Another day, another year.

So, new years eve.

Hard to think we made it through another year, but we still persevere through this strange new land.



I think I left off around new years the last time I was recapping the time we'd spent in the bunker, aside from getting used to the abilities that we'd started to manifest, albeit in small amounts, we also began to prep our gear to start exploring our surroundings a bit further out than just Sherridan. While it was serving us well with stores of food squirreled away across the more intact structures it would spell our doom if we were to run out. And so early into January we struck out west, which honestly if we'd gone east or south we'd have reached civilization a lot sooner than later, though it was curiosity that drew us, and possibly a lack of common sense.

It took us, guessing here since there was no day and night to guide us and the gps was utterly useless due to interference from the ash, a month and a half to reach the edge Yellowstone national park, or rather the edge of the lava fields. Most of the terrain was broken and cracked, though under the ash was dirt, and dead plants, though the further west we traveled the more ash choked the air. A stop in a town that had all but burnt down and collapsed supplied us with dust respirators. As we hiked and broke trail into the dark and ash stained wastes we paused in each town and small community and took time to thank the previous residents for the supplies we took, and apologize for the disturbance.  Cody Wyoming was about the furthest west we managed to travel. That's where the lava flows had rolled out to and most of the town had been destroyed aside from a few of the older civil defense buildings, and a couple of hangars at the airport. There we found the first signs that someone had made it through the initial radiation and ash. In the makeshift housing at the airfield we found no bodies, only some signs that people had been there, some left behind journals though those had been desecrated by the ash and heat and crumbled when we touched them.

However there was a message painted on the inside of a hangar. "Survived the end. Lava forcing us out, headed east and south. 30 of us. -Sep/Oct?" In our travel we didn't find anyone else, or evidence anyone had traveled along our path before us, so I hold out hope they did in fact make it out of the wastes, as there are plenty of towns to collect supplies from.

 Due to the heat and low likelihood of being able to find water out there, we chose not to approach Yellowstone any further  and headed back east to the bunker, carrying extra supplies we could use on makeshift sleds made from skis and pallets taken from the storage room of a sports shop. With the trail we had made still mostly there it only took us maybe a few weeks to return to the bunker.



And now back to the here and now. We've reached Cheyenne, for real this time. There are people here, less ash, more animals, and so far no one's decided to shoot us. However no one seems to be preparing to celebrate the new year. Once it's morning we're going to split groups, Rogan, Axel and once we figure out who's going with them, two others, are going to go into town and actually make contact with the townspeople... they seem nice enough from a distance, but we don't want to risk everyone being in town and them turning out to be cannibals or something.

Merry Christmas post, no recap tonight.

So, by all determinations according to the gps and the internal clocks on the internet, today is Christmas.

No a man in a magic sled did not deliver us gifts, though Axel did. He's apparently been working on some new gear for us for a few months using a bunch of cloth he collected. I'm actually damn impressed I knew he could sew from how well he stitched up my arm after I put a gash in it on a broken plate glass window, but I just thought he'd done emt work at some point. Turns out his mom runs (well hopefully still does run) a tailoring shop in Copenhagen off near the Spinderiet..... Yes I have no idea what any of that means beyond his mom is a seamstress and made him learn the trade as a child.

Anyway he made various coats and jackets for us while intermixing empowered runes into the gear using dark blue thread. Blends in the the black stained cloth (almost all our gear is stained black from the ash. I doubt even bleach would affect it any). Anyway all he did was word the runes in to prevent most wear and tear beyond intentional acts by us... Meaning it won't stop use from cutting it up into tatters with a knife, and may stop a bullet shot at us. Anyway he chose to make the clothes to match out personality and manner of motion I guess. That or he's a spiritual medium since he crossed a trench-coat with a tactical vest for me, and then added a hood for good measure.... It's basically everything I'd ever wanted out of an all weather piece of gear, no sleeves for unrestricted movement of my arms.

One of the other reasons he gave us for giving us the clothes was because of the Yule Cat... The short version of his explanation is that it's a mythological Scandinavian beast that eats people that don't receive new clothes around yuletide....To be on the safe side I have Axel my spare hat in return.

Anyway, merry christmas etc... and watch out for house sized demon cats from Iceland.

Recaps and recaps.

So I left off with the hallucination about he ground lightning. Over about a week or so all of us had one or another to varying degrees.  Basically to the outside observer we'd stop what we were doing, like something had got out attention and look west before passing out, for example Leishey says he heard something like a heartbeat growing louder from the west before a bolt of light pierced the ash cloud dispersing it and shot up into space, compared to Rogan where he says a '50s style UFO slammed down into the valley below the mountain and sinking into the ground, all of it was generally pretty weird. For a while we thought it was just stress really, as though we were losing our minds over time, but about two weeks later Eivan managed to get a plant to grow through force of will and we started to seriously consider that maybe something had changed. Axel was probably the first one to say what we were thinking, that Eivan had figured out magic. I don't really know what to believe about it really.

Eivan talked us through what he did and only Axel and I actually figured out how to do anything, I can sort of conjure up a ball of fire, while Axel figured out lightning and how writing out words while "thinking really hard" about what they meant, could imbue with with the effect. The first experiment he did, while simple, was quite interesting. "this paper is on fire" As soon as he finished with it, the paper actually did light on fire.

Unfortunately he tried this inside the bunker and in his ensuing panic managed to spread the flames to a bedroll, thankfully we had plenty of those. The followup to this, that I thought of, was "When this paper is torn it will catch fire". This worked out pretty well, but ultimately it would be dangerous to have a bunch of them written up as simply as that because apparently "when it is torn" is interpreted quite liberally to include damage from creasing the paper too much as well as just natural wear and tear.  We've also figured out we do have limits on what we can do. Eivan can't will a massively giant tree to grow from nothing, it has to start from a seed, and he can't do that in one go, at first it took him a month to get an orange tree to grow to maturity and kicking out fresh oranges, and it would take hours a day of concentration till he collapsed, now he says he could do it over a week just by casually focusing on it if he wanted. Haven't figured out how to use this on wounds on a person though, that would definitely come in handy if someone got hurt.

Comparative to how he started out, Axel says he hasn't figured out if he has a limit. He says it has to do with the effect and how intricate the conditions for it to work are. For example, a piece of paper written up so that it explodes into flames when torn isn't much, but say he words it so that it catches fire ten seconds after the border strip around the edge is pulled off at a specific temperature can actually give him a slight headache. As for me, I can't really do much, just conjure a ball of fire maybe the size of a softball and get it got enough that it can barely ignite stuff like kindling. I mean it's useful without a lighter on hand, but it's not showstopping like willing a tree to grow to maturity, or making a landmine out of a piece of paper.





So for the events since we left our camp near the town of children, Eivan insisted on waiting till night before sneaking down to their greenhouses and tricking the plants into doubling their growth rates for a while, It was a nice gesture I guess. Nothing much has really happened. Mostly it's just use walking through varying thicknesses of ash over-viewing a definite trail along the shattered earth as we follow highway 87. The trail is along the highway roadbed and it gets enough use... so yeah, though it seems the GPS is inaccurate as all hell because it was not Cheyenne that we'd found, but rather the smaller town of Wheatland to the north (yes we had to look at the sign at the edge of town to figure this out). It does appear that they have working vehicles in this area though since the roadbed is mostly cleared off of ash, though we haven't seen anyone driving along.

With any luck there will be people in Cheyenne to possibly explain things.

Test post, for potential publishing?

Author's note: Just a test bit for critique, a story post will be made probably on Saturday.

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Temporary title; Blastwave I: The folly of war



Dear Reader,

Good morning, good evening. Where ever you may be, allow me to be your guide through this terrible tale of the folly of man. I have no doubt that it did not happen, but allow me to explain.

Last year during July fourth, when most other people would be out celebrating the birth of the U.S. by blowing up a small chunk of it, I and a few other researchers at a facility that need not be named were performing an experiment based on a new form of technology that we had developed that captured and stored Neutrino particles. In simple terms we were attempting to bypass the normal laws of reality and send something through time in a more... direct route. To say the least the experiment resulted in an electrical fire and a loss of all the collected neutrino particles. Initially we thought that we had been pranked by another research team due to the facility having been consumed by a prank war with the winner earning a very coveted statue of a monkey, however when the smoke cleared I found, in place of the Circle K 44oz soft drink we were attempting to launch through time, a well worn journal had taken its place.

Out tests conducted on the journal indicate that, among a detectable tachyon radiation count it also has been exposed to various heavy elements that are present at a recent atomic detonation, which leads us to believe that we have evidence of a variation of one of the alternate timeline theories in our possession. After a heated debate among my research group we decided to publish the contents of the book as an action adventure story for, though we have found no reason to believe that the events recorded within did not happen in the timeline it came from, and have found no proof that it was simply a clever ruse. I have been in charge of this side venture, and have chosen to leave most of the contents unedited, except in a few instances where noted. As an added note, the page where the writer wrote his name on the book was either torn out so we, unfortunately do not know who in this alternate timeline wrote the following.

With all regards,

Associate Researcher R.G. Phoenix








p1.

10-26-2012

Am I alive, or am I in hell? I don't know beyond that I slept through the apocalypse.  The power's been out all day and the battery on my radio died in the afternoon, though all it had on all the bands was the same automated message on a loop about staying indoors due to radiation. I shouldn't have stayed up most of the night studying for midterms. Now I'm stuck here and left behind. I don't even have my room-mate to talk to. He just vanished last week saying he had a family emergency before running out of the apartment with his camping backpack and a guitar case. Then again he wasn't exactly much for conversation. Keeping the fridge door closed to try and let the food last a while.

10-27-2012

I started digging through my closet today to keep my mind on something. Forgot that I'd stored the old microwave in there, and a laptop and a bunch of  old school stuff. Laptop powered on and  runs, so I got to play some solitaire for a while.

Midafternoon now, a miracle happened. The power's back on. I can listen to the radio, mostly static though. One of the rock stations is still playing music and the DJ is talking to keep calm and that help is on the way.

I miss my family, our dog, even the rabbit.

Short update. No recap today.

Made our way further south after bypassing the town of children. It's getting colder and there's less ash in the air to really trap the heat, so we're not exactly moving as quickly as we could due to lethargy from the temperature change.

Also seeing more animals, so that's nice as well, though having a day and a night again is a little disconcerting for us. Might take us a few more days to get used to this again. I'll probably post some more in a couple days when  sleep makes sense.

More recap and events of the week.

I'm more or less transcribing things from my journal at this point, skipping over the dull stuff though.



So our attempts at fixing one of the trucks parked outside the bunker was an abject failure. Possibly due to being so close to a detonation all the electronics were fried, and try as we might, we couldn't get it to start, even after employing every trick we all collectively knew. And so we walked.

Sheridan, all that we found there was death, damaged buildings and some makeshift shelters. Those that survived the initial blast from the bombs either died from the radiation, or from the ashfall. I suppose it was kinda like Pompeii might have been after the eruption there. We did find some supplies that were still usable and managed to find an older cat tractor that after a half day we managed to start up shot oil out of the exhaust stack over myself and Leishey before blowing a piston, so that plan went up in smoke.

Axel, one of the airforce guys under Commander Rogan (accent as thick as a brick since he immigrated from Denmark), insisted that we stay and hold a service of some kind to at try and lay the spirits of the town to rest lest they become some horrible darkness and ensnare unwary travelers. We built a cairn of rocks on ridge that the wind kept clear of ash, and we each said a few words, thanking them for the supplies, apologizing for the disturbance of their resting place and hoping they'd found peace in the afterlife. I don't doubt that we'll find more places like this.

As we returned to the bunker, we saw the orange glow dim to almost near darkness. We could almost see the ash thickening and beginning to swirl as another storm rolled in. Caught out in the open we ran as quickly as we can before diving into low spots along the broken road and held on. It was a terrible wind storm with some lightning. Because of the wind and ash we could only lay there with our head under our arms and occasionally call out for a quick head count. It felt like years bit it was over as quickly as it had struck. No one was hurt, though everyone was covered in ash, even more so than usual, though this storm had cleared the sky some and we could see the silhouettes of mountains to the east before the air thickened again and only the haze remained.

A few days later another earthquake hit, based off the way the radio antennae started tilting from this one, we think it originated from the east. The orange glow picked up a bit of blue and looked purpleish for a while before changing back to orange and for a moment it looked like electricity was arcing across the ground from the east, as though a power line had fallen over and was charging the ash. That's the last bit I remember before blacking out and waking up inside the bunker and hungry. According to Leishey, Eivan found me asleep under the radio antennae and carried me back in. Not sure if I was hallucinating from lack of sleep or not since no one else felt the quake.


Enough about what was going on back then:

So about the town of Cheyenne. It's weird to say the least, no one seems to have noticed us yet despite there being twelve of us, and having a relatively large camp. Then again we've been making an effort not to be seen. There's something off about the town. There are no one we can call an adult that we've seen, and everyone in the town appears to be fine with that. We're probably going to circle around the town and avoid it. Nothing really beyond that, I mean other than it being a town full of children, they have a small group of livestock and some greenhouses that every morning a group of them, different people each day, tend to carefully to clear all the ash off. It looks like a functional small self sufficient town, but with no adults. It's just... weird, and honestly a group of adults in all black sporting military rifles showing up out of the waste could upset whatever balance they have and throw it all into chaos.

Oh, right, the ash cloud is thin enough here that there is an actual day night cycle instead of light being reflected from yellowstone's gaping maw off the ash creating a perpetual sunrise/sunset effect.

More recap and a couple letters home.

It was actually easier hiking than we expected. The ash wasn't as deep as the stuff we've been hiking through before, though the landscape is just as cracked and broken as before. We're camped on a ridge above Cheyenne. Which is actually quite a ways away from Cheyenne mountain and Norad. To be fair the map we have is kinda falling apart and we read Cheyenne and a few other road markers and jumped to a conclusion... you're think Rogan would have noticed something like that being from this area in the first place.

As an added bonus, there are people in the town... not a lot, but enough that we're actually pretty wary of just walking into town out of the wastelands... so we're just going to sit up here and watch a few days and brush up on socializing.


So, where I left off earlier in the week. The weather. Our first experience with a lightning storm was one of shock and awe. Eivan and I were up topside trying to get the radio antenna sitting rightside up when the first bolt of lightning dropped from the sky about a mile away. Brilliant blue against the orange and black of the eternal twilight. It was blinding, and we stood there watching as another strike occurred. It finally hit us that we were in a very exposed position, trying to wrangle a massive lightning rod and we quickly headed back to the blast door. No rain fell from the storm as it whipped over our location, but the wind howled and the raw static buildup seemed to charge everything, and after a few minutes as quickly as the storm had arrived it settled and dispersed. That seemed to set the score for our time above ground, we'd always keep one eye on the sky as it could turn foul rapidly and send us running for cover, lightning and wind for one storm with relatively clear skies for a few hours and then a sudden downpour of firebrands and ash that would light wood, and clothes alight as well as the thankfully much rarer hail storms of pumice that were thankfully few and far between. After a month of this all of us had sort of picked up on the subtle cues and could almost time a storm's approach minutes before the first wind or thunder reached us.

Our first long trip from the bunker occurred about a month and a half of emerging from the bunker. By this point we were beginning to have to ration our supplies, and so we had to seek something out. It wasn't far though. Without the ash and other hazards it would have only been a couple hours of hiking down the mountainside, but it was nearly a full day out and back to where we found the resupply truck. It appeared that it had been knocked over on its side from the pressure wave of a bomb, or possibly had wrecked if the driver had panicked when he saw missiles launching in his side view mirrors. We didn't find his body though, and most of the dry goods were still intact however the refrigerated section had the dried remains of rotted food. We took what we could carry and returned to the bunker. With the realization that rescue wasn't coming we started making plans to eventually leave the bunker. It had served it's purpose, but if we didn't leave, it would eventually become a tomb.

Our initial plan was to try and fix a vehicle and build a makeshift plow onto the front of it, however with that failing, we ended up walking out having made sleds using sheet metal and carrying only what we needed, we set out for our first long term trip to the nearest town of Sherridan to our northwest.

This is where I'll stop for now, Eivan and Leishey asked me to append a set of letters home that they wrote once we found we had an internet connection.

This one is from Eivan:

Дорогая сестра,

Я надеюсь, что вы и ваш ребенок сделал это в московском метро, как мы были обучены, как дети делать, если сирены называется. Я также надеюсь, что ублюдок Сидорович споткнулся брусчатка на дороге, и вы оставили его позади. Я живу, как и моих товарищей. Есть три среди нас, что я могу доверить свою жизнь. Я, Leishey, и американский доброволец, который решил помочь бороться с китайцами. Тем не менее, я жив, и наша группа двенадцать сильным. Я надеюсь вернуться в Москву весной следующего года.

Ваш брат, Eivan.

and Leishey:

Мать,

Я не знаю, как вы добились, так как я оставил Донецк. Я надеюсь, что все будет хорошо. Я путешествовал далеко, так как я ушел с двоюродным братом Eivan бороться китайцев в Америке.Площадь мы находимся в является частью Вайоминг, я хочу отец жил знать, что я сделал это здесь. Я прошу вас хорошо и дом в порядке и кузине Анне сделали это к метро и является безопасным.

-Ваш сын
Leishey



The rest of the group hasn't decided yet if they want to make a letter to their loved ones or not. I however am going to get some sleep now, since the hike was exhausting and I have watch in a few hours.

Continuing from where I left off.

A word from the writer: Presently I have 8 as of yet named characters. 3 of which are airforce, 4 of which are regular army, and one of which is a conscript/volunteer like the protagonist who was part of the  "B-team" to keep any Chinese Intel teams confused as to what the hell was going on with the group headed east. I am accepting Name and character archetype suggestions at: blogwiththeblastwave@gmail.com

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A wire broke and it took me a few days to fix the satellite transceiver.

Anyway, for the first two days of the exchange we cowered like rats in the bunker, muttering prayers in our respective languages to our gods, and others hoping that we would be spared a long death. On the second day of the exchange a roar shook the bunker as our worst fears took shape that a retaliatory strike had been targeted at the command structure of this facility. The lights flicked off, the electric hum replaced by silence. After what seemed like an eternity I spoke. "Are we dead?", a clang of someone knocking over a pot and a curse in Russian was the response I got, followed by laughter from everyone in earshot. Slowly the hum of electricity returned and the lights, their dim amber hue blinding despite how it had been only moments that they had darkened. Then a massive quake jolted the bunker from the east, knocking us all to the floor and the lights died once more.

It took us about an hour to fix the generator. The quake that had shook the bunker had knocked part of the watermill loose and it was a feature Leishey had not seen during the cultural exchange so, it took a bit of monkeying to get it working right.

To bide our time and keep our minds occupied, Eivan spent a lot of time running us through drills, partially to keep us active, and partially to keep us from thinking too much on what might be waiting for us when we cracked the seal on the bunker through pure exhaustion. He told us of what he had seen during his training in The Ukraine, especially in and around Pripyat, how nature had reclaimed the city and of strange creatures that wandered the ruins, a curious hybrid of plant and animal that seemed to mend the environment wherever they wandered. I honestly feel that he is what helped us get through this whole year. We owe him our lives, even though he would never take credit for it.

3 and a half weeks in Leishey had started to go a bit stir crazy.... honestly we all were by that point. Commander Rogan spent most of his time dissembling and reassembling the bunker armory and finally he just decided to walk out, radiation be damned. It was the door seal alarm that woke most everyone up, once we knew what it was we joined him at the door... what we saw was terrifying. Black ash lazily raining down like snow on a shattered and alien looking landscape while a cold wind whipped in from the northwest bearing an ominous orange glow. We returned to the bunker one by one as reality set in.

After another week the radiation had died down enough for us to actually leave the bunker for a few days at a time and not worry about getting sick and thankfully the wind direction had been fair for us so we weren't buried in irradiated dust and dirt. Also working in our favor nothing had hit the facility that had a cratering depth deep enough to damage the bunker enough to make us leave.  One of the first things I learned once we began poking around on the surface properly was the proper use of a Geiger counter. The government paperwork that had come with the one I used after the first strike so long ago not only was confusing, but also had me adjust the settings on it so fine that anything above normal background radiation would have made me run fearing for my life with the machine clicking like mad. Apparently I could have been outside and grouping up with the other people that had evacuated Reedley for the nearby national park after only about 7 hours. So... I didn't actually need to spend over 2 weeks cooped up in my apartment like I did.

Perhaps... but it's pointless to mull over what could have happened had I done that.

Anyway the weather. the weather was.. odd. Thunderstorms and violent wind would pass through in a matter of hours before the sky would return to it's hazy red overcast, nature was in turmoil like never before. It was mid-november when we had started spending more time on the surface, except when the weather turned foul. The bunker was our refuge and shelter from the worst of it. Commander Rogan, a Wyoming native, his theory was that the nukes had broken the weather cycle in such a way that it would not be predictable for some time. I however had a theory that the war had awoken a slumbering ancient and that the weather, at least in this region would no longer be fully habitable for at least a few human lifetimes. It wouldn't be until earlier this year that my guess would be proven right and we found that Yellowstone had in fact erupted.


We're going to break camp tomorrow. We've been comfortable here for a few days, but we'll never find any other survivors just by sitting here, unless of course we're camped overtop of a bunker, but that's beside the point, though this close to Cheyenne mountain that's a very good possibility. Despite how well we've adapted to hiking through the ash, with the unfamiliar terrain, not to mention geological uplift it's been slow going. We might actually be at Norad if we keep this pace by next monday, that and there certainly is less ash and more dirt out here...so the ashfall isn't that bad as we travel south. Eventually we'll be able to head west.