Volume I - Episode 5 Where: Melbourne, Australia When: E-Day, 8:45 am Everybody loves a fire. I watched the flames rising over the tree tops for a good while before walking back down the driveway to my unit. The other units were dark and silent. The silence was very unnerving. I'm a guy who likes his solitude - but this wasn't natural. Truth be told, it felt all kinds of wrong. I checked my phone - no messages - and hopped onto the computer again. I figured there had to be something on the Net explaining what the hell was going on. Some hint. Anything. I kept thinking maybe there had been an emergency evacuation overnight that I'd missed somehow. Hell, I wasn't exactly one for keeping up with the current news; it wouldn't have surprised me one bit if I'd somehow missed a massive tsunami alert or something. Or a volcano erupting in the middle of Melbourne. Or even little green men come to stick strange probes up our bums. A quick check of the local news websites yielded nothing interesting. The major headline was some crap about the latest scandal in Aussie Rules Football. Apparently some team's star player (whose name means as little to me now as it did back then) had been caught in a compromising position with a lady of the night. OH THE SCANDAL!! The media had been going nuts about it for days. Like football players (or any other living, breathing human male) had never been to a prostitute before...puh-leease!!! Okay, so I wasn't exactly a big sports fan. But even at the best of times, this was yesterday's news. And when I noticed the time stamps of the articles on the website, I realised just how true that observation was. All of the news stories were from the previous day. There was nothing for the 6th of August. Not one thing. "Hmmm." Having decided that the local news sites were useless, I tried to think of some international news websites to check. The only one I could think off was CNN, so I logged onto cnn.com. At first I only noticed the headline: something about the latest dreadful thing President Obama had done. But then I noticed the "BREAKING NEWS" box above the Obama headline. In big, red, bold letters, it seemed to scream out at me.

BREAKING NEWS Contact lost with Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China, and Russia since midnight local time. More countries may be affected. Communications experts baffled. Whitehouse has called an emergency press conference for 8pm EST. More details as they come to hand.

Contact lost? What the hell did that mean? Suddenly I found myself echoing the question I'd seen floating around the game chat rooms a little while earlier: "Does anybody know what's going on?" First published: Saturday, 1 May 2010 Credits: Rodan by Jepe Topmodel Kit 3 Underwear by outoftouch, Bice, ilona Pants from DAZ3D Character rendered in Poser Pro Background photography by me Composited and postwork in Photoshop CS5 Extended (brand spankin' new!) Notes: I just bought Photoshop CS5 Extended last night! I can't wait to play with all of its new features. Colour me excited. :)