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.
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