To @daHob’s prompt “creation.”

They started with the earth and the sky.

They had a hemisphere, a blank, seven miles in radius, of force-shield, set upon one of the most blasted places, where the air, the ground, even the stone was blasted and useless. They set the hemisphere there, and they sent in their radiation-scrubbing nanites and their rubble-breaking-down machines and their chemicals, until the ground was level dirt, arable and fertile, and the air in there was breathable.

The sphere had been opaque; now they made it transparent, to let in the light. They set their machines to digging up a lake and a river, creeks and streams, to funnel the water of the sky in. And they set into all these tributaries filters, so that the water would be potable.

They sent in new machines, to plant seeds, carefully-picked to imitate the land that had been here once. There were grasses and trees, bushes and flowers, so many flowers. And there were bees and other pollinators, before there was anything else.

And they allowed the rain through the sphere, so that the plants could grow.

They lived in their safe places, their towers and their bunkers, while the machines worked, and they did this not once, but seven times, because, while not many had survived, they hoped to grow again.

When the seven were ready for animal life, they began again with seven more, cleansing the blasted wasteland that had been their grandparents’ homes. While the first spheres took on wild animals, as carefully picked and cultivated as the plants had been.

A generation had passed when they allowed the first humans into the first spheres. A generation since they began, and so many generations since the war that none remembered its beginning.

They stepped into their Edens, careful places with a few careful buildings set upon their careful rivers. They set foot in their creations, and rejoiced.

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To @RealBriGang’s Prompt, with a side order of pretty much everyone eles’s U (Except probably the Uranium; I couldn’t work that one in. 😉

Uma wasn’t feeling well.

That much, everyone could tell. Her crowd of urchins gathered around her, bringing her little offerings – stories, food, drink, anything they could find in the ruins of the city, anything they could drag of carry or, in one case, force at broken-bottle-point into their little sanctuary.

They had thought she was immune. The olders had, one by one, gotten the Sickness and then had to leave. Some had come in with it, and been driven out just as quickly. Some had just gotten old, and, as they got old, gotten Sick.

But Uma was special. Uma was twice as old as any of them, at least, and, she had never gotten the Sickness. She was immune, she was precious, she was their leader.

She had brought the children in – some as infants, like Uli, slung by her shoulder in a baby-hammock, some old enough to remember that once, before the Sickness, they had known parents. She had brought them in one at a time, or in bunches. “We are your family now. You are my urchins.”

Oli was old enough to remember that there had been others, that, once, Uma had not been the oldest, and they had been Kelly’s Kids. And Kelly had said, before that they had been Tommy’s Tots.

The broken world yielded endless children, it seemed, endless children and endless Sickness striking the old, the grown-ups. The children watched after the younger children, because there was no-one else to do it anymore.

“Don’t get Sick, Uma.” They all whispered it; she was past hearing them anyway. “Please, Uma. Don’t do the thing.”

But it was too late. Her skin was already shifting, her ears stretching, her teeth growing.

Crying, the urchins drove the confused wolf-woman out of their sanctuary. Oli wielded the largest weapon, shouted the loudest. When they were done, when the wolf-woman who had been their leader was gone, Oli turned to the children. “You’re Oli’s Orphans now.”

And maybe Oli would not get Sick.

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For an Anonymous prompt: A is for Alpha

My Giraffe Call is open! Leave an alphabetical prompt!
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It all began with the first of us, called, as was appropriate and due, the Alpha.

I never knew what other name the Alpha might have held, before this place, before Everything Else. But sometimes we called her Anna, or Angie, when we were being informal.

There were not all that many minutes in which we were being informal, truth be told. The formality was something to lean upon, something to prop us up. And we needed all the props we could get, then.

But I was saying. Alpha came first. That much I was told: Alpha, and then Beta, of course, who we called Bill in those rare informal moments, and then Gamma (Gail) and then me. Delta, fourth-arrived, fourth-in-line, and sometimes Dean.

“It was more relaxed, when it was just the two of us.” I never knew if Beta was complaining or explaining when he said that. I did know that, as we went from the four of us to the whole alphabet, twenty-four of us with Omega playing last-in-line, everything got more and more formalized.

Our sanctuary was none too large – a half-sunk building in what had once been a park, surrounded by the wildlife and the monsters – and twenty-four people filled it to capacity and stretched our food supplies even more than it stretched our space. “We’ll stop there,” Alpha said. “One for every letter. It only seems fair.”

We all knew it wasn’t really going to work that way – well, I can’t speak for the first three, but I knew it, and Theta and Iota knew it, and they were the ones I spent the most time talking to. But Alpha, Beta, and Gamma seemed insistent on sticking to it. They even sent away the first two or three people to show up after that.

That’s when the rumbling began – no. That’s when the rumbling got audible. I think the rumbling had begun the minute Alpha said “I was here first, and I’m in charge.”

But now our alphabet starts at Delta, and we’re building a new wing onto the building, and we’ve started giving people Arabic letters.

There can’t be that many survivors left in the world. We shouldn’t run out of letters again, I don’t think.

And if we do, we can start again at Alpha.

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