It happened thirty years or more before I was born, but I've been told the story of my uncle's first adventure so much that I know it better than I remember most other parts of my childhood. Of all the heroes of all the tall tales I heard about the Wasteland, my uncle Eric was by far the most prominent. The tales said he was immortal, said he had stumbled upon some old pre-war tech that made him something more, something better than any human or mutant that wandered the wastes. My grandpa and my parents always downplayed the stories I heard from traders and their guards, but I didn't believe even what my family told me. As it turned out, the traders weren't that far off.

But I suppose I should explain a bit more.

My name is Cielidh, pronounced Kay-lee, and I live in a world that is the aftermath of a nuclear war.

Five hundred years before my grandfather was born, the world was at a technological high point. Man had conquered everything that was left on this planet, colonizing even the depths of the ocean. A collective of world powers came together and began working on colonizing the Moon, and eventually Mars. Small scientific colonies had been established and in use for years for decades on both places, but this project was going to be on a much larger scale, calling for a city-sized colony first on the Moon, and then on Mars, to eventually become part of a new planetary nation.

At least, that was the plan.

The Moon Colony was built, and from there the construction on Mars began. Something there didn't like us doing that, I guess; within a few weeks of construction some of the workers started to have breakdowns, claiming images of horrible creatures were haunting their dreams and waking hours. The governments denied any such thing, saying it was just stress from the longer Martian day combined with the lighter gravity causing slight imbalances in their body chemistry as the real problem. But the problems only got worse.

There were military personnel at the colony as well, and one day the entire contingent of Marines from what had been the North American Alliance went berserk, killing all other military personnel in the garrison. From there they proceeded to slaughter the entire population of engineers, and even managed to kill a few people from the small research colonies before the scientists could escape. Earth lost contact with Mars, and telescopes caught sight of explosions in the colony; the Marines in their destructive fury had breached the core of the nuclear power plant there and caused a meltdown that destroyed the entire colony.

The collective of governments split up after that, the European Conglomerate and the New Empire of Russia suddenly on hostile terms with the North American Alliance despite the amounts of political damage control put into effect. Tensions were high, but everyone assumed the worst was over. The scientists went back to their respective nations, and each world power concentrated more on staking claim to territory on the Moon.

Whatever madness had claimed the Marines on Mars began to affect the scientists that had managed to escape, and soon afterwards the first nukes were launched.

Nuclear war had been a quiet fear since the middle of the Twentieth Century, and out of fear of a nuclear winter governments began to develop better bombs. By this time they had developed a bomb that caused the same amount of destruction but produced very little fallout and even less debris to clog the atmosphere and block the sun.

When I finally met my uncle he said to me that reducing the backlash only makes someone less likely to think before they use a weapon. I suppose, in terms of the war, that he had quite a point.

Only a single nuke was launched at first, but the response was like a string of dominoes as every nuclear nation launched everything they had. History labeled it the Great War; we say it was when the world went insane. Cities were destroyed, billions of people were killed, and the very geography of the world was changed. A lot of the ice caps were vaporized from some poorly targeted missiles, and the heat melted what was left; the seas rose and claimed millions o square miles of coastline around the world. The destruction was so thorough that mountains were flattened in some places, and tectonic reactions caused volcanic activity all around the Pacific Rim; islands sank and rose, a good chunk of what had been the United States was suddenly separated from the continent by a wide gulf, and the West Indies was transformed from a massive island chain into a new landmass that connected Australia to the mainland Asia.

What was left of the world was a sprawling mass of destruction that came to be known as the Wasteland to those that still survived.

Even though there wasn't much fallout, what was there made its mark. Two races of mutants rose from the ashes of the decimated human population. One race was massive in size, veritable giants in comparison to we Norms, as humanity's survivors are called. These mutants were called Ogres and Trolls after old fairy tale creatures, because of their great size and strength, as well as the fact that the average Ogre was far below a regular human on the intellectual scale.

The second race we called Vampires, but only because they couldn't stand exposure to sunlight. The Vampires were the descendants of people who fled to certain underground radiation shelters. These shelters hadn't been as well built as was originally thought, and some radiation seeped into their food supplies and water. Their eyes and skin were affected in subtle ways, ending up with the entire population of these shelters being unable to withstand the amount of ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. Where a human's skin would redden and become sore from long exposure to sunlight, a Vampire's would immediately begin to blister and crack, the cells violently rupturing from ultraviolet exposure. We found though, that any wound aside ultraviolet exposure healed incredibly fast; even a close-range gunshot wound would close within minutes.

Of course, those two weren't the only aberrations to emerge in the aftermath.

Every government was carrying out experiments to create a better soldier. I don't know what sort of monstrosities the other nations came up with, but ours wasn't far off from simply creating a better species than humans. The North American Alliance had been experimenting with splicing human DNA with that of animals; Uncle Eric said it was called the Moreau Project, after a fictional scientist from a prewar book. After he provided me with a summary of the story, I decided it was a bit aptly named.

We began to call these creatures Weres, again after monsters of fairy tale and superstition from ages before the war. For the most part the Weres were more human than anyone wanted to give them credit, but some, some were enough to spoil the world for the rest. Most Weres were good people, wanting nothing more than to be accepted, but for every ten good specimens there was one Were who gave in to their base instincts, reveling in animal savagery as only something with a human mind can. People didn't want to admit that it was the human side that made them so evil, and blamed the entire race for the sins of a few. Aside from a few slaves here and there, you won't see Weres in any community save for the small ones scattered through the worst parts of the Waste.

The world eventually recovered, but nothing was really the same. For the most part it's just a loose collection of independent city-states, but some of the places here in North America that took the most damage have joined together in a reflection of the old government. Uncle Eric says that what used to be the west coast of the United States had declared itself a sovereign nation, and the east coast has been conquered by a military government they call the Noram Union. Those of us in between don't really care; we're left to ourselves and most of us prefer it that way.

Most of us in the Waste make out living through salvage and trading. That's the trade my uncle took up, and it's the trade he's teaching me. My parents don't approve, but my grandfather convinced them to let me go. According to him, if I'm not safe with Uncle Eric, I'm not safe staying home.

That's the story of our world as it is now. I guess the next step would be to tell you my uncle's story, but that will now have to wait for another time.