BNN: Rats Plague Britain Farmlands
Erik Valstrom Jul 10 2000 7:56PM
"I had never seen such a swarm of vermin in all my life, and I worked the Skara Brae docks for years! Out of the woods they came.. all shapes and sizes. Hungry and vicious they were! A few ratmen were among them, as if leading them onward. My crops were devastated, and even my home was invaded by them!" Such is the tale told me by Beechel Kire, a long-time Britain farmer and rancher, as I surveyed the damage wrought by the horde which had, strangely, but thankfully enough, retreated back into the dark forest whence they came.
The bodies of the grimy creatures lay in stinking heaps among what were cabbage hills and rows of onions in the well-tended fields west of the city. Beechel's was one among many of the farmlands ravaged by the swarm. Fields adjacent to his were no less subject to their depredations, and at least one farmhand was killed from wounds inflicted by multiple bites of the creatures, or by one of the ratmen accompanying them, it is not known which. If this kind of devastation continues, there will be a shortage and what vegetables we do see will likely be imported from Yew or Skara Brae farms, something Britain farmers, if not consumers, will be saddened to see.
"'Twas almost as if it were an expedition of sorts... or a foraging party of some kind. When examining the corpses, we found unusual amounts of gold and items upon them, stored in their mouths, uneaten, like packrats hauling it away for storage or something! Gold coins were even recovered from their oversized jaws... and what a rat would want with gold is beyond me!" Beechel went on to say. Indeed, this does not appear to be any usual vermin infestation, but one that may have something more behind it. Worst of all, this one raid may not be the end, but a beginning.