This time I got through and it rang twice and then it was answered. “Hello honey! How’s your countdown to the apocalypse going?” she said.

I’d spoken to her several times since she’d kicked me out of the house. For instance, I knew from our conversation last week that she was home again which made me very happy.

“Ok,” I said. “I’ve got something to tell you really quickly then I’m getting off the phone. I think this time is golden as far as acquiring titles and skills. You need to practice too. Alright, here’s what I’ve got so far: Magic and Qi are real or at least will be. You can acquire them by meditating on them. Magic is blue energy that seems to gather in the chest and head. Qi is golden energy that seems to run throughout your body, maybe meridians? Anyway, Qi is useful for healing and doing martial arts, maybe other stuff, and magic is, well magic. I’d suggest you meditate and try to get skills before the 27, no 25 minutes is up. Also, skills are leveled. I’d make Derek and his men meditate too. You are gonna need strong fighters to survive and they’ll need to be strong fighters to survive as well. Oh, and monsters are real or will be soon. I just fought something called an Acid Slime, so be careful. I’m going to be heading home as soon as the people I’m with are ready. Love you, mom! I’ll try to get home soon! I’ll try to call on the cell phone as soon as the time expires, but I don’t expect it to work. Oh, and try to gain titles from the Collective. They grant stat bonuses and skills. I love you. I’ll see you anywhere from an hour to, well when I get there.

“I love you too honey. I’ll see you when you get here,” she said. And then she hung up the phone. My mom is decisive.

You humans rock! 23 minutes to the Apocalypse and you’re making plans to win the Apocalypse! Way to go! We’re calling this one: Dadda. President for Life! – Leadership, Management, Collaboration, Planning and Critical Thinking skills granted at level 3.

I quietly pushed open the door to the locker room. Both girls were in Sukhasana yoga pose with their hands in the Gyana Mudra position on top of their legs. Told ya I had studied Eastern philosophy. Sitting cross-legged with their index fingers pinched together with their thumbs. Not sure how they knew to get in those positions, but I was willing to blame Hollywood. They seemed deep into it, so I quietly closed the door and stepped back into the main room of Mighty Max.

‘Okay,’ I thought to myself. ‘What do I need to do, well we, I guess, need to do to survive? I wasn’t sure if there was a we yet, but I didn’t want to exclude the possibility. First things first, what do you need to survive in a wilderness, ‘cause that’s what it sounds like is facing us. Shelter, water, food seem to be the main requirements. I thought back to my earlier exploration of the status bar and thought that the inventory would come in handy. I assumed that since I’d already cast a spell and had been in combat that I’d have a class and be at least level one, so my inventory should open up. I walked to the front of the store and saw all of the bottled waters and made a note to grab them… along with some Cokes, if they survived. Maybe the Collective might do what Bloomberg couldn’t, get rid of Pepsi and Coke! While I was there I made a mental list of other things that I wanted to grab: cheese blocks, milk, granola, meat, Fruity Pebbles ‘cause you know Fruity Pebbles rock, gum, beer, toilet paper, basically anything similar that hopefully would stack in one of my 20 available inventory spaces. OK, and I ran to the back stock area and brought out a couple of the large plastic tubs that we’d unload stuff from the trucks into to see if I could load them up as a single item or even stack them loaded in my inventory.

As far as shelter went, I wanted to get as far away from this store as possible, get up to my mom’s place on the hill. I figured that soon there’s gonna be either a lot of hungry people (looters slower than me) or monsters coming here. Who knows this place might even become an instance - think dungeon, but smaller.

It’s hard making plans when you aren’t sure of your environment. But water and food could be taken care of, it remained to be seen how much of an issue that would be. Just in case, I filled one of the plastic tubs with water and pop, and the other one with the food and other goods I’d been eyeing and ran back and got a lot more tubs. I looked at the timer:

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

11:54:58:98.98.98

‘Uh, shorten the timer to a more realistic time, please,’ I thought and it changed to the following:

11:54

‘Ok’, I thought. ‘Only about 10 minutes ‘til the apocalypse. Load up and get your weapons’. If I’d been in true apocalypse mode I’d probably have grabbed the weapons first, but I took the time to load the 15 tubs full and then put them in a row, right at the end of the convenience store section of the store, about 20 feet from the cash machine. I tried again to get them into my inventory but still wasn’t able to. I ran back through the stockroom and out the back utility door, being sure to prop it open with a cinder block we kept back by it for that purpose.

I wasn’t sure if the Cadillac was going to make it through the next couple of minutes or even if the trailer was, but I was pretty sure that my stuff in the trailer would, I just needed to get it out in case something happened to the trailer. I’d purposely bought low-tech. I didn’t know if the trailer was going to be changed, or destroyed, or what. I unlocked the trailer’s door and started throwing stuff out of it: swords, polearms, knives, daggers, and bows and, even a couple of crossbows.) I also bought a bunch of MREs and extra clothes, Carhartt pants, Doc Martin boots, even a shield. My last month’s $10,000 shopping spree - all of it bought online or through Craigslist. It was like a cartoon, everything was just flying out of the back of the trailer. I heard the girls yelling my name and I shouted that I was back in the stockroom. As the last MRE flew out of the trailer, I followed it out, the girls appeared on the back loading dock and the timer hit zero. All at the same moment. And, of course, a blue screen opened up. Well, actually many, but the primary one said this:

Welcome to the Apocalypse.

At the same time as the blue screen appeared, there was this tremendous gong sound, well, more like a chime, only it wasn’t really heard, it was more felt, experienced with my body. It felt like the whole world rang at once, including me, as if the entire world spoke with one voice and said, “So be it”. Then stuff started to change. All of the blacktop roads, the parking lots, all of the cement changed to rock, cobblestones I guess. They shrank too. The four-lane roads became two lanes, the two lanes became simple dirt roads, the storm sewers became ditches alongside them. The parking lot disappeared and became a grassy field, the gas pumps became bushes and the awnings overhead became trees. My Cadillac and the camper became a bamboo (or some type of rattan-like wood) rickshaw. The trailer just vanished. There was a harness, so theoretically I could maybe hitch something to it, but there wasn’t anything like a horse around it. A couple of gold pieces were left where the trailer disappeared. Fortunately, my stuff was still there, but the MRE’s looked different. I looked at Mighty Max and it was now built out of stone bricks, it was about a quarter of the size that it used to be. The girls were clutching each other, evidently shaken by the changes to the Trading Post. I looked up in the sky and thought, ‘Oh my God! The stars!” There was no (or very little) light pollution. I could see the Milky Way, Venus with my eyes. The second and third moons that had appeared were beautiful too. One had a greenish hue, the other was a pale rose. I watched as a meteor fell and thought, I wonder if that means anything now.

Intelligence +1

Recognizing that your world has changed, that old certainties cannot be followed. What’s happening? What has meaning anymore will need to be discovered.

‘Wow!’ I thought. “Are you girls alright?” I asked. They were still clutching each other, but now that the group wasn’t literally shaking, they seemed a lot more stable. Tonya responded, “Yeah, we’re OK. Just a little shaken up is all. How ‘bout you? You doing alright?”

“I guess,” I responded. “What the heck, another two moons, cobblestone streets and,” I reached for my cell phone which had changed to a square chunk of some kind of material that clearly no longer functioned as a cell phone, “and no cell service. Looks like cars are out, rickshaws and maybe horses are in, and we’re playing a whole new game, well life. Let’s read our notifications before we get jumped by some monster!” I walked toward them and we stood together on the back porch-like structure of the Mighty Max and stared unfocused as we read our screens - kind of like we used to stare at our phones. “The more things change, the more they stay the same,” to quote one of my mother’s favorite sayings.