There are many sensible reasons to build a house on a lake. Scenic views, convenient fishing, a pleasant breeze, the opportunity to say things like “lake house” in a tone normally reserved for real estate brochures and people who own boat shoes.
We, naturally, had built ours on a lake because it contained hidden treasure.
Or at least that was the rumour, and in our group a rumour only needs to survive three seconds of Dave saying it over breakfast before becoming an expedition, a construction project, and eventually a workplace safety incident. As rumour had it, somewhere beneath the placid waters of our charming little lake was the entrance to a cave of mystery. This cave, being a proper cave of mystery, had not bothered with signposting, safety railings, or a tourist kiosk. It was, however, guarded by piranhas, because Icarus is the sort of game where even the decorative puddles have opinions about your mortality.
All it took was a few hints dropped by Dave over breakfast and the gang were all set to go.
Apart from Zaph, who was sleeping in.
This was fine. Zaph approaches wilderness adventure with the efficiency of a professional assassin and the social engagement of a cat deciding whether the room deserves his presence. If there was shooting to be done later, he would appear, possibly already aiming.
Myles, as base support, medic, quartermaster, mapmaker, and reluctant adult in the room, made sure everyone had rope, biofuel lamps that stay on underwater, and at least the faintest theoretical chance of not drowning in a lake full of bitey fish. With the expedition thus equipped to a standard that could generously be described as “better than Craig’s usual,” off we went for a swim in the lake.
For the next 20 minutes we perused the lake looking for a cave opening. “Perused” here means flailing around underwater with lamps, ropes, and diminishing patience while the local piranhas treated us like a buffet that had foolishly delivered itself.
The water turned red with our blood.
Myles turned red with frustration.
Craig turned annoyingly on Dave, questioning his unnamed sources and declaring the cave to be another of Dave’s fairy tales, like the alleged Gold Dragon incident. The Gold Dragon incident, to this day, occupies a special place in group folklore: somewhere between “unverified sighting,” “deep lore,” and “Dave has been at the alchemical reagents again.”
Dave, having apparently decided that vindication could wait but construction could not, returned to the house to see how his secret stone foundation project was going. Craig, who had lost faith in aquatic archaeology and possibly the very concept of evidence, left the lake to burn down some trees.
Myles, on the verge of giving up, finally found the entrance.
Dave was vindicated.
This caused a disturbance in the natural order. Somewhere, a piranha paused mid-bite and reconsidered its worldview.
The spelunking expedition was on.
Sir Stripes stayed home. When asked if he wanted to go caving, he politely declined, indicating he would rather eat the slop in the food trough than die in a cave trapped underwater. This was, by some margin, the most intelligent tactical decision made all evening.
Myles installed solar panels on the roof of the house and ran heavy electrical cabling over the roof, down the wall, alongside the animal yard, across the ground, under the water, and into the cave. It was a marvel of neat, tidy, safe cabling designed to prevent accidents.
In the same way that a Victorian bridge made of fireworks is designed to prevent accidents.
Still, it was functional. It had purpose. It was power brought to the depths. Prometheus, had he been watching from orbit, would have nodded solemnly and asked whether the cable was properly waterproofed.
Craig made a light bulb and returned to the cave to install it. Like Thomas Edison, he would be the first to turn on a light. Also like Thomas Edison, his path to illumination involved failure. Unlike Thomas Edison, Craig’s response time between failure and blaming someone else was much quicker.
As with many Craig plans, things did not go as planned.
“The wiring is faulty,” declared Craig after several unsuccessful attempts to install a simple light.
Ignoring the fact that it took 10,000 failures before Edison successfully turned on a light bulb, Craig had given up after a mere dozen attempts and laid the blame elsewhere. The wiring, apparently, had betrayed him. The cable had lost faith. Electricity itself had become political.
“Impossible!” declared Myles. “I installed that wiring myself. Are you sure you know how to plug in a light bulb?”
The universe paused, awaiting Craig’s answer. Stars dimmed. The lake held its breath. Somewhere, Sir Stripes looked up from his trough, suddenly aware that history was being made.
“Yes, I know how to plug in a bloody light bulb, it’s not rocket science!” Craig responded.
This was technically correct. It was not rocket science. It was, however, light bulb science, and that would prove to be a different discipline entirely.
“There must be a break in the wire somewhere, we should test it,” suggested Dave.
Myles took the light bulb from Craig, attached it to the animal pen, ran a connection from the power cable to the light and switched it on.
It worked.
He removed the light and ventured further along the cable to the shoreline. Installed the light.
It worked.
He proceeded to the shoreline, installed the light, and it worked. He dived into the lake with the light, and we followed him into the cave. Myles installed the light, flicked the switch, and it worked.
Craig sheepishly declared, “How was I supposed to know you had to connect it to the cable?”
Myles held up a sparking cable and waved it at him.
“Oh, I don’t know, you could try reading the manual.”
The manual, of course, is Craig’s natural predator.
Dave unpacked the Humidifier, which worked, which is just as well because underwater caves are damp. This might seem obvious to the untrained observer, but in our group every technological milestone deserves a moment. We had brought electricity to a cave under a lake and then installed a device to make the wet cave less wet. Somewhere in the distance, engineering wept softly into a clipboard.
The cave was free from worms and bees, so Craig didn’t have to use the flamethrower. This was a relief to everyone except Craig, who believes most ecological problems can be solved by converting them to ash.
Craig returned to the house to make more lights.
Craig soon arrived back at the mine.
“Okay hand over the light bulbs and I will install them,” said Myles.
Craig looked everywhere except at Myles. He looked at the walls. He looked at the floor. He looked into the middle distance, where perhaps there was a parallel universe in which he had done the obvious thing.
“Craig where are the light bulbs?” asked Myles.
“I made them, no-one told me to bring them,” said Craig.
There followed a heated discussion on responsibility.
It was not the first heated discussion on responsibility. It would not be the last. Responsibility stalks Craig through our sessions like a bear in the snow biome: inevitable, angry, and surprisingly fast once noticed.
Dave left, returned to the house, retrieved the light bulbs, then returned to the cave where the discussion was continuing.
“Fine!!” declared Craig, “I will go back to the house and get the lights I suppose.”
He left the cave.
Dave waited till Craig left, then handed the lights to Myles.
Craig got to the house to retrieve the lights from the fabricator. They were not there.
“Dave!!!” he yelled.
Dave laughed.
Then we mined. We hauled the ore back to the house and refined it. This is the rhythm of Icarus: discover ancient underwater cave, argue about electrical competence, prank Craig, strip-mine the geological feature, drag everything home, and call it progress.
Eventually Zaph woke up, joined us, and was amazed at the empty cave.
We had already mined it out.
Zaph had missed the blood lake, the electrical audit, the Craig light bulb trial, the Dave vindication arc, and the cave’s entire mineral existence. He arrived at the precise moment when a normal person might say, “What did I miss?” but Zaph is not burdened by such things. He assessed the lack of remaining targets and moved on.
Onto housework.
Myles left to refuel the automated mining equipment and collect the ore. Craig was tasked with watering the crops. Dave added a secret stash label on the secret stash cupboard to confuse Myles. Zaph went hunting.
The division of labour was clear: Myles maintained the industrial backbone of civilisation, Zaph reduced the local wildlife population with clinical precision, Dave engaged in psychological cupboard warfare, and Craig watered plants, because this was considered the level at which society could safely entrust him.
Myles returned and asked Dave why half the mining drills didn’t even have fuel cans.
“Oh yeah, I went out yesterday and brought back the empty biofuel cans, then got distracted and never took the full ones back.”
Myles had a discussion with Dave on responsibility.
Responsibility, having failed to catch Craig earlier, had changed targets.
Dave got back to his secret project and laid some foundations partway across the lake. Zaph asked why he could see numbers floating above the lake. Dave, cursing, declared piranhas suck, and how was he supposed to lay proper underwater foundations whilst being eaten by fish?
This was an excellent question, although perhaps not one that would appear on a formal engineering exam.
Zaph solved the problem by shooting fish.
There is an elegance to Zaph’s approach. Where others see logistical difficulties, environmental hazards, or complex underwater construction constraints, Zaph sees target acquisition. Fish objected to the civil works program; fish were removed from the consultation process.
With 50 foundation pieces laid we now had a walkway, and a large area on the lake with no purpose.
Craig promptly installed a ladder that went nowhere.
It was perfect.
Not useful, obviously. Usefulness was not invited. But it was pure Craig: a vertical answer to a question nobody had asked, mounted proudly on an aquatic platform of dubious strategic value. If civilisation is measured by monuments, then ours had arrived. The Egyptians had pyramids. The Romans had aqueducts. Winchester-on-the-lake had Craig’s ladder to nowhere.
Zaph asked if we were doing any actual missions or if it was just going to be housework all night.
This was a fair question. We had, by this point, spent the evening installing underwater power, arguing with bulbs, mining a cave, labelling cupboards, fuelling drills, constructing a pointless lake platform, and enabling a ladder cult. To the untrained eye, this may not look like heroic frontier survival. To the trained eye, it also does not look like heroic frontier survival.
Myles dialled up a mission to open a new path to the riverland.
Zaph looked at the map.
“Haven’t we already been there?” he asked.
“Apparently, a storm caused a landslide and blocked the path,” replied Dave.
This was deeply Icarus. A planet where storms are not content with blowing down trees and mildly annoying the roof; they also rearrange the geography like a toddler with a sandpit and a grudge.
Zaph called a pod down from the station and presented Myles with his very own Zebra.
Now, everyone had a Zebra: Dave, Myles, Craig, except for Zaph, who used to have a Zebra, but it died.
This detail hung in the air with the mournful inevitability of a country song performed by a man standing beside an empty saddle. Zaph, efficient even in grief, did not dwell on it.
Myles and Dave discussed what equipment to bring. Zaph headed out early. Craig watered the plants.
Finally, we were ready and set out on the great wilderness exploration trip. We crossed the desert without incident, reached the Hunting Lodge, and stopped for the night. There was a storm, so we brought our Zebras into the house.
Things were going really well.
This is always the most dangerous sentence in any gaming session.
The one thing we hadn’t planned for was Craig.
Craig had installed a campfire in the wooden house without telling anyone, which meant Myles accidentally rode his Zebra through the fire, setting the house and Zebra on fire.
There are few moments in frontier life as clarifying as discovering that the cosy indoor warmth has been placed directly in the path of mounted traffic. The Zebra, who had expected lodging, shelter, and possibly some hay, instead received the full medieval siege experience. The house joined in out of solidarity.
We arrived at the site to find Zaph had already built a ramp up to the top.
“I need more wood,” he yelled to us far below.
Craig set to work. Dave moved all the mounts well away from the work area to keep them safe.
Craig still managed to drop a tree on them.
This deserves acknowledgement. Dave had identified the danger zone, relocated the animals out of it, and attempted to build a safety margin between Craig and consequence. Craig, undeterred by geometry, probability, or compassion for livestock, found a way. There are guided missiles with less determination.
Night fell, and we didn’t have shelter, so we bravely climbed the ramps, up and over the mountain. “Bravely” here means sleep-deprived, underprepared, and propelled by the knowledge that staying put would involve weather, darkness, and whatever else Icarus keeps in its pockets.
Myles came last, without his Zebra, so he had to repeat the dangerous journey. In the morning, Zaph made an early start and headed off to our riverhouse, while the rest of us rode to the waterfall and installed the beacon.
Mission accomplished.
We caught up with Zaph at the house. Dave dialled up the operation to find the black market vendor, and Craig crafted the necessary flare gun and flares.
This was a sentence containing both “Craig” and “necessary,” so caution was warranted.
We set off to kill a world boss.
Myles brought hedgehogs. Lots of hedgehogs. He installed them along the riverbank, forming what in military terms would be called a defensive line and what in our group would be called “the thing the boss will probably walk around.”
Dave swam out into the river to attract its attention.
The ground shook. Water erupted from the river. The corrupted landshark burst forth.
“Oh my god, that thing is enormous,” declared Myles.
Everyone else stared at their screens, barely able to see the tiny creature.
Yet another bug brought to you by the Icarus devs.
On Myles’s screen, the corrupted landshark was a nightmare from the deep, a Lovecraftian disaster with fins and workplace aggression. On everyone else’s screen, it was apparently a slightly angry river garnish. This made tactical coordination difficult, since one person was fighting Moby-Dick and the others were squinting at something that looked like it might be cleared up with a broom.
We fought. It almost ate Dave, who ran screaming into the woods, yelling about poison and dying as he opened his first aid bag.
Dave downed an anti-poison pill, which staved off immediate death, then chugged a health potion.
It wasn’t healing him.
He took another, then another.
Nothing worked.
This was troubling, not least because Dave’s approach to medicine is usually to consume the contents of the bag until either the problem stops or the inventory does. The forest echoed with the sound of a man discovering that pharmacology had taken the night off.
Meanwhile, back at the river, the landshark avoided the hedgehogs, smacked Myles around, and things were looking grim as we used up our ammo.
Then Craig stepped up to fight, unlimbering his flamethrower and hosing the boss like it was a tree.
This was Craig’s moment. The man who had failed to connect a light bulb to a cable, forgotten to bring the light bulbs he made, installed a campfire in a wooden house, and dropped a tree on supposedly safe mounts now stood between us and aquatic doom. He did not read a manual. He did not ask for a plan. He simply applied fire to problem.
Red numbers fell from the creature. Craig hosed it again. And again.
It retreated to the river.
Myles and Zaph got in the final shots.
We were victorious.
Craig was declared the man of the match after we took away his matches.
This was only prudent. Celebrating Craig’s flamethrower triumph while leaving him with open access to ignition sources would be like giving a raccoon a credit card and the keys to a fireworks factory.
Myles looted the corpse, then proceeded to the objective location where he fired off a green flare to declare victory.
Luckily, he had packed the flares instead of relying on Craig.
A drop pod descended. An automated shop sprang forth along with the robot attendant who asked what we meatbags had to offer. Myles traded biomass for strange materials, and another operation was successful.
We returned to the riverside house to restock and called up a simple postal mission to deliver materials to three locations.
Simple, in this context, meant hauling 100 steel, 400 oxite, 200 copper, 200 ice, and 300 iron across a planet that regards travel as a form of slapstick.
We made the long trip back to Winchester-on-the-lake to gather the required materials. After a bit of gathering to find the required oxite, Zaph headed south to the ice lands to deliver the copper and snow.
Dave tidied around the house. Myles did another extraction refuelling ore collection trip. Craig watered the plants.
The plants, it must be said, were receiving a level of care that no mount, cave lighting system, or wooden hunting lodge could reasonably expect.
Zaph made the first delivery and rode back to the house. He had just reached the end of the snow, about to enter the forest, when a bear jumped out, took him by surprise, killed Zaph, and then ate his horse.
Thus continued Zaph’s complicated relationship with mounts.
Unable to sleep until morning, Myles and Dave went back to recover Zaph. It should have been an easy trip. Myles helped Zaph up, while Dave killed the bear, and a wolf, and a second bear.
Mr Stripes, not to be outdone, killed two innocent buffalo.
Stripes really has a grudge against buffalo. He had been killing them all night. Nobody knew what the buffalo had done. Perhaps they had insulted his trough. Perhaps they had looked at him funny. Perhaps in some forgotten zebra mythology, buffalo were the ancient enemy. Whatever the cause, Stripes prosecuted the matter with enthusiasm.
Back at the house, Craig watered the plants, and while no one was paying attention, he made himself a shotgun and used a lot of supplies to make 12-gauge ammo.
This is how escalation happens. One moment Craig is safely watering crops. The next, he has moved into firearms manufacturing with the quiet confidence of a man who has learned absolutely nothing from the light bulb incident.
Zaph headed north to the desert with the steel and oxite. Myles and Dave headed south through the forest with the iron.
Zaph arrived first, although he had further to go. This was not because his new horse was faster, but because Dave stopped to harvest every wheat field, declaring it made great biofuel.
Dave is many things: builder, farmer, lore enthusiast, secret project architect, occasional fish victim. But place him near a resource node and he becomes a man hearing angels sing through the medium of inventory slots.
Deliveries successfully made, another operation accomplished.
Zaph headed back to Windchester. Myles and Dave stopped at a few caves to mine exotic ore, and collected sulphur and oxite on the way home.
Because of course they did. A mission is not truly complete until Dave has diverted into a side cave and Myles has silently recalculated the return route, carrying capacity, and the emotional cost of friendship.
“Well that was an uneventful evening,” declared Craig.
Myles and Dave looked at him.
“Zaph died,” they pointed out. “His horse was killed by a bear – did you not see that?”
“Yup – another uneventful evening, saved by Craig,” responded Craig before breaking into song.
The original tune was legally recognisable enough to summon lawyers from the mist, so the official campfire-safe version went something like this:
There’s no restraining us now,
We’re on the trail, somehow,
There’s no explaining us now,
The plants are damp, take a bow.
We’ve had the bears and the burns,
The ladders nobody earns,
We’ve got a lake full of wire,
And Craig is holding the fire.So keep the mounts from the trees,
Keep Dave away from the wheat,
Keep Zaph supplied with fresh horses,
And Myles with maps and receipts.
The night was calm, Craig insists,
Though death made several appointments,
But nothing slows this crew down,
Except unreadable instructions.
A few final house improvements and we called it a night.
Install a network monitoring system.
Install two wind turbines.
Craig watered the plants.
And so civilisation advanced, as it always does: through renewable energy, infrastructure, and the careful restriction of Craig to horticultural duties.
Did We Learn or Achieve Anything This Week?
We learnt that letting Myles do all the cabling is safer that way. Not safe, necessarily. Just safer. There is an important distinction between “up to code” and “less likely to become a cautionary documentary.”
We learnt that Craig can only be trusted with simple tasks like watering the plants, and even then only because the plants are rooted to the ground and cannot easily be set on fire by accident. Although, given enough time, one should never rule anything out.
We learnt that if Craig makes mission-critical equipment, it doesn’t mean he will bring it. Manufacture and transport are two separate branches of the Craig logistics tree, and one of them has been struck by lightning.
We learnt that sometimes Dave’s tales are true. Didn’t we learn this last week? Possibly. The difficulty with Dave’s tales is that some of them are valuable intelligence and some of them are Gold Dragon-adjacent, and sorting them requires either wisdom or piranha bites.
We learnt that Stripes really hates buffalo. This is now less a theory than a field of zoological study with a growing casualty list.
We learnt that Zaph goes through mounts the way Craig goes through flamethrower fuel. Efficiently, repeatedly, and with surprisingly little ceremony.
Dave achieved Peak Tech: unlock all tech in Tier 5. Naturally, this occurred in a week where technology was mostly represented by underwater cabling, secret foundations, a functioning humidifier, and Craig failing to connect a light bulb.
Myles achieved Let There Be Light: be the first to turn on a light. He also achieved Spelunker: find an underwater cave. Both achievements came with the usual hidden cost of troubleshooting, swimming in piranha soup, and waving a sparking cable at Craig.
Craig achieved RTFM: don’t read the manual, fail at a task, blame the wiring. He also achieved Boom Baby Boom: craft a shotgun. This second achievement has been noted by the base safety committee, which is Myles wearing a tired expression.
Zaph achieved Somewhere Over the Mountain: build a ramp over a mountain. He also reaffirmed his status as the group’s rapid-response answer to aquatic construction hazards, bears notwithstanding.
Stripes achieved Buffalo Bill: kill 4 buffalo in a hoof fight. The buffalo community declined to comment, mostly because Stripes had already found them.
Tune in next week to see if Dave’s tale of a mysterious waterfall cave in the desert is true, and if we made a mistake leaving Craig unsupervised in the house.
The answer to the second question is yes.
The only uncertainty is how flammable the evidence will be.
