Mid February
Rose Eternalgarden changed their name to Queen of the US of A
Queen of the US of A) fuck yeah I’m back!
Lily the fanatic) Oh thank god Rose. We were all getting worried after you disappeared for three months.
Queen of the US of A) ahh yeah sorry about that. :sadbun
I’ve been quite busy these past months, you know with all the rioting going on in America.
Mamabear) it’s good to know that you’re safe. We lost contact with far too many people last year.
Queen of the US of A) now that the new leadership is in America can begin repairing itself so things will be getting better here at least.
Lily the fanatic) well at least the new American leaders are all young and progressive. If there was one good thing about last year it was that it got rid of all the turtle heads running the senate
Queen of the US of A) yeah screw the turtle heads! Especially the one that had those creepy smiles. *shudders*
Mamabear) America certainly has gone leaps and bounds. Just look at who they’ve got as house majority leader.
Lily the fanatic) oh my god. She’s smart, clever and gorgeous. She was a top athlete and competed in the track and field nationals. She had a doctorate in commerce and she is beautiful.
Mamabear) I was meaning how she was trans.. Get your head out of the gutter lily. :smugbun
Queen of the US of A) whilst I enjoy the compliments that is just a bit slightly creepy lily.
Lily the fanatic) huh?
Mamabear) what?
Miss C mistress of madness) you’re Rebecca stone? That would explain a lot.
Queen of the US of A) ahhh you’re here Charlotte. :hug and yes It is I Rebecca Stone current leader of the house and Future benevolent Queen of the US of A.
Everyone) :head slap
Lily the fanatic) ummmmm…. could you please ignore what I said earlier?
Queen of the US of A) definitely not, this ones being used as blackmail for later :smugbun
Mamabear sends a head slapping gif
Queen of the US of A) oh yeah why’d you change your name Charlotte. I really enjoyed “the mistress of yuri.”
Miss C mistress of madness) for I have ascended into the ranks of the greatest minds of history. For I am now a mad scientist! Nice deflection by the way, but it won’t work. Because you seem to have not mentioned the fact that you got shot in the shoulder on stage. Nor did you mention the two other assassination plots. When @Mamabear said to stay safe in the new year, being under armed guard was not what she had in mind.
Queen of the US of A) yes mistress!
Miss C mistress of madness) :bonkstick
Mamabear) good heavens you two get a room. Also @Queen of the Us of A#6969. Don’t worry for now I won’t yell at you. I’m not even angry.
I’m just disappointed
Lily the fanatic) that’s way worse.
Mamabear) lily Dms now!
Queen of the US of A) well that was a thing .
Miss c mistress of madness) yeah. Yeah it was
Queen of the US of A) so what was this about being a mad scientist?
Miss c mistress of madness sends a gif titled muhahahahahaha cough cough
“Hahahaha” Charlotte bursts out onto the floor a laughing wreck. She’d definitely missed Rose, or was it queen or Rebecca? Well it didn’t really matter she’d missed her all the same. There’s no one else like her in the world, or at least for Charlotte that was.
Charlotte smiled faintly. She found it funny that, even as the ash fell, as crops withered and as society fell apart she somehow felt the world wasn’t so unbearable. Or at least bearable enough to smile once in a while. Of course Rebecca was the icing on the cake. She was somehow always able to say the stupidest things and grin it away.
Queen of the US of A) you seem better though Charlotte, did something happen?
Miss c mistress of madness) yeah. You know how water prices have been rising? Well I needed that money to go towards meds and food. so I made a water distillery
Queen of the US of A) wow. Congratulations first of all and second of all I now understand the mad scientists label.
Miss c mistress of madness) and that’s not all. Next I’m going to create my own indoor Garden. Soon I will be walking in the footsteps of God himself. I will create LIFE
Queen of the US of A) hold up, hold up. You’re doing what. Do you realise how much of an undertaking it will be to build a greenhouse, find and install lights and to find dirt and water that isn’t contaminated with… well contaminants?
Miss c mistress of madness) I have plans to overcome all the challenges that stand in the path of my true brilliance muhahahah
Queen of the US of A) just stay safe
Miss c mistress of madness) I will. You stay safe too, I don’t want to hear of anymore assassination attempts. Also no coups, carrot heads and definitely no callus’s.
Queen of the US of A) ok from here on in all assassination and coup attempts will not be publicizised from here on out. We will also employ a policy of profiling carrot and turtle heads. :wink
Miss c mistress of madness)
The next day came around and Charlotte was ready to start on the next stage of her project. Up next was building a greenhouse. Charlotte didn’t have enough land inside her house to grow enough for her to eat. So she needed to build a place to grow food that would be warm and would be sheltered from the outside conditions.
What to make the greenhouse out of was quite a big decision. Charlotte had to scavenge to get all the materials meaning building the entire thing out of metal or wood would be time consuming and difficult. Additionally building it out of glass like how conventional greenhouses were built was pointless as there was little to no sunlight for the plants. The entire room would have to be lit up with LEDs.
This is what influenced Charlotte's design for the greenhouse. This led to the final unconventional design. The structure would start with a Sunken floor. This would be the base of the design. Then over the top of it a tent like roof would be made to maximise the stability of the structure. The center of the structure would be held up with metal supports. It would form into a gently sloped triangle which would mean it wouldn’t break under the weight of the ash and snow. Dirt could also be piled on top to minimise the amount of radiation getting in.
The roof itself would be made with scavenged wood inside supports and with hard plastic outside that would be strong against possible acid rain. The bracing would have insulation put inside it with a soft inner material. This would make it easy to attach things to the roof such as alfoil. It would take a lot of work not to mention material but that alfoil would serve as a reflective surface capable of keeping the artificial light in and on the plants. She would definitely need a lot more equipment though if she was going to get this built.
$150 poorer and she managed to buy everything she needed. For it she purchased the bags of cement, gravel, turbostatic Graphene and artificially pulverised sand along with nails, screws, drills and other building tools. Now all she needed to get was the building materials and the “fun” could begin.
The scrap yard
This time Charlotte required a few things. She required a small enough metal pole say about 4cm in diameter. It had to be fairly tall
reaching about 3 and a half meters. She needed wood slats to make the roof inner bracing along with the hard plastic shell.
The hard plastic shell was a rather easy endeavour. A large majority of off road vehicles tended to have similar mats in the boot of the car. They were likely put in to stop dirt and to protect the cars from sharp or heavy tools. Nevertheless this made them less flexible and more resilient to tearing. All it took was to gather up a dozen of the large ones onto the trolley that she had found to aid in the water carrying. One trip home and back and she was ready to find more. The search ended quickly when she happened upon some old galvanised steel flag poles. They were about 6 meters tall by 8cm in diameter making them too big to transport and too wide for the building.
It took a while but she eventually happened upon some building supports which fit the bill. They were square polls which came up at half the required height but they could be bolted together to reach the proposed height. Thankfully these would fit in her trolley however they were so heavy that she had to take them one at a time as the poor supermarket trolley had great deal of difficulty bearing the load of any more then one.
This just left the last requirements. The wooden supports. This would prove difficult to find as the scrapyard didn’t carry wood. The wood was instead sourced from the suburbs. Left alone on the streets for a few months were arrays of cupboards, sofas and other types of furniture. The council hadn’t been by to clean it up so it was ripe for the taking. For Charlotte this meant old build yourself furniture could be cut to size whilst the old mattresses could be pulled apart for the memory foam to use for insulation.
With all the building components assembled she could finally start construction of the greenhouse. So it was time to start digging. Over the course of two weeks she dug out a rectangle in the ground. The topsoil approximately 10cm deep was removed and put into large plastic bags. This was because the ash could likely contain quantities of hazardous materials. They were potentially hazardous as there could be any type of chemical, biological or radioactive wastes lying in those ashes. The ash and topsoil was then dumped a fair bit away from the suburbs.
On the topic of fallout, the Southern Hemisphere wasn’t as affected by the radioactive fallout, as all the occasions where radioactive bombs were used on the surface. This meant there was minimal spread via wind. The downside of this was that the fallout was much deadlier than if the bombs exploded in the air. The other worrying point is that additional reactors might have been destroyed in the subsequent time after the blast. There were a few reactors in Paris which might have been destroyed in the blast. This could leave even more potential radioactive waste was made on the night of the red sun.
however for the moment it meant there was hardly any radioactive fallout in the Southern Hemisphere especially Australia as the closest bomb was Beijing, which used an experimental fusion bomb that didn’t use a primary fission core. That didn’t mean though that you shouldn’t remove the top soil for safety. The ash could contain a million other potentially deadly contaminants.
From there the rectangle was dug deeper by about half a meter, and stairs were made into the submerged floor. This dirt was then stored for later gardening use. She then got a bunch of rubble made up of bricks, broken concrete, rocks and gravel and cemented it all onto the walls of the hole. This would serve as a retaining wall and would stop any overflow from the outside dirt. From there she assembled the metal supports, only to find they were hollow with the exception of the base plates. This gave her a great idea and so she got some more of the supports put them in place by digging deeper into the ground and cementing them in place. However before she bolted the top connecting supports, she punched a whole in the base plates. This would allow the concrete mixture to be poured from the top down. This meant she didn’t even need to make any other supports allowing her to move on. She then used up the last of the concrete mixture to make the floor and stairs up out of it.
Early March
The base was finished. It took weeks of hard work both on her days off but it was finally complete. The walls and floors had finally set and it was time to build the actual roof of the greenhouse. The design meant now that the support poles were up, all Charlotte had to do was to cut the wood to size and create the two large roof panels. These would then be left on the supports and would form a strong resistant triangle based roof. So she got to work. First she cut the large rectangular outsides that would make up the shape. Next up was the diagonal pieces through the center to retain rigidity. Further cross bracing was also added to places that might need it. The outer layer of hard plastic was then nailed on top, leaving it ready to be mounted.
After about a week of work she had put together the roof ready to be assembled. She maneuvered the first piece onto the edge of the submerged retaining wall under the hazy artificial light coming from her work lamps. Looking around she grabbed one of the unused pieces of furniture she found. It was a tall desk that she had kept because it might prove useful. In this case. In this case it did prove useful as she maneuvered it onto the sunken floor. She then grabbed the roof and with all her strength rested part of the roof onto the table.
From here she would have to lift the entire roof up onto its support whilst making sure it didn’t fall into the submerged pit. For this she got a car jack and some other pieces of junk wood to hold the piece up on the other side. Slowly jacking it up from the middle she was able to get it until it rested itself on the metal supports. Pilot holes were then drilled through the wood and metal. These would allow the self tapping screws to properly embed themselves in the material. They were screwed in then metal bracings were added to the top to secure the roof panels together.
Following an excruciating day of lifting and screwing into place the roof it was at the very least partially done. Now over the top of the submerged floor was the tent shaped roof. It would keep the ash out mostly, however the front and back had to be worked on. In the case of the back a small wall could be made with limited amounts of cement, dirt, rubble and plastic. The front however needed a door. She wouldn’t be able to install wooden door nor anything on hinges. Instead charlotte may or may not have snuck into the soon to be closed butcher across town to ask if she could get the doorway plastic drapes. They were very good as keeping out the heat so they should be fine working the other way around.
March 18th
It took a while but the greenhouse had been completed. It was now fully insulated and blocked off from the outside cold and from the ash. She would have to pile a fin layer of dirt onto the roof and she would have to install all the equipment for growing food, but that was a chore for later. For now Charlotte deserved a break. A long relaxing break. A break she couldn’t afford however, because March 18th was the first recorded radioactive fallout event recorded in Queensland. And it brought with it many challenges on how to keep safe. Not to mention in this dark ash covered world winter is coming.
