This tribe is known as the Pale Ones. They dwell at the very center of the dead city, emerging from an old subterranean shelter. More organized than most, their ways are rigid but fragile — a flickering echo of a lost civilization.

The elder scavengers of the Pale Ones move through the drowned skeleton of the dead city — women too old to bear children, too frail to hunt, yet still bound to a purpose that keeps them alive.

Once they were citizens of the shelter, protected and groomed for roles that time has now stripped away. Age has thinned their bodies and hollowed their faces, carving deep lines of labor and loss. Rain clings to their skin, mud streaks their robes, and their breath is heavy with the fatigue of decades spent surviving in a world that has long since ended.

They search the ruins not for glory but for usefulness. Among flooded corridors of collapsed hospitals, abandoned pharmacies, rusted clinics, they sift through broken drawers and shattered glass — hunting for anything that might still hold value: a sealed vial, a rusted tin, a forgotten packet of medicine untouched by time. Their satchels are small, patched and battered, but to the Pale Ones they are lifelines.

These women walk slowly, cautiously. Their eyes are dull yet alert — trained by necessity to notice what others overlook. Each step through the drowned city is a reminder that usefulness is their last shield against hunger and exile. They are not warriors, not reproducers, not leaders. They are simply needed.

And in this world, necessity is power.

Among all surviving tribes, the Pale Ones cling to a fragile sense of superiority, a claim preserved not by strength but by memory. And it is these elder scavengers — dripping with rain, hunched beneath the weight of years — who carry that memory across the ruins. They are the last archivists of what once was, retrieving scraps of the old world so the tribe can keep limping forward.

Not heroes. Not chosen. But essential.