"Save the World" is a bit vague

" I see you shiver, with antici"

Janet leaned forward, waiting for the word to end and then--

"Why did you pause it?" I asked.

Bella hadn't come through the door, she hadn't come through the window.  She'd somehow just appeared in the house.  Bella was like that.  She hadn't paused it with her sonic pressure gauge, I noted, but instead with the remote that I'd lost a year and a half ago.

"We need to save the world," she said.

"I'm in the middle of a movie."

"That's why I paused it," she could be infuriating when she was calm and pseudo-rational.

"Which world is in need of saving?" I asked.

"This one."

Earth.  Earth was always in need of saving.  It hardly seemed worth stopping the movie for.

"When?" I asked.

"Twenty years from now."

"Then why can't I finish watching the movie first?"

"There's a temporal thingamajig that's caused that part of the future and this part of the ... well this is still the future from my frame of reference.  Anyway, they're temporally phase locked."

I finally got up off the couch.  "I hate phase locks!  Except for the moon, the fact that the same side always faces the earth is actually pretty cool, but apart from that and various other examples I'm not going to currently elaborate on, I hate phase locks."

"So, you in?"

"Yeah, I'm in, where's the truck?"

"It's currently in a helocentric orbit with a radius of about a hundred and seventeen million miles trying to catch a dropped teapot," she said as if that were a perfectly normal place for a '53 Chevy to be.

"So how do we get there?"

"Transmat,"

"Damn."

"We transmat to the truck, pick up the teapot, and then make the rest of our trip the usual way."

I sighed.  "Ok, let's go."

"You don't need to grab anything first?" She asked, looking specifically at my bare feet.

"You're better stocked than I am," I said, "plus the wardrobe wing is actually sorted so I know where to find socks and shoes, unlike here--"

"Your own home," she said.

"-- where I just look around the likely spots and hope some of the socks are clean," I finished.  "Let's go."

And so we did.

How I met Michael Mock (for legal purposes assume this to be fiction)

It came up on facebook.  Addressed to Michael Mock (thus he is the "you"). Reproduced below:

It was just after getting back from stopping the zombie apocalypse of 2052, the temporal distortion had been intense (it created an entirely new timeline, after all) and it made for a somewhat hard landing.

I was disoriented, the driver was trying to fix the rear axle, and I am so, so sorry about what happened to your clothes.

I swear I didn't know that [redacted] stained so much. Anyway, I hope the dry cleaning went well, though it occurs to me that I've never asked, and thanks for not messing up the timeline by telling me we'd already met when we next met.

All things considered, it's kind of surprising we only overshot by that much, it was a 40 year trip crossing timelines midstream, but the important thing is that we met, soon after I was returned to the time whence I had originally come, and the driver made it back to her home time too.

Also, no zombies. Generally a good thing.

-

[Original Work Index]

(Since we're calling it fiction)

MZAT: What to leave in, what to leave out

So, as Seger said, there's so much more, to think about, deadlines and committments, of course, but more importantly: what to leave in, what to leave out.

Another concern that crosses my mind on occasion is something that was said by the biggest zombie fan I know (or rather knew --don't worry; she's still alive) when she announced that she'd moved passed zombies. She realized that while she liked all the staples of zombie fiction there was one totally unnecessary part which could be left out changing little: the zombies.

Those two thoughts collide when considering questions like this:

My teleportation flute can't actually be used as a flute.  It has all of the physical attributes necessary, but on account of it being a magic teleportation device any attempt to play it would result in repeated teleporting to the same place over and over again in a brain frying (not literally, go with me here) exercise in futility.

Bella and I both saw this as a sort of a flaw, it is a flute after all. Flutes should be played.  Instead it was like the iPhone, a "phone" that cannot be used as a phone.  And one that, worse still, forces you to choose between Verizon ("Can you here me now?" "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE SAYING BECAUSE I CAN'T HEAR ANYTHING!  GET A DIFFERENT NETWORK!" "Well I didn't hear them say, 'No,' so Good,") and AT&T (Motto: "Mildly less shitty than Verizon.")

So Bella looked to get a flute that would work but because the hole configuration is slightly odd (most twelve holers have hole 12 in a different spot) she ended up buying on that rather than, say, key.  This left her with a nice small ceramic ray-gun shaped flute (the shape does matter) with a glossy black glaze and a range keyed to soprano G.  The range was one octave with two notes in the major key on either side.  Way too high.

When you opened all the holes it felt like you were trying to break a pane of glass.  The note would ring out clear and true, but also ear splitting.

But for it's problems it was still a decent flute, and could play the Star Wars theme nicely, and you don't just get rid of a good flute.

So Bella gave it to me.  Because why not.

That's boring, right?  Makes you think, "Why the hell would that be included?" and seems like something to leave out.

Except it has to be left in if I want to talk about this next part that happened well afterward.

Everything had been moving at a frenetic heart pounding pace and then everything stopped. Bella had been out running me so I missed the initial set up and just saw the results, five people guns drawn on Bella.  Pistols all.

A short listen and I worked out which was the leader, asked myself, "What would Edith Do?" took out the flute Bella had given me, and, holding it as if it were a gun, approached from behind.

-

Tap to the back of the leader's head to let him know I was there then pulled back far enough he wouldn't know where the flute was and thus couldn't have the belief he'd get it away from me.

"You're using guns?  With barrels?  That fire bullets?" I asked with laughter in my voice that I had to force myself to not make it sound forced.  Instead I did my best to make the whole thing sound absurd.

"When I was growing up --which we won't say when it was because I'm told it's rude to talk about people's ages and if I say mine you might feel pressured to say yours, gun pointed to the back of your head might make that pressure feel higher, and we don't want that-- the year two thousand was the future.

"Not just the future, or the Future with a capital F, but the entirely capitalized FUTURE! with an exclamation point.  Jet packs and aliens and space ships and stuff.  This is 52 years after that.  For fuck's sake the space age was the 1960s and they started more than 90 years ago.

"So here we are in the year THE FUTURE! plus 52 and you're using a weapon that requires a set of mechanical linkages to bring a hammer down on a primer to create a small explosion in hopes of creating a somewhat larger small explosion," by this time I could see that Bella had gotten her hand on a weapon, her actions unnoticed since the attention had shifted to me, "in order to propel a rock down a tube that has a spiral pattern cut into it to give the rock a nice pretty spin.

"You are hilarious.

"Your problem, you'll come to learn, is that you brought your little pea shooter to a raygun fight."  Short pause.  For effect.  "Hell, my weapon doesn't even have a trigger, it fires based on thought.  It's a good deal faster, but it is prone to going off based on imagination (cutting edge technology always has glitches) so you'd better keep me thinking happy thoughts."

Once we had the group disarmed and secured with zip ties, they truly have no end to their uses, Bella commented on the bluff and I said that you work with what you have even, I played the Star Wars theme, if what you have was a flute.  Only then did the group realize I'd held them at flute point.

-

That event had no zombies in it.  Just the breakdown in civilization that one comes to expect with zombies leading to gangs feeling free to operated in broad daylight in what should be safe areas because the police are otherwise occupied, dead, or zombified.

Does it get left in, left out?  If it does get left in I have to describe where the flute came from otherwise you're left scratching your head on that point.


I mean I can't tell everything that happened while we in the future working against the zombie hordes, so what to leave in, what to leave out?

-

[My Zombie Apocalypse Team Index]

MZAT, Part how-the-fuck-should-I-know?: Moving

[Originally posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.]

Time passed as time does but it was impossible to comprehend or track. It seemed like I'd only been there moments, it felt like I'd been there years. The seconds stretched out, the hours shrank down, the days did both at once. The problem could presumably be solved by looking at my watch, but I wore it palm-side, and my left arm lay limply on the ground, palm down. To see the time I'd have to lift my arm.

Too much effort.

So the time continued to pass at whatever pace it felt like. My eyes were out of focus. The casual observer might think I was staring off into the distance, but the casual observer would be wrong. The asshole. I was staring at nothing.

Perhaps that should have evoked a feeling or two, but I'd long since lost the ability to give a shit. The only thing I could feel was the warmth of Tsukasa's hand in mine. That, at least, was reassuring.

Time passed. It does that.

The bed we were leaning against, the thing keeping us upright and sitting, collapsed. I considered saying, "Shit." I didn't.

Too much effort.

Besides, the collapse hadn't stopped it from keeping us propped in a sitting position, so what did it matter?

Time passed. The bastard.

I was getting somewhat bored, I had to do something, but I didn't have the energy or inclination to do much of anything. I introduced a small rocking into my sitting. It wasn't much. But it was something.

Time... fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck.

And furthermore: fuck.

As time is wont to do.

I'd stopped rocking, it seemed to have lost it's purpose. My left hand had found a new motion. My index finger scratching back and forth across my jeans.

Down with time, we only need three dimensions, damn it.

I'd scratched a hole right through my jeans. Time for something else.

Boredom is.

The silence was broken. I did not catch a word that was spoken. "What?" I asked.

"I have mail," Tsukasa repeated.

"Who from?" I asked.

"Helios," Tsukasa said. He clearly didn't recognize the name.

"Oh." I said.

Time passed.

"He rules the world," I added. It wasn't precisely true, but it was as close to true as possible given the amount of words I was willing to put toward the effort.

"We should..." I said.

Time passed.

"We should probably go," I said.

Time did that thing it fucking always does.

"So..." I said.

Time... you get the God damned idea.

"Going now," I said.

I hate time.

I looked at my watch. I tried to stand up. My body didn't move. I looked back at my watch. Half an hour gone. I tried again, and again, I lacked the motivation necessary to actually move myself. An hour, two, four, four and a half, seven.

Fucking time.

In the end I managed to turn myself around, climb up far enough on the broken bed to get my feet under me. And then stayed there. I tried to get up more, but I couldn't.

"I'm just gonna lay here," I said. And had resigned myself to just that when I felt Tsukasa's hands on me. He helped pull me to a standing position and said, "We're going together."

"Together," I agreed, and took his left hand with my right again. We warped out.

We landed in the cathedral. An artifact of the crossover between reality and the game, Cathedrale de Payens had merged with Hidden Forbidden Holy-place, the scales weren't exactly right and some parts of it felt like the most conservative Tardis in history, and there were various other oddities. More so, I thought, than when I'd last been there.

Bella was waiting for us. She was able to, at least somewhat, break Tsukasa out of his funk with mention of Subaru. True love will apparently do that, at least if you're a fictional character.

Then she turned her attention to me. She explained where we stood. Zombie hordes, a nuclear detonation, sort of business as usual. Nothing too remarkable. She said she'd need my help, I said I'd give it, she didn't seem too pleased with my response.

"I said I'd save the world, what more do you want?" I asked.

"I want you fucking here. I want you to care."

"Would if I could but I can't so I won't. Sorry, this is all you get."

Bella turned around angrily and growled at nothing in particular. Then she spun back to me. Took me by the shoulders, waited a moment to see if I had a problem with her doing so, I didn't give a damn, so then she started in, "The opposite of love is not hate," she said looking me in the eyes.

"It is indifference," I finished.

"The opposite of beauty is not ugliness," she said.

"It is indifference," I finished.

"The opposite of faith is not heresy," she said.

"It is indifference," I finished.

"And the opposite of life is not death," she said.

"But indifference between life and death," I finished.

"So show some bloody difference!"

"I can't," I said.

"No!" she shouted. Then she said, "Sorry. I shouldn't have done that. But the point is sound even if the delivery was problematic. This is not the world you know. There's a knot in time, there's a crossover between a game and reality, there's magic, and monsters. There are zombie hordes and completely safe non-lethal weapons. The border between fact and fiction has been abolished.

"And that means that your depression isn't what it used to be. It can be solved in ways that previously were the stuff of fantasy because fantasy has invaded reality and set up one hell of a beachhead here. You, can stop it, maybe not for good, probably not after we've fixed things, but right here right now in this world where everything is only semi-real... here you can beat this."

"I'll try," I said. And I would, but it was more to humor her than anything else. I would put in real effort, I would really try, but I was convinced it wouldn't matter. Nothing mattered anymore. Back when things mattered was a long time ago. It seemed a distant memory.

"Good. I need you to try," she said.

-

[My Zombie Apocalypse Team Index]

My Zombie Apocalypse Team - Index

Meta parts:
Part Alpha: General thoughts on getting the team together
Part A: Timeline

Story:
Part 1: Boring Exposition
Part 2: First Encounter
--
Part 4ish: Assessing the Underground
--
What to leave in, what to leave out
--
What is love?
--
Traveling back to right what shouldn't go wrong
Talking Time Travel at a gas station
Why we can't go back
--
Part how-the-fuck-should-I-know?: Moving
--
Part ?: Semi-final conversation

Stating the obvious: You are on your zombie apocalypse team.

To reiterate, the other members of the team are the protagonists of the last three things you read, watched, and or/played.  Leaving you with a four person team.  You, and three protagonists.

Since Bella Swan was on my team and I went with Snarky Bella for various reasons, I don't have to worry too much about certain real world concerns.  But for those who don't have someone with a time machine that's bigger on the inside on their team, real world concerns matter.

What if I'd had John McClain [1], Faith [2], and Ishmael [3].  Well then those concerns do kick in.

You see I have disabilities.  There's a reason, for example, that depression gets its own index.  So if I had those three I couldn't be assured of getting the medical supplies I'm getting now, and if I did it would involve breaking into and looting pharmacies and such.

More likely I would have to explain that I'm going to become more and more useless as the antidepressants work their way out of my system.  If we are breaking into pharmacies and such then those are otherwise unnecessary and potentially risky excursions,  if we aren't then I have to take into account that for the majority of the time I'm going to be under the influence of untreated depression.

Protagonists are protagonists.  There are probably all kinds of things that can mess things up for them, but they're still protagonists.

You are you.  If you have a disability then you've got to consider how having a person with that disability, you, on the team is going to affect things.  If you have phobias or neuroses, if you have anything that differentiates you from "generic person" be it good or bad (and I'm betting you do) that's going to have an effect upon the team.

It may be that the most interesting part of your zombie apocalypse team isn't how the three protagonists work together (or fail to) but how they work together with you.  You're the fourth member of the team, and that means that your team will be different than someone else's even if they have the same three protagonists as the other members.

Maybe you're helpful, maybe the need to look after you and keep you alive slows them down considerably, maybe both at once.

-

Previous things written on the subject of zombie apocalypse teams:

How to make your Zombie Apocalypse Team - Explains in general the considerations one must make, borrowing/stealing heavily from "Part Alpha" below but in a more general way because this is about how you make your team rather than how I make mine.

My Zombie Apocalypse Team:

Part 1: Boring Exposition

Part Alpha: General thoughts on getting the team together

Part A: Timeline

Part 2: First Encounter

Part 3 hasn't been written yet

Part 4ish: Assessing the Underground

[unknown unwritten parts]

What is love?

[recruiting the remaining two characters]

Traveling back to right what shouldn't go wrong

Talking Time Travel at a gas station

Why we can't go back

[More unwritten stuff]

Part ?: Semi-final Conversation/Confrontation

[More unwritten stuff up to the end.]

-

[1] Die Hard.  I know I linked to a set, but I'm thinking the original.  If you haven't seen it in recent years then the first time you watch it your reaction will probably be, "Oh my God!  He has hair."

[2] Mirror's Edge, not Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel.

[3] Moby Dick.

MZAT - Why we can't go back

[Trying to work the piece I wrote due to a misread fiction prompt into the larger MZAT scheme of things.]
[This would be the follow up.]

With the zombies dealt with Bella pulled out a familiar looking piece of technology and said, "Ziggy says that even though we didn't arrive at the incursion start, what we've done is enough to put the timeline back on track."

"You don't seriously have..."

"No, of course not.  I got stuck in a white room inside a no-ship in a black hole for two weeks with nothing but a sonic screwdriver, a temporal delta stream calculator  a pile of electronic equipment, and a shipment of props from American TV shows from the 1960s to the 1990s intended for display in a museum in the Glaucon Quadrant.  I made some modifications, is all."

"The what?"

"It's not a Quadrant and I have no idea where the name Glaucon comes from.  It's not important.  The important thing is that we can go back to 2052."

"Why not go the other way?"

"What?!"

"Why not go back to 2012 and solve the problem at its source."

"Ok, first off, the source isn't 2012, it's 2052."

"But it started in-"

"2010, on the platonic ideal loosely attached to a server in Japan, which means trying to solve it there would not only not work, it wouldn't get you home."

"But I could-"

"Furthermore, this isn't our timeline, the changes were so great as to spawn an entirely different timeline disconnected from our own.  Meaning that the anomaly didn't grab the you from this timeline, so unless you plan on killing him and taking his place you can't slip back into your life."

"Ok, so-"

"And that's assuming your life even exists in this timeline, which it might not.  It didn't just duplicate the past from our own timeline, it organically spawned one by building retroactively backwards the way most timelines build forward meaning that any possible 2012 that might lead to the 2052 we came from could exist in this timeline and not all of them have you in it because there are such things as random chance, free will, the inertia of non-nondescript choice, and the six other axes of causality and given the severe world altering events in the intervening decades there's really no reason to assume that the 2012 in this timeline is all that similar to the 2012 in yours."

"But even so we could-"

"And you're ignoring the fifth dimension   The knot in time that started all of this?  Well it's going to work itself out sooner or later because nature abhors a non-euclidean tangle of non-temporal causality like that.  The time that we might spend in twenty ten or twenty twelve would be time that the knot was spending unknotting itself, and when it finally did that the cross timeline connection would be severed, possibly stranding us here forever, as the time link snapped into this timeline and all of a sudden an army of two billion zombies, give or take, and one evil incorporeal being with untold power over the universe, would suddenly find themselves with a stable time bridge back to the beginning, right where you were camped out.

"And if you think you can fight that off with a katana-"

"It's not a katana, it's a-"

"You're missing the point."

"No, I got the point.  We have to go forward to a future that is being killed off by nano-plague and zombie plague, has an active slave trade, is at the mercy of conspiracies, makes libertarians salivate, and has been invaded by the forces of an evil AI who somehow can screw with the real world to stop something or other from happening or else we'll never get home and everyone will die horrible deaths."

"Exactly!"  She smiled, "Ready to go?"

"Yup."

MZAT - Traveling back to right what shouldn't go wrong

[Trying to work the piece I wrote due to a misread fiction prompt into the larger MZAT scheme of things.]
[This would be the set up.]

Bella looked at a readout on a console and said, "Damn it, they're making another incursion."

"How can they be making another incursion if they haven't made the first one yet?"

"You know exactly what I mean, they're fucking with the timeline and we haven't solved the first screw up yet."

"So what do we do?"

"There's only one thing we can do, we follow them back and fix it."

"How can that be the only-"

"Look, right now we're being protected by the residual effects of the incursion on this end, which is stopping history from being rewritten just yet, but as soon as those fade the protection goes away, everything changes, and we don't even know if we'll even be here."

"Can't we just go wherever they are and stop them on this end?"

"By the time we got there it would be too late, we need to act before this end of the anomaly fades."

"Can I at least get JC and Tsu-"

"No time, get to the controls and get ready."

"I thought you couldn't go back in time."

She fired up the temporal engines and said, "I can't, but what I can do is follow them through the hole they punched in spacetime."  The truck started to vibrate.  "There's just one problem."

"That being?"

"We can't go the usual way, we've got to go straight, no time tunnel, no time vortex, no wormhole or wormsign, just smash this thing in reverse.  The good news is that the shields should protect us from colliding with anything smaller than a ball bearing."

"What about something the same size as a ball bearing?"

"Don't ask, just doge."

I had never felt the truck move through time before, and yet, somehow, I knew that this was not how it was meant to do it.  It felt wrong, and potentially deadly, and shaky, and generally off kilter.

Bella shouted out commands, "Ten feet left... NOW" and I flicked switches and hit buttons.

"Fourty, Thirty, Two hundred twenty feet."  I did my best to obey and then shouted back:

"Use radians."

"Pi over three point six, negative pi over four, ten feet!"  More buttons, more switches.

And on it went, she shouted commands, I tried my best to follow them, the truck rocketed backward through time.  At one point she didn't see a good way forward and sent us to space.  I asked, "Why don't we camp out somewhere where there's nothing there and stay?"

She said, "We can't stay away from the trail too long, we'd lose it and get stuck."

And so we went back down to earth and back to frantically dodging everything that wanted to go forward through time, that being everything.

The everything changed.  The timbre of the shaking of the truck, the tone of Bella's voice, the feeling in my stomach.

"Something's wrong," she said.  I already knew.

More rushed commands to dodge, but distracted as she divided her attention between that and diagnostics, trying to figure out what was wrong.

Then she said, "We have to stop.  2000 miles, three football fields, one eighteen wheeler and three cans of Pringles to the left on my mark," I input the distance and asked, "What altitude?"

"Local ground."  There was a pause then, "NOW!"

The feeling of moving through time stopped.  And the room dropped two feet.

It hurt.

As I picked myself up off the ground I said, "I guess I messed up the local ground level."

"It's fine.  We lost some wiring, it knocked out the shield."

"Where are we?"

"A service station," she said.  "I hope."

MZAT - What is love

[Returning to the saga of my zombie apocalypse team, I'll figure out the order later.]

Bella found me in the kitchen, I was quick make a guess as to her question, "You're probably wondering why I'm eating your chocolate chips by the handful while we're stuck in a dystopian future where the main form of sustenance is soy food and the only replacement source of chocolate may or may not contain people as an ingredient."

"No," she said. "I often gorge myself on them when I'm feeling depressed, hungry, and too low on energy to eat anything that requires preparation.  I figured you were doing the same."

"You know, they say eating a lot of chocolate produces an emotion indistinguishable from love."

"And?"

I hung my head. "I think I'm incapable of feeling love."

"I'll get back to that in a moment, but first there's something I have to tell you and a question I have to ask."

"Shoot"

"Ok, what I have to tell you is that I got bitten and since the anti-zombie vaccine is still in the "works but fucky" stage of development I'll be out of commission for weeks to months.  I won't even be able to walk from my room to the bathroom which, because the truck has an odd sense of appropriate architectural arrangement, involves three hallways and two flights of stairs.  You'll have to carry me."

"Will I have to..."

"No.  Hell no.  Once I'm in the room I should be fine, but anything that requires me to move from point A to point B will involve you carrying me around."

"Ok."

"And you will have to clean up the vomit, of which there will likely be a lot.  And prepare every meal, and preform all the maintenance, and generally speaking do everything."

"Great," sarcasm, I can haz it.

"Are you going to do all of that?"

"Of course I am but-"

"You're fully capable of feeling love."

"That's friendship, it doesn't count."

"Friendship is love.  You said love, you're not weaseling out on a technicality."

"You know what I meant."

"If you're looking for infatuation you'll have to look elsewhere, I've had more than enough of that pointed at me for six lifetimes where I came from, I've never experienced that emotion either, and I'm ten years younger than you."

"I wasn't saying-"

"It's not important, can I get to what is important?"

"Sure."

She pulled back her jacket to reveal that her shirt was stained with blood on the right side around her abdomen, "I wasn't kidding about being bit."

"Did you-?"

She pulled up the shirt to reveal not skin but bandages, "I plugged the leak, and took the vaccine, but I figure I've got about twenty minutes before I lose the ability to stand for more than thirty seconds at a time."

I had no good response to that, so I opted for a bad one, "You want to watch a movie?"

"TV show."

"Firefly?"

She nodded, "Out of Gas."

"I'll grab the reel."

"I'll be in the theater."

How to make your Zombie Apocalypse Team

I will tell you how to make your zombie apocalypse team, but first I'm going to talk about why I'm telling you.  If you'd like to skip straight to how to make it, just ignore the next section.

-

I was just looking at the all time stats for this blog and something jumped out at me: five of the top ten search terms leading people here are about a zombie apocalypse team.  The number one search term is that, and it has more than twice as many hits as the number two search term.

If you look at the top ten search terms by hits (rounding to the nearest percent):

• 59% of people coming here wanted to know about zombie apocalypse teams, notably their own.
• 21% of people were actually looking for this site.
• 12% of people were looking for the original Mona Lisa.  (My only post on the subject wasn't about the original.)
• 5% of people were looking for information on Selma Botman (the disgraced former President of the University of Southern Maine.)
• 3% percent of people wanted to know what's going on in Hungary.  (My only post on the subject is from more than six months ago.)

Those figures obviously don't account for duplicate search terms that didn't make it into the top ten (I know, for example, that a lot of the searches for Selma Botman used different search terms) or anything else that doesn't make it into the top ten, and definitely doesn't account for the much larger number of people who don't come here via search.

Still, with so many people coming here wanting to know how to make their zombie apocalypse team, I figured: why not make a post about that?

-

A lot of what I'll say here is already covered in Part Alpha of my own, and I've tried to include the basics in a note at the top of each post on my own team.

The very basic answer to the question, "how to make my zombie apocalypse team?", which I learned on facebook, is this:  Your team consists of yourself, of course, and the protagonists of the last three things you read, watched, and/or played.

That and/or is kind of important.  If you've just read three books without watching or playing anything in between, then it's acceptable to take the protagonists of those three books.  If you've played two games and watched one movie since the last time you read something then it's perfectly fine to say it's the protagonists of the two games and the one movie.  It doesn't have to be one of each, is what I'm saying here.

For me it worked out that it was, and if you want you can decide that it should be that way for you too and pick the most recent protagonist of something you've read, the most recent protagonist of something you've watched, and the most recent protagonist of something you've played, even if those three things are not together the three most recent things you've experienced.

Regardless, you grab your three protagonists and then you've got to take a moment to think of how everything fits together.  Most of the time that's not a lot of thought.

If you're a DC comics fan and got Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman then it fits together perfectly.  No more thought required, go and conquer the zombie hordes.

If the three things were reading Dune, watching Flipper, and playing one of the Tron games, well then you're going to have to have a lot more thought.

Consider the limitations.  The protagonist of Dune is very much defined by the planet he's on.  Without the spice in the air, without the sand worms in the ground, without... well, Dune, he's not the protagonist from Dune anymore.  Flipper is a dolphin, there are only so many settings in which he can operate and they all involve an ocean.  No oceans on Dune.  Any given Tron protagonist is a protagonist while inside of a computer.  A setting that never appears in Dune or Flipper.

Getting these three protagonists in one place at one time is going to be difficult.  You're going to have to be creative.  You're going to have to figure out how a protagonist inseparable from the desert, a protagonist inseparable from the ocean, and a protagonist inseparable from cyberspace can all get together and join you on your zombie apocalypse team.

-

Regardless of who the protagonists are that make up your team, you're going to have to work out how these three protagonists, and you, can be in the same place at the same time working together against the zombie hordes.  And it might be difficult.

Or, as mentioned above, it might be easy.  A lot of the time it really will be as easy as grabbing the protagonists of the last three things you read/watched/played and leaving it at that because a lot of the time they won't be tied to incompatible settings.

And that is how you make your zombie apocalypse team.

According to facebook, circa April 24th.

-

You have to know that there are somewhere around a thousand competing versions though, right?  

(MZAT Maybe?) Talking Time Travel at a gas station

[Originally Posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings in response to a prompt that wasn't really for writing a story.]
[Could be part of My Zombie Apocalypse Team story, in which case she is Snarky-Bella and I'm the narrator, but I'm not sure how it would fit in.]

"Yeah, but why are we here?" I asked.

She said, "Because the truck is low on gas and someone has to stop these zombies before they make it to the fair."

"No, not why are we here-where. Why are we here-when?"

"Because time travel is difficult."

"So you say."

She leaned back on the truck looked passed me to the mountains, I wasn't sure whether the way her hands moved when she spoke were more like someone giving an animated lecture or conducting and orchestra. Either way, the audience was invisible and not me.

"Everyone's always going through time, speeding through it at a rate known as the present with variation for relativity and whatnot. When you try to pull a u turn and go back in the other direction it's like speeding down a one way street against an oncoming flow of 7 billion people-"

"Two billion, plague and zombies got the rest."

She looked at me, then back at the mountains, "As I was saying. An oncoming flow of billions of people, not to mention buildings and trees, and animals and air, and planets, and the occasional dodo. All of these things driving forward at relentless speed into the future down a one way street.

"Any excursion to the past requires us to slam on the breaks with all of this coming up behind us, turn around with incoming at speeds that make conventional projectiles -and I mean the mag-rail launched stuff that leaves a plasma wake when fired in atmo, but usually isn't because it's designed for space- look like lethargic snails. Then we have to start going in the wrong direction.

"We have to go upstream which would be hard enough in itself but we're not in river with nicely flowing water and big open spaces and only the occasional rapids and piranha. No. We're on the road of time. The one way road, with head on traffic coming at us fast and we need to go faster. I don't know about you, but I don't want going back in time twenty years to take me twenty years. I'd prefer more along the lines of two minutes or so."

I laid down in the truck bed, the explanation looked to be a long one.

She continued, "Rounding, for convince, that's 5,259,488 times the average speed of the other traffic on the road, but going in the opposite direction. Can you imagine what a head on collision would be like at that rate? There's a reason time is a one way street and that reason is the the shrapnel from a decent collision can take out a small town. You get a head on between two travelers gunning it and it makes Tunguska look like a minor potassium water interaction."

I decided to break up this lecture, but I didn't actually move to face her, I'd just found a comfortable position and I wasn't going to ruin it by looking up. "But you travel through time, both ways, all the time."

She addressed my point, while pretending not to have heard me, "Now normally such collisions are avoided by shields or bringing the timeship-

"Truck," I interrupted, "It's a truck." There was a short pause which I used to adjust my position; I was using my hands as pillows. "A very nice truck."

"It is a very nice truck," she actually responded to me. "Thank you." And then went right back into lecture mode, "Or by bringing the time machine, in this case a truck, slightly out of phase with the timeline. Given the appropriate power sources, and good wiring which the damned rats ate through, all of this is unnecessary as you can simply take a shortcut like a wormhole."

"The rats were cute," I said

"But since we don't have the luxury," she continued, "We had to do things the hard way. And this was about as far as we could make it before a leaky shield led to things going fucky." She hopped into the truck bed and, standing over me, said, "You can get up now."

"But the metal is so comfortable and..." I couldn't find another lie to match the first. I sat up. "So what's wrong with the truck?"

"We need to top it off with gas, rewire it-"

"Again?"

"I've been telling you to get have-a-heart traps so we can get rid of those rats. You didn't get them."

"There were soldiers in the first store and zombies in the second, I didn't have a chance."

"And some welding too. We're lucky we didn't break an axle."

I looked around, now abandoned gas station, dead zombies on the ground, lights of the ferris wheel surrounded by the lights of the rest of the fair in the distance. "Can't we at least have some fun first?"

"How so?"

I pointed to the ferris wheel.

"Fine, but if they've got animals you're buying something."

"Donkey?"

"I was thinking more along the lines of rabbit, duck, or chicken."

"Something that lays eggs."

And she laughed. "Yes, I'm sure that the Easter bunny is for sale.

We got off the truck, and I looked under it. "What about him?"

"Her. Are you really so inept you can't tell a boy dog from a girl dog?"

"What about the dog?"

"Bring it." It had, at least, finally stopped whimpering. "It's probably not healthy for it to be around it's former owner." I looked at the remains of the half zombie devoured, then zombified, then finally decapitated corpse that had been attached to the other end of the dog's leash when we arrived.

"Here, random dog," I said in as friendly a voice as I could manage.

My Zombie Apocalypse Team, Part 4ish: Assessing the Underground

[Premise: The idea is that your team consists of you and the protagonists of the last three things you watched/read/played.  For me that means JC Denton, Tsukasa, and Bella Swan.]
[Previously: Part 1, Part 2, General thoughts, Timeline]
[Where's part 3?  Well I'll get around to writing it at some point, it involves discussion of what to do moving forward, and meeting the people who live in the subway tunnels.  Also, possibly, rat burgers.]
[This takes place in an abandoned subway station, looking through the bars that have been installed to restrict access to the tunnels.]

Bella: Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Me: That depends on what you're thinking.

Bella: Don't be a smartass.

Me: I'm not Edward, I can't read minds.

Bella: Edward couldn't read minds if you gave footnotes, endnotes, cultural commentary and a running gloss, I don't care what his powerset says.

Me: What are you thinking?

Bella: I asked first.

Me: I'm thinking that if we could open these tunnels we could use the subway system as a way to get around the city avoiding the checkpoints above and allowing us to move a lot of people without having to turn the truck into a taxi service.

Bella: And once we got the people here this should be easily defensible because it's only accessible via other tunnels, all of them encased in concrete. No windows or doors or soft wooden walls for zombies to break through.

Me: And all we'd need to do to expand is press forward to the next station and guard a few more tunnels.

Bella: And all we'd need to do to fall back is abandon it and station guards at the tunnel we fell back through, no risky moving in the open through uncertain territory.

Me: But I worry about water and food. Water is siphoned off of the city's supply. In the event of a major outbreak can we count on the city's supply to stay flowing?

Bella: No idea, but we could look into that.

Me: And on the food side...

Bella: You're worried that New York City is going to run out rats?

Me: Maybe.

Bella: When has the city ever been without rats?

Me: But if the rats start nomming on zombies, and then the people eat the rats... what becomes of the people?

*pause*

Bella: We need a vaccine.

Me: Yeah, but where?

*pause*

Bella: You keep saying you know this story. Who can help us?

Me: The story isn't supposed to contain a zombie plague.

Bella: But it is supposed to contain a plague.

Me: X-51 is the organization that actually does the work of manufacturing a cure, but that's to a nanotechnology based virus and the equipment for that won't be online until next year. I don't know if they can help us with the zombies now.

Bella: We're headed out there anyway, we could ask.

My Zombie Apocalypse Team, Part ?: Semi-final Conversation/Confrontation

I should be doing other things, my brain isn't really working, and it's not that good.  Still, this kind of sort of came to me, though it needs work.  Couldn't figure out what JC and Bob Page would say, so I just stole their legitimate lines.  I'm not even sure if Tsukasa is in this scene, and... yeah.

It's something to post here until I managed to make something more interesting.


Also, Bella's speech should be more awesome.  I should probably work on that at some point.


Anyway, in the event of a zombie apocalypse, it is my general belief that Bob Page would still attempt to take over the world, and thus still need to be stopped.  Though, because of the larger problems presented by the zombie apocalypse and temporal anomalies and DVL and whatnot, rather than being the climax stopping him would probably be more of a stepping stone to the final final conflict.  (That's not an error, there are supposed to be two finals.)

So I wrote this, which could use a fair amount of work as it currently kind of sucks.

For those who have no idea what's going on, look hereish I suppose.

-

JC sarcastically noted that Page would “be the Supreme Enlightened, the Illuminated One.”

Page responded, in what would have been his best Darth Vader impression if he had any sense of pop culture, “Everett has taught you well,” which wasn't actually accurate. Nicolette was the one who taught JC the eschatology of the Illuminati and MJ12, Everett was content simply to tell others what to do. Anyway, Page was still speaking while I was thinking about that and I made note of how even with everything that had changed, hordes of zombies, covens of vampires, revolutions of werewolves, the introduction of magic, and so forth, this conversation was still following the script.

As expected, Page said, “I will burn like the brightest star.”

JC followed with, “You're gonna burn all right,” and then Bella, as she has a tendency to do, knocked things in a different direction. Sort of leftward I think. Definitely off course regardless.

“I've been to the brightest star. There's nobody there. That kind of radiation is hostile to most forms of life and it doesn't have any planets anyway. It's not even all that interesting. Don't get me wrong, it's nice, but if you've seen one blue hyper-giant you've more or less seen them all.

“Is that what you want for yourself? To be a curiosity all alone in the darkness?

“While you hide in this bunker working toward apotheosis the world outside -the battered, broken world outside- is falling apart. If you do become a god you'll be god of a desolate wasteland populated only by the shambling remnants of things that used to be human.  All that will be left is wreckage and the walking dead.

“We're trying to change that, you're trying to stop us. If you stop us what then? What will you do alone in the darkness? What kind of life will you have as the god of a world teetering on the barrier between dead and undead?”

Page didn't really have a response, he was never good at improv, he just said to all of us what he would have said to JC had Bella not interrupted. I tried to remove dirt from under my fingernails as he spoke, “Look at you: You're nothing but little people... little people still living inside bodies. Lose your bodies and what are you? Nothing! You vanish! You die...”

I took a deep breath as the realization that if I was going to say something it had to be now became unavoidable. Then I spoke, “So long as we're having this nice chat before you sic the machine guns on us,” I pointed to the turrets, “there is something I'd like to add.

“I know that you've been trying to kill us for about a week, and Bella and I have been slowly working toward your downfall for about six months, and you've been working on the whole world domination project for twenty two years or more, so it might seem like at this point everything's more or less carved in stone at this point, but that's not true.

“Nothing is inevitable. Your ending isn't written for you, you can choose to change your story. You can choose to help save the world, right now. We have a plan, you don't. You could join-” Bella yanked me toward safety as the the turrets started to warm up.

Once we were out of the line of fire she gave me the kind of look that demanded a response. So I said, “It was worth a try,” even though I had my doubts.

“My speech was better.” I couldn't really argue with that. Hers was.

“If you tell us where Aura is we'll let you live!” I shouted.  No response, not even gunfire.

“I don't think he's listening,” Bella said. Pretty sure she was right.

My Zombie Apocalypse Team, Part 2: First Encounter

[Previously: Part 1, General thoughts, Timeline.]

[Quick recap of the premise: The idea is that your team consists of you and the protagonists of the last three things you watched/read/played.  For me that means JC Denton, Tsukasa, and Bella Swan.]

At first I didn't notice, but as we walked down the corridor it slowly dawned on me, finally hitting me about three steps before we reached the ladder out. I pointed to the lights, “Are these headlights?”

Bella nodded. She grabbed sort of cylindrical container with a strap on it so it could be worn across one's back. It reminded me of either a quiver or the thing the declaration of independence was kept in in National Treasure. She put it on and I asked, “Is that...?”

She said, “Yeah,” then gestured to the ladder, “Come on.”

We came out of a hatch on the driver's side floor. Getting from there out of the truck was somewhat awkward, the '53 pickup simply wasn't designed to have impossibly large chambers in its floor, and thus not designed to facilitate ease of access to said chambers.

Once we were on actual ground, Bella told me to use the flute-thing, to teleport to safety if something went wrong. I asked where it would take me, and she said, “See the giant hula hoop in the back of the truck?” I looked, and sure enough there was a giant spinning hoop in the bed of the truck with blue light within it.

“You stole the Chaos Gate?”

“I prefer to think of it as salvaged.”

“Was it in open water?”

“Why should water have all the fun?” I had to admit, she did have a point. So I changed the subject:

“What's our plan here?”

“At this moment, or in general?”

I said, “Either,” then quickly amended to, “Both.”

“At the moment we're just trying to show you your first zombie, but in general we're trying to save the world. The truck is stalled out. I mean it'll still operate as a truck, or a base of operations, or a library, or a movie theater, or... well, you know. But right now it'll only travel through time at the usual pace.

“So, we'll be taking the slow road to 2052, when the need to save the world should really take off. Until then we should be on the lookout for automotive parts, and attempt to contain any zombies we might meet.

“Right here,” she gestured to the empty street we were in, “there is, I'm pretty sure, a zombie outbreak.”

I looked around the street, clearly a bigger city than I was used to, buildings that towered higher than I'd ever seen in person, then again, when the QE2 came to my town that boat was about 30 feet from being the tallest building around.

Anyway, big city. Notable lack of people. So I asked about that, “Are the zombies the reason there's no one here?”

“Maybe, but remember that-”

+

I remembered, and we ended up speaking at the same time, “the majority of the population died off,” which is kind of a weird thing for two people to say at once.

Bella looked around and picked a building, seemingly at random, “Let's start with that one.”

-

The building seemed to be an office thingy of some kind, and at first glance there wasn't much in it. I started checking the drawers of all the desks.

“What are you doing?” Bella asked. It was a good question because what I was doing was apparently useless.

“I told you, I know this story, checking everything pays off.” I found a drawer that was locked. “Can I borrow your screwdriver?” She handed it to me and I looked it over, it had some definite heft to it, and a sort of asymmetrical charm, not to mention, “is that a spark plug?”

“I worked with what I had.”

I turned it on and asked, “Isn't it supposed to glow?”

“No. It's sonic, not luminescent.”

The drawer opened and I was rewarded with a mini-crossbow. I gave Bella her screwdriver back and offered her the mini-crossbow as well, she didn't want it. “If I'm going to use a crossbow it's going to be full sized.”

“The whole point is that it's easy to conceal and doesn't make a loud noise when it goes off.”

“I don't care, if I'm going to use a bow I want a more impressive one than that. It's a fullsized crossbow or nothing.”

“If you're just going for impressive-looking why not use a longbow?”

“Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to keep a longbow at the ready.”

I didn't, so I said, “No. None at all.”

“Trust me on this one, once you've had to do that you'll fall in love with the crossbow's ability to hold its own string.”

And a zombie came out. Which was good timing because I honestly had nothing whatsoever to say at that point. I pretty much froze up in response to it. Bella bludgeoned it the the cylinder, which she then returned to wearing. “And that's your first zombie.” I took a closer look. It looked more or less like an ordinary person, just somewhat more pale and with the blood of its victims staining its clothes and the area around its mouth. Well, the nasty festering thing that I assumed to be rotting flesh was probably out of the ordinary as well.

Bella said, “We should try to clear this block before they find a way out. If we split up it'll go faster.”

I looked at the dead zombie, I said, “Ok,” in a way that demonstrated a total lack of confidence.

“Use the flute to teleport back to the truck if anything goes wrong.” I nodded. Apparently that wasn't enough for her, “Alright?” she asked.

“Yeah...” I tried to sound less uneasy, “Run and hide is basically my standard strategy anyway.” Of course that was in games. Not actual encounters with the undead.

Bella took the lower floors, I made my way up higher.

At first things were uneventful, a lot of empty rooms, plants being the only things alive in them. On the floor higher-than-I'd-like-to-think-about that changed. I was taken off guard by three zombies, I considered trying to take them on with the mini crossbow and decided that run and hide was a better solution. They were closer than I liked, the odds of me stopping them with one shot each were exceedingly low, and they'd be able to close the gap between us before I'd get a fourth shot off. I should have never let them get that close, and clearly I'd screwed up my first solo-zombie encounter.

So I took out the flute and prepared to flee. When a fourth zombie grabbed me from behind and I dropped the flute. I hit its head with my own, probably hurting me more than it but causing it to let go, and then ran like hell, I turned several corners, got myself lost in the halls of the building, and then ducked into an office with a closet, and hid in the closet. As it turned out, there was a shotgun, called a sawed off shotgun but clearly mass-produced to be that way indicating, to me, an unclear terminology.

Similar to the way that manufacture technically means “made by hand” I suppose.

Anyway, I was hiding in a closet, with my new gun, shaking from the adrenaline, and listening to the zombies, who had clearly caught my scent or something, make their way toward me in spite of my best efforts to lose them in the maze of halls. And generally assuming that I was going to die.

But I did have on thing on my side. As I told Bella twice, I knew this story, even if not the zombie parts, and if there is anything that my knowledge of the conspiracy riddled 2050s had taught me is that there's never a problem with just one solution. If I was utterly unconvinced of my ability to survive a fight, there was surely another way to survive this.

I looked around the room, through the mostly closed closet door, as the zombies made their way closer. Not a lot there, but then I looked out the window and had a plan. Not a good plan, but a plan.

When the zombies entered the room it wasn't just the four I'd bumped into before, it was probably every one on the floor. I definitely wasn't up for a fight, even being better armed. So I ran from the closet and used the shotgun on the window, from there I was on the fire escape and quickly taking that as far as it would go, which wasn't that far because the damn thing was broken but I was able to connect from there to a ledge, and then use that to walk across a sign, and pretty soon I was on top of another building.

Which was likewise infested with zombies. I guess they preferred to stay inside.

Now as it happened Bella was on the street for some reason, so I called down to her and asked her to save me. She asked about the teleportation flute, I said I dropped it and pointed to more or less where I figured it was. She asked how I expected her to save me, and I threw her the shotgun. Not all at once mind you, I didn't think it all that safe to throw a loaded weapon off a building so I unloaded it, threw her the gun, shouting, “Gun” and then threw her the ammunition (which had come with a convenient box) yelling, “Ammo.”

Bella suggested the roof of a third building as a place for us to meet, and I tried to head in that general direction.

Shortly after I started making my way there an entire floor of the first building exploded. I suppose I should have been worried about Bella, but my reaction was more of looking over my shoulder with a single eyebrow raised in what was doubtless an incredibly stupid looking expression of curiosity, amusement, and surprise. It seemed like overkill is all.

Getting to our meeting place involved me climbing the outside of a building, not something I'm used to doing. At a sumer camp I climbed a rockwall on occasion, the principal is largely the same except that the holds are better and there's a rope to stop you from dying on a rockwall. Someone once remarked on how quickly I went up said wall, it's not a reflection of skill so much a necessity.

See, I have an irrational fear of heights. The rope doesn't help much with that because the fear is, as noted, irrational. Sometimes it doesn't kick in, other times it does. If it does then any pause has the potential to send me into climb ruining panic, so I have to go fast because anything else will allow me to think about the fact that I'm doing something that scares me.

In the absence of a rope, I definitely had to go fast. If I'd stopped to think about what I was doing there'd be no way for me to actually do it.

As it turned out, the top of the building wasn't as zombie free as it at first appeared, and I did eventually put my minicrossbow to use.

When Bella arrived I apologized for being less than useful, she returned the teleportation flute to me (and tried to tell me that I wasn't that useless, but she's not a good liar) and we worked our way, together, through that building and the others on the block.

When we returned to the truck we had an unexpected visitor. I believe my exact words were an, “Is that...?” to Bella, and a, “Tuskasa!” to Tsukasa. He ran away. Or warped away. Teleportation-fluted away is the point. When I said, “He ran away,” disappointedly to Bella she said:

“What did you expect? You, a total stranger, ran up to him shouting his name like a fan from Hell. I would have run away too.”

“What was I supposed to do? I can't just meet him by appearing semiconscious inside of his truck.”

“Why not?”

“He doesn't have a truck.”

“I can see how that would be a problem, but charging up to a character you don't actually know is not a good solution. Why do you want to meet him anyway?”

Because I love the show he's in with an unhealthy passion and would like to give him a hug and tell him that everything will be alright, moreso if I can actually mean it. I didn't say that. I said something else which was also true but not a primary concern: “Because he's a really important thing and the world may hang on what he does.”

“And that makes him different from everyone else how?” Again, she had a good point.

She showed me to one of the guest rooms inside of the truck. I slept reasonably well.

-

[Some of this written while half asleep or more, if it doesn't make sense, that's probably why.]

My Zombie Apocalypse Team, Part A: Timeline

[Story fragment here, explanation here.]

Before the dawn of Civilization – Volturi founded.

1090 Hassan Sabah founded the Order of Assassins or Hashishim. This is the earliest organization to which the Illuminati can trace their lineage.

1118 – The Templars are founded.

1307 – Templars arrested across Europe.

1312 – Templars officially dissolved, surviving members go underground, forming a long lived conspiracy group.

1776 – Adam Weishaupt starts the modern Illuminati from scratch in Bavaria.  (Thomas Jefferson will independently do the same thing in America a few years later.)  This organization will survive unbroken until the secret war of the 2030s.

1901 – Edward Cullen born.

1918 – Edward Cullen vampirified.

1936 – Cullen clan moves to a town near Forks Washington, makes a treaty with the local werewolves.

1940 – Illuminati begins using smallpox vaccinations to collect genetic data on the population, this data will later be used in the breeding program to create a subject compatible with nano augmentation.

1950s – The Illuminati found two new branches: The Bilderberg Group and Majestic Twelve (MJ12).

1953 - Model year of Bella's truck.

1980s – Original Echelon system created.

1987 – Bella Swan born.

1989 – Bella's parents separate, Bella's mother takes her to California.

1993 – Bella and her mother move to Phoenix, Arizona.

   Estimated birthyear of Tsukasa's player.

2003 – Bella stops visting her father in Forks.

   The Cullen clan moves to Forks

2005 – Bella Swan moves to Forks, gets truck, becomes disillusioned with her story, goes on a long drive, meets an alien, becomes a traveler of time and space.

2006 – A genius named Harald Hoerwick creates a game called Fragment, which is picked up by the CC corporation.

2007 – Fragment, renamed The World, released to the public as a MMORPG.

2010 – Tsukasa becomes trapped in (the platonic ideal of) an online game called The World. Six months of (the platonic ideal) of the internet from this year were linked to the period from, roughly, mid Octoober 2051 to mid April 2052.

2012 – Increased instability resulting from Bella's attempt to cross the 2010-2052 barrier resulted in a handful of internet users, notably facebook users, from this year being bodily transported into 2051 on the leading edge of the anomaly.

2018 – Paul Denton is born, the most successful product of an Illuminati breeding program intended to create people compatible with nano augmentation.

2020s – Mechanical augmentation becomes widespread.

2023 – Paul Denton found to be compatible with nano augmentation. He is cloned. Clones will be experimented on for the next 26 years.

2028 – Testing on the first Paul Denton clones has some promising signs, the decision is made to create a clone in the same womb as Paul.

2029 – JC Denton, a clone of Paul implanted in Paul's mother, is born.

2030 – AIDS is cured

   The entire west coast of the United States is devastated by an almost unbelievably large earthquake.

2031-2032 – Midpoint of the anomaly. Entities from the (platonic ideal of the) internet began to materialize at this point, but before 2051 their impact was largely irrelevant.

2031-2035 – Several secessionists groups spring up throughout the United States, civil war breaks out. Mexico invades with assistance from Russia, the US teeters on the brink of collapse, but eventually stabilizes. MJ12 (led by Bob Page), believing that the Illuminati's non-response to these events is a sign of weakness, rebels and, by 2035, overthrows the Illuminati.

2035 – The biological parents of Paul and JC Denton are murdered by MJ12, because Bob Page believes that they are a bad influence on the brothers. The brothers are adopted by MJ12 employees. Paul heads off to college. JC is sent to a Swiss boarding school.

By the end of the 2030s the global population was reduced to 2 billion via a series of plagues. Vampires, immune to the plagues, were forced to adapt to a sudden reduction in their food supply. With the human population reduced to a fraction of its former size, but the vampire population unchanged, grazing patterns were altered. Some simply made use of the chaos to grab meals they assumed no one would miss, but others, particularly those who depended on tourists, were forced to abandon their old ways and look for better pastures.

The resulting instability caused a series of minor squabbles and wars between vampires, the casualties from which reduced the size of the vampire population to one more in line with the human population. As a result the existence of vampires did not become public knowledge, but in areas where battles took place it was a poorly kept secret.

2040 – Paul Denton joins UNATCO, the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition.

2042 – The NSF, originally the Northwest Secessionist Forces, is re-founded as the National Secessionist Forces. Most separatist groups in the US unite under its flag.

   Believing that the nano augmentation project is a waste of resources, and mechanical augmentation too clunky and conspicuous, MJ12 scientist Arthur Donovan begins to look for other means of human augmentation, investigating claims of individuals with superhuman strength and subhuman compassion.

2043 – Arthur Donovan's research brings a coven of vampires to his attention. He will spend the next three years chasing them.

2045 – Leon Woods, founder of the NSF, dies in an infamous last stand. So the story goes. But rumors abound that a ghostly white apparition of the Washington native was seen some days after the battle. Tales that he sparkled are assumed to be the result of inebriation.

2046 – The Upper West Side bombing takes place. The grid zoning laws are passed in response, sections of New York are walled off so that travel between blocks can be controlled via checkpoints.

   The Ambrosia project begins.

2047 – The Aquinas project, an effort to route all electronic communications through a single hub controlled by MJ12, begins.

   MJ12 first encounters reference to a highly advanced AI that existed in Japan almost four decades earlier.  It is hoped that information on this AI can help them combat Daedalus, a rogue AI MJ12 created that doesn't like their worldview very much.

   Arthur Donovan's team captures Edward Cullen. Research begins on how to give others Cullen's strength and durability.

   JC Denton graduates from the Swiss school.

2048 – Advancements from the Cullen research are incorporated into the physiopharmaceutical augmentation project, specifically the Series L agents. Initially it was believed that the only downside was the pale white skin and red eyes that the augmention resulted in. However when the first agents stepped from the artificial light of the lab into sunlight, Series L was declared a failure. The exact words of the assessing scientist were, “Let us never speak of this again.” Subsequent series would remove the strange reaction to sunlight. The albinism and red eyes would persist.

2049 – Nano augmentation perfected. Most Denton clones were destroyed.

   In the shattered remains of California, the first recorded case of a “sparkling zombie” was observed. Subsequent research indicates that it was the result of a vampire beginning to feed on an infected individual and then leaving in disgust because she “didn't like the taste.”

2050 – Paul Denton becomes UNATCO's first nano augmented agent.

   MJ12 is able to trace references to the Japanese AI to a game called The World, created by the CC corporation.

2051 – UNATCO bombs the Statue of Liberty as part of a successful ploy to use a terrorist attack on the US to make the US a member nation. UNATCO is rechartered, and Liberty Island is donated to it as a headquarters.

   The adoptive parents of Paul and JC Denton are murdered when they object to JC being recruited

   JC Denton joins UNATCO.

   The first significant, if relatively small, wave of the zombie outbreak begins, though it largely goes unnoticed as sick incoherent bitey people are nothing new to the world.

   Characters (notably Tsukasa), items, and monsters from the 2010 online game The World, begin appearing in reality as a result of the anomaly that will be started in the next year.

   The Templars are declared a terrorist group and (mostly) slaughtered. Zombies present during the operation infect several interpol and UNATCO members. These individuals are then sent to various MJ12 labs for study. This is MJ12's first contact with zombies.

   The Voluturi are declared a terrorist group and slaughtered. This occurs without incident. The bodies of the Voluturi are sent to various MJ12 labs for study.

   A group of MJ12 scientists under the leadership of Gary Savage quit their jobs at Area 51, steal everything in their labs smaller than a paperclip, blow up everything larger, and found the group X-51. They are, naturally, branded a terrorist group. They are not yet slaughtered.

   The Gray Death, an nano-tech virus, is unleashed upon the world. MJ12, which released it, is also the only entity with a vaccine, Ambrosia, which they use for political leverage.

   Beth Duclare, a former Illuminati leader, is assassinated.

   Bella Swan's attempt to push through the anomaly creates temporal instability throughout the entire period from 2010 to 2052 and results in her becoming stranded here. It also results in several people being pulled from near one side of the anomaly (circa 2012) to this point in time.

   Walton Simons, second in command of MJ12, is appointed to be head of FEMA.

2052 – A global coalition of resistance groups attempt to steal barrels of the Ambrosia, the vaccine for the Gray Death, so that it can be sent back to Hong Kong to be analyzed by the resistance scientist Tracer Tong.

   UNATCO plans a global raid on resistance groups to crush the resistance once and for all.

   JC Denton becomes an active duty agent.

   MJ12's attempts to retrieve information about the Japanese AI by accessing archives from 2010 results in them linking not the the archives themselves, but to the ideal of the archives, which, being timeless, is the same as it was in 2010. This, and an unfortunate incident involving Coca Cola, a control panel, and a fusion power generator, creates the anomaly.

   The second wave of zombies arise, in much greater numbers than the first. They come from two sources.  The first is that the anomaly didn't limit itself to The World, but also managed to bring in some contamination from a Capcom game. The second is that MJ12 base security really, really sucks, and several of the zombies they had been experimenting on escaped.

   Several vaccines to the zombification are developed, both by the resistance and the conspiracy groups, but none see widespread distribution.

   Order breaks down across the world. In the US, UNATCO and NSF troops find themselves fighting side by side against zombie hordes. Bob Page's plans for apotheosis will have to wait.

   DVL begins small, but overt, tests of her power over the earth.

   Bella Swan, attempting to return to her home time of 2005, encounters the anomaly. She attempts to force her way through it, becoming stranded in 2051.

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[Previously: General Thoughts on getting the team together][Next: Story, Part 2]