A flyswatter is a simple device created for the sole purpose of using mechanical pressure to crush (or rather, to swat) flies, mosquitoes, and other unsavory insects of the winged variety. A flyswatter tends to appear as a flat, fine mesh or net of metal, grass fibers, plastic, or tree bark attached to the end of a roughly 10-14 inch rod, which is gripped by the user as they use the flattened mesh or net end to 'swat' the insect out of the air. The minute holes in the material allow air to pass through, enabling the crushing of said insect without air pressure warning them or pushing them out of the way of their impending doom.

The design philosophy of the typical flyswatter does not account for insects of sizes exceeding roughly 1cm in size, and certainly not the nearly 18-inch mosquitoes that will swarm in the first few days before dying off in droves. You will require much larger and more robust flyswatter and if you want to survive in the future (pro tip, use existing pool scoops with razor wire stretched across them, works like a charm).

When you first touch the Veil it's like electricity. Not the 9-volt battery on your tongue variety, but the key-in-a-power-socket type, a blast of adrenaline, and a startling amount of pain. Future glances, touches, and passings will be much more relaxed, even pleasant. We still don't really understand it--not in a meaningful way at least--but we do know that some people are better able to interact with it than others, and each person's experience is unique.

My first true Touch came in the form of a pillar shrouded in nearly see-through silk. A form just barely obscured by the Veil, waiting to be seen, grasped, understood. Like most people, I failed to Pass-Through on my first time, I could feel the Veil in my hands, yet could not slide under, around, or through it.

Astrea has reminded me in her capacity as editor, to acknowledge the timeline this is being transmitted to may be different than the one we know. In the instance you do not have an archipelago in the middle of the Freyalan Ocean called Desori, it is comprised of hundreds of islands ranging in size from simple sandbars to the 300-mile wide main island. It gained independence roughly 50bl (before the lady) and it's major exports are exotic foods, and raw materials brought down the world's only large scale space elevator. Said elevator is now a useless wreck that has been used in attempted massive scale bridges 3 times, all of which failed for different reasons. History lesson over.

Morgana woke me up by smacking me with a spear made of crystallized blood. Did I mention that she was a prodigy that succeeded in passing through on her first attempt? If not, consider yourself informed. Naturally, I did what every older brother does when confronted by a younger sibling with a deadly weapon. Mainly yelping and jumping backward, shattering several shelves as I did so, waking up everybody else.

"Found an old maintenance car for the monorail. It's all mechanical so we should be able to use it to go a little faster." She growled, clearly still grouchy due to waking up early.

"Great! A couple of things, 1, please put down the spear, 2, where did you get the spear, 3, can we switch the tracks?" Any note of panic or concern in my voice was purely an auditory illusion on the part of the others in the room.

"I could, but I won't, I made the spear out of my blood, and I dunno, maybe." She sighed and the spear SLURPED into her arm. It was arguably the most disturbing thing I had ever seen in my life. Imagine a crystal that turns into a fluid tentacle which then retracts into the forearm of the person holding it while they brush the dust off their jacket. Got that image? Now imagine it wriggles like Jell-O and smacks against their flesh like a dead fish as it does so, while also filling the air with the scent of blood for a brief moment. Blegh.

Thankfully, the mechanical rail-car had a set of wrenches we could use to swap tracks with as well as a second car presumably for hauling supplies or material, allowing us to get it from its little sidetrack onto the main one and cram everyone on if they got a little cozy. A little elbow grease got the now overloaded thing moving in the right direction, only stopping when we were about 10 miles away from our goal, at a station with a train stuck at it. Night had fallen, and worse were the inhuman shrieks and howls reaching our ears as we approached.

Astrea here, providing helpful tips for fighting your first Risen, or Zombies. They're basically Zombies.

They may appear human, but they are in fact merely the shattered corpses of dead people used as a framework for a unique type of organism. No clue how to classify it, but it's like a bajillion single celled organisms that act like a single organism. The more there are present in the body, the smarter they all get. Each one is capable of independent movement, but if there are three or more together they always work together. Regardless, they can't infect living people, worst case scenario you get a REALLY bad fever for a few days and then you're fine. Best guesses are that our immune system is simply far above and beyond what they can handle while we are alive.

Best practice is to dismember them, then burn them. If too many gather in one place they can essentially blend together using themselves as some sort of sickening glue holding together piles of rotting corpses, this is known as a Flesh Abomination. You DO NOT WANT this to happen. Burn your dead folks.

I was watching the literal zombies shamble around the clearly occupied train car. Sharp cracks and echoing booms occasionally proving there were people in there, and they had guns. The zombies heads would pop like overripe melons, and the zombies would stumble, then get right back up and go back to bumping uselessly, gurgling, and shrieking in a bizzare, high pitched tone.

We had been shedding kids like crazy as we dropped them off at their family homes, mansions, and compounds. Enough that we had barely a bakers dozen at this point. With a shrug I picked up the rifle I had retrieved from my apartment, sighted on the chest of a particularly intact zombie, and shot at it.

I will forever pity the younger generation who may never get to hear and feel the sound of a good rifle going off. Like a handheld cannon it bucked against my shoulder, the surprisingly deep and loud boom bouncing off the nearby homes, and the zombies chest exploding into goop in a very strange manner. Now, often a bullet of this caliber will enter the body, tumble, and exit, allowing the pressure caused to do most of the damage. In this case it was like the chest was already under pressure, and popping it acted like a water balloon. A water balloon full of goopy black gunk and a shocking volume of half-rotted entrails. Blegh.

The folks in the train car must have seen it happen, because soon enough chest shots became the norm, popping the zombies like overripe melons on a summer day. Of course we didn't know then what we do now, and foolishly left the goop and dismembered corpses there as we all headed our own ways. That would in fact come to bite us in the butt far sooner than we were prepared for. Ah well, the important thing is that we got the rest of the kids home, and got to home ourselves. Plus Astrea I suppose, but then she didn't exactly have any family to hole up with.

I broke two promises in those first two days, the first promising I would help my sister instantly in emergencies, the second to my parents, that I would never step foot in their home again as long as I lived.