August 11, 2015
Dear Diary,
I was worried that travel might’ve been difficult, since now a full three months have gone by, but I’m happy to say things have been relatively simple so far. As we got further north, we left the temperature extremes of the south, and diesel fuel here seems to be in good shape (we’re still on borrowed time, but at least we’ve got a little left). That meant we did things pretty much the same these last few days. Cloudy woke up earliest, did her animal stuff, loaded ‘em back into a freshly-swept truck with animal feed to eat during the drive. We set off about ten, and drive until dark, stopping for lunch to refuel in whatever small town looks good.
Stayed mostly on the highway otherwise, so we didn’t see many signs of other survivors. Some fires at night, some light. A few scattered radio transmissions here and there. Again though, we weren’t really going out of our way to find other ponies right now. Chances are they already had stability in some form by now if they were still alive. Suggesting anypony uproot themselves to travel with us to set up a new city in the middle of nowhere only a few months before winter seems pretty silly.
Ultimately we know we're going to need way more ponies than we have now. A single family alone can barely do everything they need to survive, let alone maintain the level of wealth and stability of an industrialized society. Our number estimates for how many ponies it might take to get something like the old level of technology back don't look good for us, and they look even worse for the HPI. It seems like 500 people aren't enough to do anything more than keep the species alive, and maybe not even that. That might be enough if it wasn't for the fact that the earth is now brimming with magic that would scour their souls from their bodies if it could.
Neanderthal tech just won't cut it to keep the HPI alive. I wonder how many years it will take to have enough ponies to help. Luna explained that the return of our missing population was an exponential curve, with very few in the early years and many more in the later ones. Every year should have more people than the ones before it. Let's do some simple math, diary. 7 billion people / 10,000 years = 700,000 people would reappear each year if it was linear. Only most of them don't live in North America, only about 5% of them do. That means of the 700,000, 35,000 appear here each year. 95.9 of them would be reappearing each and every day, somewhere. Probably lots of them in the cities. I hope none of them show up in LA. It pretty much sucks there right now.
We're going to have to think of a gathering system, at least in the short term. Some way to attract ponies from all over the country. I wish it was easier to cross the ocean, or we could look at Europe, Africa, Asia, those places... but I guess we'd have to learn lots of different languages.
What about South America? I suppose the ponies there might wonder why we don't want to come down and live with them. Because it's hot and there are too many damn mosquitoes, that's why!
Princess Luna seemed to indicate that ponies would be coming much slower than this to start. I wonder just how true it is. Too bad we don't know exactly where all the ponies were that Luna expected would still be here. She thought there'd be enough of us to have cities!
Didn’t happen to run into anypony on the roads, which makes sense. Adrian’s been to several different colonies, and by his estimates, there might be 1000 ponies between the US and Canada, about half of which have collected into little groups.
It’s a sorry story he has to tell, though not one we didn’t expect. Most people living today in the modern world just don’t have the skills to provide for themselves. Our society had grown so specialized and advanced that our short lifetimes wouldn’t have been enough to learn everything, even if all knowledge acquisition ceased completely for the species while we lived. Many skills required specialized talents that were rare in the population.
What all this means is that most of the “colonies” have already started to regress in some ways, at least as far as Adrian explained. Those in areas without well-water or rivers had to migrate to those that did, or else survive on bottled water and be unable to bathe. Many have started learning the hard way that even huge underground lakes of gasoline (gas stations) are going to stop running their vehicles and generators long before they exhaust the fuel itself.
Plumbing, he says, is rarely still working, and in many places ponies are boiling water to drink and bathing in rivers and ponds. The exception seems to be those who found RVs, since these vehicles have their own self-contained grids, and water can be poured in using a funnel if you’re patient enough. Given there are so few survivors, he thinks finding trailers or RVs has been a very common strategy.
If this is true, we’ll have to keep it in mind for our colony. It may end up starting as a glorified trailer park, filled with farm animals. Alas, the ignoble fate of man. Not all of the colonies were having so much trouble, though. He apparently recently left behind a colony down in Bastrop, Texas that seemed to be doing okay, though he said something about them not sticking around for more than a few more months. Had some choice things to say about some of its members, but I’ll not buy into gossip. They probably won’t want to uproot themselves. Hell, we didn’t until the fire took our city away. We might have got to next year and decided to become a desert people instead. Animals and humans have been doing it before, it wouldn’t have been impossible for us. Just have to change our habits a bit. Grow some different crops.
But we didn’t. Adrian said that actual starvation was fairly rare, and he never encountered a single pony who had or heard stories of it happening (but if they’d been all alone and eaten by animals, who would’ve known?). I’ve learned from Oliver that we can eat and even enjoy many grasses and shrubs, and Adrian thinks ponies only would’ve really been in danger in the really dry areas. Haven’t had a winter yet, at least not in the United States. Maybe some of us will freeze when that happens.
The biggest news from Adrian is that somebody else discovered what “we” did with the satellite network! He discovered his phone was still working, and that it was no longer charging him. So he played around, and set up a few more. He’s been leaving them in every colony he visits, even the ones without electricity. Maybe five hundred ponies total are in settlements with access to the phones, and can use them to communicate. With the HPI keeping things working, we should have at least a few years with some coverage, so long as everypony doesn’t insist on a phone of their own and clog the lines.
Called the HPI today, when we stopped to let the animals out and to refuel. Told them I’d learned enough that I could never tell them over the phone. They wouldn’t believe me. Dr. Clark agreed to have someone waiting for us in town when we arrive. Paris, Illinois. Their aircraft confirmed it was empty and told us so, which was thoughtful. We probably would’ve picked a different town if this one already had ponies living there. It wouldn’t feel right driving in and claiming all their stuff. Nor would it have been safe. They could all have guns.
Tomorrow we’ll arrive. Tomorrow I’ll share my unbelievable story with the last humans on earth, and we’ll lay the foundations for a colony of some of its former humans. Tomorrow we’ll be somewhere permanent, where we can farm and grow and hopefully prevent a slide back into subsistence.
I told Luna that I wanted the burden of protecting the human legacy. For now, I think that means protecting as many of the former humans as possible. Once there are enough others to focus on the needs of survival, I’ll start worrying about the lost knowledge. Maybe I can turn the saddlebags into storage for books and artifacts I could take with me even in the event of a disaster, once we’ve got all the Equestrian books out and onto shelves for ponies to read.
I noticed something interesting today, while I was glancing back at some of my old entries: I may've acquired a photographic memory. I flipped through the journal before going on my usual refuel run tonight, and while I was doing the mind-numbing work of pumping fuel into each truck, I went back to reading the journal without even realizing what I was doing. I could still see the pages in my mind, sketches and all!
This can't be normal, can it? I've never had a photographic memory before! Whatever. That's about the least abnormal thing about whatever the Princesses of Equestria did to me.
Tomorrow, our new home. And peace, at least for a while.
—Lonely Day
Note: I probably should've drawn Adrian yesterday, but I was just so excited for my cutie mark! I drew him today. He's always got his left wing in that wrap. I wonder if I should ask why...
Before the huge wave of posts by the final chapter tomorrow, two things.
1. First, thanks for sharing ths story with us.
2. I loved your daily updates. It didn't matter I had a small chapter each time, a big part of what made this story special were the daily discussions here with every bite of new info.
Looking forward to the finale tomorrow.
*Silver Quill Appears*
Continuity!
Day's got a point about specialized knowledge. I'd probably be pretty much useless without an Internet to look things up from; the best I can do without guidance is manage light repairs to simple machines, maybe a bit of sewing- and that's with hands. I don't think my years of expertise with computers, programs and networking would mean much without the likes of Joseph's monomaniacal drive.
Man. Good thing I'm not writing my own take on this scenario, because it'd be bleak.
You probably get this enough but your art is really cute and adorable <3 Love the style of it and nice chapter :D
I could say the same thing about USA and I'd be pretty much equally correct, lol. South America's a pretty big place, you know.
Can't wait for the finale!
If she spends another two weeks dancing around this...
6169764
Speak for yourself. I had a cat once who was bound and determined to be as human as possible.
My take on it is that humans have ridiculous amounts of sentience. It's not that animals can't choose to be anything else. It's that humans have a bizarrely overgrown cerebrum, a "general purpose computer" part of the brain, that allows them to do it so much more than anything else. Ultimately, it's a matter of degree, not a unique property of humanity. So in this story, animals got their brains yanked on by the core inversion. Humans got ripped right out of them. Something about (entropic) sentience is what produces creativity packets, i.e. microbursts of magic. Animals have sentience, but only a tiny little bit. And only humans ponyized of course, because the princess planned the spell that way.
And here's a funny thing. If you could deliberately breed a human who was functionally retarded, either by genetic alteration, simple random error, or gestational poisoning, then that human would be as dumb as any animal, with a poorly functioning or nonfunctioning cerebrum. As such they wouldn't be producing magic to any degree, and wouldn't get ripped out to fly along to the galactic core. And since exposure/conversion causes animals to become more intelligent...
There's going to be a lot of inbreeding going on, with less than 500 humans left...
where are the colonies located anyways that Adrian been to?
I have a hard time believing there are that little ponies in USA and Canada
Oooo, now that's an important detail. One colony is nice, but a countrywide or worldwide network of connected colonies is a completely different ballgame in terms of keeping civilization going.
Photographic memory? That's a useful new skill, at least for as long as Alex is alive.
Nearly eidetic-level memory, eh? Interesting...
6171028
I know there won't be many in the canadian praries once winter sets in. 'Tis a harsh thing a saskatchewan winter...
6170970
Technically, you need only 16 mated pairs of humans to sustainably repopulate the species with genetic deficits and 80 mated pairs for full genetic diversity. So having 500 people, assuming there is 250 men and 250 women would be plenty to repopulate the human species. I dont remember where I read this and Google is only turning up ask and yahoo answers but if I can find it I'll post the link.
Edit: Wiki article. Its by the same person I remember writing about this in the first place. However grain of salt and all that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_colonization#Population_size
Lonely Day has really embraced being a pony on several levels. I guess Equestria had way more impact on her (aside from whatever the Princesses did) than she even thought possible. It makes her early commentary on Cloudy Sky have an interesting twist now, since Cloudy Sky got the treatment way early.
Thinking on it, all the ponies thus far has pretty much embraced being a pony. Joe (who is shaping up to become Mystic Rune?), Oliver, Cloudy Sky (even if she hasn't embraced the flight part of being a pony. Hey, Fluttershy barely did that either), and now Lonely Day. Only Moriah from what has been said appears to be the most 'human' out of all of them. Haven't seen much of Adrian to say either way.
6170901 well you could always hit up your local library and bookstores and find every for dummies book you can find that is useful and go from there
6171126 Thought about that too.
Mostly after I've understood what he prefers his pony name and using it rather more than "A" or "Alex".
Just like in those "Heroes finding a diary of the man who is slowly going insane" where all records starting normally,but as time progresses they are becoming more stranger and scarier depending on how writer sane at the moment of record was written.Sooner or later,he will gone completly mad and the last records will be unfinished gibberish written with unreadeble script.
6171113
Doesn't take frozen embryos, eggs, and sperm into account. Could have quite the diverse collection. It is called the Human Preservation Initiative after all.
Though I'm curious what would happen to eggs and sperm that were artificially grown in a lab under the influence of magic . . .
so is day still transmitting signals out to people? or does someone have to find one of these phones?
6171167 I have been amassing books and knowledge like this for years now just in case the knowledge would be needed.
6171113
No, no the point is you want genetic defects, so you can have retard babies who can carry on the human legacy.
You're still dancing around the issue, Day,
tell us your secrets!record the significant details properly for coming generations....unless Day is now immortal and is planning on being there in person for coming generations.
6171371
This seems like a plan with flaws in it
normally I don't share the internal soundtrack I end up ascribing to stories, but this one fit so well I couldn't not share it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fngvQS_PmQ
Its got the worry of losing loved ones to the destruction of your world falling apart around you. The desire to have company of your friends and family. The need to be remembered. Not to mention the references to fire which would always remind Alex of his home being taken away from him.
Adrian looks like a tough pony! A real stallion of action!
Alright, so we have travelling and all... hmm, cool, looks like networks are being set up, the future looks pretty bright.
6168442
I think it's a bit different, and here's a huge spoiler block:
Sapience is magic. Literally. (Keep in mind that sentience and sapience are two distinct and separate things.) The reason ponies, etc. haven't had any issues like ours is because their galaxy/universe/whatever was already saturated in magic, and their bodies can defend against the "draining effect"; ours began without magic, but as humankind expanded, invented, developed, all that we did began to fill our galaxy with magic. (And maybe the works of alien species in our galaxy too; nothing much is said about that.) The problem is that when the galactic core hit its own saturation point, it sort of caused a magical surge that hit Earth- imagine the tide rushing in to destroy your sandcastle, then pulling back out to sea and taking the sand with it. As magic isn't limited to the speed of light, the process is instantaneous. The end result: Every human being's "soul"- the spark of sapience- is overwhelmed by magic and pulled away to the galactic core just like the sand of that castle. All you have left is the meat shells.
6171484 He looks ugly, ugly as fuck.
...Well, Bastrop isn't one of the places I would stay, just saying.
digett.com/sites/default/files/filefield_images/field_teaser_image/bastrop-fire.jpg
ww3.hdnux.com/photos/06/01/30/1578542/7/622x350.jpg
Whelp, the sending souls into the future to have them reappear in an example of exponential growth thing probably explains Moriah. I still wonder what she was going to get out of the plane though.
Also if Alex is supposed to be the one that 'carries on the human legacy', does this photographic memory foreshadow potential immortality as well. Like is Alex supposed to be a literal living relic of humanity? Will Lonely Day outlive everyone else in the group? Even then, Alex's full name Alexander Haggard can mean"The Weary Defender of Man". "Let us pray it isn’t prophetic." indeed.
Also just for full tin foil hat-ness, Sunset's “You couldn't be a princess, could you?” is further foreshadowing of this.
*puts away cork-board and pushpins*
Or I could be talking out my rear with this.
Edit: Also I finally caught up with this thing! Thank god. I was worried I was missing out on the speculation.
Edit 2: Regarding how Moriah showed up, if people that were sent into the future do actually retain their memories of their human life, then rebuilding humanity might just be a matter of setting up a 'landing pad' for new arrivals and a system that can house them. In the long term, this is less 'Last One Alive Turn Off the Lights' and more 'Don't Wreck the Place While We're Gone'.
I'd start working on converting stuff to run on magic.
Think about it--- all their technology and machinery.... but with an inexhaustible power supply. The promise of solar and nuclear and wind energy fulfilled in spades. And no pollution! Preserve civilization? Heck, with a cultural advantage like that they could be living like the Jetsons in a decade.
6171921
I now have this amusing mental image of them managing to reopen the portal between Equestria and Earth within a generation because of batteries, generators, and capacitors.
"We converted one of our old power plants to output 10 Kilocorns!"
Eidetic memory would be an important thing for anyone who dedicates her life to being a living repository of knowledge.
Also, news on population. There's still some telecommunication floating around. Coordinating ponies won't be easy, but it's still in the realm of possibility.
The humans' reaction should be quite the sight to see. I look forward to it.
Also, Adrian looks pretty darn awesome. I can't imagine what the grappling hook might represent, or what the deal with his wing is, but I'm intrigued.
I've been thinking about the HPI problem with their 500 people.
It seems likely to me that with the nature of the advance warning they had they could have easily also managed to store some quantities of human genetic material in the form of sperm and ova. They would only need to ensure that they had the right gender ratio among that 500, probably significantly female heavy since I doubt they'd have been able to develop an artificial womb capable of carrying a fetus to full term. Of course if the female majority at HPI are all young, healthy, and are willing to be used as 'brood mares' (pardon the pun) they could expand the population with few problems.
Really, it strikes me that the most pressing problem they might have is how to protect an expanding human population from magic exposure.
The HPI is already visiting existing nuclear reactors for material as we've seen when they visited LA and it will be quite a while before ponies are able to mine and refine any more for them. Ultimately, unless the HPI can develop a method to easily generate and maintain large null magic zones the human species is doomed to death by magic exposure long before they'll need to be worried about genetic diversity.
6171638 I like that analogy. I think therefore it is. It's just a matter of having a large enough manna pool to make everyone else see it too.
Interesting. very interesting. This actually ties into an old head-canon I've heard once or twice. It basically states that when a pony gets his/her cutie mark, rather then just being a butt tattoo, the mark physically enhances that ponies ability to perform their special talent. They end up being ten times better at their talent then they had been prior to getting their mark. A cutie mark represents a pony's life ambition and if Alex's ambition is to preserve the human legacy, a photographic memory would definitely help with that.
6172085
Honestly, I think this story is turning out to be the next Fallout: Equestria. By that, I mean that even when this story finally comes to a close, there will always be some new person writing some new story about some new character that takes place in this world you've created.
6172323 Can we just call this "Fictional universe"?
6172323
This is far from the first group of recursive fanfics to be created on FimFiction, even after Fallout Equestria. The Chessgame of the Gods, the Optimalverse, and the Five Score Divided by Four setting are three notable instances, and only a handful of stories in those groups have been completed.
Hell, 5S/4 got so bad that for a while there was a ban on people creating new stories in the setting unless it was already complete. The original story for the Chessverse (you know, the one that started the entire thing) is listed in the "Non-Canon" folder of the group.
6172057
Please, stop.
Well, it's actually not all that hot in the mountains, or in southern Chile and Argentina (hell, Argentina owns a portion of Antarctica). And look on the bright side, Day: your body is now perfectly adapted to swatting mosquitoes!
Dear Zutcha: I (we, maybe?) need an image of fit-for-royal-visit Lonely Day in full Rarity fabulousness, with styled mane and braided tail and all.
Please? Please? *kitty eyes*
6169873
Oh, there's no way I'm done with everything I want to do. It's just I've reached the goals the narrative created (discover what happened and try to reverse it), and resolved them. I feel like it might be time to open up the next novel. Though I know that lots of people are sequel-weary here on fimfiction, and I guess I'm afraid that we wouldn't keep such a good group moving forward if I did. I guess that's my main fear.
Also, the journal format has been great at covering large parts of the story at once. It's (in my opinion) fairly weak compared to regular prose, but it's let me do some awesome worldbuilding. I would be sad to see it go, but also excited to be able to do regular narrative again. I guess I'm really conflicted.
6169902
That was absolutely, positively awe-inspiring. It's a shame that's never going to get approved by fimfiction, because I think that's the most compelling AU I've ever read (also the only one, but who's counting). I was a little confused when I saw the story was missing, but I see you moved it somewhere, so future generations can enjoy it. I also notice the title of the story is plural, and I shudder to think what other little monstrosities might end up in there one day.
6169922
In any case, Alex really, really wants to work with the HPI. She made her loyalty to them over Princess Luna pretty clear by keeping them secret from her. I think she would consider it a major failure if they ever start fighting ponies. After all, it would really be humans fighting humans in that case, just one side would be transformed unwillingly first.
6170609
Somewhere else. He hasn't told us where he's from. He's been journeying around from city to city ever since people vanished.
6170876
Thanks very much, it's been a blast to write the story!
I decided I was leaving things a little less settled than I'd like (one of my editors, Two Bit, hounded me about he ending), not to mention the huge poll where most people wanted the story to keep going. In the end I'm still ending it soon, but not quite as soon. Just a few more chapters, to set the stage better for the next one.
I'm not sure I'll be able to do daily updates again. If I did, they'd probably be short chapters, like these ones. I don't know if I could write prose daily like I can write journal entries. Guess there's one way to find out. Gotta take off those training wheels, as they say. I don't think I'll leave the universe for some time. Plenty more stories to tell.
6170901
Well, having friends helps. Alex's mechanic skills won't be useful without cars, though by then she will have had so long using them for other things that she'll have adapted. Maybe you would too.
6170902
Zutcha does some amazing work. I only wish I could draw half as well as he does.
6170914
I do, but I think Alex is pretty ignorant. Or not being very serious. Probably both.
6170962
Well I won't keep it going for two weeks, so she can't delay that long! Unless she doesn't say anything before the sequel. >.>
6170970
It might take many, many generations to do that, though. Humans have, after all, experimented with artificial selective breeding. Eugenics weren't exactly a fun time. I suppose they could try to genetically engineer a deliberately stupid human, though at that point you have to wonder if they've really saved humanity or not.
It's not like the animals have all become equal to what humans were. They're just equal to what he animals are on MLP:FIM. They don't build factories or compose art like ponies; most of them keep right on living the way they always did, just way smarter. I guess a few of the ones that learn about things like "houses" (probably from Fluttershy) do show some obvious signs of imitating ponies. I still wonder how they got ferrets on a vegetarian diet...
6171028
If 1 in 1,000,000 people stayed, then there are ~ 7000 ponies in the whole world. 1000 in the US an Canada would actually mean that slightly more did, since they should only represent 5% of the population together. There would've been only 350 if that were the case. Also, Adrian only pointed out one, but there are likely several others. It's just out of scope for this story to talk about them. We'll see more in the sequel.
6171243
They don't trust the pony main characters enough to tell them yet, but I would be very, very surprised if the HPI didn't have an extremely sizable stockpile of viable genetic material. They can't really expand their population right now (they're at capacity in their bunker). Right now, it's a race to improve their shielding enough to expand. Otherwise, they'll hold at where they are, reproducing just enough to keep things stagnant, until they have new space and resources to expand into.
6171330
The radio transmitter stopped when LA burned. She'll have to set up something new when she gets to her new area. The Satelites have kept working though, thanks to the HPI.
6171413
I thought "man, maybe for the first time ever somebody who downvotes a story is going to tell me why they didn't like it."
Didn't happen, though. Guess it's slightly better than bulk-downvoting everything the human tag, or the like.
6171431
I still think she would want to keep the journal even if she were immortal. Old habits or whatever.
6171474
I have listened to this song more than once during the writing of this story. It's quite possible it influenced me. But then, I never write without music. Generally I pick the soundtrack specifically because it works with the feel of the story I'm trying to tell. I think I did that this time too.
6171743
I actually have some friends who lost their house in that fire. I wouldn't live there either.
6171775
Hey, somebody noticed what I did with the name! ^^
6171921
To some degree it seems Equestrian "technology" runs on magic. The trains look like they burn pretty clean, for instance. Though they also apparently have a hydroelectric dam. There may be instructions to doing this to some extent in their books, though I imagine it can't be easy. Seems like running something on magic would be like running something on Neutrinos.
6172203
Yep, this is the key. They can't start expanding their population until they have somewhere for their new population to go. Until then, they're stuck just keeping the population they have.
6172348
Sequel: Alex's Wish Fulfillment Adventures!
6173228
It's true, all the drama on that is finally over.
6173463
It's HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEER.
Granted, it does screw with the Equestria Girls canon, but that wouldn't really have fit in the universe anyway considering all the other ways I've already screwed it up.
6173505
I asked at the time, and he wasn't excited about it. Still, he does sometimes take requests. Maybe he'll be more willing now that I'm not the only one who wants it!
6173620
Wait, you actually...
God have mercy on us all.
Though if it does get approved, leaving it listed as a sequel to Last Pony on Earth might confuse some people if they stumble into it by accident.
Not that bastrop isn't a nice place, but why there of all places to mention specifically? It's not exactly a landmark to people not familiar with central Texas
6180648
Hell, I'm from
Texas and I had to get a map to find it
...This is heavy.
The next day, several thousand people showed up in LA.
Too soon?
6196056 That's where I live. o-o
6196056
True that! Just be glad it's not Bulverde (little town near San Antonio, bet you've never heard of it.)
Coming from the perspective of someone who's read Sterling's Emberverse series I find the Equestrian's ludicrous optimism for how well this is going to work hilarious. They apparently know nearly nothing about human culture or mentality. They thought they were going to come back after a few weeks and find multiple towns with an intact government? HAH! The spells the only reason sunset wasn't fighting Eaters the whole way thru Los Angeles! (pony Eaters... brrrrrgh, that's a nasty image.)
The spell re-deposits people in order of their capacity to easily adapt to their new forms yes? And apparently includes not only ponies, but all of the various sapient races of Equestria, from diamond dogs to dragons. That being said, the fact that we only seem to have about 100-200 people scattered the length and breadth of Old America (ignoring the rest of the world) is... worrisome. I think the spell is perhaps having a hard time selecting people with the optimal degree of mental flexibility and is having to choose between stalling, and introducing more unstable individuals. After all our protagonists, the first people back and thus ideally suited, by the spell's own judgment, are ambivalent at best about their new shapes, and we can expect a decline in morale and stability as we continue to get newcomers. Things will get worse before they get better.
This is spectacularly well written, and I am having a blast contemplating the sociological results of all this buggery. watching a society collapse and re-build is my favorite kind of story to read, and I hardly ever get a good example to chew on, so thank you.
8796609
I thought of Embers as soon as Dr.Clark explained situation. Pretty much it same outlook as dragons there had though. Casualies will be in any way, they could not ever foretell what would happen, but that's better than nothing.