Pinebarren Cottage
“We all get called here in the end.. I thought we lived out the rest of our lives peacefully. But they come to tear us limb from limb, and turn us into dust.”
Overview
Pinebarren Cottage is a brick house located in the Green Halos surrounding the crater states of Morvek, Pythos, Orok, and Nacken; and is somewhat a central point where these environments meet. There is a dense overgrowth surrounding the cabin of a pine forest, a place where the higher altitude pines which grow in the Green Halos all meet and make the ground so acidic that very little can grow (and very little light gets through). It is located in a small ghost town which was presumably used by the Red Hoods once upon a time, perhaps as part of a supply route.
Appearance
Made of red brick, it is a 3-bedroom, 2 bathroom house with white accenting and a shingled roof. The front entrance at this point, has been completely blocked and rotted beyond access after a tree fell and broke the front porch, and rainfall secured it into a putrefied and petrified blockade. It looks like at one point, it was quite nice, and possibly the porch was used for surveillance.
There is a back entrance which leads into a small kitchen, with a hallway and sitting room close to a flight of uneven stairs. Both bathrooms are upstairs, with one attached to the master bedroom and another accessible from the hallway. One of the bedrooms was used as an office, the other two as sleeping quarters. It seems that at its peak usage, it housed five Red Hoods, though under Interfacer control it houses anywhere from six to ten at varying stages of their life cycle.
Past the kitchen was a hallway to the upstairs and a door to the basement. Soma gathered himself and turned to the basement stairs, and upstairs, trying to decide which path to take. Then he heard footsteps, he heard muttering on the radio. In other languages. Someone was coming down the stairs, slowly but surely.
Historical Uses
Initially, it's thought that this dates back to a time when brick was actually available for building materials, a mixture that can only be found on the Weird Terrain and thus is lost to time. Brickmaking is in fact, a technology lost to time itself, and one only the Red Hoods remember -- even the Dusios of the Green Halos could not replicate this nowadays.
Like many other locations which were once used as reconnaissance points for the Red Hoods, the people of Project Interfacer have opportunistically seized it for their own purposes. Nowadays, its uses are shrouded in mystery, officially serving as nothing but an abandoned building and not marked on any maps. However, it is still accessible through the leyline which Red Hoods used to transport themselves, and certainly physically accessible if you're brave or stupid enough to try and find it.
Current Usage?
Pinebarren Cottage does not appear in any recent documents, aside from an interrogation conducted by Simon Caeles and his brother Maximilian Caeles on Interfacer Enoch Carnovia, who was found there with the bodies of three butchered Dusioi and two barely functional old model Interfacers from Typhon. Enoch described his experience as such in the interrogation:
“They call these kind of places 'treeless houses' and they’re… like playgrounds for young Dusioi. They had me repair the other two interfacers and help them wire things. But then we found out they were our pilots. That our pilots were… not there to give us a peaceful retirement. They wanted our scalps.”
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