Note: This story is written in parallel with the author's first Rimworld game, with randomized pawns. It is a real-time dramatization of all things, good and bad, as they happen, literally written as I play. Peripheral elements are added for plausibility and storytelling purposes, but the events that occur are all directly transposed from the ongoing game.
As I am told, the only legit game is a Randy Random game, so that's what this is.

Planetfall

The only witnesses to the crash were the animals, wandering around the verdant plains of a planet which probably had a name, or at least a number, somewhere in some archive. A fiery, smoking meteor roared down, making a grey streak in the sky as it fell, and smashed to the ground, striking a crater and shaking the earth.

Had it meant to make planetfall here? Perhaps it had been an escape pod. Perhaps it had just been a chunk of debris from a now-disintegrated spacecraft. Regardless, the three people inside had survived the fall, their longsleep sarcophagi doing what they had been built to do – take the force of the impact to allow the occupant to survive.

Larisa was the first to wake. Her eyes opened but she could only see a sky-coloured blur. Her head ached, as did the rest of her. She felt immensely cold, and as she ran her hands over her arms, she realized why – the cold slime of the longsleep sarcophagus still clung to her. Her hands, slippery with goop, clawed at the edge of the sarcophagus, finally finding purchase. Her muscles aching, she hoisted herself out. She wobbled on her legs, but didn't fall over. Wiping her eyes, she tried looking around, her vision improving slowly.

The blurry blue-grey forms of two more sarcophagi lay a ways further, its occupants still completely asleep. She could tell they were still alive from the blinking green light. They'd find their own way out, like she had. She looked down at herself and saw only skin-coloured blur. Some people apparently asked for coffee right after longsleep, but for her, first order of business would be getting some clothes on before the others woke up.

Trying to focus, she looked around for a water source and saw what looked like a small pond over in the distance. She felt around in the smashed and bent sarcophagus, slicing open her pinky on the sharp edge of a torn metal plate, and eventually her fingers found the strap of the survival kit included in every sarcophagus. It would have all kinds of stuff, but most importantly, a set of clothes.

She staggered to the pond-like blur, her bare feet squishing in the mud, and dipped a toe in the water. Cold, but not dangerously so. She took a few steps into the water, the cold chilling her bones, and rinsed all the slime off. Getting it out of her hair was a pain, but she got it done eventually, her vision steadily improving. She crawled out, opening the survival kit until her fingers felt the coarse texture of a towel. Then it was simply a matter of drying off and hauling her aching body into the synthread pants and shirt she'd pulled from the kit, along with the rubber shoes she wriggled her feet into.

Better. No socks though. She hated wearing shoes without socks.

Maybe she didn't have a particular craving for coffee, but she did feel hungry as a horse. She rummaged through the survival kit and found what she was looking for, her eyes now focused enough to recognize the gold-coloured packaging of the MRE's packed as part of the essential goods for surviving the first days. Although, calling the nutritional paste an 'MRE' was stretching the terminology a bit.

She sat down, squeezing the gunk out of the packet and sucking it down. It tasted like newspaper, but at least it held all the nutrients necessary for a full day's necessities. She looked up at the sky, her vision almost fully restored. Early morning, end of spring, she estimated. What better way to start the day than washing off slime and eating newspaper paste.

But where exactly was she starting this new day? What year was it? How far had her ship gone until, somehow, someway, these three sarcophagi had found their way here? This clearly wasn't Earth, or Terra if you preferred. She, and the two other occupants of the longsleepers, had clearly fallen to a strange planet, and seeing how there didn't seem to be any civilization for miles around, probably a Rimworld. Would they even survive here? Just the three of them? Worry started to creep into Larisa's heart, because no matter how lush and beautiful this world was, no one survived for very long if they didn't know what to do.

Before she could go from worried to anxious, a bleep sounded and the green light on one of the sarcophagi began blinking. Moments later, a bothered moan came from the contraption, sounding female. At the same time, the other light also began to blink. Seemed her fellow crash landers were waking up. She hoped they weren't too annoying. It was better not to be alone on a strange world, and she was really hoping these two would have at least some idea what to do, but honestly, she'd take the company of animals over that of people any day. A hand felt around at the edge of the sarcophagus, and Larisa supposed she should get up and give the newly-awakened person a hand.

She stepped over to the sarcophagus and laid her fingers on the slimy, blindly feeling hand.

"Hey, wh… is th… that another person?"

Larisa said nothing, closing her fingers around the other woman's hand and helping her out. Damn, she hoped her own exit from the sarcophagus had been a bit more graceful than this one. The girl she hauled out was slack-jawed, one eyelid drooping and her slimy hair clinging to her face.

"Say… say something, will you?"

Yeah, that would be kinda hard. Larisa just kept quiet, as she'd done all her life, and hauled the woman out of the longsleeper, pulling out the survival kit with her other hand.

"Is… is someone there?"

A male voice this time. Larisa sighed and rolled her eyes. One at a time. She gently placed her hand on the man's shoulder to confirm she was there, then took his survival kit, thrusting it in his slimy arms. He reflexively hugged it against his body.

"Wait… who's that talking now?" the tan-skinned woman blinked, trying to rub the slime from her eyes. She squinted and slurred, "Wait, there's two more people?"

Larisa sighed, loudly enough for them both to hear, and took his free hand, guiding it to her shoulder so he knew where to go. Then she picked the other woman's survival kit back up and slowly walked them towards the water, trying to avert her eyes from their nakedness. It was the first time she actually saw a man naked, and she couldn't even look at him from pure embarrassment. At least this one was a young specimen, around her age of eighteen. If it had been a wrinkly old one, ugh. The woman looked a bit older. Mid-twenties or so.

"Why is… why is only one of you talking?" the man asked.

"I don't… I don't know. Why aren't you saying anything?"

"I can't see anything. Where… are you taking us?"

Larisa ignored the questions and guided them both towards the water. When they were at the edge of the pond, she quickly tapped the toe of her shoe on the water's surface, so they knew what to expect. She gently guided the girl into the water, and she began, thankfully, washing herself of her own accord, her face still numb and her eyes trying to discern shapes but not succeeding.

The man complained when he set his foot in the water. "Wait, that's… that's cold!"

"It's… only water," the tan-skinned girl slurred. "You'll… be fine."

Larisa's relief was immense when the man sat down in the water and also began washing himself. There was no way she was going to do it.

The woman seemed to be done, feeling around for the water's edge and slowly creeping out on her hands and feet. Larisa threw the towel over her shoulders and let her get dry and dressed, handing her the appropriate items while she did the same for the guy. They dressed like blind people, probably because they were. Larisa figured it'd take more time for them to get back into working order, they were probably just 'common' humans.

"So uh… why don't you talk?" the woman asked, still straining her eyes to see anything more than just blurred shapes. What a stupid question. How could she explain why she couldn't talk to people who couldn't see? Wait, she knew. She stepped over to the woman, lifted her index finger and put it against the woman's lips, making a cross over her mouth. Then she did the same to the man.

"Oh! Maybe she's mute," the man said. Good, about time they realized. She clapped twice to show that was, indeed, the case. Then she stuck an MRE into the hands of both her new companions.

"Oh, right. Guess that makes sense."

Larisa got a better look at them now, free of the slime and numbness of the longsleeper, and no longer impeded by their lack of clothes. The man looked more like a boy, probably sixteen or so, clearly trying to look older by means of hazel sideburns all the way down to his jaw. He looked alright, she supposed. A bit too baby-faced. The woman had long jet-black hair, which complemented her lustrous tan skin, and Larisa was jealous to realize she found her very good-looking. Much better-looking than she was at least, her face determined and powerful, and yet delicate. But maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it'd cause them both to spend time with each other and leave her mostly alone to do her own thing.

"So uh, I'm Karl. Karl Johnson," the man said, plucking at the packaging of his MRE. "I mean… we should tell each other our names, right? But just call me Chef, everyone does that. Well. Not that there's still much of an 'everyone'."

Chef, huh? That at least suggested that he was good at making food, otherwise it would be the worst nickname ever.

The woman squeezed the MRE packet's contents in her mouth with a smooth movement. She'd done this before, apparently. "Cass," she said. "But somehow it always ends up turning into Cassie."

The boy – 'Chef' apparently – chuckled and said, "I s'pose you can just write down your name when our eyes get good enough to read, huh?"

Yes, that was, indeed, the plan.

Cassie, the tan-skinned woman, looked around, squinting at the three sarcophagi. "Just the three of us? This is going to be interesting."

"We might run into other people at some point though, no?" the guy said, sucking awkwardly at the MRE packet. "I mean, this place might be populated?" He looked at the golden wrapper of the nutritional paste and made a face. "Ugh, this tastes offensively bad."

"At some point, maybe. But so far, I can't see any man-made structures or signs of civilization… not that I can see much of anything right now." She ran her fingers through her hair, pulling at the knots. "I mean, think about it. There's an infinite amount of planets in the universe. What's the odds of us landing on a populated one?"

It had an atmosphere, Larisa thought to herself, and it was close enough for their longsleepers to eventually arrive here. So there was a very good chance humanity had already sent the occasional colony ship here. After all, the human race had fanned out across the galaxy for millennia now, and was probably still doing it, no matter how long they'd travelled. Sadly, she had no way to tell her two companions this, so she just had to let them prattle on.

"Not too shabby, actually," the boy said. "There's humans everywhere these days. Well, that depends on when 'these days' is… we must have slept for years and years."

"Probably, yeah."

"Well," the boy rose on wobbly legs, "this planet's populated now. By us."

"I s'pose. I can see a little better. Should ransack our sarcophagi and our survival kits to see what we can use. Best if we get a shelter up. We shouldn't spend our first night sleeping rough, we'll need our energy in the coming days."

"Sure."

Larisa tapped the girl on the shoulder. The boy saw it, and came to stand by them. With her finger, she wrote in the dirt, in big capital letters: LARISA.

The others had to squint, but they managed to read it eventually. "Well," the boy said with a smile, "Nice to meet you, Larisa."

She hoped it was actually nice to meet them, as well.

"Same," the other woman said. "We should get started, though." She clapped her hands. "Alright, everyone! Pool resources." She added deed to word and went to her sarcophagus, on shaky legs. Leaning inside, she began chucking everything that wasn't fixed to the longsleeper onto the ground, over her shoulder. Larisa looked on, taking stock of the items. It didn't look like a very impressive collection, but it was a start.

The longsleeper and proprietary survival kit Cassie had arrived in had contained all sorts of necessary items for the most immediate needs: a plasteel knife, a small cutter-welder complete with its own power source, several more MREs, a few lengths of rope, a box of nails, a mess-tin, a compass and a multi-tool. Several seed packets completed the loadout. The others' contents were similar, with a few differences. Larisa vaguely remembered specific items included in her longsleeper, based on… what she was good at? Or had she chosen them directly? The memory escaped her, which wasn't illogical. It had been, after all, centuries ago.

Larisa did remember the writing pad and pencils that had been stowed into her sleeper, and Chef's had held two plasteel cooking knives. It was immediately clear what Cassie's job would be when her last item emerged, a bolt-action rifle, looking basic but effective. Ugh. She'd probably insist on hunting animals for a quick food source. Larisa could accept shooting dangerous predators, or hunting game if really necessary for survival, but this chick better not start shooting at everything that moved. Or maybe… maybe her job would be to keep the others in line. A rifle tended to do that pretty well.

"No need to be worried," Cassie said casually, apparently now seeing well enough to discern facial expressions to a somewhat reliable degree. "I'm a sailor. My crew is my life, and you guys are my crew now. This is for the protection of all of us, and for hunting. Not to put me in charge." She chuckled. "I know fuck-all about surviving and establishing a colony, so we wouldn't last long if I was calling the shots." She checked the rifle's chamber. "Which begs the question, do you two have any idea what to do next? Like, how to build a shelter and such?"

Larisa shook her head, and Chef, too, said he didn't. "But we have a small survival booklet. I'm sure that'll tell us how to proceed from here."

"Sure." She sighed. "We have no one who's any good at building things? We sure could have used someone like that."

"I can see pretty well, just about," Chef said, picking up one of the welder-cutters. "We still have food to last a few days, so a shelter is priority. We can't read the booklet just yet, well, Larisa can, but yeah…" he cleared his throat. "So let's start with what we can do." He looked around. "Lot of solid trees around, from what I can tell." He was right, the trees were clearly oak and ash. "So let's get cutting."

Larisa pointed at her eyes, then to the area around her.

"Why?" Cassie asked.

People always wanted to know why, didn't they? Larisa slapped the ground and alternated between a thumbs-up and thumbs-down.

"Oh, I see. Well, take this. You never know." She held out the rifle. When Larisa hesitated, she gave it a shake and insisted, "Come on. We don't know what kind of creatures live here. And with what I can see, I'd probably shoot trees instead of attacking predators right now."

She took the rifle, just to stop the nagging.

Chef and Cassie got to work, setting their multi-tools against the trunks of the trees, starting with small ones, and working their way to bigger specimens as they got more confident. Larisa hoped neither of them would be stupid enough to get a tree on their heads. As they worked, she wandered around, trying to get an idea of the immediate lay of the land. A few spots looked interesting, and she jotted a crude map of their surroundings down on her notepad. It wasn't detailed, but it would serve for now. She also noticed thorny bushes scattered about, with fruits that were either raspberries, or an implausibly accurate imitation of them.

She roamed as far as she dared, never letting the smoke plume of the crashed longsleepers out of sight. There were several rock formations around, mostly what looked like granite and slate. She didn't know the first thing about mining (or was it called 'quarrying'?), and she guessed neither did the others, but they might be forced to learn someday, and it was good to know where the stone was if they needed it.

It was just after midday by the time she decided she'd explored enough, and she returned to the others, finding them sitting on tree stumps, their mess-tins over a small fire. She frowned when she saw that the tins were filled with nothing but water. What, were they making tea?

"Can't just drink water from a puddle, hun," Chef said, his brow glistening with sweat. "Gotta boil it first, get the germs out."

Oh, right.

Beaming, he pointed at the wood stockpile next to him. "But hey, see what we've done with our time?"

She supposed he had a right to be somewhat proud. He and Cassie had felled several trees and cut them into poles and boards, and the stockpile was impressive, several cubic metres of wood. It wouldn't build them a skyscraper, but combined with the box of nails and the survival booklet, they could probably build themselves something better than just a lean-to.

Cassie just sat there quietly, munching some kind of root she'd pulled from the ground. It looked like a wild parsnip, but Larisa didn't think this girl had the knowledge to properly identify roots. With a frown, she wrote,

don't just pull roots from ground

can be poisonous

Cassie read it, still squinting, and then shrugged. "I sniffed it. Then took a few bites and it was edible."

"It's a parsnip," Chef confirmed. "I don't know much about surviving in the wild, but I've seen this thing in plenty of kitchens, don't worry, it's safe to eat."

Larisa harrumphed – there wasn't much else she could do – and began leafing in the survival booklet. It didn't hold as much information as she'd hoped, but there was a small guide on how to build a shed. They could work from there. She held the booklet out to Chef. Somehow, she trusted him more than miss gun-toting pretty-face.

"Alright… let's see…" Chef mumbled, turning pages back and forth. "So uh… first thing…" He looked up from the booklet. "This ground's pretty level, right?"

Cassie finished her parsnip and tossed the greens away. "Pretty much, yeah."

"Right. We should start by installing… what's it called… deck piers, right." He looked up at the wood stockpile, and down at the booklet again. "We need to saw rectangular wooden plugs of, like, fifty centimetres long. Say… forty of them?"

They started work, taking the longer poles and turning them into smaller piers. Larisa had never worked with a welder/cutter before, but Chef briefly explained what little he knew about its operation. It was rather self-explanatory, the cutting laser had several settings, 'wood', 'stone' and 'metal' among them, and it went through the wood like butter. When the piers were cut – Larisa had cut only a pitiful number compared to Chef and Cassie – Chef hammered them into the soft ground using a big wooden block as a hammer. Together, Chef and Cassie tested if the piers were level, and hammered a few more times on the ones that needed it.

They went on, Chef reading from the survival book with every step, trying to make sense of things and then explain them. They strung support beams over the deck piers to hold up something called 'floor joists', then attached boards to the tops of the outer beam, supposedly to keep the floor joists in place. When that was done, they had a primitive, and rather crooked, floor framework. They nailed boards to the framework to create a floor.

After a brief pause, during which they drank the water they'd previously boiled and went for a stroll to the nearest raspberry bush for refreshments, they got back to work, Larisa keeping quiet about the painful blisters forming on her hands. It felt nice, in a way. Maybe it was the sense of achieving something, or maybe the pain just made her feel more alive. It was late afternoon when they started work on the framework of the back wall, and early evening when all the wall framework was done.

"Shit." Chef said, his hands in his sides, looking at the framework. "We forgot to make the back wall lower and to slope the side walls." He thumbed through the booklet. "Keeps the rain from… ah, fuck it. I'm not starting over."

They treated themselves to another MRE and drank the rest of the water. While a new batch boiled, they went on. The welder/cutter made things proceed extremely quickly, and the boards on the roof went on one after the other, Chef and Cassie laying a board on the framework, cutting it to match the length of the one before, and nailing it down.

Darkness began to fall, but the shed wasn't done yet. Larisa's blisters were big sacks of plasma and her hands were riddled with splinters, but the pain, while causing serious discomfort, also felt strangely calming. Pain always had that effect on her. At least they got the roof, the back wall, and part of the side done.

"Light's going," Cassie pointed out, sounding bored. "Call it a day?"

Chef stood with his arms crossed. "Mmm. S'pose we'll have to. Wish we'd gotten it done before nightfall though."

"I don't think the night will be too cold." She trudged over to the wood stockpile and began hauling armfuls of leaves to the half-completed shed. Looking up as she walked, she muttered, "No rain coming either. Least not for the first few hours."

Hauling leaves for a softer sleeping spot was a good idea, and the others did the same. It would be a relatively warm night, but still Larisa wished she had a blanket. Cassie articulated her thoughts, though not in the way Larisa would have preferred. "Tomorrow, I'm shooting some animals. Make sure we have some nice furs to sleep under."

"Good idea," Chef muttered. "Could go for some grilled venison too."

Ugh.

"G'night."

"Night."

Larisa tapped her knuckles on the wood twice.