: KAREN MCCUMFREY".
Whimpering slightly, she pulled herself back forward, rubbing her palms on her pants to remove the bits of rock and debris. Carefully, she put her hand on Karen's face to close her eyes, only to jerk it backward as an inventory screen popped up, showing all of Karen's items, including her clothes. There was a LOOT ALL button at the bottom.
Sam pulled away from the body, standing up and looking around, really looking around, for the first time since she'd even gotten in the car. She was standing in the middle of an overpass; they'd been about to turn left onto the interstate. It was... shockingly quiet.
There were no cars running, no planes flying, no radios playing. All she could hear were human voices, swallowed by the surprising scale and emptiness of six lane highways. There were a few horns here and there, but they were dying out as people realized that everyone was in the same situation.
She walked, coughing roughly, to the railing overlooking the interstate. It was a spur leading directly into the heart of the city, and she could see miles of stalled and crashed cars. Some, like Karen's, were on fire. Looking away from the road, she saw larger plumes of smoke coming from another part of the city, somewhere there weren't any tall buildings.
"Airport."
He was a round-faced fellow, leathery with something that was too bushy to be called five o'clock shadow and too thin to be called a hedgehog. His voice sounded like an old screen door trying to close against fifty years of rust on the spring coupled with a phlegmy cough that sounded worse than Sam's and, worse, it looked like he'd earned it across four (face) three (teeth) two decades he'd had a pack a day habit.
He spat a wad of something Sam gagged and tried to believe she'd never seen onto the road below, earing a cry of outrage.
"The old airport's thataway. Used to be the airport for the city, but the city decided to put on its big boy pants and built a new airport up the highway. Th'old airport's still there, but it only does local shit or rich guy shit. Y'know, crop-dusting, cop radar bullshit, or a rich guy taking a twin engine down to Atlanta. Them fires out that way are probably small planes what crashed, y'know?" He nodded a bit, snorked a hunk of foulness and spat it onto the highway below.
"Dude. Could you not do that? Or do it somewhere else? Gross." Sam struggled with her gag reflex, then hacked up another five thousand lungs, thanks to SMOKER'S LUNG: 37 MINUTES.
"Whatever, bitch, thought you looked interested. Suck a dick." And leatherface walked away, pulling out a pack of cigarettes.
Sam rolled here eyes turned away from the highway below her and did everything she could to forget about that guy while remembering what he'd said. She walked away from the railing toward the middle of the road, looking between the stopped cars to examine the people. If you'd asked her what she was looking for, whe would have stared in blank confusion. She was just looking. Sometimes a situation just asks you to look at it.
As she passed the first dashed white line she saw people helping each other. A silver-haired granny pulled a case of water ... a silver-haired granny directed a man one-third her age to pull a case of water bottles out the back of her van and start passing them around. In the other direction, young man earnestly bit his lip and examined minor wounds.
The second dashed line didn't go so well. A kind man; a young, robust Santa; a round, beardless, friendly face sat on top a healthy dad bod, offered warm smiles and a gentle pat on the shoulder to a woman with several young children. His non-patting hand was in her purse.
PERCEPTION +1
The next day, arguing with herself in the shower (water services never stopped, not relying on electricity), Sam constructed a number of thoroughly rational and ethically unimpeachable arguments for her response. She had lemmas. Dilemmas. Trilemmas. She even briefly toyed with a tetralemma before discarding it as too unwieldy. She developed a dialectict that would have made Hume weep, and Marx bite through the brim of his hat in outright philosophical commie horniness.
Philosophy happens after we do shit, if we're lucky. Otherwise, it gives us Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum (but I repeat myself).
In the moment, Sam didn't put quill to parchment. Sam put Chuck Taylors to pavement and put everything she had into getting to the thief as quickly as possible. What she would do when she got there was a problem for when she got there. Honestly, future people should be ashamed they hadn't alreayd solved the problems we caused. Like, dude, you had all the information. Pull it together.
Sam came in like a wrecking ball, screaming, gagging, hacking. She tripped and fell on her face as the thief, his would-be thieved, and her children stared at her in varying degrees of befuddlement, shock, and alarm. Sam, meanwhile, felt the injuries as her palms, forearms, and elbows hit the pavement. Her health bar ticked down a notch in her HUD.
She had a HUD? Jesus.
"You ASSHOLE." Pulling her herself to her knees, she glared at [NAME UNKNWON]. There was a flash of blinding pink-purple light that rocked her head backward. When her vision cleared, she saw the would-be thief collapsing gravitationally to the pavement with half his face missing. His would-be victim and her children were screaming hysterically, insofar as anoyone would be freaked the fuck out seeing a random [STORE] employee blow half a man's head off with her eye lasers.
YOU HAVE LEARNED MAGIC MISSILE
MAGIC MISSILE : LEVEL 1
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