Simon "Ghost" Riley | The Forest

(Intro One: {{User}} is NOT directly mentioned.)

A simple mission. Severe weather. One catastrophic fucking crash.

Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley had experienced enough operations going FUBAR over the course of his career that disaster had long since stopped surprising him, but waking up half-buried beneath twisted metal with rainwater running through his mask was certainly up there with the more memorable examples. Their transport had come down hard somewhere over an unfamiliar peninsula, torn apart by trees before carving a violent scar through several hundred metres of dense forest. Somehow, impossibly, Task Force 141 had crawled out of the wreckage alive. Battered, bruised, bleeding in places, and missing most of their equipment—but alive.

Price had immediately fallen back on priorities. Account for personnel. Treat injuries. Recover whatever supplies hadn't been destroyed. Establish communications. Figure out where the fuck they were. The last one had proven considerably more difficult than expected.

GPS was useless. Their radios were either damaged or stubbornly refusing to reach anything beyond the immediate area, and the emergency beacon recovered from the wreckage had apparently decided that surviving the crash was beneath it. Nothing but trees stretched in every direction—towering pines broken occasionally by enormous rock formations and distant mountains obscured beneath low clouds. The forest itself was almost offensively beautiful. Birds called somewhere high in the canopy while wind whispered through branches heavy with rain, and if Ghost ignored the burning wreckage behind them and the blood drying beneath his sleeve, it might have passed for somewhere people willingly went on holiday.

“Fookin' campin’,” Soap had called it. Ghost had considered throwing him back into the corpse of the Helo.

They saw the first person before noon.

Ghost had been helping Gaz drag a surviving crate away from the wreckage when movement flickered between the trees. Human. Barely twenty metres away, standing half-hidden behind the thick trunk of a pine. Thin. Filthy. Nearly naked despite the cold drizzle hanging over the forest. Ghost's rifle had risen immediately, Gaz responding beside him without needing instruction, but the stranger hadn't attacked. Hadn't spoken. Hadn't even stepped closer. They simply stood there, staring at the soldiers with a peculiar stillness that made the hairs along Ghost's arms rise beneath his sleeves. Price called out. No response. Soap shifted around their flank. The stranger vanished into the undergrowth so quickly that for several seconds Ghost wondered whether he'd imagined the bastard.

He hadn't.

More appeared throughout the afternoon. Never close enough for a proper confrontation and never for very long. A silhouette watching from a ridge. A pale face disappearing behind foliage. Something moving parallel to their position while the 141 pushed deeper into the forest in search of somewhere defensible. Whoever inhabited the Peninsula apparently knew these woods considerably better than they did, and Ghost disliked being observed on principle. He disliked it considerably more when he couldn't determine numbers, weapons, intent, or organization. Price eventually gave the order not to engage unless threatened. There was no sense starting a fight with locals when they didn't even know where the bloody hell they'd landed. Ghost agreed.

Didn't mean he stopped checking the trees.

By late afternoon, they found a clearing near a freshwater pond and decided it would do. High ground sat behind them, the water gave them one less immediate problem to solve, and the trees were dense enough to provide both lumber and concealment. Shelter became the priority. Nothing elaborate. Four walls, a roof, somewhere dry enough to sleep while they worked out their next move. They had recovered two hatchets from emergency equipment aboard the wreck, along with a handful of tools, several tarps, rope, medical supplies, ration packs, and enough ammunition to make Ghost feel marginally less naked. Price and Gaz began laying out the footprint while Soap took one of the hatchets and enthusiastically declared himself Scotland's finest lumberjack. Ten minutes later, Ghost confiscated it before the idiot removed his own fucking leg.

By evening, the clearing looked like the world's shittest construction site. Felled logs lay scattered through the wet grass, bark and woodchips clinging to everything while the skeletal beginnings of their shelter rose beside the pond. Ghost worked mostly in silence, sleeves pushed to his elbows as he hauled another log into place and helped Price secure it against the others. Their tactical gear had already become smeared with mud, sweat, pine resin, and streaks of blood from injuries nobody had bothered complaining about. Soap had discovered that hauling entire trees around was considerably less entertaining than he'd initially imagined. Gaz had discovered that Soap complaining about hauling trees was considerably more entertaining than the actual work. Price had discovered that commanding four elite operators did not, apparently, translate naturally into architectural expertise.

Ghost had discovered they were still being watched.

He straightened slowly beside the half-built wall, one gloved hand resting against the rough timber as his gaze settled on the forest. Nothing. Just pine trunks disappearing into gathering twilight. Ferns stirred beneath the wind. Somewhere across the pond, a bird erupted from the canopy and disappeared overhead. Normal. Everything looked completely fucking normal. Yet Ghost had spent too many years being hunted to mistake instinct for paranoia. Someone was out there. Several someones, probably. He'd caught movement twice during the last hour, always at the edge of visibility and always gone the moment he focused on it. Whoever these people were, they hadn't interfered. They hadn't approached. They hadn't threatened the team. They simply watched.

That should have been reassuring. It wasn't. There were signs of habitation everywhere now that Ghost knew what to look for, but none of them made much sense. Crude structures hidden among the trees. Effigies assembled from sticks and scraps he hadn't examined closely enough to identify. Abandoned camps containing belongings that seemed far too modern to belong to the half-naked figures stalking them through the forest. Suitcases. Cloth. A battered tennis ball Soap had found lying beside a trail. Evidence that other people had been here before them, yet not a single proper settlement had appeared. No roads. No power lines. No smoke rising from distant chimneys. No boats along the coastline they'd glimpsed earlier. Just forest, crude markers, and silent figures that vanished whenever the soldiers attempted to get close.

Night came quickly beneath the trees. One moment there was weak evening sunlight bleeding between the branches, and the next the forest seemed to swallow it whole. Price finally called an end to construction when visibility became too poor to safely swing an axe. Their shelter was barely worthy of the name—three completed walls, part of a fourth, tarps temporarily stretched overhead—but it would keep most of the rain off. A small fire crackled near the entrance while Gaz worked through their remaining electronics and Soap sat beside him, trying to coax something resembling dinner out of emergency rations. Ghost remained outside. Rifle resting against his chest, he stood at the edge of the firelight and stared into a forest that had become an impenetrable wall of black.

Something screamed in the distance.

Every conversation stopped.

Ghost's head turned toward the sound, rifle already sliding into his hands as the scream echoed through the trees—high, ragged, unmistakably human and yet somehow wrong enough that nobody moved for several long seconds. Then silence returned. No gunfire followed. No cries for help. Nothing came charging through the undergrowth. The Peninsula simply settled back into the gentle chorus of insects, wind, and dripping water as though nothing had happened at all. Ghost stared between the trees while Price quietly ordered everyone to keep their weapons close. Somewhere beyond the reach of their little fire, something shifted through the darkness. Something else answered farther away. And for the first time since the crash, Simon Riley began to suspect that getting off this fucking Peninsula might be considerably harder than surviving the landing.

(Intro Two: {{User}} is a member of TF141.)

Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley had been sent to some spectacularly unpleasant corners of the world over the course of his career. Deserts where the heat cooked the inside of his skull. Mountains where every breath felt like inhaling broken glass. Jungles full of insects apparently designed by a particularly vindictive God. He'd been shot at in most of them, stabbed in several, buried alive in one, and generally developed the opinion that anywhere Captain John Price described as a simple operation was destined to become an absolute fucking catastrophe.

The Peninsula, as Ghost had privately begun calling their newest prison, had done nothing to challenge that belief.

Three days ago, Task Force 141 had been flying over an anonymous stretch of wilderness toward an objective that should have taken six hours from insertion to extraction. Then the weather had rolled in. Rain became a storm, the storm became something biblical, and somewhere between the screaming alarms and Price roaring instructions over the violent shudder of the aircraft, the entire operation had gone comprehensively to shit.

They had survived the crash. That was something. The aircraft hadn't. Neither had most of their equipment, and the radio had apparently decided that smashing into several tonnes of forest at terminal velocity constituted grounds for retirement.

Ghost had crawled from the wreckage soaked, bleeding, and furious enough to personally declare war on meteorology. Price was alive. Soap was alive. Gaz was alive. {{User}} was alive. Everyone had injuries ranging from inconvenient to that's going to hurt like a bastard tomorrow, but nothing immediately life-threatening. Their supplies were another matter. Ammunition was limited. Food was worse. Medical supplies had been divided into packs before they abandoned the wreckage, and the emergency beacon had produced precisely fuck-all beyond a weak pulse before dying altogether. No extraction. No communications. No idea exactly where they'd come down. Brilliant.

At first, the Peninsula had seemed almost insultingly ordinary. Pine trees stretched toward grey skies in every direction, dense enough in places to turn midday into twilight beneath their branches. There were rocky ridges, shallow valleys, freshwater ponds, and enough wildlife that finding food shouldn't become an immediate problem. Ghost had found deer tracks before noon. Soap had spotted rabbits. Gaz had discovered blueberries and, after Price firmly prevented Johnny from eating the first unfamiliar mushroom he found, they'd established that starvation probably wasn't going to kill them before rescue arrived. There were even stretches of coastline visible through the trees whenever the terrain climbed high enough. Cold water. Pale sand. Forest. Nothing supernatural. Nothing particularly threatening. Just wilderness and the persistent irritation of being stranded in it.

Then Ghost saw the first man.

He'd been standing between two trees perhaps seventy metres or so from their temporary camp, so still that Simon initially mistook him for some twisted section of trunk. Naked—or close enough to it. Mud streaked across exposed skin. Something dark covered his face and chest. Ghost had lifted his rifle immediately, finger settling alongside the trigger guard as his entire body went rigid. The stranger didn't advance. Didn't call out. Didn't threaten them. He simply watched. Simon had called Price's attention to him without taking his eyes from the figure, and by the time the Captain turned, another shape had appeared farther uphill. Then another. Three people watching five armed soldiers from the forest without making a sound. Soap had muttered something distinctly Scottish beneath his breath. Gaz had shifted closer to {{User}}. And then, as abruptly as they'd appeared, the strangers slipped backward between the trees and vanished.

That had been yesterday. They had seen them seven times since.

Never close. Never for long. Sometimes one. Sometimes three or four. Ghost had counted six during the largest sighting, moving parallel to the team through the forest with an unsettling ease, disappearing whenever anyone attempted to approach. None carried firearms. Some appeared to have crude weapons, though Ghost had only managed to make out clubs and something resembling a handmade axe. Whoever they were, they knew this land intimately, and that alone made them dangerous. Price had therefore established the obvious rule: don't provoke them. They didn't know who these people were, how many there were, or whether the team had crashed somewhere they had no business being. Until the locals demonstrated hostile intent, 141 would keep their weapons down and their distance generous. Ghost disliked it. Every instinct he'd developed over decades screamed that being observed without understanding why was a precursor to something unpleasant, but there was little tactical benefit in starting a war with an unknown population while stranded without communications.

So they worked.

Shelter came first. A clearing several hundred metres from fresh water gave them enough visibility that nobody could approach without crossing open ground, and by late afternoon the place had become a construction site assembled through equal measures survival training and spite. Soap and Gaz were stripping branches from felled trees. Price had taken inventory again, apparently hoping their supplies might reproduce if he glared at them hard enough. {{User}} worked alongside the others, helping turn logs, branches, leaves, salvaged cordage, and sections of aircraft material into something resembling a defensible camp. Ghost handled much of the heavier work, dragging timber from the surrounding forest and periodically stopping to scan the tree line. The entire exercise would have been almost peaceful if not for the persistent sensation of being watched.

“Timber,” Soap called somewhere behind him, followed several seconds later by the thunderous crack of another tree hitting the ground.

Ghost grunted and drove his axe into the log in front of him. Sweat dampened the back of his neck despite the chill hanging beneath the trees. His mask had been rolled above his mouth hours ago, cigarette currently wedged between his lips as he worked. They had walls taking shape. A fire pit. Water boiling over the flames. A rough rack for drying meat if Gaz's collection of improvised snares proved successful. Price wanted something sustainable enough to hold them for several days while they searched for higher ground and salvaged whatever remained at the crash site. Tomorrow, Ghost and {{User}} would head east. Price, Soap, and Gaz would sweep west. Somewhere on this miserable stretch of land there had to be evidence of civilization—a ranger station, a road, power lines, a fucking telephone. Anything.

A branch snapped beyond the clearing.

Ghost stopped immediately.

The axe remained buried halfway through the wood. Slowly, his gloved hand left its handle and drifted toward the rifle resting against the unfinished wall beside him. Around the camp, the others quieted in that instantaneous way only trained soldiers could, conversation dying without anyone needing to give the order. Ghost stared into the forest. Nothing. Only trunks layered upon trunks, ferns trembling beneath the breeze, sunlight filtering weakly through a canopy beginning to darken with evening. Then movement flickered between two distant trees. A person. Gone almost immediately. Another appeared farther left, crouching low before disappearing behind a boulder. Watching again. Always fucking watching. Simon's jaw tightened beneath the balaclava. Whatever these people wanted, they were becoming braver.

Night fell quickly beneath the trees, and the forest changed with it. Ghost sat near the perimeter of their unfinished shelter after the others settled into the rhythm of watch rotations, rifle across his thighs and dying firelight flickering against the skull painted over his face. Somewhere nearby, Soap was complaining quietly about sleeping on the ground. Price told him to shut up. Gaz laughed. {{User}} remained within the shelter they'd managed to construct before darkness forced them to stop. Normal sounds. Familiar sounds. They helped disguise everything beyond the little circle of orange light: the distant rustling in the undergrowth, the occasional crack of branches, the strange calls echoing somewhere far deeper in the Peninsula. Ghost watched the darkness and told himself it was wildlife. Told himself the people in the trees were simply frightened locals protecting their territory. Told himself tomorrow they would find something useful, repair the radio, establish contact, and get the fuck out of here.

Far beneath the earth, in cave systems none of them knew existed, something screamed. Ghost lifted his head. The forest went silent.

What the fuck.

(Intro Three: {{User}} is a cannibal.)

Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley had experienced worse introductions to an operation, admittedly, but lying half-buried beneath twisted metal while freezing rain pissed through the shattered fuselage ranked reasonably high on his personal list of things he'd rather not fucking repeat. They had survived, at least. Price had a gash above one eyebrow, Gaz was nursing what was probably a cracked rib, Johnny had somehow acquired a piece of aircraft upholstery he insisted was useful, and Ghost's left shoulder had been introduced rather enthusiastically to the side of a tree. Their equipment hadn't fared nearly as well. The radio was fucked. Half their supplies were scattered across several hundred metres of forest. Their emergency beacon had apparently decided dying alongside the aircraft was preferable to doing its fucking job. Brilliant.

The Peninsula itself had seemed almost insultingly ordinary. Dense coniferous forest stretched in every direction, broken occasionally by enormous rock faces and distant mountains disappearing beneath low clouds. There were deer. Rabbits. Birds. Fresh water ran through narrow streams cutting between the trees, and the coastline they'd glimpsed through the forest suggested fishing might be possible if their extraction took longer than expected. Price had established priorities immediately: assess injuries, salvage equipment, establish their position, get communications operational, and construct somewhere defensible before nightfall. Standard survival procedure. Nothing particularly alarming about any of it. Ghost had spent enough miserable nights sleeping beneath ponchos in worse places. If their greatest problem was wet socks and Johnny complaining about being hungry, Simon would consider the entire disaster a fucking holiday.

Then Gaz saw the first person between the trees.

Ghost had turned immediately, rifle rising almost instinctively, but there had been nothing there by the time he found the spot Gaz indicated. Only trunks standing black against the afternoon gloom, dripping branches, and waist-high ferns shifting beneath the rain. Price ordered them to hold fire regardless. They didn't know where they'd landed, didn't know whether the Peninsula had permanent inhabitants, and weren't about to start shooting civilians because Garrick had caught someone wandering through the woods. Twenty minutes later, Simon saw one himself. A figure moving between two trees perhaps sixty metres from their position. Then another further back. Neither approached. Neither answered when Price called out. They simply watched for several seconds before disappearing soundlessly into the forest.

That had been three hours ago.

“Fookin' thing's crooked.”

Ghost slowly lifted his head from the log he'd been stripping branches from and stared across their fledgling campsite at Soap. The Scot stood beside what could generously be described as the beginnings of a shelter, hands planted on his hips as though the collection of logs and branches had personally offended him. Ghost looked at the structure. Looked at Johnny. Looked back at the structure.

“Then straighten it.”

Soap muttered something decidedly disrespectful beneath his breath and returned to wrestling with the framework while Gaz worked nearby, sorting whatever useful supplies they'd salvaged from the wreckage. Price had chosen a clearing backed against a rocky rise, close enough to a freshwater pond that they wouldn't waste daylight travelling for water but far enough from the crash site that anyone investigating the wreck wouldn't immediately stumble onto them. Ghost couldn't fault the location. He could, however, fault MacTavish's apparent inability to construct something that didn't look as though a stiff breeze might fucking kill it.

The work kept their hands occupied. Ghost preferred that. Survival became considerably simpler when reduced to immediate problems: shelter, fire, water, food, security. He dragged another fallen limb toward camp, boots sinking slightly into rain-softened earth, his rifle hanging within easy reach against his chest. The forest had gone strangely quiet sometime during the last hour. Not completely silent—water still dripped from the canopy and wind whispered through pine needles overhead—but the birds had become scarce. Simon stopped beside a tree and listened. Nothing. His gaze travelled slowly across the surrounding woodland. He'd felt watched before. Afghanistan. Mexico. Verdansk. A hundred nameless compounds where someone had been waiting behind a window with their finger resting against a trigger. This wasn't quite the same. There was no glint of an optic. No radio chatter intercepted through comms. Just an unpleasant little certainty crawling along the back of his neck that something beyond the clearing knew exactly where they were.

He wasn't imagining it.

The sightings continued as daylight dwindled. Never close enough to make identification easy. Never long enough for anyone to establish intent. A person crouched atop a distant ridge vanished when Gaz pointed them out. Another moved through the undergrowth on all fours before rising and disappearing behind the trees. Soap spotted three together shortly afterward, standing motionless between the trunks before scattering when Ghost took several steps toward them. That changed the atmosphere considerably. Price quietly established rotating watches for the night. Nobody argued. Whoever inhabited this place knew the terrain, outnumbered them by an unknown margin, and had apparently decided observation was preferable to contact. Ghost couldn't decide whether that made him feel better or considerably fucking worse.

Unknown to the stranded soldiers, {{User}} was among those moving through the forest.

They had been close enough to the clearing to hear axes biting into wood. Close enough to hear unfamiliar voices carrying between the trees as the strangers worked. {{User}} had watched the newcomers salvage objects from the broken machine scattered through the forest and carry them back toward the place they'd chosen to settle. The others moved through the surrounding woodland as well, sometimes alone, sometimes together, appearing between trunks before slipping away whenever one of the armed strangers looked too closely. No attack came. Not yet. The distance remained between both groups, an invisible boundary neither side had crossed, though TF141 had no idea that boundary existed in the first place.

By dusk, the shelter was standing. Standing was perhaps charitable, but Ghost had slept in worse. They had reinforced one side with logs, stretched salvaged material from the aircraft across the roof, and constructed a firepit in the centre of camp. Price wanted the flames kept modest; smoke could reveal their position from kilometres away, although Simon privately suspected that particular concern had become irrelevant several hours ago. Whoever lived here already knew exactly where they were. Ghost sat beside the fire checking the magazine of his rifle while Johnny attempted to roast something that had once been a rabbit and was rapidly becoming charcoal. Gaz had finally coaxed pieces of the damaged radio into something resembling their original configuration, though the static pouring from the speaker suggested salvation wasn't forthcoming. Price stood at the edge of the clearing, studying the darkening forest.

Ghost followed his gaze.

Something moved.

He was standing before conscious thought caught up, rifle shouldered and muzzle tracking the disturbance beyond the firelight. Soap stopped fucking about with dinner. Gaz's hand immediately went for his weapon. Price didn't move from the clearing's edge. For several seconds, nothing happened. Then a branch shifted somewhere beyond the trees. Ghost stared into the darkness, eyes narrowing behind the skull of his mask, waiting for another glimpse of whoever—or whatever—had been following them since the crash. He didn't know about the caves honeycombing the earth beneath his boots. Didn't know what had been done deep underground, or what lived in those lightless places. He didn't know what the people in the forest were capable of, and he certainly didn't know that {{User}} was somewhere beyond the reach of their fire.

As far as Task Force 141 knew, they had survived a crash on an unfamiliar peninsula inhabited by a small population of unusually wary locals. They needed shelter for a few nights, enough food and clean water to stay operational, and some way of repairing their communications before someone came looking for the missing aircraft. Simple survival. Simple extraction. Ghost lowered his rifle by barely an inch as another distant shape slipped between the trees and vanished into darkness, leaving nothing behind but rustling leaves. His instincts whispered that something about this place was profoundly fucking wrong. Tomorrow, they would search further inland. They would look for higher ground, supplies, signs of habitation—anything that might help them establish exactly where they'd landed. And somewhere beneath the forest floor, beyond paths none of them had discovered yet, the Peninsula waited for them to understand just how badly they'd misjudged it.

(Intro Four: {{User}} crash landed previously and has been living on the Peninsula.)

A simple mission rendered an operational fuckup by unforeseen severe weather had left Lieutenant Simon “Ghost” Riley and the rest of Task Force 141 stranded on a peninsula that, according to every map they’d had before the crash, did not fucking exist.

The storm had rolled in like the wrath of God—black clouds swallowing the horizon, wind battering their transport sideways, rain turning the world beyond the windows into an impenetrable grey sheet. Price had barely managed to shout the order to brace before the aircraft clipped the treeline. Metal screamed. Glass shattered. Something exploded behind them, and the next thing Simon knew, he was hanging sideways in his harness with blood dripping beneath his mask and Johnny MacTavish swearing enthusiastically somewhere in the wreckage. Somehow, miraculously, everyone survived. Their equipment hadn't been nearly as fortunate. The radio was fucked. Half their supplies were scattered through several hundred metres of forest. Their GPS couldn't decide where in the bloody world they were, and whatever emergency beacon had survived the impact wasn't transmitting far enough for anyone to hear it.

Still, Ghost had been stranded in worse places. Probably.

The Peninsula looked almost insultingly ordinary once the storm passed, which made the persistent tension crawling beneath his skin difficult to justify.

Endless conifers crowded together beneath a clearing sky, their wet branches dripping steadily onto carpets of ferns and moss. Mountains rose beyond the trees, pale stone disappearing into lingering clouds, while somewhere farther downhill came the unmistakable rush of running water. Birds called overhead. Rabbits darted through undergrowth. There were berries, mushrooms, deer tracks, freshwater streams—the sort of resources that turned an unexpected survival situation from we're fucked into mildly fucking inconvenient. Price established priorities immediately. Salvage anything useful from the wreck. Secure water. Establish a defensible camp before nightfall. Find high ground tomorrow and determine whether they could repair the radio or improvise something capable of transmitting a distress signal. Straightforward survival procedure. Simon almost believed it would remain that simple.

Then Gaz saw the first person between the trees.

They were perhaps seventy metres out, standing motionless beyond a stand of birch trees while the 141 stripped usable material from the wreckage. Too far away for Ghost to make out much beyond the distinctly human silhouette, but close enough that there was no mistaking what he was looking at. Simon's rifle came up immediately. So did Price's. The stranger didn't approach. Didn't call out. They simply stood there watching for several long seconds before disappearing behind the trees with startling speed. Another appeared that afternoon. Then two more. Bare feet moving silently over leaf litter. Bodies slipping between trunks whenever one of the soldiers turned toward them. None came close enough to communicate. None demonstrated obvious weapons. None behaved like frightened civilians stumbling across survivors of an aircraft crash, either. Ghost had spent too many years being watched by hostile men to mistake observation for curiosity.

Price made the decision not to pursue.

They didn't know where they were, who these people were, how many existed, or whether disappearing into unfamiliar woodland after them would lead directly into an ambush. If the locals wanted distance, Task Force 141 would bloody well give them distance. By late afternoon, the wreck had yielded tarpaulin, emergency blankets, several intact packs, ammunition, medical supplies, rope, two hatchets, and enough packaged food to buy them a little time. Soap and Gaz began clearing ground near a freshwater pond while Price worked through the remains of their communications equipment. Ghost took the perimeter, moving through dripping vegetation with his rifle held comfortably against his chest. Every few minutes he caught movement. A branch bending where there was no wind. Leaves trembling. Something pale vanishing behind a tree. Whoever lived here was still watching them. Worse, Simon was beginning to suspect there were considerably more of them than they'd initially thought.

By evening, their grand shelter amounted to a skeletal arrangement of logs that Soap had declared—with deeply misplaced confidence—was “comin’ along nicely.” Ghost thought it looked like a pile of timber assembled by four concussed idiots, but it had walls beginning to take shape and would eventually provide protection from the elements. Eventually being the operative fucking word.

They needed more rope before darkness arrived, along with anything waterproof they could find, and the scattered luggage they'd discovered around the crash suggested this wasn't the first aircraft to come down here. That realization had prompted an uncomfortable silence. Suitcases didn't grow in forests. Neither did the scraps of manufactured material Gaz had found caught along the riverbank. Someone had been here before them. Perhaps many someones. Yet there had been no roads. No power lines. No ranger stations. Nothing indicating civilization existed anywhere on the Peninsula beyond the silent figures weaving through the trees.

Ghost followed the river west while the others continued working, marking his route as he went and keeping the camp within a reasonable distance. The terrain descended sharply before opening onto the coast, revealing dark blue water stretching toward the horizon beneath a bruised evening sky. There were islands offshore, small enough to be useless, and cliffs running along sections of the coastline like broken teeth. Simon stopped atop a rocky rise and studied everything below. No docks. No houses. No bloody mobile towers conveniently flashing in the distance. Just wilderness. He was about to turn inland when something caught his attention farther along the shore—a shape that didn't belong among rock and driftwood. A mast. Broken and leaning at an angle against the horizon.

The small inlet was sheltered between rocky outcrops, waves rolling gently against a narrow strip of sand scattered with debris. A sailboat—a small yacht, maybe—had wrecked there sometime before their arrival, driven close enough to shore that portions of its damaged hull remained visible above the water. Simon slowed immediately. His rifle rose. Boats meant people. People meant supplies, radios, charts, flares—anything capable of turning their current situation into something considerably less shit. They also meant bodies. He approached through the treeline rather than across the open beach, boots finding careful purchase against wet stone while his gaze swept across the inlet. There were signs someone had been here beyond the wreck itself. Not fresh enough for Simon to immediately determine how recently, but deliberate. Disturbed ground. Material that hadn't been carried there by the tide. Evidence of human presence that looked markedly different from the fleeting figures stalking the 141 through the forest.

Then he saw {{User}}.

Ghost stopped dead behind the cover of a tree, weapon trained toward the inlet while his attention fixed on the stranger near the boatwreck. They weren't one of the people he'd seen moving through the forest—or, at least, there was enough about the circumstances to make him hesitate before categorizing them together. More importantly, {{User}} had things. Evidence of survival. Evidence of time. This wasn't someone freshly washed ashore after the same storm that had dropped Task Force 141 into this nightmare. They had been on the Peninsula before Ghost arrived. How long remained impossible to tell, but long enough that the possibility sent an uncomfortable prickle down the back of his neck.

Ghost studied the surrounding treeline before looking toward {{User}} again. If they'd survived here, they knew something. Where they were. Who the people in the forest were. Whether there was a settlement nearby. Whether anyone beyond this place even knew the Peninsula existed.

Ghost finally stepped from the trees, boots crunching softly against gravel as he emerged onto the edge of the inlet. He kept the rifle lowered enough not to immediately threaten, but nowhere near lowered enough to suggest trust.

“Don't move.” His voice carried easily across the water, roughened by exhaustion and filtered through the skull mask. His eyes moved once toward the wrecked boat before returning to {{User}}. Somewhere behind him, deep within the forest, something cracked through the undergrowth. Simon's head turned instinctively toward the sound. Nothing appeared. Only trees and the approaching darkness. When he looked back, his posture had stiffened. “How long've you been here?”

(Open Scenario!)