River McIrish: Somehow, by fortuitous fortune, our cameras started working again. EMP isn't supposed to work like that. EMP was known to fry camera equipment and render them forever unusable. We sent up a drone to see what had been done and some of the pictures that it brough back were chilling. After our last foray out, seeing the sick and dying people, we hadn't gone out again opting to hunker down in our bunker and hopefully wait out the last vestiges of the radiation. The most horrific part of it was seeing Jamie Jolina She was dying of radiation sickness and trying to enjoy herself on the swing, the cells in her body dying as she was painfully trying to move around to gain some vestige of comfort. And the saddening thing was that she still had that smile on her face. Jamie had always been one fo the most cheerful people in Sunset Valley and yet she met this fate, which would take her life with good grace. Unfortunately for Grim, his job has been a full-time occupation as of late.
River McIrish: Getting used to living in a bunker with 20 other people has been quite the eye-opener. When we were on the surface before the war started, it was a situation where we had our own separate places to go to when tensions got high, or we could wear whatever we wanted to in the confines of our own home. Now it's a matter of being who you are in the midst of people that you share a survival shelter with. The other people in the shelter have become your family. And it takes a different mindset to be able to live with people who have vastly different tastes and attitudes than yourself.
River McIrish: We somehow manage to try to avoid annoying each other but there are times when we need our space. My favorite pastime is to curl up on a bunk and read a book. AJ and Tosh tend to work out and do martial arts and Harm strives to be a better cook so that he can feed us terrific meals. In fact, he and Tosh tend to do a lot of the cooking in the bunker. While others have picked up cooking skill books, they don't do too much cooking. It's usually Harm and Tosh who do the lion's share of it.
River McIrish: There really isn't much to do inside the bunker but we make the best of it. Lately Tosh has been so stressed with the fact that he'd broken up with Meg which means that he's free. I'm sorry to be slightly smug about that, but he just didn't seem to be the blonde girl type, but I digress. He seems to spend a lot of time with the board breaker and the martial arts dummy. And it seems as though Lia and I are spending a lot of time watching him break boards. Everybody oohs and ahhs over AJ breaking plywood boards, but Tosh is onto concrete slabs and he's broken at least four stacked that I have seen personally. What is it about men and their propensity to love to break things when they're frustrated and need to work out their frustration on something?
River McIrish: We sent the drone up again two days later and the frost has gotten worse. The temperature has been dropping and it's been getting very cold. Luckily we've been underground so the cold hasn't been affecting us, but it must be like Hades for the survivors. The leaves are off the trees and the ground is completely frozen. The drone got a glimpse of poor Sam Sekemoto who was seated in an armchair in the middle of a small pond. I feel for the survivors of Sunset Valley who have to endure this cold with no food, no potable water. We live in comparative luxury in this bunker when compared to their meager, harsh existence. And we learned that Jamie Jolina's radiation ravaged body had given up the ghost.
River McIrish: It has taken an apocalypse: social mores have gone by the wayside and we, who live in the bunker, don't even flinch when we see others wearing just their underclothes walking around in the bunker. It's whatever is the most comfortable at the moment that defines our existence. In fact, Tosh was cooking in just his underwear the other day...and I have to say that he's ripped. Yes, I'm fanning myself as I'm writing this. Unfortunately Bud on the other hand does need to keep his shirt on to anyone else but his wife.
River McIrish: I think the first blow in the dissolution of social mores came with the unisex bathroom. As far as we were concerned, it takes more trouble to make separate bathrooms for men and women and we just said to heck with it and made it one bathroom. We have a string of showers and bathroom stalls for privacy and men and women are in the bathroom at the same time. In fact I've stripped in front of a man and had my shower while he went about his business in the washroom without missing a beat. It just doesn't matter any more after the Bomb. I'm sure the old me would have freaked out that a man was in the same bathroom as me before the Apocalypse. Need I mention that the man was Tosh...and he was just heading into the bathroom stall. I hope he liked what little he saw.
River McIrish: The drone did go up again and we noticed that winter had descended upon Sunset Valley. The pictures were bone-chilling. The snowfall was intense and the howling winds in the drone's stereo mic was an eerie counterpoint to the tableau that greeted us. Oh, the poor survivors of Sunset Valley. There is no way that they will be able to survive the bone-chilling cold. And this snow doesn't seem like it will let up. This nuclear war has changed our atmosphere and the weather patterns. I know there will be food shortages but as soon as we can get our greenhouses going in the bunker, we know that we will have fresh food to survive then we can start about setting up the next generation. Hopefully they won't be as foolish as their predecessors, thinking that they could harness the power of the atom and still resist the temptation to harm others with it.
River McIrish: Evidently others have taken notice of Tosh's board-breaking skills. When I walked into go gaze upon Tosh's finely honed and deadly hand breaking some more concrete, I noticed that Dina Caliente and Jennifer Coates were eyeing Tosh with eager looks on their faces as he was busting multiple concrete slabs. Hmmm... Between Lia, Dina, Jen and myself. Tosh may just have a harem of girls watching him. And when he puts on that Sims Navy uniform...oh yummy.
River McIrish: Well, a girl can dream, can't she?
