She does manage to find some branches floating in the bay or near the ocean shoreline, once she makes it closer to the unusual trees. They are, more or less, mostly soaked through, though some have landed on the sandbar and are only a little wet. 

The tide is definitely coming in now, though. There's not going to be a sandbar left for much longer. 

Yep. Time to get the salvageable branches and then skedaddle up past the high tide line to set up her campfire. Definitely want to make sure she's well clear of the oncoming tide.

It doesn't take too long to get a fire going. She shaves some little chips and flakes off the dry bush branches, gets 'em down really fine, then sparks with her striker to get them lit. Blow, add more, blow, add bigger things, blow, etc. Eventually she's got an actual proper fire going.

At that point, she spikes all the fish onto the ends of a couple particularly straight-looking sticks that she sharpens the ends of (these can be wet, it's even better if they are), and she'll roast some tiny fish over the fire. Shouldn't take long. Probably when the scales are kinda charred then the insides are cooked, especially if she holds 'em a bit high.

They certainly seem to be cooked, as far as she knows. They taste like unseasoned fish. There's a lot of small bones which get in the way of eating them, but they do taste like food, at least. 

Wooo. Okay. Okay. She knows how to feed herself out here. That's progress. Next stop, exploring the weird wooden thing. Up the hill she goes to take a look.

It looks to be a very old wooden hut, built as best as it could be out of random pieces of driftwood, nails, and some straw and sticks. It wasn't put together very well, which is why it collapsed at some point in time. 

Huh. If it's fixable, it could be a pretty great head start toward shelter? She's never done anything this big before though, so that might be a challenge.

She spends the next several minutes looking the structure over, trying to see if there are easy spots to fix it by reusing nails and using a rock in place of a hammer. This may be troublesome, however, on account of the fact that she's twelve.

Being twelve would certainly make it difficult to reconstruct with tools she finds herself. However, one of the first thing she notices when looking it over and moving parts of it around is a skeleton, clearly human, wearing the threads of clothing, on the rotten wooden floor of what remains of the hut. It's crushed underneath the roof and walls of the hut. It's unclear whether or not they were already dead when the walls came down, or if the walls coming down was what killed him. 

That's... very very concerning. She's maybe not going to stay in there for shelter. If all else fails, the cave she came through would make pretty solid shelter, and probably lots more stable.

She'll finish searching it, though. Might be stuff to use. Or learn. 

And having the skeleton around is kind of a fun kind of creepy, just suggestive of danger is all.

When she moves more things out of the way, she'll find that there's another cave entrance hidden under the place where the skeleton was lying down. There's a rusted latch that might imply how the occupant of this hut used to access the cave underneath the hut. 

Okay that looks like a pretty interesting reason why this previous person would've set up their shelter here. Sorry, skelefriend, you're gonna have to get out of the way. She's way too curious about what's down in this cave.

The passageway is very dark, and when she rounds a corner and then another, and suddenly, everything is pitch black. 

Or is it? Without the light of the outdoors, she can see the faint, faint light of something glowing on the damp ceiling and walls -- some lichen, growing and glowing, ever-so-faintly. 

Okay. She'll give it a moment, take some time for her eyes to adjust. Maybe they'll adjust enough that she'll be able to see in the lichen's glow, maybe not. Only way to find out is to wait, look around, and don't move until she's sure one way or another.

Her eyes adjust. 

It's still very very dark in there, but she can see faint outlines or rocks and the passage forward, the greenish light reflecting off of the facets of the roughly worn rock facets along the way. 

She sure wishes she had a flashlight. She also wishes she knew how to make workable torches. Instead, she'll just she'll explore down the passage very slowly and carefully, making as much use of the faint light as she can.

The passage curves gently rightwards and downwards, the feeling of wet getting stronger and the prevalence of the glowing lichen increasing the deeper she goes.

And then she rounds a corner and there's suddenly there's a glow of reflected sunlight as reflected off of not-quite-still water, lighting up a medium sized cavern, complete with stalactites covered in lichen, stalagmites jutting up out of the floor, a cave exit where the sunlight is peeking through, and tied to the rocks near where Sable emerged from the passage, a sailing ship. 

Her sleek hull is weathered, most of the paint long since peeled off. Her sails hang limp, rigged fore-and-aft to her two masts, dotted with holes and rips. Her lines are tattered and frayed with age. Rusted cannons are just visible inside her flanks. Fading letters at the stern identify her as Maya. A beautifully-carved figurehead decorates the bow, though her expression is one of terror.

A worn, rickety gangplank bridges the gap between the deck and the shore.

Oh. 

Sable's never seen a ship like this before, but her heart skips a beat. A chill runs over her body, and her breath catches in her throat.

She finds herself walking closer, even before she makes the decision. 

This ship is beautiful, and she needs care, and she needs repairs, and most of all she needs a crew. Sable just knows somehow, deep in her bones, that ships need crews and need love.

She's never considered life on a ship, but the image of leaning over the railing as the waves rush past suddenly captivates her.

She walks carefully up the gangplank, crosses the deck, and rests her hands on the foremast.

"You're all alone, aren't you? No crew left," she murmurs, tears welling up in her eyes. "That person up there, in the hut, were they the last one? I wonder what happened. They clearly cared about you, if they were guarding you to the—", she sniffles, "—the end like that."

The ship creaks faintly, probably from the pressure of the tide pushing her against the rocks.

Sable leans against the mast. She liked sailing at summer camp. She'll probably like it here. She nods to herself, sniffles again, and speaks. "I'll be your crew. If you'll have me. I'll patch your sails, if I can find the cloth, and I'll replace your lines, and we'll sail to a shipyard, so they can help you with the things I can't do."

The old ship seems to settle somehow, the wooden sound softer than a creak, closer to a rustle, like old tension relaxing after holding out for ages.

Sable nods to herself. Okay, first thing to do is see what she's got to work with. She starts carefully exploring the ship, running her fingertips gently along the ancient wood whenever she can. 

The top deck has little to find, nothing more than a steering wheel that presumably controls the rudder, a small boat with oars ready to be placed in the water if need be, and plenty of rigging that leads up the masts, though climbing those may seem a bit of a dangerous endeavour. There is a wide rope ladder leading belowdecks that seems in good enough shape for her to climb down it, though, if she so chooses. 

Hmm. Down she goes then. She really wishes she had a flashlight, but oh well. She'll cope — mostly by going slowly.

There's a little bit of light from the cannon portholes one deck down, which is enough for her to see that the rope ladder descends even further than one deck, though the deck below her has no such cannons and is actually mostly below waterline, and so it is even darker there. This deck, at least what she can see from the ladder, is at least partly used for cannon-related storage: plies of heavy metal balls lay in piles against the sides of the ship, and there are sealed barrels that very well might contain gunpowder, though they could also contain any matter of other things. 

There are several sailcloth curtains segmenting this deck, though the sailcloth is frayed and it's not hard for sable to see further barrels and cannonballs through the holes, along with some hammocks that are barely holding together in the sections. 

She'll have to check the barrels. Any and all decks below this will just be way too dark to explore unless something on this deck turns into a light source. Can the barrels be opened safely, without damaging the ability to reseal them?