Nocturne

3: étude

"Let's skip all of the hysterics and actually do something, shall we?"

"Lucas, you're strangely calm in all of this."

"I've watched too many anime to be surprised anymore."

"Why am I not surprised..." Cynthia offhandedly remarks.

"So what's the plan, Lucas?" Thaddeus says.

"Survive."

I observed the picturesque waves of clouds overhead as a light breeze blew through my short hair, providing much needed cooling in my helmet. The bright sun beat down on the cold-injured grass from the west. Trees lightly swayed, rustling their leaves audibly in the process. The rolling plains extended beyond the horizon, with the Cascade mountains setting the backdrop of this unsuitably serene scene.

"Stop staring off into space like an idiot, what do you mean by 'survive'?"

"Don't die. I think that much is obvious."

"No, but how?"

"Get food, water, shelter, rest, all of that stuff. And don't get bitten. Survival is kinda uninteresting. In this biome, I don't think it's likely that we'll be too bothered by the weather. Food and water should be plentiful. We have great visibility, so it's gonna be difficult to be bitten by surprise."

"Yeah but what about the ones with superpowers?"

"They can do what they want. Of course, we don't want to anger them. But as it stands now, we don't have any ways of dealing with them."

"I'm asking about how we get those ways of dealing with them?"

"Why don't you read into my words more? I'm not answering the obvious prompt because I've got nothing. I might be a shut-in but that doesn't mean I have the communication skills of a 7 year old."

"OK, NEET."

I decided to ignore Cynthia's venom for now. "Normally I'd expect to be transported to some fantasy world and be greeted by priests and stuff touting me as their kingdom's hero or something."

"Yeah but we aren't playing Dungeons and Dragons now, are we?"

"Anyways, since we don't have any support for now, we'll have to survive by ourselves. No city outside of the arctic circle can withstand barrages of arctic blizzards. And even then, those cities would be weak to other things that normally don't affect them, like earthquakes. I highly doubt that modern society would last too long if they really tried to kill it. Therefore, according to my calculations, we should try to be self-sustainable."

"Don't reuse a Twitter meme from 2019, thank you."

"Barring that cringey reference, he has a point. We are no longer able to rely on modern society and economy to provide us with shelter and sustenance."

I was glad to see that at least Aoi was on my side here. Thaddeus remained silent throughout the whole ordeal, and I couldn't make out his expression behind the black visor of his helmet. Whatever. It would be his loss if we decided on something he didn't like.

Towards the west, the Sun was inching away from the sky. Its redshifted rays peaked through the fluffy gray cirri, tinting the formerly blue sky shades of orange and magenta. I estimated that we had around 2 hours until the sun set.

Going off of popular media, zombies are most active under darkness. Continuity with these media was far from guaranteed, based off of my past experience. I've not seen one zombie film depict zombies creating large natural phenomena like a blizzard. If this were a normal zombie apocalypse, I'd have my 2 rooks, knights, bishop, and single queen, and no pawns, against 32 pawns that take up the whole other side of the board. But here, not only did I still not have any pawns, but my opponent now has 32 queens. It's bullshit.