July 7, 2080

I'm currently reporting to you from the front lines. I'm currently in Missoula. I had to go out for diplomatic reasons, and I have to say that after seeing it first hand, I underestimated the mess out here. I was right in keeping out of anything even resembling an urban area. Things outside Yellowstone are worse than I thought.

Feral Ghouls are a constant threat in the areas around the major cities. They seem to be found mostly to the former urban areas, like Bozeman and Missoula.

The folks at the Ski Lodge are tend to deal with it by moving in armed groups and not going too deeply into the town. While surprisingly energetic and don't feel pain, the ghouls aren't quite the ones you find in Fallout 3 and New Vegas. They're more comparable to the Mindless Ghouls and Ghoul Crazies of Fallout and Fallout 2. That means they're not the super fast, damage resistant monsters of the FPS games, rather they're just your regular old ghoul but with the mind of a crazy ass berzerker. On the other hand, they also tend to come at you in packs. Organized packs.

I talked to the doc about this, and our guess is that they're not the result of a ghoul exposed to too much radiation. There have been fully cognizant Glowing Ones, like our favorite insano cult leader, instead we think its the result of starvation coupled with long term exposure to radiation. They go mad from hunger and thirst but don't die because the radiation heals them even as they degenerate, leading to an insane half-dead zombie creature. Or at least that's the guess.

Still, though, they're not even the worst. There are other humans. Masterson's taken to calling them 'non cooperatives', which is a friendly way of saying either highly anti-social thieves, looters, and cannibals. Yes I said cannibals. Fucking man eating cannibals. Their behavior varies. They tend to be either nomadic or highly territorial and rarely number more than a half a dozen, often being limited to one really crazy guy suffering from radiation poisoning whoes been alone in the ruins far too long and is willing to view his fellow man as meat on the hoof.

Between the two, it makes scaving in larger urban areas very dangerous. The folks at the Ski Lodge are lucky that they're actually a reasonable distance outside city boundaries. They plan out their expeditions pretty well only going in using large groups with heavy armaments while sticking to the main roads and not delving too deeply into the boundaries. It's a sustainable low risk, low gain strategy that seems to work reasonably well for them.

The folks in Missoula have it much harder off. They're actually living in and around the outskirts of the metropolitan area, most desperately trying to hang onto what little fragments of their previous lives remain. In many ways they're like the folks from Cody, that's Sheriff Whitaker's town, only writ large and without a dictatorial psychopath to keep things from falling apart.

Principal Brown is a good man. A very good man, but he's not exactly a great leader of men. He's gentle, soft-spoken, and not really what you'd call a forceful personality. He's passive and persuasive. It's almost impossible to dislike him and he has this affect about him that makes you kinda feel like jerk when you disagree with him. Great for conflict resolution, not so hot on leadership in dire straights. Frankly, he reminds me of Mr. Rogers.

He managed to keep the locals away from each others throats up to this point, but even he has his limits and he's met them. Things are starting to fracture both from without and within, thank you Cyrus.

The reason I came here was diplomatic reasons. I want to negotiate with the various local leaders. Fred Pitts, the leader in Bozeman, was quite happy to see me. He's a very chatty, social guy. Actually reminds me of me before my Regeneration in his inability to stand silence. He of course asked us to relinquish our weapons and patted us down before we entered their home, he even apologized for acting distrustful, but no one minded. After all, it's to be expected in this day and age.

I discussed with him what we've discovered about the Pale Riders, but he told us he wasn't able to afford to send men to help fight them in Missoula. He made it clear that it wasn't because he didn't want to, but because he needed as many people as he could to scav for food. They don't have much in the way of a surplus.

You should have seen the look on his face when I gave him a cut of the grain I found as a sign of friendship. He was impressed. He thanks me for my kindness, and observed that with this bit of buffer, he might just be able to spare a couple men, and asked if there were any volunteers.

We walked out of the place with ten new members of our party. Most of them weren't officially trained, but their tracking skills and observational abilities are well earned. Before he left, he gave us a parting gift as well. Since their cars were all in the lot, only the ones they broke down for parts weren't running. As a sign of his friendship, he gave us a car. Damned nice car too.

While we're still getting used to each other, I think the odds are good that if we can handle this damned raider gang, Bozeman's being added to the mail route. We already talked about a fair trade of assets.

His people are for the most part, the just the kind of people who you'd vacation at Ski lodges. In essence, your classical white collar upper middle class professional crowd. While many of them are office rats, there are also a handful of salesmen, lawyers, doctors, and even some engineers. In other words, a glut of marketable job skills well suited for our current hostile economy.

They're also well placed to use as a base for scaving operations deeper into town to try and find the good stuff. We says he's reluctant to do it on his own, but if we were to pool the resources of the four settlements, we could pretty much punch clear through any ghouls or crazies dumb enough to get between us and our target.

They have a small Hydroponics setup, but its not really enough to do much more than supplement at the moment. What they really want is for us to share the Aquaponics farming setup with them. If they can grow food they can pretty much call it quits on the scaving for basic living supplies. According to their eggheads, it'll be easy to build the tank setup from old dumpsters, what they need are samples of the duckweed, tilapia, and fowl.

Honestly if this turns out well, I'm thinking three will soon be four. I like these people.

Sadly, I can't say the same for Missoula. It's a fucking wreck. While they'd managed to pull together some cohesion after the bombs to distribute resources and deal with the ghouls and crazies, that fragile balance was shot all to hell when the raids started.

According to them the raids started early last year. Back then there'd been a couple groups of organized towns people. Brown's hadn't been the largest. While secure he wasn't in the best scaving was however one of the people everyone turned to help work out conflicts. The largest had actually been run by a former construction worker. They'd built up fortified a shanty town of almost a hundred on the edge of the cities warehouse district.

The Pale Riders struck without warning, punching down the fence and stealing as kidnapping as much as they could carry before putting the rest to the torch and leaving. To make it worse, in the immediate aftermath the noise probably attracted every ghoul within a quarter of a mile. They were forced to flee towards the school, abandoning what was left of their supplies and personal possessions to avoid being overrun by ghouls.

This repeated several times in small encampments across the town leaving a disorganized hoard of shell shocked survivors who were forced to seek refuge among the only semi-secure location available, the school.

Now onto another, less pleasant subject: Cyrus. I have to say, the man is highly manipulative an absolutely self-centered. He's also lazier than I thought. The moment I showed up he started kissing up and seemed honestly pleased to have someone else to do the actual work. I'm getting the feeling that given the option, he'd rather play the Evil Chancellor than Evil Overlord. As much as I want to kill him though, a number of the locals seem to like him.

I questioned him on how the hell he got there and he was pretty blunt. He and the men he left with fled down Route 90 headed to Washington state, just like he said he was when they got to Osburn. They got warned off going any farther down the road due to rumors of heavily armed Marauders and they'd been forced to leave with only what they could grab, so he claimed it looked like a good location to stock up and winter, as well as a place to try and figure out what the hell was down the line. During the winter, they found out. Place was hit hard and fast. Smash and grab.

Cyrus claims to have been the only survivor, says he was smart enough to set up a bug-out location in the woods nearby the town and bolted for his supplies and then from there headed back east arriving in Missoula pretty much in the dead of winter. He gave some warning but was generally thought to be exaggerating. He told 'em so, and he's been playing it up ever since.

According to him, he wants to kill the SOBs so he can get back on plan, unless something better comes along. Honestly I'm not sure what to say or how to deal with him.

Missoula though absolutely needs help. They lost 35 to starvation and cold during the winter and are living hand to mouth. The grain we brought as a gift did wonders to secure their loyalty, but to be honest, I'm considering suggesting that we simply turn the school into a Forward Operations Base and see if its possible to evacuate the entire civilian population.

Well, now only planning. I've been talking with Bear and the others via radio and I've come to believe our best bet is an ambush modeled on the one I used to take down the sheriff, only writ large.

I've taken some advice and looked at the maps. Route 90 crosses the Clark Fork river just a mile or so outside of Missoula. My plan is simple... use the highway bridges as choke points. If they bring one of their dump trucks, simply blow that bridge while the truck is crossing. If we can't hold them off, blow the bridge.

In general we have a terrain advantage. I intend to use it. These bridges are going to be our Hot Gates, only I'm going to have proper fall back positions to prevent them from overrunning us.

The second objective is prisoners. We need to know where they're based and if we can find that out, we can scout them and prepare for an attack. They have a large number of people they took as slaves and I'm not about to let that many innocents be used as forced labor by a crazy fucking death cult.

Now for the home stretch.

I had to leave home for Diplomatic reasons but am still in contact. We're using Morse code messaging broadcast by radio using coded phrases and a cypher. Paranoia can be your friend.

Also using it as a chance to get people used to running the place without me holding their hand. Lucas is in nominal charge though he's been keeping council with Helen, Kelly, and the Pastor.

Before I left another piece of chaos showed up. I now know why Fletcher is so fucking nuts. The reason is, he's fucking nuts. After an especially heated 'negotiation' session, Burns approached me and all but begged us to forgive Fletcher.

Burns explained that the man once confided in him that he suffers from Manic Depression... in other words, he's bi-polar. He used to take meds, and while he wasn't a particularly easy to get along with, he was much more stable and reasonable. He wasn't happy to tell us, as it was a bit of a betrayal of trust, but honestly both Masterson and I are just about through with the old fucker.

At this point my options are limited to cutting contact, arranging a change of power, or finding some way to make homemade Prozac. Burns was begging us to not break contact, but seems too loyal to simply overthrow the old codger.

Besides that, things are settling in nicely. Maybe once this damned war is over I can peacefully hand over the reigns to someone else.

Once we have the men we're going to do some looting ops into the larger towns and cities. We have people with the talent, but no one to protect them while they work. Once this damned war is over I hope we can get back on task.

Yes, we have a very limited ability to make Gun Cotton and are reloading our weapons at this point. Were trying to make best use of more primitive arms that can use Black Powder though, for obvious reasons. It's easier to make.

Pastor has some understudies. He actually has 3 of them. One he's training to be his second here, and another two he's training to be the pastors for Plymouth and Fletcherville. He's got the whole religion aspect covered.

I'd like to infiltrate the Pale Riders and cap their leaders but I don't know where they're based. Yet.

And again, a moat isn't practical. We're talking a 4 wheel drive trucks with seven foot off road tires. Trucknor laughs at your pitiful moats.