After Era - A New Dream

Oneshot

“It feels good, doesn’t it?”

An old man is sitting on the top of a tall building. From there, he could see the still beautiful city of Rome. Even after centuries having been abandoned, the Eternal City still retains her beauty. Rome truly deserves the nickname Eternal City.

The man is drinking a glass of wine as she gazes long to the horizon. The setting sun makes the view even more beautiful. The light reflects in his eyes, reminding the light he had in his eyes long ago. That light has dimmed now, as he is slowly reaching old age.

“Soon enough, I will follow you two. Too bad though, because i will die in bed unlike you”

Besides him, there are two glasses of wine sitting on the edge of the roof. While he is drinking his own wine, he never touched those two glasses, as they are for someone else. But they will never come, as they had already left this world.

The old man then rests back on his chair, as he closes his eyes from the setting sun, thinking back to his younger days….

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In a thick green forest, a man sighed.

“I wish we're able to live peacefully soon....”

The man silently wished in his mind as he rode on his horse, cutting through the thick forest along with a company of 20 horsemen.

However, they were not the only ones in this forest.. He and his company were a part of an expedition force with the goal of exploring and finding key sectors of the old Rome, which was known to be a busy city in the past, and bring it back to its former glory. It was an expedition force of 150 people, 20  of which were what people a hundred years ago would call researchers, but in this now tribal society, they are far from those white sleeved scholars of the past. Now, they are just a bunch of “Experimentalists” that study the knowledge found in old books written before the near extinction of humanity, who were taught by the elders that survived the extinction event. And so, they are now called Experimentalists, or just Eccentrics.

Their current objective is to find a place called a power plant. The people of this man had just recently taken total control of that ancient city. After harsh battles and skirmishes, they were able to drive out the monsters that plagued the old city and would now be able to use it as a foundation to restart civilization. But to use the city to its full potential, it needs power. Water and food were not a problem, that is thanks to the Tiber river and the small population that numbered less than 5000. But, much of its infrastructures needed electrical power to be able to use. And their small scale power generator wouldn't be enough to even power less than half of it.

As such, a grand scheme was carried out to revive the old Rome and build a new nation for this new world. Humans as they are, a city, a nation, is needed in order for humanity to survive, just like their ancestors did. However, they were still in discussion on how to carry out this plan and debates also started on how to run the nation. However their goal was clear: to band humanity under one rule.

By doing this expedition, in addition to finding a new, much larger power source, they hope to find abandoned cities and towns, or maybe even smaller human settlements, even if it’s just one family. The current settlement was composed of different tribes and clans that were established after humanity was able to live together in a tribal society. Most of them lived nearby the rivers, or factories and bunkers spread throughout Italy that can be used as emergency shelters in case of an apocalyptic event.

It all started 500 hundred years ago, when a comet hit Earth, in a scale smaller than the extinction of the Jurassic period, but the damage was severe nonetheless. Even modern society was too fragile to be hit by a disaster of such scale.