Game: Dredge by scyllallycs.
Location: Trothguard, on the Sea of Angels.
Player Character: Unknown vessel/unknown captain.
Dredge is an exploration-based journaling RPG and was something I immediately thought would be a neat aid to my own worldbuilding - as I could use the game as prompts to create a story for a character that could be part of my world.
Today's card:
Day 15
Some entity in this damned place has a sense of humor that would - and should - get them stabbed in the eye.
I woke today to a warm sun, a slight breeze, and the relaxing play of waves against the side of the ship. A rhythmic and soothing sound that was interrupted well before I'd shaken off my brain-fog in the morning by the chirp of a cricket.
At first, I was puzzled by this sudden companion on my ship. We had - insofar as I could remember - never been close to any form of land or any other thing we could dock with. So, how, I wondered, did a cricket manage to get aboard the ship? Was it always here? Hidden with other crickets somewhere and just quiet for the past 14 days? It seemed unlikely, but I couldn't drive the thought from my head and after several hours I couldn't take it anymore. I had to find it.
I searched the ship top to bottom, every nook and cranny, every box and barrel, everything. The creature was nowhere to be seen, and sometime near the end of my search, I noticed that the sound of it never changed. Always the same volume, always seemingly the same distance away... it was immediately both unsettling and infuriating.
Eventually, I gave up, and spent the rest of the evening before crawling into my bunk morosely looking out over the sea. I must be going mad, I thought, and the signal of this madness was the incessant chirp of a cricket.
No sooner had I resolved myself to my fate, when suddenly the noise stopped. And in its place, an uncomfortable silence punctuated now and then by the creak of the ship.
I fell asleep with the uncomfortable realization that I actually missed the sound.