You are the Hermit, the oldest of your people. Your surface is blackened by the heating light of the sun, long since darkening your transparent membranes. You have lived for a long time indeed, though you feel as though your time on this world is still starting to come to an end. With age comes knowledge, however, and you are thus the most wise of all the people.

Who better to lead them in a place that is almost as old as you? You who witnessed the rise and set of the sun a million times? The one who was there at the beginning, when the first of your kind coalesced together, molecules binding together and creating...

You.

You tell your people to spread out, to search through this part of the city. There are not many of you, though many of them have started to bud and split, something you lost the ability to do centuries ago. The new ones are eager to learn, blinking new colours bright and proud, a stark contrast your faded tones.

[20] As they spread through the elaborate streets of the ruined city, they find the entrance to a large underground building. Spurred on by the pups, they enter cautiously, armed only with their wits and their skills, they look around. Soon one returns to you, flashing colours rapidly with excitement. You follow them back to the underground building. Inside is a large plaza, light shining in through a glass ceiling long shattered. Images for goods long since gone cover the walls, strange products comprised not of collaborative cells, but of metal and stone and wood, much different from your nature. Some of them are still on the shelves, though what purpose would they have for you and your kin?

Large walls of smooth stone, the paint long having flaked from their walls, holds up the heavy ceiling, covered in shattered windows. The rain could pour in here, though it seems that the building has enough drainage to stop it from flooding too easily. There are a number of rooms attached to the main hall that could make for good storage and work areas, but some tunnels lead from the main hall into the darkness of the underground. None of your people dare head into those tunnels, though when they go near, they hear only growling.

What should we do next?
Should we settle here, in this building? Should we explore deeper into the tunnels, into the darkness of the earth? Or should we barricade the tunnels and leave before whatever is down there comes for us?

Or do you have something else in mind?

Tribe: Twelve slime creatures and twenty pups in various stages of maturation. Several are beginning to reach pre-detachment stage.
- The Hermit.
Technology: Nothing but your hands.
Infrastructure: Hollowed Marketplace (subterranean)
Food: A broken barrel of fermented fruit mash, dragged to base camp by foraging slimes. This will not last long.
Resources: Charred brick and shards of ceramic line the streets above the marketplace, and the structure itself may hold valuable tools.
Magic: Dew Point Hieroglyphs
- A set of ritual inscriptions that cause the material they are marked with to rapidly condense water onto its surface, accumulating a thin, permanent membrane of water which can be siphoned for breeding or consumption.
Religion: You do not worship.

settle