Marcus rolled his fingers over his leg as he stared at the line, the others giving their input as they saw fit. To be completely honest, in their current state, avoiding combat and setting up a base of operations was probably the highest priority of all, and diving smack dab into the middle of an unknown forest like Nova had suggested they do (even AFTER Rae's prior warnings about some sort of whisperings) made the least sense of everything. Wasn't the safest and most logical thing to do be sticking to the outskirts of the forest before anything else? Everyone else seemed to think as much, so...

"I say we avoid heading in for now. Place sounds REALLY ominous, and without any means of self-defense we're basically sitting ducks if we go in now." he sighed, standing up from his previous position and looking to the sides. "I'll head right and circle around the forest; Adam can probably take the left if we're splitting to cover more ground, or we can all just go as a group. In the case of a former, if we hit a dead end, meet right back here, alright?"

With that, Marcus glanced around and took a fallen branch off the ground before stepping behind the red line and drawing a giant 'X' in the dirt; right after that, he planted the branch firmly in the ground. Luckily, due to the lack of brush, the branch stood out quite well among the low-lying grasses, making it easy to spot if they decided to return here. With that, Marcus walked off to the right, hoping to find something of interest... Hopefully one that wouldn't try to kill him.

It didn't take long, though, for him to come across one of the reasons for their earlier discomfort, though; an entire section of the forest, completely razed to the ground. What made it worse, though, were the obviously burnt corpses of what Marcus assumed to be people. The heat still emanating from the area only served to further his discomfort, and though he was nowhere near sick, the sight of it all was quite... Disturbing.

"...The hell happened here...?" he asked himself before cautiously looking around the charred remains of trees and underbrush. The region seemed to be a former campsite, given how the bodies were near a circle of stones clearly made to contain a fire, but... That campfire didn't seem to be the cause of the mess... No, given how the bodies seemed to be sprawled out nearby, it was quite likely that these people were killed, and the fire used to try and erase the evidence. The ability to handle dead bodies wasn't really somewhere he wanted to tread (no, in fact, he'd much rather be off looking for artifacts if that was to be his job), but given the situation information was key. Cautiously moving around the first corpse (of what he counted to be five people), he found something that he considered himself lucky to find- a small dagger, one sheathed away and that had barely escaped the worst of the damage from the fire by having itself buried in the dirt, presumably after it's previous owner fell. Though his moral compass was obviously freaking the heck out because he was essentially a grave robber by doing this, Marcus took the dagger, sheath and all, and slid it onto his belt before continuing to look over the site. Hopefully, the people behind him (if any) would be able to find some more clues as to what the hell went down here.

"...Well, whatever the hell caused this, it might come for us next..."

[@Tokki][@VitaVitaAR][@WeepingLiberty][@Zombehs]