The night watch

It started with Eleanor Bull. I opened a save to see how the evenings were going and followed her. She was one of the strollers, the people who spend their free evening walking around near home. She had been standing in the same spot for an hour. Standing still is not strolling. So now a stroller really walks: the whole evening, slower than on the way to work, stopping now and then to look around for a few seconds before moving on. Some of her neighbours prefer the trees near home, and walk from one to the next instead.

While I was watching the evening, I saw haulers walking home with full loads, Guy and Lena Shaw among them. Their shift had ended halfway through a delivery, and they simply took their work home. That is not how a day ends. Now a delivery in hand comes first, and only then do they stop. In the rare case there is no way to the drop at all, the load goes down on the ground and someone else picks it up.

The next save had the same problem one job over. Julia Rowe was sitting by the campfire with a log on her shoulder and the camp’s axe on her back. So now everyone finishes up before the evening. Julia brings her wood to the logging camp and hangs the axe back on the rack, and Hazel Morris brings the last of her harvest to the farmhouse before going home.

Then night falls, and that is where the real news is. The glimmers come out of the old shafts at night, and until now the only answer was a watch tower with a crossbow. Its bolts need iron, and iron is far down the road. The quarry wakes the glimmers long before that. So the first defence is made of wood: a guard post, a lookout on stilts in a fenced yard, with two watchmen and a rack of clubs.

The watchmen live the other way round. While the town works, they sleep for eight hours. In the evening they sit by the fire with everyone else. At 22:00, when the others go to bed, they take a club from the rack and wait at the post. When a glimmer wanders within five tiles, a watchman walks up to it and hits it with a low bonk. Three hits and it is gone, and its glow and bones fall where it died, for the haulers to collect in the morning. At 06:00 the clubs go back on the rack and the watchmen go to bed.

A quiet night is a different story. As long as the old shafts have never stirred, there is nothing to watch, and sitting through eight dark hours was boring. Now a sign comes up once everyone is in bed and the night flies by at twenty times the speed.

One last small thing: going back to the main menu or quitting now asks whether to save first.

For now the post comes with its two clubs and they never break. Next, the clubs wear out, and a carver in a small hut makes new ones from wood.