The Bonds of Time

Chapter 4

Andrew Joshua Talon, with many thanks to Kanako Urashima

DISCLAIMER: Love Hina is not mine. I'm not making any profit off this fanwork, and the authors used own themselves. "The Love Hina Fan Boy War!" is the property of Kanako Himekazi-Urashima, which she gave me permission a while ago back to write a prequel to.

Therefore...

(A/N: The background of Kevin Hanson (a.k.a. Kebinu) was written entirely by… You guessed it, Kebinu ^_^. He's one of the best writers I know, and this only adds to my claim.

Roll em…)

***~''~***

Kevin Hanson stretched his sore neck, glancing around the room of his ground-floor apartment. Looking up from his bass guitar, which he'd been absently noodling on, he glanced at the clock. It was almost noon; nearly time to depart for his next class at the university.

"Two more days," the fifth-year senior murmured to himself, as he slowly rose to shut his amplifier off. Two more days of classes, and he'd graduate and be done with school forever.

It was Wednesday, May 12, 2004.

Stumbling over to his nightstand, where he'd left his electric razor, he set to shaving, glancing at the cards that'd been mailed to him by his family for his twenty-third birthday two weeks prior, smiling slightly at the messages written on them. We love you. We're so proud of you. Love, Mom. Love, Dad.

"I wonder how long it'll take me to pay off all that money they loaned me," he mumbled once again with a smile, finishing his daily battle with stubble and setting the razor down, pondering how he should spend his last few precious minutes of freedom. Feeling a little music was in order, he went to his computer to fire up an MP3 or two.

As he laid his hand on the mouse of the PC, three things happened within about half a second.

First, a brilliant white light came through the open window of the apartment.

Second, the power went out.

Thirdly, the plate glass of the window shattered into fragments and exploded into the apartment with a torrential, tornado-force blast of wind. Luckily, Kevin had opened the screen, so his face was out of the way of the shards of glass that hurled into his room at barely subsonic speeds. However, that was cold comfort inasmuch as before he even realized what happened he was lifted into the air and flung roughly five feet straight into his heavy wooden door. It was lucky he didn't fly into the door from farther away, as he didn't build up enough momentum to break any bones from the impact; but once again, luck is a relative term, and the strike on the door was more than enough to send searing pain through his body, along with knocking the door clean off its hinges and sending the both of them sailing out into the hall. As he and the door collided with the far wall of the hallway, he let out a gasp as the air was knocked out of his lungs and crumpled to the ground, curling into the fetal position and desperately gasping for breath.

It was an indeterminate amount of time before his head stopped spinning, probably ten or fifteen minutes. Slowly lifting his eyes from the floor, he groped around for his glasses, which had apparently been knocked off his head by the violent impact. Finding them and placing him over his eyes, he was startled to find them almost opaque from being covered with dust. He quickly blew them off and went to wipe them on his shirt—at which point he noticed it, too, was covered with dust.

Shaking himself off and wiping with the inside of his shirt, he replaced his glasses and for the first time saw the damage. Loose timbers, pieces of metal and glass, tiny chunks of plaster—all littered the floor of the hallway. It looked like the building had been hit with a wrecking ball. Ignoring the aching in his shoulders and back, he ran down the hallway to get outside. Instinct told him a partially destroyed apartment complex was not the safest place to be.

When he reached the front door, he went to open it—and stopped dead. No point in trying to open a door that was sitting on the sidewalk some fifty feet away, its metal frame mangled and plate glass shattered. He glanced around at the area. The south-central part of St. Cloud, Minnesota, was a residential area built around the university campus located on the western bank of the Mississippi river, and populated mostly by college students. Considered a historic neighborhood and boasting large, brown street signs that said so in so many words, the area was littered with apartment buildings, old brick houses that dated to the late 1800s, and fraternities and sororities.

"Littered" being a particularly appropriate word, because at the moment the area more resembled a landfill. Lengths of vinyl siding from a nearby apartment building protruded from the asphalt of the street, which they had been driven into like gigantic spears. An old yellow-brick sorority house kiddy-corner from that building had been leveled into a pile of junk more closely matching a demolished Lego building. All down the street, cars that had been parallel-parked were flipped over, crushed into steel pancakes or driven through houses. One Volkswagen Beetle was folded around a low branch of a large oak tree.

Further down the road, the campus of St. Cloud State university was clearly visible three blocks away, thanks to the flattening of every single house and tree that could obstruct the view. The top half of the thirteen-story Sherburne dormitory—the tallest building between the Twin Cities and Fargo, some residents bragged—was cloven clean off, the remaining structure sticking into the air with flames and smoke drifting from the top like a giant, red brick chimney. Most of the other buildings were in ruins.

"What… the… hell…"

Forcing himself to breathe deeply, Kevin continued to look around—and then for the first time the smell hit him. Decay. Blood. For the first time he noticed the corpses. Dozens of them, strewn across the streets, some of them missing legs, or arms, or heads, or all of the above. Some contorted in ridiculous positions. Dust clogged the air, a haze penetrated only by blinding beams of sunlight. The sun caught Kevin's attention as he looked up, and his eyes widened.

The sky was blood red, the sun cleaving through the haze, shining a brilliant white. It was like standing on the planet Mars.

Mentally, the shock of everything had not sunk in quite yet, but he could already feel the reaction from his body: he was sick to his stomach. Knowing he couldn't hold it in, he sunk to his knees again and suffered through a painful bout of dry heaves. Even after his stomach had nothing more to void, it continued to twist in on itself, leaving him coughing violently. Amid the pain, one worrisome thought tugged at his mind.

"It's like… something out of The Day After," he groaned aloud, speaking only to make sure he wasn't losing his mind. "Were… were we nuked?"

Slowly pulling himself to his feet, already starting to feel the protests of what were sure to become bruises in his back, he made his way back into the building. Too confused to feel sad, or even angry, he was seized with a single thought, a single desire: Find out what the hell happened. Walking back into his apartment, he reached for his cell phone and dialed his mother's work number. He had to let her know he was alive.

No dial tone.

"Well, hell," he mumbled in frustration, dropping the useless phone to the floor. He glanced around his apartment and heard a loud, creaking noise as he did so—it sounded like the building settling. Suddenly consumed with a sense of urgency, he looked around quickly and snatched a few possessions—his shaving kit, his pillow, some drinks from his refrigerator, knowing that without power they'd go warm quickly—and started stuffing them into a pair of paper grocery bags.

"I always knew these would come in handy sooner or later. Everybody laughs at pack rats until an ICBM falls on their neighborhood," he remarked with a slightly ironic smile, as he hoisted the bags and clenched onto them tightly as he made his way out of the building once again and circled around to the parking lot. His small black Ford and a few other cars had apparently been shielded by the building from being damaged. He flung the door open and tossed the bags in the back seat, and immediately ran back inside for spare clothes. As he dug through his dresser the sound of snapping timber became audible. Growing alarmed, he decided to abandon his salvage effort and ran out of the building as fast as he could.

Throwing some shirts onto the front seat next to him, he sat down in the car and turned it on. As the engine came to life, a loud blast of static assaulted his ears, courtesy of the car's speakers. Remembering that the first thing people on the news said when a natural disaster hit was to check the radio for information, he punched the "Seek" button and watched as the radio ran through the entire FM frequency range without hitting upon a single station. There was only static. A nuclear explosion's electromagnetic pulse could damage any electrical equipment, but only if it was turned on at the time, and only in the immediate area. Whatever happened, happened almost half an hour ago. More importantly, there was no mushroom cloud, no heat, no radiation—his hair still being on his head was a testament to that.

"This… no, it couldn't have been a nuke," he said quietly to himself, his sore throat making it hard to talk above a murmur. "This is bigger. Way bigger."

He couldn't resist reaching down to pinch his arm, and let out a quiet curse of disappointment upon discovering, courtesy of a minor self-inflicted injury, that he was definitely not dreaming. Sighing, he put the Tempo in gear. Determined not to dwell on what was going on, he set himself to a task: get back to the Cities. Get back home. Find out whether his family was still alive. The rest of the world could wait.

As he pulled out of the alley into the street, he heard a loud creaking noise and glanced back just in time to see the apartment complex cave in on itself, settling into a heap of timber and vinyl, raising a cloud of dust and sending out a blast of air that shot through the open windows of the car and blew his long brown hair, which had come untied, off his forehead.

"There goes four years of my life…" he groaned, leaning his head on the steering wheel. "Well, somebody said to be happy you have to get rid of your worldly possessions. I guess I'm gonna find out if it's true…"

***~''~***

The Tempo's speed topped out at 85 miles per hour, and it was 82 miles from St. Cloud to Stillwater. Knowing full well it would take at least an hour to reach his parents' house, Kevin intended to spend as much time at top speed as possible. He doubted the police would notice—if there were police left to notice. From the very beginning, however, his path was obscured. Getting out of the deserted, destroyed city was a twenty-five minute ordeal; debris littered the wrecked streets and seemingly whenever upturned cars and tree branches weren't there to frustrate his efforts, uprooted pavement was.

According to the car clock, it was 1:00 PM under a red sky by the time he finally arrived at Interstate 94. Heading eastbound on the highway, he began for the first time to encounter other living people. They were mostly alone, or in pairs, wandering down the highway, perhaps a dozen all together. Most of them didn't even look up as he passed by, and he didn't dare to stop. One side of him chastised himself for driving past them without a second glance, but another side rationalized it; there was no way he could help them when he didn't even know what the hell was going on.

Midweek traffic was mercifully light so the highway was mostly free of debris, but at one point near Monticello a livestock truck blocked his path; the massive 18-wheeler hadn't flipped, but had oriented itself straight across both lanes of the freeway, rendering it impassable. A streak of black rubber skid marks behind the truck denoted what looked like a rapid stop; as he slowed to approach the tractor-trailer, he saw that its windows were shattered and the body of what appeared to be its driver lying motionless in the grassy median, a red streak running across the grass for some ten feet behind the body.

Wincing, he turned his attention to the trailer itself. The motor of the truck was still running, and an audible mooing sound came from the half-open trailer to the rear. Cattle, he reasoned, stranded inside the trailer. Climbing out of his car, he walked up to the rig and hopped into the front seat, putting it in gear and letting it roll on idle onto the median and out of his way. As he hopped back down from the cab, he felt a twinge of responsibility, or maybe guilt, inside him, and absent-mindedly paced to the back of the trailer, reaching up to undo the steel latches holding the door closed. Pushing the doors open despite his sore shoulders, he came face to face with a dozen cows, staring at him uncomprehendingly. For a moment he felt pity for these creatures, raised by humans not to know anything or understand anything.

At the moment, however, he was just as helpless as they were.

"Go on out," he called to them over his shoulder as he walked back to the car. "No one's going to eat you now. Maybe no one's left to eat you."

Following the interstate south and east back towards the Twin Cities, he encountered a few more people and noticed three cars on the other side of the highway, headed westbound for some unknown destination. Seeing Minneapolis—or what was left of it—should have been a brutal shock, but by this time he was numb to the devastation, and he wouldn't have stopped even if he wasn't.

The going was slow through the city; destroyed and burning cars clogged the concrete road, and he had to use all four lanes just to keep heading east. From what he saw from the freeway, the Minneapolis skyline had been leveled as though a gigantic foot had mashed the skyscrapers into the ground; the huge Metrodome stadium had been stripped of its Teflon roof, leaving only the hulking gray superstructure behind. A city of three hundred and eighty thousand, wiped off the map. As he passed under overpasses and over the Mississippi river, he noticed people in small groups of around ten each making their way into downtown. People with weapons.

The National Guard…? He wondered to himself. No, probably gangs. When there's a power vacuum and disorder reigns, the first thing to happen is looting.

He knew the way now, and the obstacles were gradually overcome; the clock in the car read 3:30 PM by the time he pulled into the driveway of a rural home outside Stillwater. He was barely able to get the car off the street, as a trio of pine trees had toppled across the driveway and blocked him. He went to hit the remote opener for the garage door, and frowned in frustration when it didn't respond.

In a moment he remembered; there was no electricity.

Climbing from the car, he stumbled up the driveway to the house. From the front, it appeared to be relatively intact. The windows were shattered and glass littered the driveway in front of the house, but otherwise it was in one piece and structurally sound. Making his way around the house to the front door, he noticed that the yard had not been so lucky. The family swimming pool in the back yard sported an upside-down birch tree, roots and all, sticking up out of the middle of the pool like some kind of grotesque ornament. The gray-painted back deck was torn off the side of the house and resting on its side on the ground. It looked like the destruction had clipped the back yard but missed the house.

Unlocking the door and stepping inside, the house seemed the same as it ever was, though no lights were on and all the digital clocks were dead.

"Mom!" Kevin called out, raising his voice for the first time after medicating his throat with several cans of soda during the drive. "Mom, are you here? Is anyone here?"

For a moment, there was silence. He'd been hoping against reason that his mother would have left the school where she taught to come home immediately, but it was laid bare as folly now. Of course, even if she had survived whatever happened, she would have stayed at her school to take care of her students. Kathy Hanson was just that kind of woman.

He was snapped from his rumination as a high-pitched, somewhat shrill noise came from the bottom of the stairs in front of him, catching his attention. His eyebrows rose in recognition of the cry.

"Ellie… Ellie! Hang on girl, I'll be right down."

Bounding down the stairs to the basement, he broke through the family room and turned the corner in time to see a wire-frame kennel, and one very frightened-looking three year old white Labrador retriever, pawing desperately at the door and thumping her tail. Quickly opening the kennel's door, he sunk to his knees as the family dog leapt out of her cage and jumped on him, wagging her tail and nuzzling her face into his chest.

"Ellie…" he said softly to the dog, overwhelmed with emotion after the numbness he'd spent the past few hours in. He let himself sink to the ground in momentary exhaustion, as she gently licked at his face. Ellie at least was safe. He wasn't alone. There was hope.

"Heh heh… sorry girl, it's about time for you to eat your dinner, isn't it?" he laughed softly, scratching the Lab behind her ears. "I bet you're wondering what the heck went on… well, so am I, baby, so am I." He paused momentarily and contemplated just how stupid that would have sounded if anyone was there to hear him, and slowly climbed back up to his feet, turning to go find the dog food. Apocalypse or not, everyone had to eat.

After Ellie had eaten her fill of dog food, he made his way into the garage and threw the door open manually, climbing into one of his parents' unused Explorers and taking the dog with him, as he was unwilling to risk leaving her at home and coming back to find the place having collapsed on top of her. Starting the truck up and backing out, he set out westward for White Bear Lake; if his mother was alive, that would be where she was.

The trip took him past the places where he'd grown up, played with friends, gone to school; most of it was debris now. The five-mile-wide body of water that gave White Bear Lake its name was as still and smooth as glass; the wind had stopped dead, and the sun still hung burning in the red afternoon sky. In half an hour he had reached the western side of what was once a city of twenty five thousand.

For four hours he tooled the deserted streets of the ghost city on the lake, a time period in which he encountered twenty people. This time, he stopped. This time, he talked. Frantically, he queried each person about if they had seen her; each time he gave the same description, and each time he received a sad shake of the head. Each time he had to give the same response when the other person asked for some news of their loved ones. Each time he parted with someone, he offered the same advice: find a house that's still in one piece, find something you can keep food cold in, and stay inside at night. It was common sense and nothing more at this point, but he didn't want to feel useless. He drove by every school he could find, but every one was either demolished or deserted.

After the fruitless search, he drove back out east, back to his house. He hadn't found his mother, and his father had been down south in Missouri on business. It seemed unlikely he'd ever see them again. His brother by all accounts should have been in school in Mankato, but if that far-flung city to the south had suffered the same fate as everything else he'd seen the odds of finding him alive were astronomically bad. For the moment, he decided, he would just go home and figure out how to stay alive. Decisions on what to do could wait until later.

***~''~***

"Later" stretched out into weeks, and eventually months. By day, he made the journey by car from the house to find supplies, occasionally running into other scavengers in the process. The entire affair was bizarre; two or three people gathered at a store to loot it for all it was worth, talking and chatting casually with each other, as though nothing had ever happened. A terse greeting would be made, he would ask where the others came from, they would respond in kind, and they would all go about finding the things they needed. It was a bizarre kind of civility under equally bizarre circumstances.

That civility did not last long, however. After two or three weeks the gangs began to appear. Most would carry crude weapons, though some possessed firearms; at first they roved the streets by foot, then pickup trucks with armed men riding in the back would appear, driving up and down the roads, looking for food, shelter, new members, sometimes just for a fight. It was like something you would expect from a war-torn third-world country; now, however, there might not be any real difference between "first" and "third" world any more.

He'd taken all the ice he could from local stores to keep food cold, but he was running out of supplies as it was, and soon the stores would be out of ice as well. Without a stove to cook, there wasn't much to eat either. He'd made ten more fruitless trips over to White Bear Lake in the first month, and didn't dare to any more after that for fear of the gangs. After the sun went down, he was paralyzed with fear and got little sleep, for dread that looters would attack the house (and him) while he slept. He had a flashlight for a few days, but the battery soon went dead.

So this particular sweltering late summer evening Kevin paced the floor of his house while Ellie munched on a rawhide bone contentedly on the floor, knowing he had to decide what to do but gradually becoming aware that thinking of things to do was doing nothing but giving him one damn painful headache. There were too many variables. Where could he go to be safe? How would he have any clue where that was? Was there even a single safe place left any more? Had whatever this was, happened all across the country? All across the world?

Finally he sat down next to the dog and ruffled her fur, sighing. Lucky her, not being smart enough to understand what had happened.

"Ellie," he grumbled, "I've the strangest feeling we're not in Minnesota any more."

The dog paused momentarily in her chewing to glance at him, then resumed her repetitive munching on the rawhide. She was hard to see in the late evening light with no flashlight. Belatedly remembering his parents had kept some emergency lights, Kevin stood up and paced over to the hall closet and pulled out some candles to brighten the darkening house. He wouldn't be caught off guard if he kept the place lit; maybe, just maybe he could get a good night's sleep tonight. Methodically, he stationed one candle in the living room, one in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one in his bedroom, two in the basement. He finally allowed himself a grin as he set the last one, feeling pretty pleased with his disaster management.

"Oh, wait… matches…"

Twenty minutes later, he sank to the ground, defeated. Not a single match to be found . The house was even darker than before, and if there were any matches there was no way he could find them now. Without light, he couldn't keep track of Ellie, or keep himself from wandering into doors or walls, or keep people from breaking in. He was cursed to spend another helpless night.

Sighing in exasperation, he clung to one unlit candle in his right hand, rubbing the wick with his left. "Damn, I really am useless after all," he muttered angrily, waving his fingers in front of the unlit wick. "I can't figure out what to do, I can't find Mom, I can't even light a stupid…"

Light suddenly flared in the dark room.

"…fire…"

Kevin's words trailed off as he stared wide-eyed at the candle in front of him, now burning brightly. A few feet away, Ellie paused momentarily to glance at the flickering light, before resuming chewing on her toy bone. He could feel his fingers starting to tremble in confusion, and quickly set the candle in a stand lest he drop it and set the house on fire.

"What the hell… just happened?" he mumbled, staring down at his hands. "Was that spontaneous combustion? Or… did… I…"

He turned to a second unlit candle. Rather than take the conventional route of holding it in the first candle's flame, he held the candle in his right hand, his left hand outstretched towards the wick, and spoke softly:

"Fire."

The candle abruptly sprouted a small, warm flame, and this time he could have sworn he saw the tips of his fingers glow just a little bit. His excitement and curiosity growing with each second, he ran downstairs to find more candles. This time instead of speaking the word "fire", he shouted it mentally. And again and again, the candles sprang to life, each time more energetically than before. Soon the house flickered with candle light.

He was feeling a rush now; like a little kid, he bounded around the house. He didn't know what had given him this ability, and at the moment he didn't really care. It was like something out of a movie.

"This is so damn cool!" he shouted, pumping his fists, as Ellie stood up and watched in confusion, wagging her tail uncertainly. Somehow, for the first time since that awful day, he had a feeling things were going to be all right. If somebody expected him to live through some post-apocalyptic hell on earth, the least they could do was give him some wicked magical power. Oh sure, there was the possible 'rejection by humanity' angle, but at the moment the only one who knew about the power was Ellie, and they call dogs "man's best friend" for a reason.

As fast as the discovery was made, questions poured into his mind. Were there other people with powers like this? How many? Where could he find them? Where did the power come from? What did it all mean? He had to have an answer to the questions, and it wouldn't come to him sitting around the house watching the sun trace shadows on the floor. Anyway, it wouldn't be long before the weather started getting cold again, and with no fireplace in the house he would freeze. He had to leave.

Energized, everything started coming together. By candlelight he poured ice into three coolers and stocked them with everything he could grab from the house's refrigerator. By candlelight he fetched a suitcase from the basement and filled it with clothes and blankets. By candlelight he carried it all out into the Explorer and dumped it in the back.

The second surprise came shortly after, when he went back in to grab Ellie's food and carry it to the truck. Placing both hands on the fifty-pound bag of dog food, he gave a mighty tug to get it off the ground—and involuntarily screamed "Shit!" when the heavy sack sprang off the ground like he was lifting a sandwich in a Baggie. Letting go with one hand, he raised the bag up on a level with his head, staring wide-eyed at it. A quick shake confirmed there was definitely still some forty pounds of dog food in that paper bag, yet it felt like nothing. A wiry guy who'd never even attempted a bench press in his life suddenly hoisting forty pounds like it was thin air?

After tossing the bag into the truck and taping it shut, he made his way back into the house. Sitting down at the table in the dining room, he took an unused notebook and pencil he'd found in his old room and began to write. If his luck had truly taken a turn for the better, then someday his mother would find the message he was scrawling tonight.

He did his best to keep the note simple; once upon a time he'd wanted to be a writer, and the temptation of letting flowery prose creep into his writing was hard to fight. But fight it he did, and in twenty minutes the note was complete. He set it on the table and anchored it with a drinking glass taken from the cupboard.

"Dear Mom:

If you're reading this, then you survived whatever it was that happened. I hope you're doing all right. As you can imagine, my classes were kind of cancelled, so I came home. Don't worry about me, I'm fine. In fact I might be better than I was before, in ways I never expected. I hoped I would be able to find you here, but it looks like it didn't happen. I want to stay and keep looking for you, but I can't do that. I need to leave. I wish I could explain why, I just feel… different now.

I don't know exactly where I'm going. I'll probably head to Mankato first to try and find Jeff, but after that, who knows? I don't care and it doesn't bother me, so don't worry. If a minor thing like the end of the world couldn't do me in, there's nothing that will. (And don't worry about Ellie, I took her with me!)

Thank you for always believing in me. I promise no matter what I end up doing, I'm going to give you and Dad a reason to be proud of me. There's a lot I wish I had a chance to say to you both, but I just hope you know I love you both very much and I'll miss you. And don't worry, however long it takes, I AM going to get that degree!

Love, Kevin

August 29, 2004"

In the end, the letter was probably more for his own peace of mind than anything, since surely if his parents were alive they would have found him by now. Satisfied with his work, he snuffed the candles with his hands, experiencing no pain from doing so, made his way to his old room, and laid down to sleep in his old bed, maybe for the last time ever.

***~''~***

When morning came, he found his usual sluggishness replaced by an urge to get moving. He rolled out of bed to see the room already bright with sunshine, and trotted out into the living room to find Ellie lying on the floor, looking up at him.

"Ready, girl?" he said softly, feeling far more invigorated than he should have, concerning the circumstances. The dog thumped her tail in response, and that was all the confirmation he needed.

After a quick trip outside so boy and dog could relieve themselves, he took Ellie down to the garage, and both boarded the S.U.V. He maneuvered the Explorer down the driveway past the silent and long-unused Tempo and the fallen trees, glanced back one final time at the house, and turned out onto the road. A few minutes later he stopped at a deserted service station, chuckling to himself as he helped himself to free gasoline.

"Heh, a fire user better be careful around stuff like this," he snickered as he topped the tank off. "Here I was always wanting a little car because gas was so expensive… fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony," he muttered, glancing up once again at the sun high in the pink morning sky. Climbing back into the truck, he made his way out onto the highways back into the Twin Cities, bound for Interstate 35 and a route to the south. Maybe Mankato would be just like St. Cloud. Maybe all of America would be too. Oh well. Somehow, it would all work out.

"Well, girl," Kevin called to Ellie, who like any good dog had her head out the open window and her tongue flapping in the breeze, "We can stay in Mankato for a while and look for Jeff, but then I suppose we'll need some place to head to for the winter. I'd say Florida, but that's so cliché. Any thoughts?"

Naturally, there was no reply.

"Maybe I really am losing my mind," he sighed, shrugging. "At least we won't argue much. Well, I've always wanted to live up in the mountains, myself… how about Colorado?"

***~''~***

Can you say, "foreshadowing?" ^_^ I decided to take a quick break from the narrative style of writing, out of respect to Kebinu (and future contributors like him).

NEXT CHAPTER: Talon relates how the Aftershock of the Cataclysm came and went-But the war for Earth continued…