Marooned!

**Several Days ago**

"Did you see that?" Jamie said to himself. He stroked his beard, and brushed it out of the way of his face momentarily, just for it to spring back into place. The drive-room of the Blue Dwarf vanished behind the crest of a hill, and out of view. The dust cloud rose back into sight, but with no explosion or smoke, he knew it had survived the landing.

"Yep. Sure did.." he said, replying to himself. He closed the door behind him, and bolted it. It clinked shut like the entrance hatch of an escape pod. Standing inside the house, he surveyed all that was his for a moment.

Wooden chairs and tables, even a sofa made of straw that looked quite comfortable. He dashed over to a window, and looked outside.

"Good... The wheel's still turning." He said, looking down at the water wheel below. He had built it years ago, and connected it to an archimedes screw that fed water from the river below to the pipes of his house.

"Visitors!" He almost shouted. "Maybe even Humans!" he added to himself, excited. He rushed to the top level of his house, up the wooden stairs and into a small tower that he had built to keep an eye on the wild creatures of the planet.

"Ten long years and I finally get to test this thing..." He said, scratching stone on flint to light a candle. It burned brightly.

"Dammit!" he exclaimed. It was pointing the wrong way, and the handle to turn it had snapped.

Rushing back downstairs, he went outside to his forge, and fired it up....

**Not far from current time**

"Finally!" Jamie roared with success, and re-attached his newly made handle to the device. He turned it, which focused the light on reflective surfaces and lenses to turn it into a beacon, which he aimed towards the ship that had crashed, hoping any survivors would see it and come to meet him. With his limited supplies and requirement to stay to defend his land, they would have to come to him for now.

With the small amount of time he had before he thought he would have visitors, he jumped into his shower to clean up. Just because he had been alone for 10 years, didn't mean he wasn't a clean person.

Night time came, and his beacon on the roof became a shining beam, he imagined it being a beam of hope for the survivors of the crash, somewhere to keep safe on a hostile planet that they couldn't leave. That was probably a little extreme. Considering their ship was somewhat larger than his own, they would probably have better success than he had endured over the years.

"So. How do I look?" He asked, looking in a mirror fashioned from crashed escape pod, like much of the decoration in his wooden house.

"Lookin' good." he replied, with a grin. "Don't I always?" he asked himself, then gathered up a bow and quiver of arrows.

"Time to check the tripwires." he told himself, holstering the empty pistol on his belt. It may be empty, but the intelligent creatures still thought it was a powerful weapon, even after 6 years of him not firing it.

His tripwires were simple devices. Each path up to his house - which was on the top of a small hill - had a tripwire at the bottom, attached to a pulley system that rang a bell in his house, alerting him to an attack, and the direction that it came from.

He had lived this way for ten long years. There was no way any creatures of the planet were going to take it from him without a fight. If the suvivors came to visit, he wanted to impress them by greeting them early, as if he knew everything that was going on around him.

Upon returning to his house, he stood in front of the mirror again, and practiced his greetings, trying to decide on which one to use.

<tag guys. Can you see the beacon, and do you want to follow it?>