Wednesday 30 March 2016

Alyeskan Gazetteer: Roth Island

The Gazetteer returns and ventures out into the wilds of the northern tundra, a mysterious and wildly inhospitable place where death and the biting cold are the only certainties.

The focus this week is on the cursed Roth Island and its abandoned outpost, though maybe not quite as abandoned as first thought...

The Roth Island Mystery

Roth Island was named after the famous Commonwealth explorer Admiral Francis Roth who one of the first expeditions to map the Alyeskan coastline. A meteorological station was established on Roth Island prior to the Great Darmonican War, the buildings of which remain to this day.

Throughout the War the Roth Island Station dutifully radioed its daily weather reports, least until one day when it simply stopped transmitting altogether. At first it was thought that the station's radio transmitter had been knocked out of action by bad weather, after week off silence a small military expedition was sent to investigate and found the station abandoned with no sign of the men assigned there or what had happened to them. The only clue was the commander's journal that mentioned a stranger that staggered over the ice sea to the north, delirious with tales of some sort of ruined city far to the north. Further questioning by the station commander found that the man claimed to be the sole survivor of some expedition, but he wouldn't give any more details beyond that.

The last entry in the journal mentioned about one of the station's staff going missing, but all the entries after that had been torn out. Thanks to the combination of the then still raging War and the invasion by the resurgent Wulvers no further investigation into Roth Island took place and it simply got filed away in the archives. The Commonwealth decided to leave Roth Island completely abandoned, due to a mixture of fears at what had happened and a lack of resources. After the War a small weather station was established at Prospector's Reach.

Roth Island Today

Today the Roth Island Station remains in the same state as it was found in after the mysterious disappearance of its men, only the journal of the station commander and some sensitive material were removed by the Commonwealth. The various buildings have survived largely intact, though admittedly with decay and damage from the elements in places but they are still able to provide shelter if need be. The Station consists of the 'main' building, a series of interconnected wooden huts and a couple of other buildings such as a hanger and a separate building for storing fuel.

These days the only visitors tend to be Aerial Corps patrols (though only a flyover) or those seeking an isolated meeting place, the hanger as certainly shown sign of occasional use since the Station was abandoned. Of greater concern to the Commonwealth is the occasional radio transmissions that the Station broadcasts, particularly since the Station's radio equipment was removed and the generator disconnected. Even more disconcerting is that fact that the transmissions claim to be from the men who vanished....


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