Chapter Text
Bramble had been on the night bus for almost six hours now, with another six to go. Stars glimmered overhead, the darkness of the land beyond the window melding into a single smudge of black and blue, like the bruise of a well-paddled arse. She couldn’t sleep. She’d never been able to sleep in anything but her own bed, and so she fell to thinking. She thought back on what choices had led her here, to this moment, crammed in next to an overweight, elderly man that snored so loudly she half-expected his tonsils to rattle free and roll down the aisle, being driven to a place she’d only ever heard about when she was very small.
Everything held a strange, almost dreamlike quality, as if she wasn’t quite living in the moment, merely an observer, looking through the eyes of someone she didn’t recognise, watching their life play out. Only six days ago, she’d sat at her tidy little desk in her tidy little cubicle at Joja’s tidy, corporate office in her hometown, tippering away at her keyboard, her mind numb with the endless repetitive tasks that dampened her spirit and exhausted her so effectively that she rarely bothered with much more than collapsing on the sofa once she got home, moving only to order pizza or reach for her Xbox controller. The atmosphere at Joja was almost robotic in the way employees all filed in at the same time, took their seats, then their lunch, then their seats again, all toddling out as one at the end of the day.
Mindless. Repetitive. Soul-sucking. Hell, she was pretty sure the guy two cubicles in front of her had died of mindrot.
Bramble had caught herself drifting, her mind fighting for something stimulating, something different, something new, anything to take the edge off the endless reports and figures about how much money the owners of Joja were making when she barely made rent. Her wandering mind had lit upon an old memory, something she’d thought long forgotten.
A dimly lit room, a dark sky beyond the window. A chill in the air, despite the roaring fire in the corner. A sign of Yoba on the wall. The soft sounds of weeping from the shadows behind her. A single bed with blue covers, an elderly man lying beneath them.
Her Grandpa.
Dying.
He’d said a lot of things, little of which she remembered. She’d only been small, after all. What she did remember, all of a sudden on a Monday morning, was that he had handed her a letter, and told her to open it when she was ready, and that she’d know when that time was. His eyes had been wide, as if he had been trying to impart some secret message to her. What that could have been, she had no idea. She certainly remembered how difficult it was to pull the letter from his iron grip, as if he was afraid to let go.
She sighed. Everything seemed to become a bit of a muddle after that. She’d found the letter in her drawer in her Joja desk, which was odd, because she didn’t remember ever bringing it with her. But she’d opened it at her desk, and found the deed to an old farm in a place called Stardew Valley. A scrap of paper had fallen out as well, but she’d lost it under her desk.
She’d looked the place up, right there at her computer. Never mind that she wasn’t allowed to use it for anything other than work itself, she wanted to know. There was almost nothing there to find, other than a bus timetable that ran only if someone bought a bespoke ticket, the price of which only made sense if the bus ran on iridium.
It had been then that her boss had decided to pay her a visit, tipped off no doubt by Joja’s 'System for Noting Idle Time, Compliance & Habits' warning him that someone wasn’t being squeezed for their full eight hours’ worth of minimum-wage monotony. He arrived with a scowl on his face and a scolding on his mind, and something in her just snapped.
A furious bout of shouting later, and Bramble found herself on the step with a box of her possessions in her hands, the letter poking up from the middle of the detritus like a rose.
That was when the dreamlike state began. As if she hadn’t lost herself her job, as if she hadn’t packed up everything she owned into two suitcases and said goodbye to her father, as if she hadn’t sent a letter ahead to someone called Lewis to warn of her impending arrival. As if she hadn’t just uprooted herself from everything she’d ever known.
A particularly loud snort from the gentleman beside her jolted Bramble back to reality. With a light frown, she shook her head and took to staring back out the window at the rolling landscape, becoming ever more unfamiliar as time went by. She couldn’t remember ever being this far from home before, and she’d just decided to move to the middle of nowhere?
This must be a dream. The woman she knew wouldn’t have made these decisions. She was quiet, studious, some might even say dull. She enjoyed lie ins, video games, takeaways, mindless rubbish on the telly and maybe one too many glasses of wine. But above all else, she was sensible. It wouldn’t have been that hard to find another job. She could have stayed home, kept renting her Joja flat, found another Joja job at another Joja branch…
But no. She had been impulsive. She had been reckless. She’d spent the last of her savings on this stupidly expensive bespoke bus ride, with only enough gold to see her through the next couple of days, if she was lucky. It certainly wasn’t enough for a trip home.
The bus rumbled on through the night.
Dawn broke just as it rattled to a stop, and Bramble shifted in her seat, her eyelids heavy, her back aching. A sign flashed at the front of the bus, and her stomach did a strange kind of flip.
STARDEW VALLEY
Glancing out the window, she saw two unfamiliar people waiting on the grassy verge, an older man with an impressive grey moustache and a flat cap, wearing a green shirt and brown trousers with suspenders, and a middle aged, redheaded woman with her hair in a ponytail, wearing a red chequered shirt. Both smiled brightly when they made eye contact with her, and she scrambled to find her feet, all but climbing over the wide man, who continued to snore.
The driver helped her pull out her suitcases from the storage underneath the bus, then leapt back into his cabin, peeling away and leaving her standing there, coughing slightly at the dust from the road.
“Why, hello there!” The older man greeted her, grabbing her hand and pumping her arm up and down so enthusiastically that her whole top half wobbled. “You must be our new farmer!”
“Um,” Bramble replied.
“I’m Mayor Lewis,” Mayor Lewis explained, still shaking her hand. “I knew your Grandpa many years ago, and I have to say, you look exactly like him!”
Bramble blinked a bit at that. She was twenty-five, dark haired and green eyed, round of middle and heavy of bottom, not old, wrinkly, weatherworn and grey.
“I’m Robin,” the redheaded woman said, taking her hand the second Mayor Lewis released it, her palm calloused and surprisingly strong. “I’m the local carpenter. We just couldn’t wait to meet you once we heard you were coming! Come on along, let’s get you settled in.”
“I-” Bramble began, but Robin had already picked up her suitcases and set off at a brisk pace along the dirt path, taking a right as Mayor Lewis scampered along behind her. With a shrug, she followed them, glancing at the signpost as she passed. One sign indicated the way to the town square, and the other, slightly more battered sign, pointed the way they were headed, towards her grandpa’s farm.
Her farm.
Barr Farm.
It took ten minutes to walk from the bus stop, and the path rounded a little bend. Bramble wasn’t sure what she had been expecting when the farm was revealed to her, but it certainly wasn’t what she saw. She had thought Barr Farm would be rustic. What she hadn’t expected at all was a post-apocalyptic survival challenge. A sprawling mess of several acres, overgrown with weeds, long grass, shrubs, trees, fallen branches, scattered stones, even huge logs and boulders tossed about that looked like a giant had thrown a tantrum, all encased in a thick border of short cliffs, as if the farm had been dug out of the surrounding rock. A light mist hung over the land like spiderwebs.
“It’s not much, but you’ll love it,” Robin said cheerfully, walking up to a ramshackle old cabin with a rickety wooden porch. Bramble gulped. Was this where she was supposed to live? It didn’t even look like it had running water.
“Be nice,” Mayor Lewis scolded. “Robin’s just trying to entice you to hiring her to build you some upgrades. Yes, it’s a bit of a fixer-upper, but I’ve no doubt that you’ll settle in in no time!”
“Right, right, of course,” Robin deposited the suitcases on the rickety wooden porch. “Well, it’s lovely to meet you, we’ll leave you to it, hm?”
“I-”
“Oh, do be sure to stop by Pelican Town and say hello to everyone when you can,” Robin continued. “Everyone’s so excited! We don’t get too many new faces here, you know? Gosh, I think the last new face was… oh, I don’t know, some twelve years ago?”
“Well-”
“We’ll see you tomorrow,” Mayor Lewis said. “Oh, by the way…” he pointed out a wooden crate to the side of the mailbox. “If you have anything to sell, pop it in there. I’ll come by and exchange it for gold, I tend to be up pretty early, so any funds will be there for you in the morning.”
“Sell-?”
“I’ll leave you a welcome package too.” He gave another wide smile that spread his moustache over his top lip like hairy butter, then about faced and marched off back down the path, picking his way through the scattered debris. Robin gave her a cheery wave and followed suit.
Bramble stood a moment, gaping after them. She drew a long, slow breath and let it out, raising a hand to run over the back of her neck as she stared out over the acres of land that hadn’t seen a loving hand in decades.
“What the fuck,” she muttered. “Have I gotten myself into?”
The front door stuck as she tried to shoulder it open, the old hinges rusted and squealing. She gawped as a single, small room was revealed to her, a bed in one corner, a small dining table and chair against the other wall, alongside a fireplace and a TV.
A… TV?
She shook her head, hauling her suitcases in after her, leaving lines of dust on the wooden floor. So this place had electricity, but no kitchen? No sink? No… toilet?
Fucking hell. Bramble glanced up and shrank back a little. Spiderwebs clogged the corners of the ceiling, which boasted exactly zero lights. No matter how tired she felt, no matter how achy after being crammed into a tiny bus seat for twelve hours, this place needed a clean.
The sun was well in the sky by the time she was done. She’d had to muddle together a feather duster by grabbing a stick from outside and sacrificing an old feather boa she’d kept as a memento from her Joja university days. Despite the cabin’s small size, it took an alarmingly long time to clean, prying into every nook and cranny, her shoulders tense, terrified that a spider was going to drop on her head at any given moment.
She shivered. Though she’d worked up a bit of a sweat carting dust outside and beating her makeshift duster on the rail (and repairing it every time it fell apart), the early spring temperature crept into the cabin, the tail end of winter stubbornly clinging to the sharp edges of the air. It was draughty in here, and she dreaded what it would be like come true winter. Or worse, the summer, when it would be so hot she’d have to peel herself out of bed every morning like some horrible version of human velcro. At least there was electricity, but she had no idea where she’d hang an aircon unit. Or where she’d even get one.
Bramble headed outside, gathering up a bundle of sticks from the detritus by her front door. At least that was a simple task, there seemed to be more sticks than anything else, except perhaps weeds. And stones. She brought them in and tried to start a fire with a box of matches that she found on the mantlepiece, swearing under her breath as the damp wood simply smoked and refused to take. She sacrificed an old T-shirt to get it going, then huddled nearby, warming her hands. Her stomach growled, and she dug into her suitcases again, coming up with an old Joja Noodles-In-A-Pot, just add hot water!
She sighed. There was no water, hot or otherwise. Setting the pot aside, she searched high and low for a spigot, a tap, anything, before trooping back outside, spotting a small pond to the east, and a larger one much further away to the south, by a large and creepy looking treeline.
“Ah, well,” she said, picking up her Joja Noodles-In-A-Pot. “If I die of some kind of algae-poisoning, at least I won’t freeze to death.”
When it began to get dark, she huddled closer to the fire. She really didn’t want to sleep here, not when she wasn’t sure if she’d gotten all the spiders out, and not if the bed was so old it would crumble to dust the moment she parked her ample arse on it. All the same she rose and moved over to inspect it. To her considerable surprise, the bed seemed new, as did the bedding. Even better, it was clean. So it was with no small relief that she finally undressed and rolled under the covers, staring up at the dark ceiling as the fire burned down to embers.
She’d stick at it for a month or so, just enough to make some cash, then she’d go home and try grovelling for a job. Maybe she’d try Joja Art, or Joja Game Design, or Joja Fitness, anything other than Joja Corporate… sure, they owned over half the companies in the country, but maybe she’d get really lucky and find somewhere where the chairs weren’t modern medieval torture devices.
Exhausted, she barely finished her thoughts before she tumbled into a deep sleep.