My nightmares overnight dealt with monsters eating babies. Lots of monsters. Lots and lots of babies. I vomited shortly after waking up in the morning. Somehow though, I survived the nightmares to make it to day 4 of the apocalypse. I can’t say I am not at least a little bit surprised. I have had multiple close calls every single day. If this is what my life is going to be like from now on, then eventually my luck is going to run out. We needed to step up the evacuations from Oakland, Sunset Hills, and Crestwood. The sooner we had those areas cleared of people and then anything that mattered to our collective survival the better. I was determined to help carry that out today. Hopefully, I only get attacked by monsters once today. That would be almost like a vacation.

  With that final thought I finally got out of bed a little before 6am. I knew that Frank, Billy, and I all needed to leave before 6:30am. I got dressed and ran downstairs to find everyone eating breakfast, Natalie included. Oh yay, it has started already.

  I grabbed a stack of pancakes and slathered them in butter and syrup before digging in. I realized that I was hungry despite going to bed right after eating last night. I was through my first stack and heading for seconds when my dad texted me.

  “Neal, just checking in on you. I keep seeing you in videos. I hope your safe.”

  I texted back, “Dad. I’m doing good. Survived my first air strike yesterday. Don’t worry didn’t get injured. We destroyed an awful lot of abyssal orcs, lupin, and probably wrecked their plans to destroy the forces defending one of the portals. Everyone says hi.”

  Brittney asked from the stove where she was flipping pancakes, “Who are you texting?”

  “My dad. I was just responding letting him know I am safe. I said everyone says hi, in case you get a text or a call later.”

  “That’s sweet. Is your dad safe?”

  “He should be. He is probably in bunker under the Rocky Mountains with the rest of congress and their families.”

  “Oh. I forgot that your dad is in congress.”

  Nora replied to Brittney, “Most of his family is in politics or the military. Sadly, no one in the family was stationed anywhere near here. Otherwise, we would have way more support.”

  “That’s not entirely true.” Natalie said. “He has an uncle or a cousin who is near the top of the command at Andrew’s Air Force Base over in Illinois.”

  I smiled, “Nats right. However, he is outside of Army command, so I can’t honestly get much support from him during all of this.”

  Natalie cocked her head, “Support? Support how?”

  I tread carefully, “We have had a lot of military officers doing one of three things: ignoring or unable to adapt to our new reality, using knowledge we provide to screw us over, or trying to hog all the credit for stuff. Personally, I don’t care about the last one. The first two are a problem.”

  “Well, if I spread the truth about you, then you shouldn’t have to play politics, because the politics will naturally flow to you.”

  “I guess the depends on how you will personally be framing the truth.”

  “Neal, you worry way too much.”

  “I have reason to worry. For all I know, someone could come in here and take all this away from me. I would prefer that not to happen.”

  Natalie blinked and got a bit of a shocked look to her face. “You’re serious? When I’m done everyone will be suitably impressed with what you’ve been doing. Assuming of course, that it is genuinely impressive.”

  We all looked at her. There was a mix of shock and mild insult. Nora spoke up, “You should be reasonably impressed with the lengths we are going to secure Fenton.”

  Nora had stopped talking, but then looked like she had something else to say. “Neal. Fair warning, the reason we are all leveling so fast is that everyone is getting 200% extra experience right now. I dug into the data when I hit level 5 so fast. At some point that extra experience is going to go away. So, we need to get our 2nd classes sooner rather than later.”

  Natalie looked Neal and Nora, “Both of you are level 5?”

  Joe spoke for the first time today, “I’m level 5 as well. Part way to level 6.”

  I responded to Both, “Congrats Joe. And Yes Natalie, several of us are already level 5. It matters because not every class goes to level 10.”

  “I had heard that many classes only go to level 5. I have no idea what people are supposed to do then. Does the system offer a new class at that time?”

  “I can say categorically no. It leaves it to people to find a class token for a compatible class. It is one of the many things we are focused on.”

  “Wow! I didn’t realize you guys were so homed in on classes.”

  “Yeah, I’ll tell you on the ride over to the Fenton Government center.” That was going to be the moment of truth. Does she use that information responsibly or does she somehow twist things that we are not doing things in the best interests of people. I needed allies, and I only hoped that Natalie would be the ally that tipped the scales. I sent a text to my dad, “Dad, Natalie Snowe is here. She is going to be doing a ton of segments on me and my team in next few days. I’m still a little worried that this could backfire.”

  We all headed out to the car. Frank, Billy, Natalie, and I all got in and Frank drove to the government center. It was brief, but in that time Billy handed Natalie one of our new binders on classes. He explained to her that getting an idea of who had what classes and class abilities would be useful when trying to fight invasion. With most adults being able to be called to active service it seemed important to see what we had at our disposal. Natalie was a little shocked to see separate sections on common, uncommon, and rare classes. She didn’t know that rare could be broken up into low, mid, and high tiers. She was really hoping she could get stuff like this out to the general public. Listening to Billy go into details on classes told me that he was very much on top of that topic. I was able to just sit and listen while she got to have her reaction.

  Soon enough we found ourselves at the government center and got out to visit the facility. We ended up showing up at the same time as Maggie and Emily. The ladies did a double take upon seeing Natalie Snowe. She wasn’t a household name yet, but there were certainly appearances by her on Hound News daily as well as video clips of her online. Maggie spoke first, “Good morning Representative Cassland. Looks like you have a special guest today. Will you be spending some time at the government center this morning. I can call the mayor and have him finally come in for that sit down with you.”

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  I half smiled, “Maggie and Emily, so great to see the two of you this early morning. I would like to introduce Natalie Snowe to the two of you. Natalie, these are the administrators for the combined district. When I’m not here, these two are in charge. They have already shown themselves to be highly competent in managing the chaos as it were.”

  “Ladies, I know it’s a pain for you to get here this early, but I do absolutely appreciate you doing that. We need time to get the power copiers settled, I hope they will start showing up in the next half an hour or so. I will need to take one of them with my team today. The more levels they get the better off humanity is. Do you recommend one to go into the field.”

  Maggie replied, as she was here all day yesterday with the people who could copy abilities, “Yes, there is a man who is probably a solid fit, but he is older.”

  I mentally groaned, “How old?”

  Maggie chuckled, “62. He has the right attitude, but doesn’t seem very suited soldiering.”

  I rolled my eyes. That does not sound positive at all. “Introduce me to him after he gets here. First up is checking in on your progress.”

  Maggie’s expression went neutral and she looked past me to Natalie in a silent ‘are you sure you want her to know.’ She finally spoke, “Not a problem boss. I’ll walk you through it. That will also get Emily up to speed so we collab better.” She then unlocked the doors and stepped to the side to allow entrance. She stepped in behind us once we were all inside. Frank showed us over to the room where the ability copiers were yesterday. None of them were in yet, but this was good to get us started.

  Natalie turned to Frank, “once you do what you need to, I’m going to need you to be my camera man today.” Frank turned and looked at her like a deer in headlights and then turned to me. I nodded, which caused Frank to nod. “Perfect. So Neal, what is Frank putting out there.”

  “I’ll explain just as soon as Maggie and Emily are back. I hope you understand the trust I am placing in you.”

  “Yes Neal. I understand. I’m not here to hurt you or stab you in the back. More than anything I am curious as to what you have accomplished. By the way, have you loaded all that class information onto the internet?”

  “Yeah, Billy made a website where we have uploaded all the classes encountered, but he hasn’t made the website public. Right now, it needs a complex password that I don’t know.”

  “Okay. When do you plan on making it public?”

  “Probably just as soon as you plan on broadcasting the first footage of your observations of us. There is no reason to put it out there ahead of time.” I still felt like there was a bit of verbal jousting between us, but I wasn’t going to entirely let my guard down. In some ways, its like I was still at odds with myself.

  “You seem to be putting an awful lot of this on me. You are the one that seems to be sitting on a trove of valuable information. How did you figure all of it out?”

  “That is the easy question. We wrote everything down. We made observations. We scoured our status and menu. We asked questions about what we didn’t know. As each piece of information was obtained, it generated more questions. I still think we have only answered about a tenth of the questions we’ve asked ourselves and each other.”

  “That little?”

  “Yeah. Our world has grown and shrunk at the same time. Teleportation is now a thing. If we can figure out how to make our own teleportation circles we can then have near instant transportation across hundreds or even thousands of miles at a time. How does that change logistics? How does that change travel?”

  “I’d heard about those teleportation circles. Weren’t they powered by human blood?”

  “Yes, so we need another power source. I am not bleeding profusely to travel cross country.”

  Billy walked into the room with Maggie and Emily, “That would be one hell of toll to go across the interdimensional highway.”

  We all looked at him. It really wasn’t that funny, but a part of me still wanted to laugh. He was trying to be funny and not mean. I chuckled. Billy was trying to just tell jokes. I wondered if Emily was the cause?

  “Maggie, if you could get us started on explaining what goes on in here. This will be helpful for everyone.”

  Maggie smiled and stood up a little straighter. “Certainly. What we have on the table behind me are this binder and these ability tokens. The binder is where we record every ability that comes through here. We note down the name, affinities, and description. These tokens here are the original of the ones we have here.” She pointed to the ones arranged next to her in little Ziploc bags with labels on them. “These others are the ones that are copies or extras of the originals. We make a point of not letting anyone use an original except to copy it. These abilities have a range of uses, and we have several that we hope to start distributing today.”

  Natalie asked, “and how do these ability tokens help people?”

  “Right, good question. Let me clarify. We all have ability slots. Everyone has at least 4 slots. By holding on to the ability token here you absorb the knowledge and gain the ability. We believe that our fighting forces will need any abilities they can get to help them fight and survive. Eventually, we hope that this becomes a new industry. Those that can copy ability tokens would be very valuable people indeed.”

  Natalie continued, “Where do you get the ability tokens in the first place?”

  “Yes, so we have found a number of people that can steal abilities from corpses. We have them gaining levels and using their abilities on dead enemies. We hope to eventually build up a large database of abilities.”

  “Wow, so we are stealing from our enemies. Is that the only way to learn abilities.”

  “So far, yes.”

  “So, this industry seems rather essential to Humanities’ survival, wouldn’t it, Neal.”

  “Yes. It is our best bet to gaining abilities to fight back against our enemies. There is also a certain amount of justice in taking their abilities to use them against the enemy.”

  The tour went on to show Natalie what we were doing for food, security, and a census. Natalie had a lot of questions about the need for a census, but it boiled down to, we won’t know what we have to fight demons unless we actually attempt to see what we have. Natalie seemed satisfied with this. About then the ability copiers started showing up.

  Maggie asked an older man to come over and she introduced him to us, “Representative Cassland, this is Vern Bluewright. He is the individual I mentioned earlier.” Vern was a bit of an oddball. He was older and thin, but wore a t-shirt with an image from an anime that I didn’t recognize. Granted, I didn’t watch much anime. That was Chris’s passion. Before memories of Chris flooded in I shut them down. I couldn’t get lost in those thoughts. I focused back on the older man. He wore thick glasses. He was almost six feet tall and weighed maybe a hundred and fifty pounds at most. He was not going to be carrying any gear. That much was certain. Vern’s eyes were fierce though, like he had something to prove.

  “Vern, glad to have you with us. We need to level you up. You might seriously want to invest in some physical stats.”

  “Geez, you’d think I couldn’t handle myself. Don’t worry, boy. I’ll be good help.” He just smiled at me, “Where are we headed?”

  “Our ride should be here momentarily.” We didn’t wait long for the two Humvees from our squad to show up. Ted was driving the lead Humvee and pulled up to the front doors. Seeing some of the squad from last night gave me a small surge of pride. These men and women survived despite the odds. I introduced each member of the team with us to Natalie with varying degrees of response from each of them. You could tell how conservative a person was based on their reaction to Natalie’s presence. Katnessa had the biggest issue with Natalie, but that didn’t seem political at all. I had no clue what that was.

  Once we got intros out of the way, Frank, Natalie, and I all hopped into the second hummer to join Clint and Hal, the two guys who did not have to go command in Crestwood last night, to have injuries tended to. We headed to that very same command facility now to get our people that ended up there overnight. It was a pretty quick drive over there, and we passed people packing up to get their families into Fenton before things got any worse. I still had this sinking feeling that things were going to get worse.

  Soon enough, we pulled up to a newly erected gate in front of what used to be Crestwood Mall. We were stopped, and they asked for identification, which was provided before letting us through. We were advised that the Colonel was hoping to see me today. I was not entirely looking forward to that. We pressed on and parked quickly.

  Soon enough, we found ourselves looking over a sleeping Reggie. Griggs was in a coma and one bed over. In the bed to the other side of Reggie was Phil. He was all patched up and eating some cookies I brought him. He passed on the orc healing potions, said he’d rather be in bed. Don’t blame him one little bit. Jack, Barney, Harry, and Jill were around somewhere, and now we needed to track them down before I went to go see the Colonel. Natalie had separated from us to go talk to soldiers. She said she needed tons of sound bites. Frank was with her, so I’m not sure she is going to do anything nefarious. I certainly had a crazy day ahead of me.