The Brink of Extinction OOC/Planning

A lone man walked down a dust-beaten path, a torn-up cowboy hat on his head and a rusty revolver in his right hand. He hobbled down the dust-beaten path with a noticeable limp, and visibly winced every time he stepped on the ashen surface of the road with his right leg.

One either side of him was an endless sea of ash, the occasional superstructure of a destroyed building sticking up through the ashen desert. The dusty road wound between dunes of ash, some still burning, and around the ruins of what used to be a major Midwestern city, maybe St.Louis, from the ruins of the Gateway Arch sticking up through a dune of ash. The dust storms had been rough out west.

The man stopped, and leaned his dust-coated hand onto the rusty surface of an archaic steel beam that jutted forth from the ground like a fractured bone. He looked down at the old revolver in his hand. One bullet left. He could get it over with now, if the rusty gun still worked. There was no way to find out, though, and the man didn't want to get his hopes up, so he shoved the revolver back in it's rotting leather holster.

He walked a few more miles that day, and then stopped in the remains of a highway. The tops of cars could be seen, all of them being buried by the endless dust storms. The man took out his canteen, took a slow drink, and looked up at the sky. He hadn't much water left, but there was another storm coming. He put his canteen back in his old, green camping backpack and looked back up at the cold, dead sky. he felt around the ash, digging some with his arthritic fingers, until he found the sky roof of a Honda Prius. This would work. He grabbed a rusty sledgehammer from where it hung on a loop on the side of his worn jeans and shattered the window with one hit. After pushing the glass under the Prius' back seat, he laid his things down, turned on an electric lantern, and slid the slide-out panel from the sky roof over
to protect him from the harsh radioactive winds.

The man went to strike up a fire with a few assorted twigs that he found around the car, but after realizing that the smoke would suffocate him, he took out a can of beans and ate them with a rusty spoon, raw. After eating, he reclined on the old back bench of the Prius, which had been torn to the point that more foam stuck out than there was material left. The fierce howling of the radioactive, apocalyptic winds rattled through the top of the car. There would probably be another inch or two of ash on the ground by morning. The man sighed, looked at the gun again, and laid his head back on his old, ratty sleeping bag.

This was going to be a long night.

---

In the year 2021, the world will end. Nobody will see it coming. Governments will be powerless to stop it. We, the inhabitants of this forlorn world, have abused our planet beyond the point of no return. On December 13th, 2021, the San Andreas Fault broke out into an earthquake to end all earthquakes. it was so incredibly powerful that Richter scales in new York registered a 9.0. The quake not only caused California to sink into the sea, but caused several major nuclear power plants built along that fault to catastrophically explode, filling the air with toxins, which floated up to the ozone layer, burning a hole above the radioactive sea that was once California. The fickle finger that is politics pointed at a North Korean mining operation in Chile, which they foolishly believe caused the quakes that destroyed the ozone layer in a second spot. There was a war, and both sides took heavy casualties in the way of thermonuclear warfare. They had no idea what they had done.

Our oceans burned away. The holes in the ozone boiled the life-giving waters of our planet down to nothing but piles of salt and the cries of dying humans who's last words were "only if...". Only if we had stopped ourselves before it was too late. Only if we had never invented the nuclear bombs that had turned out planet into nothing but a dust-covered ball of iron. Only if we hadn't set ourselves on the brink of extinction.

The last people left now wander their dead world (or what's left of it) not fighting or pointing fingers, but trying to survive. They wander a cold, dead, suicidal Earth that has abandoned them. very few people survived, most out of sheer luck. And luck is all that's left in this shell of a planet we call Earth.


Rules:

1. respect all forum guidelines.
2. no god-modding, powerplaying, spamming, flaming -you know the drill.
3. put the word "neutron" at the end of your sheet.
4. no instkilling
5. mary sue is dead. She was lost in a dust storm one day and nobody heard from her ever again. Don't try to RP as her.
6. the world has been, well, over for about two years. Your characters should know how to take care of themselves by now.
7. You can "do it", but don't write about "doing it", or you'll find yourself buried in sex feet of radioactive ash next to Mary Sue.
8. cursing is allowed, to an extent. No F-bombs (we dropped enough A-bombs), and every last word out of your character's mouth mustn't be a curse word.
9. no futuristic or overpowered weapons. Things like automatic rifles and machine guns are things of the past. The most your character can carry is (maybe) a shotgun, but if you want anything more, ask me first.
10. character interaction is fine and encouraged, but there's very few people left on Earth, so your character shouldn't know fifty million different people.
11. please limit your character's location to North America. Most people don't know Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, or South America enough to know how to properly rp there. (Note, you can have your character be in Mexico, the USA, or Canada, though).

the sheet:

name:

age: (something realistic please)

gender:

location: somewhere in the US, Canada, or Mexico (though i suggest you skip over Mexico since it's close to the equator and is probably uninhabitable).

appearance: pictures are fine

personality:

items: your character can have some supplies with them, but here you need to write what supplies they have and how they carry them. Be REALISTIC.

weapons: nothing too overpowered in the way of firearms. melee weapons of all sorts are allowed, but be realistic (no swords, clubs, medieval hatchets, you get the picture).

other: if you read the rules you know what to put here.

res'd

res'd

res'd (overflow)

sounds interesting, just unfortunate you picked exactly the wrong disaster to destroy the world- earthquakes can't do any of the things you put up there. Especially not on the san andreas fault- it's so close to the ocean that a large portion of the force would be dissipated.

Also, releasing massive levels of pollution at once like that wouldn't raise temperatures- it'd drop them. After a certain level of upper-atmosphere concentration it stops just trapping but also reflecting energy.

... never mind that it's impossible for any temperature increase humans could theoretically survive to boil the oceans. Humans can't survive at temperatures higher than 100C, and it'd have to be much, MUCH higher for that much moisture to be able to stay in the air without just falling back down.

I based this apocalypse on the one from tbe Book of Eli, but the way the apocalypse happened in this is relatively irrelevant. If it bothers you that much, however, I'll fix it.

nothing still?

ah well, guess there ain't no rest for the wicked.

Hmm... Will there be a storyline, like, beyond 'stay alive?' o3o

Yes. It will involve a group of anarchists that form a commune.

Is there info on it in the OP?

I can add info on it into the OP. that was going to be my first post.

In a nutshell, this commune of anarchists are cannibalistic hunters of men, like the guys in The Road. It's their only source of food, so they hunt the characters down, kill them, and eat them. All of the characters, meanwhile, will be moving south to avoid the impending winter.

bumpapotamus