I went and showed the prospector what I'd found out about his mystery metal and the battery I was working on. He was blown away by it and wants to know if I'll stay out here and work for him making batteries. I said no but gave him schematics on what I've worked on and offered to keep him posted on anything else I came up with. I want to go home.


I also have been messing around with some scrap electronics from a radioshack, a stripper clip of bullets to the guys using it as a root cellar and I got free access to all the old stock still around, and have a small tablet working now. The laptop is nice but it, the solar panel, the car battery and the satellite transceiver is heavy enough that it's troublesome for hiking around with it unless I'm in a group and there's some talk that the 12 of us are probably going to start splitting up in Vegas. Rogan's wife should be somewhere there, so he'd have no reason to go further west than there, while Doyel (Tahoe's opposite number from the air force, intelligence, jokes are a bit crude but always well timed. Canadian Ex-pat, signed on with the airforce and scored top marks and got the pick of the job options) and Wade have said they're considering staying here in SLC. Though personally I'd say they'd only last a week before a joke got them tarred and ran out on a rail, they are religious, but the humor is crass enough that some of the locals occasionally take offense.

Anyway tablet is some nokia thing I found, pretty bombproof more or less, I mean two years later the screen's not cracked or damaged and when I gave it a charge it came to life so there's that, and with a whole radioshack's stock to work with I replaced a few of the burnt out and terrible hardware and through some guides I found on the internet boosted the internal radio strength enough that in theory I could do the same trick I'm using for the laptop with it, with negotiations taking so long I'm tempted to keep experimenting.


Additionally I've had a couple more dreams similar to the one where I saw the progression of humankind from start to spacefaring odyssey. The latest one I could see the pillar of basalt from where I was sitting tending a fire on the floor of a desert basin. The coyote from the first dream was there and sitting opposite me across the fire... I heard it speaking but understood nothing. Not a single word. After a while it's like it just knew whatever it was trying to tell me was going over my head and it wandered off into the desert without me...I wonder if there's someone out here who does dream interpretation. Might see if I can bother the druids some about this.

Checked out the airport. It's mostly been restored to serviceable condition, however it's very expensive to buy tickets because fuel of that grade is something that takes a lot of resources to make, and they won't accept ammunition, only prewar bills and coins. The point of it is that they used the plane to fly over a load of tools, parts and chemicals needed by the desalinization plant crew to increase capacity and maintain the equipment, stuff that is apparently available in excess in California. The plane however is going to be here till they have enough cargo, passengers or a mix of the two to make it cost effective to fly out again.

Additionally I got bored and wandered around the market while Rogan and Tahoe (an intelligence officer who was with the actual team I and the others were providing a distraction for) are finalizing how we get paid and the duration of our contract will be to protect the SLC "missionaries". Tahoe has a few screws loose, then again I think we all do in one way or another, might be how we survived. Anyway in my wandering I found a guy trying to sell some rocks he'd found poking around a copper mine that had been, up until a recent earthquake gotten buried by a pyroclastic flow. He says it's like a natural battery, the nearby shopkeepers called him a snakeoil salesman. I gave him a shot and messed around with it using a voltmeter I found out in the ashlands in some town we wandered through and it does indeed have a charge, albeit very low, less than 1 volt. I bought him a sandwhich and that bought me a few chunks of the material about the size of a baseball, all of which I did test first and it all has a charge proportional to the size of the material.

So the material itself is copperish with a rosy tint to it. At first glance a person could be forgiven for thinking it was just chunks of refined copper ore, it's darker and not a shiny, with a bit of electrolosis in water I was able to tanish it even more and it didn't turn green like copper but was more of a reddish gray. I broke off a chunk and dug around till I'd found a mineralogist who'd worked in the mine before the war. A few hours of doing various tests on it his determination is that it's an alloy of copper, lead and zinc rich silica. I relayed the story of how the prospector had found it in a copper mine that had shut down and then been hit by a volcanic landslide and he figures that under those conditions such an alloy could have been made through sheer luck, but can't explain the electric charge. Additionally the alloy has a low melting point, 230 degrees Fahrenheit, however it becomes very malleable at 150 to 160. 

I've been experimenting with it since then and managed to make simple battery like how in highschool chem you could use pennies vinegar and cardboard and a bit of sandpaper to make a basic wet cell battery.. it's kinda like that only I'm using distilled water to just wet some paper, and layering thin plates of the metal that I flattened out with a controlled fireball and a hammer... it was actually harder than I'd expected because I can boil water pretty easy and keeping it cool enough not to melt the metal was a challenge. I wonder how thin I can get the plates and how long it'll keep a charge... this is going to be interesting to experiment with.

Today, a plane flew into the airport.... Everyone in town just stopped and stared as it circled, waggled the wings as if it was waving then turned towards the runway.  It was strangely abnormal compared to every day life. It was some kind of propeller driven cargo plane, I don't think anyone actually expected to see a plane considering the storm that whipped through from the east last night.


On a whim I poked around one of the public libraries. An ancient looking lady with a ruler as long as I am tall nearly took my head off when I coughed louder than was "acceptable"....I'm assuming she's the head librarian. Anyway I looked up the index card for the public record on the building the druid's tree grew out of. I'm not a fan of conspiracy theories but it was a joint ownership of Dow, Monsanto and a Chinese firm that I couldn't read, much less figure out the phonetic pronunciation as there aren't any Chinese people out here to translate for me.


Reviewing what I wrote down and typed from my dream...I dunno. I guess it is kinda calming to me.

I had meant to make a post a few days ago after a party being held by a group of druids but I slept more or less the last couple of days as a result. I suppose you could say the party was that good.

Anyway druids, harvest wardens, useful heathen treeworshippers or whatever you call them. They're the people who can  somehow commune with the plants and convince them to grow faster and in certain ways.... the ones in SLC also throw a wicked party, and I'm still trying to make sense of the dream I had after drinking a mug of the filtered sap they were passing around. The ones here have a massive maple tree that they consider to be the source of their abilities... I'm not interested in arguing theology so there's that. Grew up through the center of a building and smashed it all to pieces and when they aren't out tending to the fields most of them hang out under the tree and have converted it into apartments for the lot of them.

Anyway, last Monday they invited Eivan to their second spring festival, and Eivan in turn invited the rest of us to come along on Friday for that. Drums, bonfires (which honestly still seems like a bad idea in an underground environment that close to the root system of a tree but it works out fairly well apparently since no one died of smoke inhalation or fire) and alcohol of various sorts. It was kinda like burning man only under a huge tree instead of out in the desert. Anyway the sap, it's purple, glows and tastes like bananas... and that's about all I remember about it. After I drank the mug everything about the party after is kinda blurry, and the dream I had was.. fairly weird then again I guess compared to the reality of the world.. it wasn't that weird.


Basically I watched the history of the world sped up rapidly atop a perch made of basalt. Think like the Devils Tower in Wyoming (Or Close Encounters of the Third Kind if that's your forte), only instead of a mesa it ended in a spire with pillars of basalt below forming something of a spiral down to the ground below, though I didn't climb down. I just sat there and watched as humanity started from hunter groups to hunter/gatherer tribes, agrarian societies formed in the span of minutes. Occasionally I glanced up to catch glimpses of the old "gods" and "spirits"holding vigil. Empires rose and fell over a mere hour, the sky grew dark as the fires of industry erupted filling the air with ash and soot heating the forge of world wide war before clearing into a brief relative peace. Then the sky split with lightning the gods of old fled into the ether and the earth shook with thunder as the stars fell from the sky erupting and scorching the earth, shattering the basalt beneath me I clung to the largest pile I could find and managed to find my footing to watch below as the earth cooled, humanity emerged from the shelters and bunkers, rebuilt, squabbled and fought over resources, constructed new fiefdoms and restored empires. Then the stars appeared again rocketing up from the earth into the sky, but destruction did not come this time. The rock I was perched on followed slowly as my view changed showing the stars now allowing me glimpses of a vast network and star spanning empires and clusters....And then I woke up after a spectral coyote, similar to the old petroglyphs depicting the old stories of the southwestern spirit "Coyote", as in the Coyote that scattered the stars at random after taking over for the great spirit to put up the constellations then getting bored, jumped onto the floating rock I was sitting on, and knocked me off into the gulf of space.

Woke up missing a boot and laying on a bough about fifty feet up the tree feeling like someone hit me in the head and elbow with a tomahawk.....So word of advice if you get offered a mug of unknown substance that looks purple and smells like bananas...eh I dunno I don't feel any worse for the experience.... So it's up to your discretion.


Don't know if much word has made it east or west but the areas around Utah are currently collecting opinion of the folks living here to decide if they should try and unify with the rest of the country or form their own type of centralized government.  Somehow Rogan managed to hook us up as an escort/scout group for the delegation going to Las Vegas to poll opinion there.

Salt lake city.. interesting place. Sundays a ghost town while they take the "on the seventh day he rested" quite literally. Day spent with family and a community wide service near dusk at the cathedral.

Majority of the people here hid out in the, for lack of a better term, huge ass bunker at the bottom of the Bingham Canyon mine. I mean literally the housed more or less the entire population of Salt Lake City. the story goes that after the cuban missile crisis the owners of the mine got a wild hair that maybe the fingers on the trigger wouldn't be so calm in the future, so they quietly started constructing a bunker under the mine and into the bedrock. While doing that they ran an eight lane wide tunnel from the mine along underground to the heart of SLC. The bunker itself was designed to fit the population of the city and to hold enough gear and supplies to last two years. As the population of SLC grew, so did the bunker.

Salt Lake city didn't get hit directly, however the nearby airbase, completely glassed, so the majority of the structures here are still intact, though the residents didn't know for sure until four months after when they cracked the seal on the main blast doors. When they came out they found various squatters in the cathedral running a market and bartertown. There was a standoff between the old chuchgoers and the folks inhabiting their house of worship. Interestingly enough before there was any bloodshed, some guy wandered in out of Zion canyon national park, flipped over the squatter tables and beat the everloving fear of god into a few of them with a whip made of skeletonweed before wandering back out into the desert.....I swear I've heard this story before, but they have a whip made of skeletonweed and there's a couple people who swear to have witnessed it and a few blurry photos, so I dunno.

We got into town and just sorta scattered and wandered around for the last few days. People are very nice, and John Moses Browning would be proud of all the rifles, shotguns and pistols I've seen of his designs. There's a nice manufacturing base and I traded a couple bullets to get my rifle refinished and fix the scratch that was put into it. Eivan found a small group of Russians here, they had been on layover at SLC international when the nukes started flying and got almost forcibly dragged into the bunker by some very insistent members of the community. Rogan met up with his brother-in-law yesterday and got word his wife and kid had been here and then headed west once caravans started forming and travelling, so there's some good news for some of us.

Nice town, little unnerving how nice everyone is, but nothing's overtly sinister about it.

Weird, my birthday passed by without my even noticing.

Anyway we reached grand Junction on the third and Salt Lake City this evening.

While scott hasn't figured out how to teach us how to do the eye trick he does, Axel did figure out a group of runes that work well enough together to increase viability in terrible weather.... so we now have a set of goggles with those runes inscribed into the frames that a person can see about 300 feet in 10 foot visibility. Axel then inscribed the same runes into the frame around the windows on the truck rather than tire himself out making goggles for each of us.

We did encounter one bandit during a relatively calm period on the road, I was the one who was on top of the second trailer with the 240 when some guy tried to creep up on us while we were turtling along.... I guess he just didn't see me because of the ash clouds roiling around behind me or something, and only when I yelled "Oy! Can't you see the fuckhuge auto rifle?" did he actually notice me before falling backwards startled into an ash drift yelling out apologies and running back into the wastes. Only one I saw from the top of the trailer though, and I was looking for them..or well anything. Did see a group of deer bedded down at a relatively sheltered spring up a draw but that's about it.

grand junction folks appreciated the supplies.

Anyway the reason for a lack of posts, the storm brought a lot of interference making it impossible to connect to the internet.

Tomorrow we get to meet the people of Salt lake city.