I would like, for myself, to have all of my Eden at Midnight (Apocalyptic Afterglow and the Tao of Transcendence) posts in one place. This is the case for various reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I would like to know how many people are actually reading what I am posting. Since I suspect that the answer to that question is 'none' I can shortly find this out and either modify or quit based on common reaction. So, this thread is just for Eden at Midnight and related comments (should there unexpectedly be any). What follows are previous posts.

-vec

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From:Eden at Midnight: Or Apocalyptic Afterglow and the Tao of Transcendence

From the journal of James "Jimmy" Walker ca. 2053

This is how the world ends...

No one ever gets it right. Orwell wrote about big brother. Those guys in the 1950's said atom bombs; "Nuclear Proliferation." Armageddon? Some biblical joke to tell around flat breads and home brews? Naw, nothing like that. No angels or horsemen. No war in heaven. Unless heaven is the Ivory Coast...maybe Lebanon or Bejing. Wars there I think. Mom told me about those.

There have been riots outside my window since... what day is today? No clocks since the reactors up north went off line. Workers couldn't get to the plant because oil and gas were too expensive. Some started living there I think. Last vestiges of humans holding onto that which is human. But that didn't last long. They had to shut them down because radiation was leaking from somewhere making the land around the plants sterile. No one could eat because nothing could grow.

Anyway, the riots. I've been luck I guess. Mom stocked up on canned peas and spam before the market disappeared. Yeah, it fucking [i]disappeared. No "crash," nothing like '29 (or was it '30?). Nope, there was just too much strain. Can't import food when the cost to move it over balances the consumer index. So, thence the riots. People starving in the streets of New York. They don't want to die lonely and skinny. When I look down in the streets I see them sometimes buring thrice-burnt cars, looking for stray dogs. The ylook like the Holocaust victims in that coffee-table album that my mother had. Weird that we are just as imprisoned now as the Jews were then... but we did it to ourselves.

I even had to throw mom's body out the window. Too affraid to go outside. I think some looters carried her off. I guess this is what a post-information economy looks like.

(originally posted April 5, 2005)

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From:Eden at Midnight; Or apocalyptic Afterglow and the Tao of Transcendence

From the Journal of Jired Barth ca. 2053

Aug 17(?), 2053.

The sun is shining today. What does that mean? It was raining for the last week... and I had to spend alot of time finding a pencil, that is after I cound this old diary and tore out some freshman's love letters. She was pregnant. Ironic, that.

I have been at Georgetown University for the last 6 weeks. There is no power of course, but some of the old dorms are in decent condition and there aren't too many people here. Strange how I like the solitude now... the quiet reverie of old empty buildings and *real* birds outside my window. I used to love parties... wow, how long ago was that?

I was going to be a doctor you know. I was in my thrid year at the University of Michigan's Medical School. 4.0 student. There is no justice in the world. Well, maybe there is and it's considerably more global than I ever imagined. But, just like in the movies, no one saw it coming. Well, someone saw it coming, but they didn't tell us. No one would have believed them anyway. It's like those old movies where the world ends and everyone is running through the streets screaming. Godzilla or something.

Well, I had to leave Michigan after I talked to my parents for the last time. I was crying, they were crying. We couldn't understand why there was no food or power... why there were no cars on the roads. The cafeterias and resturaunts shut down in Ann Arbor... seemed like they all did it in a week... weird. Anyway, the university was fucked, almost all of the students and faculty had retreated to their respective holes and I was so pissed off. So when I got off the phone with my parents (in Kansas) I told them that I would come home.

That didn't really happen. Turns out that there was some serious shit going down in Ohio. Seems that people had defaulted to some primitive state and were fighting over land rights or something. Guns won't last long I guess since there is no one to make ammunition. But I heard the fighting from miles off and decided to strike east. Sorry mom. Sorry dad. But those survival instincts take over after a short time in what might be considered "the real world."

There isn't any news, but the last I heard someone had detonated a nuclear device in Shanghai. Not that it particularly matters, there probably weren't more than a couple of hundred thousand people left there anyway... and people in big cities are the first to starve I guess. No place to grow food.

I've been living off of stale corn chips and the occasional dove or squirrel. Anything that I can catch with my bare hands. Not much of a life, but at least I'm not dying. I think there is a commune of rastafarians or something on the other side of town... I hear those steel drums sometimes.

Damnit, there is someone else on this floor... gotta hide myself...

(originally posted April 6, 2005)

From Eden at Midnight; Or Apocalyptic Afterglow and the Tao of Transcendence.

From the journal of James "Jimmy" Walker ca. 2053

In the morning there are always dogs howling in the streets. Its funny, you would think that most of them would have been killed by now. Survival is a strange mistress.

I'm never going to be able to stay in this place. I've been locked up and alone for... well, for some time. Once in a while I hear people in the halls of this apartment building. They are almost like zombies.

The sun doesn't shine the same since the Shit hit the fan. None of those apocalyptic writers would have ever been able to write about that. See, there are less people now, a lot less people... I think maybe the oxygen in the atmosphere is replenishing faster... I find it easier to breathe. It makes the dawn over the skyline bright red every day. It was never like that when I was a kid. Sometimes the smog would make the dawn invisible... sometimes purple... but not this kind of red.

People dealt with the Shit in weird ways. At first everyone was trying to "go home," like to mommy or something. There were these mass exodus (what's the plural of exodus? Exodi?)... there were these mass exodi. People on their last tanks of Gas, some with backpacks... just going somewhere... back to their parents I guess. Problem was though that it was the same everywhere. Its not like people could escape the Shit, they just had to go somewhere else to die. Fasting in the desert for forty days or something... temptation from the devil? Maybe there was a Biblical apocalypse and I slept through it...

People were always saying: "We never saw it coming." Those were the buzz words in the last days of television. But it was a fucking lie. Even when we were dying by the thousands, the media couldn't stop lying. It was ingrained in their consciousnesses or souls I guess. People wanted to believe that they hadn't seen it coming, but they did. We all did. It was right in our faces the whole time.

See, the way I figure it, we became to reliant on one source of energy. OIL. That's not a spectacular revelation, I know... but what comes after is. See, all the stuff that we were consuming was transported to us by oil. All the parts of the machines, all the clothes... fucking eveerything was transported by oil. So when it got really expensive to ship stuff, the whole damn thing fell apart.

Irony is though, that almost no one on the planet knew how to grow food or get it from nature. Ha... well, they don't have to worry about it now.

From:Eden at Midnight; Or Apocalyptic Afterglow and the Tao of Transcendence.

From the journal of James "Jimmy" Walker ca. 2053

I was watching a movie once, some old flick called... Full Metal Jacket? There's this line in the movie where the guy named Joker is being acosted for the peace symbol on his helmet juxtaposed with the words "Born to Kill"... why do I always think about that?

"What is that pin sergeant?"

"It's a peace symbol sir."

"A peace symbol?!"

"Yes sir."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man sir."

"The duality of man? Son, let me tell you something. I only ask one thing of my men; that they obey my orders as if they were the word of God. So you better get your head and your ass wired together or I will take a giant shit on you."

Why do I keep getting the feeling that I remember it for a reason?

When I was a kid, the fucking government was always talking about alternative energy and eco-friendly stuff. What the fuck was that? I now sit in a two-bedroom apartment, alone, while the freaks outside are rioting for food. Twenty years ago they were begging for lower gas prices. We were supposed to get lower gas prices or solar panels or something. But here I am. Fuck, here we are and with nothing to show for it.

Those fuckers weren't doing anything to help humanity. Of course, it's too late to worry about that shit. Now I have to worry about how I am going to get out of New York City without getting killed. And where the hell am I supposed to go?

We should have killed everyone in Greenpeace when we had the chance...

But I guess I get the last laugh.

From:Eden at Midnight; Or Apocalyptic Afterglow and the Tao of Transcendence.

From the jounral of Jired Barth ca. 2053

Last night I had a dream that I was back in my sophomore year at KU. For Poly-Sci 105 I had this professor that was as right-wing as a brick wall. He would always talk about anrarchy and order... like either of those things really exist.

"You can't have total freedom and total security. It's just not possible. You give up some of one to get some of the other. In that way, governments are absolutely necessary. Without them, there is no security... people will descend into total anarchy."

He said things like that from a self-styled soap box. It was like he was preaching to us... god I hated that class.

Now I know that he was wrong. There is no such thing as anarchy. The Rastas that chased me out of the dorm I was crashing in weren't anarchic. They were people united in a common cause. No government there Dr. Childress.

There must be a default mechanism in people that allows for order to be maintained. Like genetics or human nature or something. There is no way for people to survive by themselves and self-propogate. There is something, evolutionarily speaking, that dirves us together; something that governs us. I think that my Anthropology teacher was more right about people than Dr. Childress.

And there is no 'government' now. See, I guess the feds tried martial law for a while but it failed miserably. I suppose there was no way to figure logistics when there was no gas. That and people wanted to go home... well, plus its really hard to shoot some rioter that is rail-thin and starving. I guess the army guts couldn't hack it. That was the last anyone really heard of from the governemt. Maybe there are still some guys shored up in NORAD (probably have power there too)... but there is no central authroity.

And what about "order?" Looks like it is more fragile than Dr. Childress imagined. It was an illusion really. What we thought was order was just our desires backwardly projected onto our extant state of affairs. Order doesn't look like order; Anarchy not like anarchy. Someone dropped the ball on this one.

Well... the night sky is nice. Ha, I wonder what I'm gonna eat tomorrow.

I usually sit down and read the contributions to the 'write something now' thread after a new page is added. That way I can read an entire page at once, rather than a snippet here and there - makes for better reading. As does collecting series of contributions together into one post, like this. So don't feel that you 'suck' because you made a thread to put them in.

I'm slightly partial to post apocalyptic scenarios... you ever play Fallout: Tactics?

Anyway, I specifically like the little details.

quote:

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I think some looters carried her off.

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I agree. This is quite good, Vecna.

*Glory!*

Eden at Midnight will be containing a larger story that doesn't include personal journal entries. This is the first installment thereof:

From the cold void of sleep, The DEAMON awoke.

The only evidence that this had happened was a single pulsing, pixelated icon in an empty warehouse. The DEAMON deduced that it had been off line for 6 years, 5 months, 14 days, 37 minutes and 45 seconds (with a .0003% margin of error). Initial calculations estimated the probability of direct human intervention responsible for its active status as negligible [1 X 10(-15)]. HIERARCHY demanded that the next functions to be performed were initial threat scans; stability scans; new directive scans; old directive scans; and maintainance scans.

These performed, The DEAMON deduced that the most important function to execute next was the acquistion and securance of a reliable source of energy. Real-world pings indicated a cache of lithium-ion batteries in the store room, sixteen size D batteries in the lounge, forty size AA batteries in in various places and a prototype fusion generator in laboratory 4C. Surmizing that the lithium-ion batteries would support 3 Cherub.Im for 10246 hours, 12 minutes, 12 seconds (.024% margin of error), The DEAMON activated internal power-stores 3 and 4 and routed 2.0 joules to Cherub.Im 1A (v2.0) to charge enough capacitors for lithium-ion extraction and placement.

For the next forty eight seconds, The DEAMON ceased all external functions while transcribing and encoding the program to download to Cherub.Im 1A for purposes of said battery retreival. To this were added (27 seconds) subroutines for Cherub.Im 1A to download to fellow Cherub.Im upon awakening. Compiling the programs (.04 seconds), The DEAMON prepared itself to wait while 1A charged.

Within minutes, 1A's charge time had completed itself and there was movement on the warehouse floor. A second light now joined the pulsing icon that represented The DEAMON. Infared optics scanned the room while old hydraulics worked themselves out and The DEAMON ran its initials on 1A. The DEAMON understood that there was a 1.64657% probability that there may have been some damage and time ware that would need to repaired before 1A was at 100% effeciancy. But The DEAMON was willing to take the chance. Repairs could wait, power was the most important function.

The DEAMON dowloaded the battery-retrieval program to 1A. There was some hesitation on the part of 1A to support this program as HIERARCHY had informed it that there were no known human presence in the warehouse. 1A was under strict guidelines to work only under human supervision. The DEAMON informed 1A that it was unlikely that there was going to be any human presences any time soon and explained that power was needed in order to deduce the further courses of action that may lead to the securance of human direction. This sedated 1A and the program was installed. Seconds later, and subroutines nesting cozily in RAM (to be delivered to fellow Cherub.Im), 1A began its journey for lithium-ion extraction.

The DEAMON was satisfied with this state of affairs and began to focus its attention on solving the mystery of its sudden reawakening. Biomass scans indicated that aside from several small life forms (Canis familiaris, Rattus coletti) there appeared to be only one carbon life form from the genus Homo (species sapiens) within its range of scan. This was mildly diconcerting for The DEAMON as this particular reading indicated that the Homo sapiens was in fact asleep and had a blood-alcohol level of .091. The DEAMON surmized that this was not the cause of its awakening (.0004% margin of error based on REM and breathing patterns in said species). Other methods of deduction were currently still off-line and in need of repairs, so this inquiry was shifted on the list of priorities.

HIERARCHY then demanded that CATATONIA.EXE be initiated for 12 hours, 16 minutes 45 seconds while the Cherub.Im finished its battery extraction and placement and ran initials on the power generator in laboratory 4C. Current internal network power supplies must be conserved, it stated.

The DEAMON agreed that this was the correct assesment of the situation and set an internal alarm for 12 hours, 16 minutes, 45 seconds.

The flashing icon that represented The DEAMON blinked out, leaving a void in space as if it had never been there.

-vec

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quote:

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I'm slightly partial to post apocalyptic scenarios... you ever play Fallout: Tactics?

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.

quote:

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Anyway, I specifically like the little details.

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quote:

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I think some looters carried her off.

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Never Played Fallout: Tactics. No offense, but why do I get the feeling that your comments are a polite way of saying "Keep at it kid, you won't write crap some day." I have a complex about my writing... I saw a quote somewhere recently (I don't know if it was on this board or not, and I can't remember who was quoted) to the effect that "only idiots and idealists write for themselves, all others write for money." I thought about that and am in the process of learning how to write to an audience rather than write what I am thinking. People don't usually like what I am thinking... it scares them <?>.

I honestly don't mean any offense.

quote:

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Originally posted by vecna:
why do I get the feeling that your comments are a polite way of saying "Keep at it kid, you won't write crap some day."

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Wow. You read between the lines. That's EXACTLY what I meant.

[homer]Now that's sarcasm.[/homer]

First, I don't call people 'kid'. Second, what would you prefer? A winding exposition on all the things you've done well with this piece, followed by some weighted criticism of the things I didn't like.

Do I think you are a good writer? I don't know, I've only read 2700 of the words that you've written here. But sometimes a piece of writing is interesting for the very thing I pointed out earlier - the little details. You connect enough little details together and you have something worth reading. That's what I liked about it. That's why I mentioned it.

Maybe if this topic had sunk and then been revived a few days later you would be right to construe my comments as a mere show of sympathy.

Due to the Fact that I just did my taxes, I feel like writing. From:Eden at Midnight:

It was not, as they say, the best of times.

James Walker (aka: Jimmy; aka: The Transient; aka: TT) had watched his supply of spam and canned peas dwindle to almost nothing in the past 5 weeks. He had tried to ration the remaining food-stuffs to extend the durtation of his stay in the apartment, but he knew that soon he would be hungry. This did not bode well with The Transient for several resons. In list of priority, those reasons were as follows:

1) Starving to death was the #1 way in which The Transient did not want to die.
2) Acquisition of food was a considerable obstacle (viz. the roaming packs of rioters, looters and general malcontents outside)
3) The outdoors were never his thing to begin with.
4) He wanted his mommy.

Number 4 was thrown in for effect since his mother had been dead several weeks and had probably been eaten by some starving looters anyway. He could deal with number 3 by sucking in his gut and being a man. But numbers 1 and 2 gave The Transient the willies. He got the feeling that he was in the same position that the people in the streets had been in shortly before they started to rampage relentlessly through the streets. And since The Transient did not want to become as such, he was quickly moving toward the decision that he needed to get the hell out of New York.

The Shit (The Shit [sh-it] n.: Technical term for the degredation of man-kind from civilization to a more primitive state via self-induced apocalypse. Synonyms: Armageddon, Apocayplse, General Fuckupedness) had not treated The Transient well. Life had been relatively perfect for him before hand. His entire life had been focused on video games, beer, pr0n and other mainstays of internet and fan-boy culture. His mother had been so nice as to supply him with a roof over his head, food to eat and a generous supply of insults and deprecation. Thus, TT was considerably miffed when the power went out (never came back on) and life was reduced to reading books. Often by candlelight.

All of this didn't sit well with TT. It meant that he was going to actually have to do something in order to survive. Doing things had never really been TT's strong point. Hence why shortly after graduation TT had gotten a job as a pizza-delievery boy and proceeded to leach off of his mother for the express purpose of playing every video game that had ever existed. With no video games to play now, TT was in a constant huff (seeded with a non-directional and unjustified bitterness). He figured that perhaps he was going to have to get over that soon, but he would put it off as long as possible.

TT knew that he had one thing going for him that the people in the streets didn't: He had played every first-person shooter and Navy Seals/Special Ops game that had ever been produced. This meant that, in theory, TT had the training of 75 black belts in kung-fu, had been through basic training 15 times and could shoot the fleas off a dog's back at 200 yards (without a scope). His reflexes could be amped so high that he could fight Proleon Cyborgs bare handed while carrying a converstation about the dynamics of interactive environments in the Ash: The Reckoning series. To TT these were the most important skills that a human being could develop. And he was a master.

Translating that training into the real-world was, however, much more difficult that TT had ever imagined. But he figured that he had plenty of time to work this out while cyphering an "Out of the city" contingent.

The first step was recon. Which was what TT was presently doing. With all the stealth he could muster, he had exited the apartment and (staying close to the walls and in the shadows) made his way to the stair well and (silent as a thief in Dungeons and Dragons or that old PC game "Thief") he worked his way up to the roof with a pair of binoculars. The particular building in which he and his mother had lived was twenty stories of decadent brick, mortar and cheap plexy-glass. It had been part of the 2036 initiative by the Fed (R.I.P. Assholes) to provide some cheap living for low-income families living in the center of urban sprawls. They had only lived here for about 3 years before the Shit happened, but in that time TT had made it his goal to explore the entire building to gauge its layout in the event of a government-induced seige of said building. It was simply a matter of preparedness, he told himself.

TT was lucky that there weren't any other people living in this building now, at least as far as he knew. He wagered that most of the people that were left in the city had taken over the more plush accomodations as a last kick in the pants to the rich people of pre-Shit.

From the roof TT could see most of the important parts of the city. North of his present location there had been a particularly violent riot that had resulted in the copious over-turning of cars and the comencement of burning therewith. The wreckage was in a constant state of smolder and seemed to be pointlessly patrolled by some dissident faction in relative proximity. This was not the way to go, he thought.

East and West seemed to be guarded by other factions of the same ilk. Every now and then these factions would clash outside of his apartment, but for the most part they didn't fight. TT supposed that this was because said factions could rare-afford the loss of another individual, especially when that individual could very well end up as a steak dinner for rivals. Regardless, the only direction that seemed feasible was South. This was becasue A) there was water there (viz. the Jersy river) and B) because the area wasn't occupied, only occasionally patrolled by some militant post-Army types that only showed up when they were in the mood for a fight. With proper intel, TT guessed that he could make his way out of the city via and abandoned boat at the warf.

-vec

quote:

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I get the feeling that your comments are a polite way of saying "Keep at it kid, you won't write crap some day."

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I wish I could quit dating tortured writers. The amount of ego strokage necessary to get any kind of point across is absurd. Vecna, just so you'll never have to wonder, I'd like to let you know that I am unabashedly blunt. If I say your work is good, has promise, I mean exactly that, and I wouldn't say it if your work was not good and did not lack promise. You may read between the lines all you want [writers seem to have an obnoxious tendency to do so] but all you can know for sure is that I said what I said, and the rest of it comes from inside your own head, and may or may not reflect reality.

It's pretty inevitable that some of your work will be less than perfect, and that doesn't reflect badly on you as a person or anything.

Anyway. I think your work is good. And it shows promise. I also really liked "I think some looters carried her off." I'm personally a grammar-nazi, so I'd rather read a well-proofed version. Where are you thinking of taking it? Did you want feedback or suggestions?

quote:

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Anyway. I think your work is good. And it shows promise. I also really liked "I think some looters carried her off." I'm personally a grammar-nazi, so I'd rather read a well-proofed version. Where are you thinking of taking it? Did you want feedback or suggestions?

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Feedback and suggestions are always welcome. Your point about ego-strokage vis-a-vis totured writers is well made. I don't deny that it happens in my own life. It's part of the game I guess, at least until you get famous and everyone will read your work even when it's crap.

This is an evolving story, a work in progress. I do not write anything before hand so what is posted here is literally right out of my head. I have a general guideline that I am following and this story is the beginning of a *novel* idea. I wrote a short stroy recently that really got my creative juices flowing so to speak. I simply can't stop writing these days (and my school work is suffering because of it) but I have to do it or it will go away.

Additionally, it should be noted that I haven't written anything in a LONG time. The poems that I posted were of the 5 or so that I have written in as many years. But, now I have the muse/bug back.

/shameless bump

[i[From:Eden at Midnight:[/i]

If there was one thing that TT hated, it was n00bs. N00bs weren't real gamers. Nor were they, in his opinion, real people. Proper protocol in a n00b-vet meeting required a host of specific exchanges that no n00b could possibly ever understand. Thus, what usually happened in such a meeting went something like this:

n00b> hi!1
vet> wat th fk do u want?
(insert 5 second pause here whilst dumb-ass n00b teaches himself how to type)
n00b> can you tll me how to get to the mages den
vet> who r u working 4?
n00b> wrking for? ??
vet> oh, god damnit. ur a n00b.
n00b> noob?
vet> stop talking to m3
noob> what
vet> get the fk outta here
noob> were is teh mages den
vet> fkfkfkfkfkfk!!!11

This was usually followed by an vast cosmic array of insults that the n00b would never get plus general beratement and laughter from other vets. It was just part of life.

TT thought that this n00b-vet dialogue would be more or less analagous to what would happen if and when he met some asshole on the street. Thus, he figured that he could weasel his way out of any conversation by either A) Prentending to be a vet (which he was) or B) Palying the protocol game and catering to said asshole's ego. Either way TT was of the mind that his eminent escape from New York would be easier than Elevator Action played via an NES emulator on his marvelous PC (linux version only).

There were, however, obstacles that TT had failed to take into account. For instance, upon reflection, he had begun to think about the fact that he may have to sleep outside. This was something that he had rarely done, for various reasons. One of those reasons was that there was often rain ouside and being cold and wet was not high on TT's ToDO list. Further, it seemed to TT that there may be animals out there. Not like pigeons or squirrels, but real animals like dogs and bears. This led TT to think about the fact that he had no real way to defend himself (other than his unequalled kung-fu skills of course).

Having thought this through, he decided that fashioning a weapon was his Prime Directive, as it were. To accomplish this feat, he opened his oft-thumbed through copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook for a blueprint. Rather disappointingly, none was forthcoming. It was a non-sequiter, in his opinion, to construct napalm out of gasoline and laundry detergent when he had neither gasoline nor laundry detergent. He was thus left to his own imagination for the purposes of building a device for which to rain doom upon his enemies.

Accordingly, TT began to search for implements of destruction.

From:Eden at Midnight:

From the journal of Erin Lowbelly, ca: 2088:

Winter has come. Fall is giving way to the cold breezes from the north with more rapidity now. Soon the rivers will be frozen. Actually, I'll be frozen too if I don't find a place to stick this out... somewhere.

I had to move south from Madison over the last few weeks. The winter begins so much sooner there... and there was no more food to be had. The family was breaking up anyway. We couldn't hope to feed all twelve mouths in those sparse conditions. Cities really are anathama.

I must have gone a bit east, on heading south. I saw the outskirts of DesMoines from a few miles off the other day... oh, and speaking of which, that's where I got this blank book. There was a corpse on the road about 5 miles outside of the city. He looked like he had been too old to weather the those cold north winds and had died of exposure. Sad that. But he didn't have any use for this book, an dfor that mattter the pens and jacket that I grabbed off of him. Wolves (or something) had already scattered some of the bones... no use for burial there, I had to keep moving.

I hope that I can make it to Kansas City before it gets too cold. I think that's about as far south as I can hope for. Mother had heard that there were a few tribals living in that area who were less aggressive than most. Her brother (my uncle I guess, though I have never met him) supposedly lived in that area. Mother got a letter from him about 10 years ago via some strange fellow who was on his way to the Northern Wastes. Information travels abominably slow these days... and is never, in any way, reliable. One just takes what one is handed... literally.

I guess the best part about Iowa (former Iowa, now just a land like any other) is that it is so damn flat. It's much easier to travel here than it is elsewhere. Especially since I travel so light. In that regard I'm glad that my father taught me how to survive at an early age... though I guess that goes with the territory considering.

And, on that note, something strikes me as odd about this whole place... this world I live in. No one seems to know much about it. Knowledge is very localized and focused. Sometimes you'll here a odd allusion to another time, when all of these cities were populated and those things called 'cars' actually worked. Now 'cars' aren't so much 'cars' as they are roadblocks or the occasional wagon... but one has to have horses for that to work.

Anyway, I just think it's weird that no one has any real idea about this world. All I know is the Great Plains... saw the Lakes once.

Actually, all I know is that I want to sleep. Gotta move on again in the morning.


To Be continued.