Rest-and-Resupply Stop

A little slice of home-away-from-homeworld.

Are you a hero on a quest through a Wild Wilderness? Have you been tramping through the jungle for weeks, fighting off Mooks and monsters? Are you wounded or running out of supplies? Is the confrontation with the Big Bad approaching, causing you to wonder if you can possibly complete your quest and/or survive with your injuries and battered gear?

We have everything you need here at our Rest-and-Resupply Stop. Services provided include:

• Safety: The thick walls and night watchmen protect you (at least temporarily) from the Big Bad, his mooks, monsters, and other dangers, to allow you time to rest and plan your next steps.
• Sleep: After your long trek of sleeping in cold tents and caves on the bare ground, the rest stop offers warm, clean beds. You're guaranteed to sleep the full night, including protection from any pesky prophetic dreams.
• Hot food: After weeks of dried meat and hard biscuits, you'll enjoy hot stew and roasted meat, all washed down with ale and mead at the friendly tavern.
• Supplies: If you are not fortunate enough to have Infinite Supplies, you can gather more weapons, ammo, clothes, and provisions to replace those you used or had to abandon; including specialty items that may be needed later on in your quest.
• Healing: Treatment with Healing Herbs is available for any new wounds received, or old ones that are acting up. Depending on the type of wounds, you may only get partial healing, but it's enough to get you to the final confrontation (not guaranteed to last the full fight).
• Information: Our library has leather-bound volumes and ancient parchment with esoteric texts relating to the Big Bad, McGuffin and other such useful topics. We can also provide mostly accurate and up-to-date information on current affairs for those who have been out of contact, for a price.
• Directions: Either verbal, maps or the services of a guide for the next stage of your journey.
• Romance: After weeks of loneliness on the trail, you can flirt with the barmaid. Or, if your purse is filled with enough coins, some rest stops may have attractive courtesans who can help soothe your tensions away.
• Motivation: Even Determinators can get disheartened. Here in the peace, comfort, and (optional) beauty of our Rest-and-Resupply Stop you can reflect, perhaps get advice from a wise old mentor, sage, or priest. This can remind you what you are fighting for and renew your Heroic Resolve.

A harbor's rest stop will have ship repair services and nautical supplies. In science fiction, a spaceport or Space Station is the equivalent location for a rest stop.

Just be careful to keep your goal in mind and not stay here too long. After all, The Call Knows Where You Live and we’d really rather not become a surrogate Doomed Hometown. Also, you should watch your back, because even though you are fairly safe in the RARS, the enemy's spies or assassins might slip through. Especially those shady guys with the Black Cloaks and hoods, lurking in the dark at the back of the tavern.

In settings where appropriate, the RARS is often a Hidden Elf Village or equivalent. May also be an Inn Between the Worlds, the Only Shop in Town or a fantasy tavern. The video game equivalent is a Healing Checkpoint. Often contains the Action Film, Quiet Drama Scene

Truth in Television, of course, ranging from the caravanserais and inns of the old Silk Road, to rest stops and No-Tell Motel next to the modern highway, to visitor centers just over the state line, and even large towns and cities that started out in the medieval era as important rest stops for travelers and merchants passing through on carriages.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Deltora Quest: Tom's Shop. Said shop includes supplies and the directions needed, but that the heroes cannot follow.
• Full Metal Panic!:
  • In The Second Raid we have the little gem when it was the similar prostitute that looks a lot like Chidori.
  • In the manga version (specifically on Sigma) we have a moment after Chidori is taken by Leonard Testarossa. After the kidnapping which includes bombs and pretty much a good deal of a good fight, Sousuke is bound to find a few of these. The Determinator part actually delivers the best gem of that arc.

Literature

• The Lord of the Rings
  • The Hobbit. Both Rivendell and Beorn's home provide shelter and support to the weary travelers on their long trek to the Lonely Mountain.
  • The Fellowship Of The Ring. Frodo and his party find refuge at Tom Bombadil's house and Rivendell, and the Fellowship benefits greatly from their stay in Lothlórien.
  • The Two Towers. Faramir's hideout in Ithilien, where Frodo and Sam find food and rest during their journey to Mordor. Faramir grants Frodo (and anyone under his protection) the right to go anywhere in Gondor for A Year and a Day, and gives Frodo and Sam walking staffs with the (magical?) virtue of finding and returning.
• The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: The beavers and their lodge acts as a rather short-term version and demonstrates the dangers of offering these services.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant (all three trilogies) has Andelain. While not a human (or other race’s) settlement like most examples, it still provides the peace, protection, and motivation.
• Deltora Quest: Pretty much each of the books has its own RARS:
  • City of the Rats has Tom's shop; particularly high on the resupply factor...
  • Valley of the Lost: Their brief visit to Tora magically relieves them of their stress and worries while they are there.
  • Return to Del: Withick Mire where they make their final plans and Barda heals from being poisoned.
• In "The Galaxy, and the Ground Within," the fourth book in the Wayfarers series, the tale takes place entirely at the Five-Hop One-Stop, a galactic truck stop for long-haul spacers, after a technological mishap halts all travel to and from the planet it's situated on for several days.
• In Isaac Asimov's science fiction novel The Stars, Like Dust the independent planet Lingane controls a number of strategically located small planetoids (incapable of supporting any independent populations themselves) on which the Linganians have built servicing stations which provide anything passing ships might need "from hyperatomic replacements to new book reels".
• The Robert A. Heinlein science fiction short story "Misfit" details how a group of young men in the "Cosmic Construction Corps" work to convert a small asteroid into Space Station E-M3 (including moving said asteroid into a new orbit, between the orbits of Earth and Mars). When Space Station E-M3 (and two other stations, E-M1 and E-M2) are in place and completed "no hard-pushed traveler of the spaceways on the Earth-Mars passage would ever again find himself far from land—or rescue".
• In Heinlein's novel Between Planets Circum-Terra Station (in orbit around Earth) is described as having many functions, from meteorology to astronomy to serving as the place where the government stockpiles nuclear weapons to keep Earth's population in line. But the space station's main function is as a transfer point for freight and passengers from short-ranged surface-to-orbit shuttlecraft to interplanetary liners, and for that purpose it has refueling facilities, repair yards, and even a large hotel with artificial gravity.
• In Heinlein's novel Starman Jones interstellar travel is accomplished by way of a Portal Network of "Horst congruencies", leading to one of these on a planetary scale, in the form of Garson's Planet. Garson's Planet is bitterly cold, with an unbreathable methane atmosphere; it is "the least unpleasant" of the thirteen planets of its star, Theta Centauri. However, the Theta Centauri System is at the other end of the Solar System's sole Horst congruency...but there are half a dozen other congruencies accessible from Theta Centauri, and Garson's Planet has therefore become "the inevitable cross-roads for trade of the Solar Union". While parts of it are evidently rather high-class, the parts directly depicted in the novel tend to the seedy side, with lots of bars (complete with bar girls) and other "tawdry inducements for the stranger to part with cash".
• In Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga interstellar travel again is via Portal Network (of "wormholes") meaning these — whether space stations or whole planets — are common in the setting. A notable example is Kline Station, a politically independent space habitat in a distant orbit around a "dark star" with no planets, but near which half-a-dozen wormhole exits can be found within practicable sublight cruising distance of one another; the "Docks and Locks" area of the space station complex features prominently in Ethan of Athos (mostly set on Kline Station) and it's very clear that, while it obviously has no natural resources of its own, Kline Station is nonetheless a significant commercial center on account of its position on the wormhole nexus. The planet Komarr is even more important to the action of the saga; while (unlike Kline Station) it is a planet, it's a pretty worthless one (cold and without a breathable atmosphere, with the population living in domed cities) without much in the way of natural resources, but once again of strategic importance on account of being at the convergence of numerous important wormhole routes. Komarr has been "a galactic trade crossroads for centuries", with an economy founded on "providing services to the trade ships of other worlds" that pass through its wormholes. As on Kline Station, Komarran domes prominently feature "Docks and Locks" districts, where cargoes can be loaded and unloaded. The broader Komarr System also features a number of off-planet space stations at the entrances to the wormholes.

Live-Action TV

• Battlestar Galactica had variations of this in both the classic and reboot shows, both in the pilots, no less:
  • Battlestar Galactica (1978): In Saga of a Star World, Galactica and her wards are dangerously low on supplies, and put in at the planet Carillon to rest and resupply. It's a Cylon trap, and it's only through the efforts of the Properly Paranoid Colonial Warriors under Adama's orders that they are able to get the Colonial civilians back to their ships and fight their way out.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): In the pilot miniseries, Galactica is effectively unarmed, having just been converted into a museum ship, and the entire fleet is short of supplies because it consists mostly of whatever ships happened to be traveling between the Colonies when the war kicked off. So they put in at Ragnar Anchorage, a secret Colonial supply base protected by a radioactive cloud that interferes with Cylon systems. This is also how they discover the Cylon "skinjob" infiltrators when one of them begins malfunctioning due to the radiation. Once they've loaded up everything they had time to grab, they have to fight their way out past the waiting Cylon fleet.
• Doctor Who: The TARDIS functions as a mobile Rest and Resupply Stop despite being the iconic ship of the series. Functioning as a place where the Doctor and the companions find most of the items in the list; including supplies to chase the Monster of the Week such as in "Vincent and the Doctor".
• Star Trek:
  • In an early episode of Star Trek: Enterprise, the Enterprise crew come across an automated repair station which is just what they need after suffering damage in the previous episode. They pull in and get refitted, only finding out later that the station has no problem covertly salvaging parts (including crewmembers) from the ships it is repairing.
  • "Encounter at Farpoint," the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Farpoint One wants to get certified by the Federation to be an official wayside stop and the Enterprise is sent to check them out.
  • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The titular Space Station is one of these because said station is sitting right next to a Wormhole that connects the Alpha Quadrant with the Gamma Quadrant some 70,000 light years away.
  • Star Trek: Voyager: Given that the titular ship and her crew spend most of the series stranded on the far side of the galaxy in the Delta Quadrant, Voyager had to stop off at these from time to time, though not as often as some fans would have liked.
    • In "Prime Factors", a Pleasure Planet invites them to stay for R&R, asking only for tales of their adventures in payment. However, the planet also has technology that could get them home faster, causing a rift in Voyager's crew when the locals refuse to trade it.
    • In "Fair Trade", Voyager stops at a Space Station before crossing the Nekrit Expanse, and Neelix becomes obsessed with finding a map of the Expanse because he's passed out of the region he knows.

Video Games

• There are several such places in Final Fantasy X. First, there is Rin's Travel Agency, which has several locations across Spira. Normal towns have also served as such for the protagonists.
• Breath of Fire:
  • Breath of Fire II: Providing Sleep, Healing, and a Save Point in the middle of a Crossroad between a Witch Tower, a Restaurant where they will cook the weak, a town where you can't save and the river route to a Cake sale.
  • Breath of Fire III takes it further by making the player bring it over for almost everything but Supplies. Given that the characters discuss the events you can remember where you left your game all that time ago, but not your fairy village (which the player can make it a supply point and a place for buying some top-tier weapons), and recall which town or dungeon you needed to go.
• Poke Marts and Pokemon Centers act as a cross between this and Healing Checkpoint in Pokémon games.
• The ports in the Uncharted Waters series are subdivided into full-scale ports with all manners of shops and institutions, and these—tiny settlements, usually far from the main civilization centers, whose only function is to give your fleet a chance to weather a storm, stock up on food and water, and repair your ships if necessary.
• Dragon Quest:
  • Dragon Quest VI has the Service Call ability, which summons a random merchant/inn/priest while on the field.
  • Dragon Quest XI has Campfires located in many points in the Overworld, which provide not only safety from monster attacks, but a free inn, a statue that provides all the functions of a Church, a place to use the forge, a place to call your horse, and usually a merchant.
• Luxaren Allure has the combination inn, weapon and consumables store, and alchemy facility, on a side path off the Pehl Mountain Path.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has stables all across Hyrule, which also serve as inns, and Beedle can usually be found nearby.

---