The Quiet Folk
[Time Skip: Year 3]
You think it’s just you. You hate yourself for being gullible, for being childish, in the way that you tend to trust what people say. Everyone else out there seems to be able to tell the difference. Makes it like a punch in the guts when you find out what’s true ain’t what you know. Sometimes you end up wondering if you’re the only one who believes like that.
It’s a funny thing for a newspaper man to not know when people are lying. But what does a newspaper man care much, so long as the paper sells? Even if he’s wrong, the headline the next day can declare yesterday’s informant lying scum, and the news continues on with a life of it’s own... the newspaper man just has to hold on, really.
I didn’t mean to start a paper, honest. I just wrote down what people told me so I wouldn’t forget. I wrote down what happened to me, so I wouldn’t forget that, either. One of the first things people ask an orphan is “Where didja come from?” and only the youngest ones don’t have an answer. Everyone else has a story. A place they lived, the people who were there. Except me. I was one of the oldest ones at the orphanage, and hadn’t been there all that long, I don’t think. Where did I come from? Home. Home is where I came from. But I didn’t know where that was, or who my parents were, or who had been taking care of me before I came to the orphanage, or hell, how I learned to read n write. It was just... home... somewhere, out there, somewhere not-here in the great wild wastes. My story was blank, so I started writing it all down. It wasn’t until people started to ask to read my notes enough that I thought I’d put them together in a paper.
Most people don’t expect me to be to as quiet as I am when they meet me. I don’t mean to be quiet. It’s just that next to the others, my voice is softer, my words fewer. I don’t mind, it means people sometimes forget I’m there and I get a chance to watch them, hear them, without all the extra... stuff. People act different, talk different, when they don’t think you’re paying attention. It’s not that they mean to. Just people bein people, I suppose.
Imagine my surprise to find others like me. Not that forget, so much, but that are quiet and tend to believe you more often than not. If you’ve got a moment, I’ll tell you how I found ‘em...
When Bravo went up in the acrid stormcloud of heat and death during Hiway Rob’s Stampede, everyone left, cause there really wasn’t much left to call a place. I left with the rest, staying with Ramguard at Castle Falken for a time. They’re a rambunctious, lively crew, used to protect Tent City in Bravo-That-Was. Lion-Hearted folk, but in need of doctors, crafters, and the like to make their Castle survive and thrive. I tried to go out in recruitment, hit up Doc Ezra’s Black Diamond Trading Company to beat feet along the supply lines. We’d hit up the different settlements and I’d grab what news here and there I could to help get people to places that needed them. I consider Doc Ezra a friend, he’s decidedly been proven the most honest and trustworthy man in Bravo-That-Was, as dangerous a title as that may be to hold. Lucky for someone like me to have met up with him when things were quieter, I think. Not many one can trust out there like that.
Anyhow. When a newspaper man gets wind of homesteads cropping up in what was a smoking, irradiated crater not a year before, he tends to want to get evidence of it with his own eyes. But by jove, even hearing of it wasn’t enough to prepare me for the sight. People were already working the land, trying to coax blasted earth to bring forth bounty. And they were succeeding. How, I’ll never quite know. Sam and Jed Lovelace were the first couple I came across, their house along the outskirts of the settlement. They invited me in, let me stay a few days while I ranged the place, taking in all the changes these people had wrought. They had come from all over, converging together here. They go by the family name Lovelace, and they’re the Quiet Folk. And they were like me. They were all like me, with the believing... and the quiet. It’s the damnedest thing.