The Apocalypse YA2020 Non-writer entry in two posts, hopefully concurently.

The Apocalypse YA2020

My family moved to the valley a short time ago. When they came here I was just a spark in my Mother’s womb.
I was quite weak when I first arrived but soon I grew up strong and healthy.
The valley was a beautiful homeland. My parents came in from the north end and we settled in the far southern reaches of the valley. The valley was longer north to south and it was flanked by steep slopes east and west all the way up to the sky.
The sky was a dull white color and everywhere there were large pinkish colored clouds. The wind always blew in gentle rhythmic patterns. The air was warm and generally sweet smelling although there were times when very foul odors were carried in with the breeze. Usually these strange smells didn’t last long and the air would clear after a while.
The valley itself was a fertile land, it provided and excellent food source for our family and some of the other small family groups that migrated here with my parents. The land had rolling hills that seemed to go on forever and the earth was rich in nutrients for growing. The terrain was full of cracks and fissures that allowed the vapors of the earth to slowly percolate up through the ground into the perpetual winds.
We thrived living here, our family grew large and I had many brothers and sisters. The other family groups grew also and soon we were no longer a small band of homesteaders but a colony spreading out over the whole valley. Life was good and all were well fed and happy in our perfect community.
As our population increased the valley started to change. It was subtle at first but soon the changes were very apparent. The terrain was changing, the land was turning brown and black. The areas that were so fertile seemed to be drying up and the ground was becoming hard and was losing its vitality. No one understood what was happening but there was talk among the elders that our population increase was draining the land of all its nutrients and our waste was polluting the ground. The Younger members of the colony did not want to believe this and they felt something else was destroying the land. Many claimed it was due to climate change but the elders were not giving that theory any credence.
Then one day everything changed, the air temperature spiked and it felt like we were living in the tropics. The constant heat was taking its toll on the colony. Day after day there was no relief from the heat when suddenly a strange white substance started oozing up through the cracks and fissures in the land. It was a yellowish white color and it looked like a big blob of gelatinous mass. The substance was everywhere and when it got on someone’s body it slowly ate its way into all their bodily membranes and dissolved them from the inside out. Panic broke out among the colonists and the pathogen was rapidly killing us. The elders convened and studied the epidemic and through experimentation they figured out if we covered all our exterior body surfaces with a heavy coat the white substance could not penetrate through our skin. This information was passed through the whole colony, measures were initiated, and soon the epidemic was thwarted. It seemed once the pathogen could no longer infect the colony the stuff stopped oozing through the ground. The plague had killed about a third of the population. The elders never did come up with an explanation for what occurred. It became a mystery of the valley. The heat still persisted and we had to adapt to a hot sweltering climate with no reprieve in sight.


MOD EDIT
part two of the story is here
www.abovetopsecret.com...

cool valley...I like

I realized I read the second part before the first.... oops
As I said before the descriptions in your writing are perfectly placed...
I feel like these two parts could really be the start of a bigger story????

Good job zrexx!

a reply to: SupermassiveBlackHOLE

How do I keep these two post together?

a reply to: zrexx
You might have to talk to a mod and see if he can merge the threads for you... I doubt you would be disqualified
But they would almost certainly only allow you to count the stars and flags from one of the threads.
Im not sure to be honest buddy. Maybe talk to Gordi about it.

a reply to: SupermassiveBlackHOLE
Could you just have him merge them. I am more interested in the comments than the flags. This is a first attempt at writing.
Something I've wanted to do for years. I would just like to see members responses to see if they think it has merit.

Thanks for your help.