The Bastion

“Welcome! Welcome, welcome – you look like you've travelled a long way to be here. Someone will be here soon enough to check for injuries or, well, you know, the sickness, and then you can start helping us out. What sort of thing do you do? Trust me, life will be a whole lot easier here if you can make yourself useful.”

– Siobhan Knowles

The Encampment is where many spend the majority of their time in the Bastion. Comprising of personal tents, the cookery firepit, and the small but mighty garden patch (overseen by Rhys Withers), it's the closest thing the Bastion has that resembles 'home'. The eclectic yet stratified nature of the Bastion's population can be felt here, from the never-ceasing conversation about how 'best' to divvy up resources, down to the sheer variety of accommodations: camo-green bivouacs from the dwindling supply housed in the Substation, repurposed hospital marquees, commercial camping tents having seen more than their share of weather, and some less familiar designs from beyond Din Talin's borders.

On a daily basis, people can be seen milling about doing their daily tasks here – and should you finish with your duty, there is always something more to be done. Taking inventory, routine health check-ups, cooking, cleaning, going out on hunting or foraging patrols… and, of course, deciding how best, how frequently, or whether at all to do any of the above. While Chris Lincoln keeps an eye on those tasked with patrols and security, and Naomi D'Ambrosio oversees the Medics and the infirmary in the Substation, there's a lot else that needs doing, and not everyone is always satisfied with the way things are decided.

The Substation, as its name implies, is an old electrical substation that has been refitted into a fortress against the contagion. The fortified, yet limited, space hosts the Bastion's infirmary and makeshift medicinal labs, the former for when an ailment is severe enough that a medical tent in the open will no longer serve, and the latter used for ever-ongoing research into better bandaging, better painkillers, and better immunity-boosting mechanisms. Both of these, and the scientists working therein, are under the charge of the Chief Z-Medic Naomi D'Ambrosio. The substation also hosts the equipment storage, a motley collection of items alongside some military-grade equipment that is starting to run very low on stock. The Bastion's storage spans several rooms that were once administrative offices.

Due to the increased importance of its vital content of food, medicine and equipment, access to the Substation is rather limited, with special permission or elevated status being required to even view its insides. Throughout the day, guards can be seen patrolling the outside and the roof, keeping a supplementary lookout over the Border, while doctors and other scientists run in and out of the building in a frantic hurry.

The long-decommissioned electricity towers have power cables running every which way – first to the east, before turning north to the mountains and south to Din Talin. Although they haven't worked in a long time, Lottie Armstrong and Eddy Currents spend a fair amount of time tinkering away with them…

Several years ago, the Bastion's Archivist Raul Shen began a project to discover and preserve things from the old world, given the apocalypse's devastating effect on most records of data. These years of constant toil have resulted in the development of a rather large and impressive archaeological dig site, known colloquially as the Excavation.

Unfortunately, bar a few insightful and sometimes useful artefact discoveries, the site has failed to yield any major breakthroughs, dragging the name of its notoriously aloof supervising Archivist through the mud with it. However, if you ask them, they simply haven't dug far enough yet: the same response as any other time that criticism was levelled against the project.

The Border separates civilisation from wilderness. Since the Bastion's very inception, it has existed: a barbed wire perimeter, then an intimidating chain-link fence that flanks the Bastion on all sides. Beyond them lies naught but waste as far as the eye can see, and in the distance, nature's own walls of dense evergreen forest.

Most threats can't be dissuaded by the passive power of a fence alone, however. As such, the Border hosts the Bastion's largest contingent of guards: the revered Border Patrol, headed up by Eris Novak, who keep watch from atop and beyond the safety of the Border, dissuading any zombies or wannabe opportunistic raiders with their mere threatening aura. Oh, and bullets. The job of the border guards is dangerous, but a surefire way to gain respect from most in the Bastion, especially Chris R. Lincoln and his second-in-command, Vice Captain Mars P. Scott. Mars has also found themself in charge of dispatching of any zombies–or soon-to-be-zombies–who find themselves within the Bastion's border.

Beyond the border to the south lies the road down to the formerly shining cities of Din Talin, worn and in disrepair from years of neglect. This road is familiar to you: after all, wherever you came from it's how you arrived at the Bastion in the first place. Expeditions out of camp, already tightly controlled, tend to prefer the cover of trees to the exposure of the tarmac.

The Bastion, in its original form as a substation, was never meant to be a highly developed area. That much is evident by the choking evergreen forest that wreaths it on all sides. A majority of this forest is uncharted land, save for the road proper down to Din Talin and several known paths frequented by regular Food and Supply Patrols, headed up by Shansa Kanel, whether for food or for medical supplies.

Mere rumours about the forest require only one look at the thing itself to put most off from foolish ideas of trying to explore it. Dense trees, thick bushes and uneven terrain make it difficult to traverse with any significant load, while leaving you vulnerable to ambushes by wolves, nomadic raiders and even sometimes zombies. However, some argue in favour of pushing back against the frontier, the untapped riches of the forest tempting them…

To the north, beyond the reach of the thickest parts of the Dark Forest, lies an impressive mountain range visible from even the Bastion… if you climb high enough over the tree line. Given the area's seismic activity and tall, rugged terrain, it was one of the areas hit hardest and thus abandoned in the wake of the earthquakes in 2083. Any infrastructure leading in and out of the area lies in ruin, save for a now-defunct power line connection down to the Bastion.