“Hey, eGirl!” I said. “I’m surprised to see you back. I would have thought you’d have headed on into town.”

“No car,” she said. “And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a lot more there out there. Plus, what am I supposed to do, what’s an eGirl with no e? and, well…” she paused here.

We all waited for her to start again.

“Well, you’re Monsoon Alacrity Seebring, Heir of the Duchy of Northern Tulsa. We figured if anyone might know a little bit more about what’s going on, you should?”

“What’s this?” Big Mike asked. “Duchy of Northern Tulsa?”

“Ah, hell,” I said. “How’d you find that out?” I said to her, and “hold on for a second,” to Big Mike.

“Well,” she said. “I’m eGirl. Looks like some of my skills in the old world, transferred to this one. Once Miranda and I figured out that we had status screens we started trying every possible word combination that we could and discovered the Government screen. Of course, the first thing we noticed was that line Heir: Maysoon Alacrity Seebring. And I just happened to know a guy named Monsoon Seebring and then I remembered you telling us that Monsoon was a nickname and, lo, here we are. I figured with no cars there was a chance that you'd still be here.” She paused and just smiled at us then.

I looked at her, well identified her and her friends then, something that I should have done earlier. Rule #9 in the Monsoon’s Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse is now: Always Identify Strangers or People Who’ve Been With Strangers.”

“eGirl, Level 5, 101 HP, Scholar”

“Miranda Sky, Level 4/4, 95 HP, Mage/Thief”

“Jake Spader, Level 5, 111 HP, Mage”

“Did you just identify me?” asked eGirl.

“Uh, yeah,” I said.

“Rude!” she said.

“It may have been and for that I’m sorry. I guess we haven’t really addressed politeness post-apocalypse style. So, I ask you this, Ms. Scholar, do the possible privacy violations of identifying someone outweigh the security risks of not doing so?”

“Today on CNN,” she said. “I don’t know. Yet. But, I think we’ve got other things to talk about, don’t we?”

“How about we go back to that ‘Heir of the Duchy of Northern Tulsa’ thing that they brought up,” said Big Mike.

“Ok,” I said. “Say Government.”

He did, so did basically everybody I assume, since I saw them all drop into their screen reading trance.

“What does this mean?” he said. “What the hell, Monsoon? Were you going to tell us about this?”

“Well love a duck!” I said. “I don’t know. I was hoping to get some more information about it before we opened this can of worms. Thanks for this, by the way, eGirl.”

“Not my problem!” she said. “The truth will out.”

“Anyway, let’s make sure everybody’s on the same screen. Everybody except Janet and I see a screen that says something like want to switch governments?”

I looked around and everybody was nodding with the exception of Janet.

“Alright, well, let me share my government screen with you all.”

Just like last time, at the top was a map of the Duchy with a lot of black space on it. Only the top north-eastern counties were present. Following that was the same text as before:

Government

Duchy of Northern Tulsa:

Duchy Seat: Sand Springs

Duchy Seat County: Osage

Ruler of Duchy: Grace Annette Seebring, Duchess of Northern Tulsa

Heir: Maysoon Alacrity Seebring

Counties in Duchy:

Adair County

Craig County

Delaware County

Mayes County

Noble County

Nowata County

Osage County

Ottawa County

Pawnee County

Rogers County

Washington County

Wagoner County

Size of Duchy: 83,252 km2

Population of Duchy: 342,151

Code of Laws Taxes Government Army Treasury Ruler Chat (Heirs and Officials Only)

I did and it looked the same as last time, except the number of people had gone down again. A lot.

“How can there be a Duchy of Northern Tulsa in the State of Oklahoma?” said Big Mike. “Not to mention those Counties are named pretty much what you’d expect to find in the state of Oklahoma. I mean I was a marine. I fought for and lost friends fighting for the United States. You’re telling me that They dissolved it? And put your mom in charge?”

“Thanks again eGirl!” I said. “This is why I didn’t want to have this discussion with you all, yet. I don’t know anything. Well, I talked with my mom, but she had to go talk with some Minotaurs.”

Janet looked at the little girls and said, “Cow Men!”

They nodded their heads like that made all the sense in the world.

“Anyway, she said she had meetings and that she’d get back to me on Tenebrisday,” I said.

“What?” he said. I could see Consuelo nodding in agreement. “Your mom got appointed Duchess and you didn’t ask her any questions about it? When did you talk to her?” he said.

“Aquaday,” I said.”

“That’s what, two days ago, and Tenebrisday is two days from now. Four days before she’s going to get back with you? That’s a little bit insane, isn’t it?”

“Have you met my mom?” I asked. “She says exactly what she means. She said she was busy. I happen to know that she had a meeting with about twenty Minotaurs with great big axes and a bison-headed man that was even larger right after I got off the whatever-the-heck you call that call thing.”

“Heir Talk,” said Janet.

“Thanks, that Heir Talk thing. It’s an apocalypse. She’s trying to save lives. She doesn’t have a lot of time to spare,” I said.

‘“Wow,” he said. “Just wow!”

“Possible dysfunctional family aside, I don’t know anything. She evidently had stuff, really important stuff to do. I get it. She’ll get back with me. Until then, I’m getting stronger, so I can survive. We’re getting stronger, so we can survive. That’s what I know right now. That’s what I’m doing right now.”

“By the way, Heir Talk?” I said to Janet.

“Yep, I thought it was a cooler name than Ruler Chat,” she said.

“Lord, don’t change,” I said. She smiled. After that, we calmed down. I explained my mom’s almost compulsive need to plan. I gave them examples. I told them how I wound up at Maxes. I told them what my childhood was like. But most of all, I told them how I was proud of her. I told them that if anyone could come up with a plan to save as many people as possible, it would be my mother. I think that they started to believe me after a while. Janet and Tanya had only the barest contact with her but backed me up based on it.

I think Tanya said, “Yeah, she started off soccer mom, then it got a little bit frightening when she kicked into gear.”

Janet just repeated what she’d said earlier, “She’s who I want to be when I grow up.”

“So,” I said. “Level Five Scholar and a Level Four Thief/Mage and a Level Five Mage. Sounds like you’ve got some stories.”

“I get the feeling our stories probably pretty similar to most folks. We were talking in the living room of the house we rented, we’d just made our class selections when this giant spider came through a window after us. It looked like a wolf spider only about a foot to a foot and a half long. It stood about shin high. We had Force Bolt spells and Miranda had this back-stab ability. It came after me, I hit it with my spell and stopped it for long enough for Miranda to stab it. Evidently, she stunned it and we killed it while it was stunned. This happened on Aquaday. We put up some plywood over the broken window and kind of hid in the house until this morning. We’d been talking about what to do and, like I said, decided to try to get to you to see what you knew. I’ve always been about information. You know that. It’s why I lived on my phone at work. I have an MIS degree and a Library Science degree. It’s why I took this Class. I figured it would help me gather info, figure things out. I hate not knowing things.”

“We met Jake on the way here. We were walking down the road, lane, whatever that you call a cobblestone street, and we got into it with this giant lizard, not a mountain boomer, but it looked like a big skink. We were trying to do the same thing that we’d done with the spider, but it had a hold of my leg and Miranda couldn’t get at it to backstab it. Jake cast this spell that caused stalagmites to appear under it and after that Miranda hit it and we killed it too. So we brought him along with us.” We all turned and looked at Jake then.

He looked at us for a minute before he started. Not nervous, but tired looking. His brown thinning hair was matted with sweat, his glasses glinting in the light under the tree. “I guess my story isn’t that unusual anymore, he started. “I don’t know, I haven’t met anyone other than these two and you all. But judging by the numbers on the Duchy screen, I’m thinking that I’m not that special. I used to be married. Used to have a baby girl too. I used to be a gamer. Once the first screen’s happened, I thought ‘hey, I wonder if I have a status screen?’, “I wonder if I have an inventory?’, ‘I wonder how I select classes?’ My wife and I were excited about it. She was a big Gardner and a gamer too. She was going to be a green mage, a druid or something like that. We were playing with magic, trying to figure this whole thing out, you know? We’d been going at it hard since the Event. No cell phones, no cable, but we had this new toy. We had plenty of food, she canned and, well, gardened. She was vegan, so I was too except at work. I was excited, couldn’t sleep. I was out in the backyard trying to figure out my magic when something came in through my baby’s window. I was so excited. I could do Magic! She and her mom were at the front of the house. It was a big house, a big yard about three acres of gardens surrounded by another 25 acres. We had our own little hill. We’d just built it last year. It was where we were going to retire to. I was at the back of the yard so I wouldn’t bother them. They were both still sleeping. I was an architect. I was thinking about how I could create walls, materials to build houses using Magic. I never even heard anything. I came in for breakfast and wound up burying what was left of them this morning. After that, I just started walking and met up with these two.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

“Lord,” said Big Mike. “Brother, I understand. I had two more daughters. We had.” And then he reached out and grabbed Jake and held him while they both cried. The little girls gathered around their dad and clutched his legs, crying too while Consuelo gathered both men into her arms and hugged them both.

I didn’t know what to do. Janet came over hugged me, followed by Tanya. eGirl and Miranda grabbed each other and we all stood there for about ten to twenty minutes crying. Not just for Jake’s loss, or even the Smiths, but our loss as humans. Sure it was the apocalypse and people we knew and loved were dead or dying, but it was also our loss of certainty, of the expectation that the next day was going to be the same as the previous, that we’d get up in the morning and go to work and come back to our partners, our wives, our Caddies and try to figure out what we were going to do to make it better, be better. All of that was gone. We lived in a world now where we weren’t the top dogs anymore, a world where we, our families, our loved ones could vanish, broken in the blink of an eye.

I’m not sure who stopped first, maybe Big Mike when he grabbed Baila and Amada. People pulled back into themselves and we became a group of people standing awkwardly together with tears on our faces. I let go of Tanya and Janet, eGirl and Miranda moved apart a little and Jake pulled back from Big Mike, knuckling his eyes, trying to regain control. Big Mike left an arm outstretched to him though, a bro hug, a hand resting on his shoulder, just to let him know he wasn’t alone. His pain was understood and recognized.