Roger's cute folksy Cadian anecdotes

## background on The Islands

Scattered along the northern and northeastern coast of Cadia's North Continent, these rocky islands are actually part of the same geological phenomenon as the mountains which divide the desolate tundra of Konyu province from the desolate plains of Alberr. Hardscrabble farmers and their hardscrabble priests work to raise up subsistence crops and little soldiers, while the real money (such as it is) is made in fishing.

It's not a particularly desirable part of Cadia. It's isolated, with few islands large enough to support more than a single town. The weather is harsh in the winters, though moderate and pleasant in the summers; still, the winter storms can knock out media-feed access, which includes emergency contact with the mainland should the war front move in. Speaking of the war front, things from space that happen to land in the Eastern Sea will naturally tend to emerge around the Islands, so *that's* fun to keep in mind.

However, it is depicted in media as a pleasant rural idyll. People eat the shit out of Anne of the Islands.

## roger's little anecdotes

### the Food Throne incident

So the closest grocery store was the Food Throne on Klayberg Island and one day we're on our way there, right, in my uncle's boat, to go get all the groceries for the month, and about halfway there we see a fucking missile on its way down! So we all duck and pull the tarp over the top of the boat like that's gonna help, eh, and we ride out the shockwave and shit, and at this point we're closer to Klayberg than home and it's my dad's and uncle's duty to go help out so we head in. Everybody in the boats are running signals at each other - no radios, obviously, it got knocked out, but the sailors still do flags for pretty much this exact reason, eh? Nobody knows what's going on, we're all watching for the next strike, we get to the dock and start helping with the evac and all, right, and I'm like eleven so I'm no help but I got my little Whiteshields helmet on and I'm trying to convince my dad I should get to carry one of the boat guns 'cuz I'll be twelve in four months - we spent like four hours ferrying folks over to Redcastle and then two more hours trying to buy flour at the Redcastle Food Throne, and the whole time we're like, where is the rest of the war already?

Turns out somebody back at the battery on the mainland was cleaning the guns and they tilted the barrel to get at it easier to clean and then when they test fired it afterward, it just happened to hit our fuckin' Food Throne

### the first boat incident

There weren't enough kids on Greyfern - that's where I grew up - to fill a troop when I was little, so we had to ride over to Klayberg for Whiteshields meetings. It was fine on school days because we were all in school on Redcastle and there's a ferry between Redcastle and Klayberg so we'd just take that, but on Saturdays we'd need to hitch rides, and fishermen *work* on Saturdays, so it was tough for our parents to coordinate, I guess.

My cousin found a lifeboat wrecked on the shore the spring when we were twelve and we turned it over and it still floated, so we cut ourselves some oars and just skipped the ride we were supposed to take to get to the meeting, because we were cool kids and we were gonna show up in our own boat like grownups, you know? And we'd *been* boating before, and we'd also been to Klayberg all the time, so we thought we knew how long it would take - but we were fucking twelve, you know, we were dumbasses. We were thinking how long it takes in a motorized boat, and we were two kids trying to row.

We were out there for *hours*. They sent a helicopter after us.

### the raccoon war

Over on the mainland they had a real moose problem but the biggest things we usually got on the Islands were raccoons. They'll eat just about anything and they get real fat; when you get cut off from supply lines you can eat them but the meat's hard to preserve because it's so fatty. Also tastes like trash because that's what they eat. Folks my grandpa's age used to be nostalgic for raccoon bacon because they grew up eating it, though.

Anyway one year when I was little the raccoons were an even bigger problem than usual and they started getting into people's air raid shelters and eating all the hard tack and getting belligerent about you pullin' them out again, eh. They sent the Whiteshields around to go clear out all these raccoons from people's air raid shelters and my two neighbors got *bodied*. They were twins, these little ginger kids, and they opened a door and the fattest raccoon you ever saw came busting out like a cruise missile and *laid them out*. We thought we had casualties in our raccoon war.

### the moose incident

One swam over from the mainland once and tried to fuck the tank they keep parked in Redcastle Harbor.