Icarus: Who Needs Zaph?
Zaph was away this week.
This was suspicious.
Not suspicious in the ordinary sense, where someone has merely failed to attend a Friday night gaming session due to real life, family obligations, fatigue, or the deeply unreasonable expectation that adults occasionally do things other than sit in front of computers pretending to be competent. No. This was suspicious in the CCF sense, where the absence of the group’s tactical sniper coincided perfectly with the arrival of firearms manufacturing, industrial oil processing, experimental logistics, arctic survival planning, and the sort of mission briefing that should legally require a grown-up.
Unfortunately, the grown-up was Myles.
So, naturally, the evening began with therapy.
Agrizoophobia, or Why the Local Wildlife Now Has a Budget Line
Myles had developed what the professionals probably call Agrizoophobia, assuming the professionals are willing to take a phone call that begins with, “So, in this alien survival game, the elephants keep trampling the medic.”
The condition had not appeared spontaneously. It had been carefully cultivated over several weeks by Icarus’s charming local fauna, which had trampled Myles with wild elephants, stung him with scorpions, bitten him with cougars, and, worst of all, subjected him to the laughing mockery of hyenas.
The hyenas were the real tipping point.
There is something deeply personal about being laughed at by a creature that has just decided your ankles are a tapas menu. Wolves bite. Cougars ambush. Scorpions sting. Elephants flatten you in the same businesslike manner that Dave flattens a biome for a house extension. But hyenas? Hyenas editorialise.
Dave, being the group’s Den Mother, house builder, farmer, accidental quartermaster, industrialist, and heavily armed therapist, proposed a cure.
Overwhelming close-combat firepower.
Specifically, submachine guns loaded with incendiary rounds.
Because nothing says “please respect Myles’s personal space” like 400 flaming bullets per minute.
This was, in many ways, a very Dave solution. It was practical, dramatic, expensive, and required turning large portions of the base’s industrial output into portable wildlife discouragement. It also had the added benefit of letting Dave explain gun logistics, resource chains, and ammunition production while Myles stood there quietly calculating how many dead cougars it would take before the nightmares stopped.
Then Myles saw the cost of incendiary bullets.
The flaming vengeance dream died immediately.
Myles baulked at the price, because apparently trauma has limits when measured in sulphur, copper, and the crushing opportunity cost of not being able to make some other absurd machine Dave refuses to explain yet. So the grand plan was downgraded from “rain of cleansing fire” to stock standard 9mm instruments of death.
Less biblical, perhaps, but still emotionally useful.
Project Uzi
The operation was immediately named Project Uzi, because “Project Reasonable Personal Defence Device” lacked poetry and also because no one in this group should ever be allowed near a weapons procurement committee.
We turned half our iron ingots into ammo casings.
Half.
There was a moment — not a long one, but definitely a moment — where the base’s entire industrial future could be heard sobbing softly from inside the smelter. Iron ingots, which could have become structural supports, machine parts, tools, replacement bits, or sensible infrastructure, were instead pressed into tiny metal promises that said, “Dear wildlife, please reconsider your life choices.”
Myles researched various types of bullets, submachine guns, and assault rifles. This raised the obvious question, because even in a group with Craig, some questions remain unavoidable.
Why was Myles getting an Uzi, and Dave getting an M16?
Dave explained the matter with the calm certainty of a man who had spent far too long thinking about Myles’s panic radius.
“Myles, you panic when the wildlife gets close, so you need something designed for close combat – hence the Uzi.”
This was hurtful, accurate, and therefore the worst kind of group feedback.
“Whereas I prefer to stop the critters before they get close – hence the M16.”
Dave then clarified that the M16 used 5.56 rounds and had the stopping power of a wet paper bag, but it was the thought that counted. This was reassuring in the same way being handed a paper umbrella during a meteor strike is reassuring.
The next problem was gunpowder.
In the real world, gunpowder uses three ingredients. In Icarus, however, we use what can only be described as civil war gunpowder with the quality assurance standards of a medieval apothecary having a difficult morning. It requires only sulphur and charcoal, which are then ground together in the same mortar and pestle we use to make absolutely everything else.
Without cleaning it.
Because in space, no one cares if your gun explodes in your hand.
Myles went to the closest sulphur mine and noted there was no extractor. This was a sensible observation made by a responsible adult. Myles then returned to Winchester to get an extractor, because planning and logistics are the difference between civilisation and Craig.
Myles arrived back at the site to find there was, in fact, already an extractor.
It just had no fuel.
This is a special category of Icarus disappointment. Not the clean failure of “we forgot the machine,” nor the dramatic failure of “Craig has led the bears home again,” but the banal administrative failure of “the machine was present and merely starving quietly in the wilderness.”
So Myles refuelled it.
It had no resources to collect.
Of course it didn’t.
Having achieved one complete loop of logistical futility, Myles then travelled to our other sulphur mine, the one a long way south, where it contained only 37 sulphur. This strongly suggested that Dave had forgotten to refuel it the last time he was there, which is the kind of conclusion one reaches carefully, scientifically, and with a small note in the mental filing cabinet labelled “Things to Bring Up Later When Dave Mentions Myles Forgetting Something.”
Myles also found a sulphur mine doing nothing at the lakehouse, so he installed a mine there as well.
We now had three sulphur mines running.
This was either strategic redundancy or the opening phase of a resource network so convoluted it would eventually require its own town planner and a moral inquiry.
Myles then inspected the charcoal cupboard.
The situation was grim.
We were down to 10,000 charcoal.
To most people, 10,000 charcoal would represent an obscene quantity of partially burned tree. To CCF, it was a crisis. A cupboard containing only 10,000 charcoal is not a cupboard. It is a warning sign. It says civilisation is three mammoth attacks away from reverting to pointed sticks and harsh language.
So Myles put more wood in the fireplace and started the firepits.
The alternative was Craig burning down a forest with a flamethrower, which was emotionally satisfying but economically inferior. A tree will produce about 600 wood, which can then be turned into 600 charcoal. Burn the tree down, however, and you only get a couple of hundred charcoal, plus Craig standing nearby with an expression that suggests the scientific method has gone exactly as planned.
Meanwhile, Dave headed north to perform maintenance on our platinum, iron, and titanium mines. This involved checking the waterwheels and collecting the resources, because Dave’s industrial empire does not run on dreams. It runs on rotating infrastructure, suspiciously heavy bags, and his absolute refusal to let a resource node live in peace.
Back at Winchester, Myles made ammo casings, gunpowder, titanium plates, and finally a submachine gun with 9mm rounds.
For Dave, Myles made an assault rifle with the previously mentioned pissant 5.56 rounds.
The revolution had arrived.
It had mediocre stopping power, but it had arrived.
Oils Ain’t Oils
While the firearms program lurched into existence, Dave continued feeding rotting plants and dead fish into the biofuel thingies to turn them into oil.
This is one of those sentences that sounds appalling until one remembers it is also the foundation of our current industrial base.
We had 125 litres of oil, which meant the industrial complex was doing its thing. Its thing, apparently, was transforming old salad and deceased aquatic life into the black blood of progress. All we needed was 30 more litres and we could make a Polymerizer.
No one was entirely sure why we needed a Polymerizer.
This is common with Dave.
Dave does not explain industrial ambitions early. He simply stares into a crafting tree with the expression of a man receiving prophecy. Then, three hours later, everyone discovers that the base now contains an electrical substation, a masonry wing, and a machine that requires five different fluids to produce a component whose purpose remains classified.
Eventually, the oil target was reached.
Myles researched the Polymerizer, built it, installed it, wired it up, and added an advanced battery pack so it could churn out plastic 24/7.
Dave refused to say why we needed plastic.
This was not comforting.
Plastic, in Dave’s hands, is never just plastic. It is a prelude. It is the opening tremor before the mountain starts making machinery noises. Somewhere in Dave’s head, a spreadsheet had smiled.
Soy – The Wonder Plant
Dave then discovered that soybeans were not merely edible, profitable, and annoyingly numerous. They could also make milk.
This was already alarming.
Then he discovered they could be used to make vegetable oil.
This was worse.
Vegetable oil, it turned out, was a key ingredient for guns.
The soybeans had crossed a line.
Once a crop can participate in both breakfast and ammunition, it ceases to be agriculture and becomes logistics. One moment it is humble soy. The next, it is part of an arms supply chain. This is how empires begin: not with a flag, but with Dave saying, “Actually, the beans have strategic value.”
It should be noted that you can even eat soybeans if desperate.
Addendum: Dave is never that desperate.
Coffee Cropping
Dave asked Craig to water the plants.
Craig noted that he was perfectly capable of managing menial farm tasks and did not need to be micro-managed by Dave.
This was a bold statement.
A risky statement.
A statement that immediately filed paperwork with fate.
Ten minutes later, Dave observed that the plants had still not been watered. This prompted much mockery from both Myles and Dave regarding Craig’s ability to do menial work on time.
Craig, who operates best when the task involves jumping over something, falling off something, dismantling something structurally necessary, or alerting fauna to our location, had apparently found watering plants beneath him.
This did not stop him from escalating the operation.
Craig installed lights in the coffee farm so he could work 24/7 as slave labour for Dave.
It was unclear whether this was an act of contrition, rebellion, or Stockholm syndrome. The important thing was that the coffee farm now had lighting, and Dave’s agricultural-industrial complex had acquired a night shift.
Then came a wonder of wonders.
Craig put the coffee in bags packaged for delivery to the vendor.
Correctly.
This was such a rare moment of functional task completion that the group did not speak too loudly in case it frightened the event and caused it to revert into normal Craig behaviour. We will not even mention the bag of soybeans.
Tonight’s coffee production yielded 665 Ren.
Clearly, the Icarus developers have a serious caffeine addiction, and Dave spends far too much time on spreadsheets optimising production. There are entire historical economies less thoroughly analysed than Dave’s coffee pipeline. Somewhere, an accountant looked at Dave’s farm and whispered, “Too far.”
Craig’s Unauthorised Projects
While Craig was farming, Myles pointed out that animals were still crossing the causeway.
This was a problem.
The causeway had once been a triumph of landscape domination. It allowed safe crossing, efficient travel, and, apparently, free animal transit. Nature had interpreted it not as infrastructure but as an invitation.
Craig ran over to check.
“It’s only a rabbit,” he noted.
Dave was not reassured.
“Rabbits eat crops, and attract wolves,” Dave replied.
This is exactly the kind of sentence that sounds ridiculous until Icarus proves it true. In Icarus, all ecological relationships lead eventually to wolves. Rabbits attract wolves. Noise attracts wolves. Silence attracts wolves. Existing, in a slightly wolf-adjacent way, attracts wolves.
Myles suggested that Craig do something about it.
The obvious Dave solution was to do some research, set up an automated turret, wire that up to the grid, give it plenty of ammo, and let it deal with the animals. As a side benefit, a project like that would generate a lot of XP.
This is how Dave thinks.
A rabbit crosses a bridge; Dave designs a powered defensive perimeter.
The Craig solution was simpler.
Remove the causeway.
This was not what Dave wanted.
Dave was unhappy with low-tech solutions and complained that he now had to ride all the way around the lake to get home. It is difficult to overstate how tragic this was for Dave, a man who had just advocated researching and powering a turret to murder rabbits rather than accept a slightly longer commute.
It is like Craig just cannot win sometimes.
Strangely, the huge amount of stone used in the construction of the causeway had vanished.
Shortly thereafter, Craig complained that he was dead.
Coincidence?
We think not.
Myles performed the usual Craig rescue, because somewhere in the role description for “Base Support & Medic” there is apparently a clause reading, “Recover Craig from foreseeable consequences.”
This was followed by a trip to the vendor to sell our coffee production, because even after unauthorised civil engineering and probable stone-related mortality, capitalism waits for no man.
The Arctic Trip, or Dave Invents Coffee and Myles Gets a New Phobia
With the guns made, the farm running well, the oil production doing whatever dark industrial work Dave had planned for it, and the Polymerizer sitting there producing mystery plastic for reasons Dave refused to reveal, we decided it was time to do an actual operation.
An operation.
A job.
One of those things the people in space send you down to do, presumably because they enjoy watching ground crews discover preventable problems in real time.
Myles dialled up an operation to unlock a path to the Arctic.
The instructions were clear: travel to the site marked on the map, get the mining equipment that had been dropped from space, open a pass to the Arctic zone, and explore the new zone.
Easy peasy.
A mission we could do while Zaph was asleep.
This assumption should have been written on a plaque and mounted above the door of Bad Ideas Hall.
Dave noted that hypothermia could be a problem.
This was useful. This was sensible. This was exactly the sort of thought that occurs before a group of people ride zebras into snow country with guns and the collective planning discipline of a pirate council.
Everyone made sure they had heated bandages.
Dave then remembered that water canteens helped cool you. This was great in the desert, but perhaps not ideal for an Arctic trip unless the plan was to become a decorative corpse. Hot drinks, therefore, seemed wise.
So Dave went to the stove.
The stove had been installed years ago.
It had never actually been used.
This is a perfect example of CCF base design. We possess entire rooms full of machines built because one day we might need them. Some machines sit quietly for months, awaiting their moment. Others hum ominously despite no one understanding what they do. The stove, dusty and neglected, had finally received its call to greatness.
Dave added coal.
Dave’s eyes lit up at the plethora of hot beverage options.
Hot chocolate.
Tea.
Coffee.
“Hey,” Dave yelled, “we can make coffee.”
This produced an immediate crisis.
Do we sell the coffee beans for money, or make life-saving coffee for an arctic mission?
Dave thought.
Dave agonised.
Dave attempted fraud.
He tried to cheat by using coffee seeds instead of beans, but the stove cannot be fooled. The stove, despite years of neglect, possessed the moral clarity of a customs officer and the patience of a disappointed teacher. Seeds are not beans. Beans make coffee. Seeds make Dave sad.
Finally, he gave in and made a shiny new thermos, because there is no point in making hot coffee if it does not stay hot.
Myles jumped the queue by putting his canteen in the first slot, thus stealing the first coffee run.
Dave was not impressed.
Craig, excited at the idea of hot beverages, ordered a shiny new canteen from space.
Thankfully, they do not charge for delivery.
Finally, we reached that sacred time of night where we spent an hour preparing for a trip into untamed territory, the great unknown, the blank edge of the map, the place where sensible people take inventory and idiots say, “It’ll be fine.”
We had done this so many times before that we had it down to an art form.
The process involves Myles going through the storage cupboard and weighing the pros and cons of each piece of equipment while everyone else slowly loses the will to live.
On the approved list:
Beds, campfire, one MCX furnace.
Hedgehogs.
Prebuilt supplies to make a hut.
Wood, charcoal, food.
Orbital exchange board.
Beacon.
Guns and ammunition.
A shiny new set of decent armour for Myles from the space station.
Mounts, meaning zebras, because apparently hearty desert transportation was exactly what the Arctic demanded.
On the reject list:
Dehumidifier.
Portable power generator with biofuel.
Lights.
Wiring tool.
Firepit.
This list would later become important.
Not in the way lists are supposed to become important, where the items you pack help you, and the items you reject are unnecessary. More in the CCF way, where the rejected items come back like ghosts in a Greek tragedy, each wearing a nametag that says “Myles said no.”
We set off like famous adventurers of old.
Scott.
Shackleton.
Oates.
Yup, just like them. So much like them, in fact, that we considered renaming our characters, but could not agree who would be Hall & Oates.
We checked the map. Our target location was clearly marked.
The route appeared simple. Ride south a bit, head through the pass, enter the snowy region, and ride a long way through the snow to the target location.
Expected challenges: polar bears and bad weather.
This was a pleasingly short list.
Icarus immediately expanded it.
As soon as we entered the snow, we encountered unexpected challenges: snow cougars and snow wolves, but not a single polar bear. We fled on our zebras, whose dainty hooves were designed exactly not for these conditions, straight into a giant scorpion ambush.
It was like the wolves had planned it.
This is the sort of thing that sounds paranoid unless one has played Icarus. The wolves do not merely chase. They coordinate. They herd. They flank. They attend seminars. Somewhere, deep in the snow, a wolf with a clipboard was ticking off “drive idiots toward scorpions” as a successful training exercise.
And these were not modest scorpions.
These were giant scorpions the size of ponies.
In the Arctic.
Giant scorpions.
In snow.
There are design decisions, and then there is someone at RocketWerkz looking at a frozen biome and saying, “You know what this needs? Venomous armoured nightmares with pincers.”
Luckily, Dave was riding ahead pretending to be Zaph, so we managed to avoid the scorpion trap.
This was a little unsettling. Dave being tactical is not unheard of, but Dave being Zaph-adjacent suggested either character growth or a temporary tear in the fabric of group identity.
Then Myles saw something.
“Look out for that nest,” Myles yelled as he rode past Dave, gesticulating in sheer terror.
“What nest?” asked Dave, looking around.
“The blue one on the ground,” yelled Myles, pointing.
This was like waving a red flag to a bull, assuming the bull was Dave and the red flag was a possibly dangerous alien object that needed poking.
Dave rode over to get a better look.
“This one?” he asked, pointing at the ground.
“Yes,” Myles responded, kicking Patch to make him go faster.
“This oxite deposit?” Dave queried, kicking it with his foot.
There was a pause.
Then Dave said, “Oh noes, quick flee before the scary oxygen overwhelms us.”
Dave burst into laughter.
Even Stripes was amused.
There was dead silence from Myles.
Thus began Myles’s newly developed Petraphobia, treated immediately as a running joke by true friends, the sort of friends who do not help you up so much as write your new weakness on the group whiteboard in permanent marker.
To placate Myles, we added oxite deposits to our list of things to avoid in the Arctic.
The list now read:
Polar bears.
Wolves.
Giant scorpions.
Oxite.
Bad weather.
Hypothermia.
It was a good list. It had range. It covered both genuine threats and embarrassing misunderstandings.
We made an impromptu weather stop when the region decided that being hunted by incorrectly placed scorpions was not enough. Craig repaired a small wooden hut so we could all huddle around two campfires to avoid a blizzard.
The zebras stood outside in the snow.
We were very surprised to find them still alive after the storm passed.
This says a great deal about Icarus animal husbandry. The humans require heated bandages, coffee, shelter, tactical planning, and emergency firepits. The zebras stand in a blizzard looking vaguely annoyed, then continue on as if nothing happened.
Finally, having shrugged off the worst the region could throw at us — giant scorpions, blizzards, oxite — we arrived at the target location.
And there it was.
The intel was good.
A landslide had blocked the pass from the river region to the Arctic region.
“Oh Snap,” Dave thought.
Or possibly said. With Dave it can be hard to tell, because the emotional range between “interesting construction opportunity” and “catastrophic planning failure” is narrow but intense.
Craig looked around.
“Why are we here?” asked Craig.
“It’s our mission,” explained Myles. “We need to reopen the pass so we can explore the arctic region.”
Craig looked around again.
“This arctic region, the one we are standing in?” queried Craig.
Dave, Myles, Stripes, and Patch shared a look.
This was not a small administrative wrinkle.
This was a full mission-shaped farce.
We had travelled through the Arctic in order to unlock access to the Arctic.
Perhaps, if we talked fast enough, we could confuse Craig and cover up the complete fiasco this mission had just become.
“All we need is the equipment that was dropped, to open this pass, then we can go home to a nice warm beverage,” Myles said.
“Where is the equipment?” asked Craig.
Dave was puzzled.
Who had kidnapped Craig and replaced him with a Craig that asked the questions Zaph would normally ask?
Dave looked at the map.
“It’s just over here,” he noted, pointing at the map.
“Where exactly is that?” Craig asked.
“On the other side of this rockfall,” Dave responded, as the mission all fell apart.
There are moments in every expedition where the air changes. The light dims. The music stops. Somewhere, a narrator clears his throat and prepares to describe an avoidable disaster.
Craig, suddenly and horrifyingly lucid, summarised the situation.
“So, just so I am clear, we need to dig through this rockfall to recover mining equipment that would let us dig a tunnel through this rockfall?”
“Yes,” Myles replied.
Craig considered this.
“Ok, I am in, let’s do this,” said Craig.
And suddenly everything was right with the universe again.
Because that is Craig. Present him with a tactical contradiction, a logistical absurdity, and a circular dependency with rocks in it, and the man does not complain. He does not seek governance. He does not ask whether the mission designers had been drinking. He simply hears the distant sound of chaos calling his name and begins warming up.
“Plan B,” said Myles, studying the map. “We head north till we get out of the snow, head west to the river, ride south to get the equipment, then blow a hole in the wall, and head home.”
So we did that.
Mostly.
Halfway there, the weather turned, and we hid in a cave. Luckily, we had prepared for this. Myles got out the campfire, the forge, and the beds, and we happily mined.
Dave set up the dehumidifier when Myles wasn’t looking.
The dehumidifier.
From the reject list.
It appeared quietly, like contraband at a school camp.
Myles did not approve it. Dave had packed it anyway. This was not rebellion, exactly. It was Dave. Dave hears “we don’t need that” and translates it as “pack it in case Myles is wrong but do not mention it until the evidence becomes hilarious.”
We eventually reached the location for the equipment.
Of course, it was halfway up a mountain.
Of course it was.
With Zaph taking the night off, we had to rely on Craig’s ramp-building, mountain-scaling skills to recover the laser drill.
This sentence should cause concern in any experienced reader.
Craig.
Ramp-building.
Mountain-scaling.
Laser drill.
Any one of those ingredients could ruin an evening. Combined, they should have produced a civil defence alert.
And wait for it…
Surprisingly, nothing went wrong.
At this point we had to wonder whether Zaph was operating Craig by remote control.
The drill was recovered.
The ramp did not collapse.
Craig did not fall into the geology.
No one was killed by a physics problem wearing a Craig mask.
This was deeply unnatural.
We returned to the rockfall and set up the laser drill in the marked location. The mission voiceover informed us that we had been on Icarus long enough that it was sure we would have come prepared with a power supply.
Dave glared at Myles.
“A power supply, that power supply you told me NOT to pack, you know the one in the cupboard.”
Myles looked sheepish.
“I guess I need to ride all the way back to Winchester, then.”
Dave did not let him suffer for long.
“As amusing as that would be, all I hear is blah blah blah when you are prepping,” responded Dave, pulling out the portable generator from Stripes’ pack. “Now if you could just wire this up, and put fuel in.”
Myles looked even more sheepish.
“I left the wiring tool back at Winchester, so I guess I have to go back for a tool and fuel.”
Dave reached into the depths of Stripes’ pack again, which by now appeared less like a mount inventory and more like a travelling hardware store with stripes.
“As amusing as that would be … sometimes I just have to do everything myself …” muttered Dave, pulling out the wiring tool and fuel.
The wiring tool.
The fuel.
Also from the rejected logistical shadow realm.
At this stage, Myles’s carefully curated mission list had suffered significant reputational damage. The approved items were present, yes, but the mission had been saved by the exact items Myles had specifically excluded. Somewhere in the distance, Zaph’s absence grew louder.
“Wait – I got this next bit,” said Myles, hoping to reclaim his reputation. “I packed hedgehogs for when the animals attack.”
This was true.
Myles had packed hedgehogs.
Not the small adorable kind, although given Icarus’s hostility, those would probably explode. These were defensive spikes, proper medieval anti-animal furniture designed to discourage anything charging through the wrong place.
Myles deployed three rows of hedgehogs between the laser drill and the pass behind us.
Craig moved the zebras to a safer spot and set up a fence, again playing Zaph’s role.
This was becoming uncomfortable. Craig was acting responsibly. Dave was tactically prepared. Myles had forgotten key equipment. Zaph was absent. The group roles had started spinning like a badly installed ceiling fan.
While we prepared, wolves and other animals wandered up to see what we were doing, so we killed and butchered them.
Craig set up the firepit so we could cook the meat.
Yes.
The firepit from the do not bring list.
At this point the reject list had become less of a list and more of a prophecy.
Finally, we were ready.
Dave flipped the switch.
The generator thumped into life.
The laser powered up.
The beam hit the rockfall and blasted a hole through the obstruction with all the subtlety of a corporate memo titled “Minor Terrain Adjustment.”
As expected, animals attacked.
“I am redeemed,” Myles cheered.
This was premature.
Because the animals did not attack from the rear.
They did not charge into the carefully deployed rows of hedgehogs.
They did not follow the lovely defensive script Myles had prepared for them.
Instead, we were attacked by three mammoths from the front, through the new hole.
The hedgehogs, meanwhile, stood proudly behind us, protecting us from the animals that never turned up.
So the jury is still out.
Is Myles redeemed?
The defence argues that Myles correctly predicted animal attack.
The prosecution notes that Myles defended the wrong direction.
The court reserves judgment, pending further mammoth-related evidence.
What followed was a great deal of gunfire.
A great deal.
Thank the powers that be for SMGs and assault rifles.
The submachine gun proved deeply therapeutic. The M16, despite its pissant 5.56 rounds, contributed to the group’s overall philosophy of “shoot the problem until it stops having opinions.”
Three mammoths later, eight wolves later, and after the required field work of skinning, cooking, and loading tusks onto the zebras, Myles declared the mission a success.
The voiceover cut in.
Now that we had cleared a path, it would be ever so grateful if we could explore the Arctic area for exotics.
We looked at the map.
The area to explore was clearly marked.
It was an area we had already ridden through.
We had ridden through the snow to get to a drill, to open a path to a region we already knew about, so that we could then explore an area we had already travelled through to reach the equipment that opened the path.
Yep.
Another successful mission brought to you by Myles and his motley crew.
It was getting late, so for once, sensibility won. We turned around, rode to a nearby lake, set up a small hut, deployed beds and a fire, and logged for the night.
This is what victory looks like in Icarus: exhausted men, traumatised zebras, mammoth tusks in the luggage, and a small wooden hut beside a frozen lake while the mission system quietly pretends everything made sense.
Tonight’s Campfire Song
Tonight’s campfire song was originally going to be “Bohemian Rhapsody,” sung by Myles.
The legal department, which consists mostly of common sense wearing a cheap wig, has advised that we instead perform an original CCF campfire lament that sounds like four idiots freezing beside a lake after shooting mammoths for shareholders.
Snow Biome Operetta for Absent Snipers
Zaph, you missed the mammoth bit,
Myles had brought a brand-new gun,
Dave brought half the shed for fun,
Craig became the sensible one,
Which frankly made us stare.
Zaph, the rocks were very blue,
Myles mistook them for a nest,
Dave then laughed and did his best,
To make the oxygen seem cursed,
And now oxite’s on the danger list.
Snow wolves came from stage left,
Scorpions waited stage right,
Zebras questioned every choice,
And no one packed light.
Dave had fuel, Dave had wire,
Dave had gadgets marked “do not require,”
Myles had hedgehogs facing backwards,
Craig had fences, meat, and fire.
Then the laser carved the mountain,
Then the mammoths thundered through,
Myles cried out “redemption!”
But the spikes had missed their cue.
Run away from the oxite,
Laugh until the blizzard clears,
Warm your hands on bad decisions,
Tell Zaph he should have been here.
Did We Learn or Achieve Anything This Week?
We learnt that no one listens to Myles when he is making a list for the mission.
This is not strictly new information, but the evidence base has expanded. A portable generator, biofuel, a wiring tool, a dehumidifier, and a firepit all appeared after being rejected. Every single one improved the situation. This does not look good for the list.
We learnt that if you cure Myles’s phobia, he just develops a new one.
Agrizoophobia was treated with an Uzi. Petraphobia was born from an oxite deposit. At this rate, the only safe long-term strategy is to issue Myles a firearm, a thermos of coffee, and a laminated card reading: “Not everything blue is trying to kill you, although on Icarus it is understandable that you checked.”
We learnt that we didn’t need electric lights.
This was the only thing Myles got right on the exclude list.
Naturally, no one will remember this next week.
Last week, we said to tune in this week to see if Dave’s new oil obsession had a purpose.
It is still not clear.
There is now a Polymerizer, an advanced battery pack, and plastic production running 24/7. Dave still refuses to say why. This can only mean one of three things: vehicles, weapons, infrastructure, or something worse than all three because Dave found it in the tech tree and it had numbers beside it.
Achievements Unlocked
Dave achieved: Save the Day
Pack the quintessential piece of equipment you were ordered to leave behind.
Myles achieved: SNAFU
Situation normal, all f#$ked up.
Craig achieved: Understudy
Be Zaph.
Tune In Next Week
Tune in next week to see if Craig reverts to normal when Zaph returns.
Tune in next week to see if Myles can redeem his op planning reputation.
Tune in next week to see if Dave can stop cracking oxite jokes at Myles’s expense.
He cannot.
But hope, like a zebra in a blizzard, refuses to die.
