Background

Some generations are simply fated to be born at the juncture of great events.

The children born shortly before the black death ravaged Europe, or before world wars, were of such a breed. The children that lived through the various terrors of the twentieth century, for example Mao's famines or the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge would also qualify.

For Kenneth Elgrim and his entire generation it was the Yellowstone Eruption, with all the various other disasters normally more or less lumped in under that infamous title.

One day it was cartoons and video games, it was breakfast cereals and homework, and then the next day it wasn't. Nothing else mattered for a time, wars, politics, the economy, everything had just sort of stopped. Uncounted millions were dead, the government seemed paralyzed, nobody knew what to do exactly, it was simply too much, it was simply too big.

In his own little mountain world the ash came, thick and constant, and the sun faded behind a sort of perpetual overcast. Elsewhere crops were failing, cities were falling into riotous civil strife, resources were completely overwhelmed. They watched it all on T.V for a time before the power failed.

The Elgrim's had several advantages from the outset. They were isolated, the had a strong community, and they had trade skills that were particularly useful in times of crisis. Kenneths father was in law enforcement, and his mother Andrea was a nurse. Like a sizable portion of rural Americans, they often went months between grocery runs, and were more inclined to attempt projects themselves rather than to hire help.

But these advantages came with responsibilities, and it was not long before Kenneth's father was deployed away from their small community to do his part for the disaster relief.

It was the beginning of the most stressful time in Kenneth's young life, as even after a month of constant worry and fretting, when his father did return home to them from the terror of war it was only to bring a trio of relative strangers with him, and to lead them into the wilderness where they would live in misery and isolation for the next half year.

These strangers would become his extended family, the widow and children of a man who had died alongside Kenneths father in the fighting. They had suffered in a way that Kenneth and his mother had been spared, and the Elgrim's did what they could for them, although the food quickly ran low and there were times when they did not know where their next meal would come from.

The war ended, the years passed, they returned to some semblance of their shattered lives.

There was no power that was not from a generator, and gasoline was a precious commodity. Within a short time there no running water, no cell signal, and of course nothing resembling the variety or plenty they had known prior to '04.

Slowly people returned to the area, and some of these people perished on such a regular basis that they stopped trying to hold funerals. Starvation was prevalent, reparatory illness from the ash was a close second. Most people were awake at dawn and asleep shortly after sunset, their days filled with the sort of labor their not too distant ancestors had known, the sort of work that breaks people down and wears them thin.

Suddenly young people were a valuable resource again. Kenneth and his foster siblings were put to work early and often. Horses that were once luxury items for retirees and dude rides were back to hauling and plowing, dogs were back to herding, cats back to killing vermin.

Apart from all these day to day concerns, and these weighed on them all heavily, was the collapse of the major cities and the refugee's seeking shelter in the mountains. A militia was quickly formed and most people were given fair warning that there was nothing for them in the area. Justice was normally something as simple as a fist, or a rope, and Kenneth had witnessed more than one hanging by the time he was old enough to start carrying a gun himself.

But it was not all doom and gloom, the world was battered was not broken, and pockets of prosperity did survive the world over. Slowly, year after year, their situation improved. Radio and the batteries to made it run made a return, essentials like fuel, medicine and canned goods began to trickle back in. Although everybody still lived and died by the harvest, the game and the river it was enough to take the edge off and allow people just a bit of breathing room.

Kenneth remembered the first time he saw the internet on a cell phone, the first big festival put on by the local towns replete with dancing and live music, the first tractor working in the fields since the eruption. He remembered finally being able to trade old books, read dozens of times, for new books that seemed like little portals into another world.

It was not until age sixteen, when by quirk of destiny or fate, Kenneth found an item in the fuselage of a wrecked helicopter that was to change his life. The details of that story have been told elsewhere, but suffice to say that the acquisition of such an extraordinary weapon set him on a path stranger and more fantastical than he could have ever imagined.

Now nineteen, the young man has grown restless in his little mountain town. The wider world beckons, his spirit chafes as he works the ashen land in mediocrity , and he finds himself drawn ever more frequently into conflict as the region comes to rely on the young man and his unusual weapon to keep the peace in a land not yet healed from the ravages of the Rodian Wars.