Session music: Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier – Corb Lund.

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The team slowly advances along the winding road that leads up the hill toward the village. The fog grows thicker, shrouding the details of their surroundings, but what they can see is desolate. As the group once saw in the forest south of Ponikla, and as the expedition team later encountered in a deserted section of Radomsko, the village’s outskirts are in a state of decay far more advanced than the date would suggest. The asphalt of the road is cracked and buckled, and Leks’ bearers frequently have to detour around craters and potholes that would wreck the handcart. The few vehicles alongside the road sit on their steel rims, the rubber of their tires cracked and dry-rotted. Buildings, too, slump under their own weight, their load-bearing members bent or splintered.

There are bodies everywhere, too – those of the human victims of the nerve agent attack, as well as those of the scavengers who came to feed upon them. Many are already picked clean or rotted down to the bone.

Leks calls a halt. The hill’s crest is finally visible a few hundred meters ahead. A tight cluster of buildings marks the village’s center. He confers with Red and puts out flankers. Miko and Arkadi move off the road to the north; Minka and Alexei take the south. Red and Magda stay formed up on Leks’ handcart, while Zenobia and Jablonski form the rear guard.

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Back at the eastern approach to the hilltop village, the combined group of the PCs and the Rawa Mazowiecka militia circles up about four kilometers away. Their first move is to send in a trio of motorcycle scouts. Through their binoculars, they can see the point, about 700 to 800 meters away, at which the three riders start losing cohesion, then all sense of direction.

The group waits for the riders to regain their sense of direction and return. Then Arkadi and Alexei move in on foot. The probe confirms Arkadi’s theory of the previous day: whatever is interfering with vehicles and other machinery isn’t having a noticeable effect on the ability of personnel on foot to move and navigate.

Red, Leks, and Arkadi confer with Captain Majewski. The PCs will mount the initial assault on the village, augmented by three of Majewski’s troops. Sergeant Jablonski and two of his cousins volunteer for the detail.

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Magda stares at the map. She knows what it means – though she’d lost the signal for a moment – but she now has no idea where she is on it. None of what she’s seeing lines up with any landmarks in her field of view. “I… I don’t know,” she whispers.

Behind the OT-64’s wheel, Alexei shakes his head, fighting off a wave of fatigue. A stray ray of sunlight pierces the incoming rain clouds. It’s lower in the sky than it should be. He frowns and looks at the APC’s fuel gauge. The needle is well below a half-tank. He doesn’t remember driving that much. No one in the vehicle can remember eating lunch, nor the last time they hydrated.

Red squeezes his forehead against his pounding headache. “I really don’t want to do this, but I’m going to have to bluescreen all of these people.” The blank expressions around him remind him that he’s the only one present who knows what a Windows 95 is. He sighs, sets his carbine inside the Hilux’s cab, unbuckles his pistol belt, and gestures for Magda to do the same and join him.

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“We’re getting pretty far afield, and this is getting weirder. I want more firepower,” Red declares. He cranks up the Hilux’s radio and calls back to Ponika. The signal is attenuated and static-laden, but he’s eventually able to reach Alexei. The East German teenager whistles up Arkadi and Miko and heads north in the team’s OT-64. It’s about a three-hour trip. By the time the reinforcements link up, there’s maybe an hour remaining before sunset.

The team decides to make the best possible use of their remaining light. They shuffle vehicle assignments and push on, following the tracks, which are still more-or-less straight to the north-northwest. As the sun dips below the western horizon, Magda calls a halt. She pulls the precious set of night-vision goggles out of her pack and heads for high ground. After a few minutes of careful scanning, she trots back down the hill. “I’m not going to be able to track in this. I can’t see any campfires. There’s some sky-glow to the west, but that looks more like a larger community. And there’s fog coming in from the north.”

“The north?” Minka asks sharply. At Magda’s nod, she frowns. “The river is to the south.”

Red scratches his beard. “Supernatural fuckery aside, fog is usually caused by cold air. Or,” he looks at Minka, “it could be supernatural fuckery.”

“Or supernatural fuckery could be causing cold air,” Zenobia snarks.

“Farmhouse?” ventures Magda.

“Farmhouse,” Minka hisses emphatically.

“Farmhouse,” Red concurs.

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“‘Horse eaters,'” Minka quotes in a cold, flat voice. Her knuckles whiten on the haft of her hammer. Her eyes are unfocused. She takes a step toward the northwest. Another.

Leks moves in front of her. Stares her down. “We don’t do these things alone.”

Minka breathes deep and refocuses on Leks. “Fine. But I’m going to do this thing. I will crush every last one of them if they ate my fucking horse! I don’t even care what it is! I will kill them!”

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The morning after Leks’ journey to the Bracia Wilkow, the Estonian steps out of his lodging to see Stanislaw walking up the south road to Ponikla. The teenager is clearly exhausted. Under the lingering effects of whatever Filip shared with him, Leks can clearly see – and smell – what Stanislaw has been up to. Leks grins to himself and falls into step alongside Stanislaw. “Welcome back! Long night?”

“Um.” Stanislaw flushes. “Uh, yes. Yeah.”

“You look tired.” Leks nudges his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get some breakfast in you.” He steers the younger man toward the hostel-turned-town-hall.

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It’s been a few weeks since the team has had much of a chance to just sit down and talk. Constant rain has made the harvest harder, and the week-long diversion to organize the allied salvage operation at the wrecked train didn’t help matters. The crowd filters into the hostel’s common room, where Magda and her staff of pre-teens and elders have laid out the usual communal meal for sixty to eighty people.

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A brief update on Kaserne on the Borderlands:

With the expedition team’s arrival in Czestochowa, I’m shifting the campaign’s focus back to Ponikla for a while. This will entail a time shift. When we last saw the Ponikla-based PCs on screen, it was early September 2000 in-game… and July 2023 in meatspace.

To maintain a loose semblance of continuity, I’m picking up in Ponikla in early October. In the weeks since the expedition left, the village has been busy salvaging the train wreck, bringing in the harvest, training the seeds of a local militia, and pursuing various infrastructure projects (wind and micro hydro power, upgrades to Red’s medical clinic, establishing radio broadcast capability).

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My longer-term intent for the campaign is to get the Ponikla team caught up to the expedition team in the timeline before shifting focus again. As readers familiar with the first-edition canon may have inferred, my plan for the expedition team is to follow them through The Free City of Krakow and Pirates of the Vistula, with the two PC groups hopefully reuniting for The Ruins of Warsaw. We’ll see how far we get… and, with scheduling issues for nine adults, how many years it takes us.

And then, the road. Mud and gravel, winding up into the hills southwest of Czestochowa.

Pettimore knows this land. The echoes of Appalachian mining country run in these valleys. The reflections of the last time he came here flicker before his eyes. He taps Cat on the shoulder, takes point, leads off. The rest of the team follows, weapons pointed out. Pettimore isn’t concerned. The danger is ahead, not around.

And then, the mine.

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