*
We sat in a giant theatre that was fitted with around 300 seats.
There was a platform in front of the general terrace seating where a large table was set, its wooden surface glistening under the lights on the ceiling; light bulbs.
I sat in one of the seats alongside my fellow Invigorated at the front-most row, on my left Nicholas and Paul on my right.
The rest were strewn about in the first row, including others from different Safe Zones.
Sitting at the large table were seven individuals including the Commander of Safe Zone 1.
A large grey projector was to the side, being operated by a beauty with orange shoulder-length hair and large round-rimmed glasses. She wore a white blouse and jeans along with a pair of converse tennis shoes.
It only took a minute for her to finish and stand beside the large table and begin to address us.
"Welcome to Safe Zone 1, everyone. I am Rena. I'll be starting off this General Meeting.
We have several matters to discuss and I'm happy that representatives of all Safe Zones are here.
For the sake of accommodating newcomers I'll introduce the Panel members and their respective fields," Rena said.
She turned to the figures seated at the table and began introducing them by order.
"This is Mr Floyd Newman, Head of Safe Zone Security and Human Resources," she pointed at a short and stout man with dark hair.
"Mrs Regina Williams, Head of Food Security and Social Welfare," Rena indicated towards an African American woman with a slim figure.
"Mr Ivan Karmov and Mr Alexander Benot in charge of Information, Communication & Technology and Weapon Production respectively," she indicated to a Russian man with a burly figure and a bald Caucasian man with an intense gaze.
"Mr Wang Zhen in charge of Energy and Power development as well as Miss Sarah Swan, in charge of Agriculture," she pointed at an elderly Chinese man and a lady with leather black hair.
"Last but not least, is our Commander, Mr Thomas Ledston.
These people are the Panel, chosen to make decisions on humanity's behalf. Collectively they have the final say on matters of grand scales," said Rena as she finished her introduction. "I will now leave this time for Mr Newman to start us off."
The stout man stood and faced us with a solemn gaze.
"Allow me to welcome everyone. We decided to have this meeting after the rescue operation a few hours ago to bundle up all the matters we need to discuss," he said as he took a deep breath.
Bro, please don't add to the tension.
"Three months ago, we set out to protect the remainder of humanity, building walls around Safe Zones and accommodating the survivors.
It was hard but here we are. We have survived and we are the last hope of humanity.
However, we have faced a few problems, one of which lies with innate abilities."
Hmm? Innate abilities have a problem?
It's in times like these that I remember that I'm basically 2 weeks old (to post-apocalypse information).
"When innate abilities were introduced, Mother Earth took into account the passions ignited from our happy thoughts and fashioned them into abilities.
However, as she said. It wasn't perfect.
Of the roughly six hundred Invigorated, most have similar abilities of limited capacity, usually to do with family, entertainment and occupations," he said.
"If you recall, the strength of innate abilities is linked to how much passion you expressed during the apocalypse. Not the will to live.
The problem we face now is that for most people, their happy thoughts were of family or their jobs or childhood, some of which couldn't be fashioned into strong innate abilities.
For most they lacked passion, having more of longing or missing what they had lost.
We have a severe lack of strong firepower. Sadly, it is impossible to create more Invigorated but we can improve the already existing ones, through two criteria.
Training and Technology."
Fascinating.
This meant that the more you displayed a raw passion for your happy thought you'd be able to awaken a strong innate ability.
Take me for instance. I awakened Gamble because my mind remained rooted in the fact that I wanted to make my Gamble have a meaning. I had the passion for my craft which helped me make life better for my family.
For most people, in tragic situations they find themselves thinking along the lines of 'My life might have been shitty, but it's better than this' or 'My family wasn't the best but I miss them' which isn't passion but a feeling of longing.
It does not display what makes us most happy but makes us choose the less painful alternative.
And people like this were a majority among the Invigorated. Those whose happy thoughts were actually just them wishing for a family that they didn't care about that much before the apocalypse or the next best thing.
This gave birth to useless abilities.
Mother Earth told us that her criteria worked on raw passion. If passion wasn't there, either people would be rejected by the life energy or the aforementioned would happen.
"For the training aspect, it's what we've been doing all along, training you in the use of innate abilities.
For technology, we have some completed projects that we wish to announce and distribute to all Safe Zones.
I'll live this to Mr Karmov to elaborate," said Mr Newman as he sat down.
The Russian man stood up from his seat and cleared his throat.
"Most of you must know by now that we have had communication challenges since the apocalypse. Our enemy has the ability to disrupt radio waves all over the globe and thus wireless communication has been rendered meaningless.
Using old network systems is inconvenient over long distances and we've had to resort to using Invigorated who have abilities related to technology to communicate all this time.
Since even the Safe Zones aren't capable of restoring the disrupted radio waves and special frequencies, we had to develop a new communication system.
We call it the Instantaneous Radio Frequency Transmitter," he said.
Rena operated the projector and had it show an image of what looked like a black music box with two aerials sticking from it. It did not have any excess designs except a small panel in the middle.
"This device solves the bulk of our problem.
It functions similarly to a walkie talkie. It sends a powerful signal over from one of these to another.
The difference it has with other devices we've invented over the years is that the user has to send one short message which will then be transmitted with the signal through the turbulence in the atmosphere.
It took a great deal of work to produce a radio signal strong enough to not be disrupted, however, it only works on short distances.
The premise is that the distance has to be short enough otherwise, despite its strength the signal will still be nullified," said Mr Karmov.
Great! I had no idea what he said, but I was glad that we had a solution. A short-range solution.
It had bothered me why we could not use comms on the battlefield, but my questions had been answered.
Though it instilled fear in me on what kind of thing we were dealing with that effectively disabled everything on Earth.
For important inter Safe Zone communication, a special drone was used to deliver electronic messages, but it usually took time. It was still better than nothing.
Mr Karmov went on to describe how the Transmitter worked and the custom earpieces made along with it.
He then left time for the bald dude who was in charge of Weapon Production to also introduce the new weaponry that they had devised.
"Our department has been in process of producing more effective weaponry against Stragglers, particularly Grade As.
We finally made a breakthrough and are just finishing up on mass-producing our new models for all the Zones," he said and then prompted Rena to show the model.
What appeared was a gun similar to the SIG550 assault rifles we had been using. The only difference was that it was larger and its ammunition was .... unique.
It was like we were going to be firing large shells from rifles.
"As you can see, we've modified the prevalent assault rifles and made them more accommodative of the new rounds of ammunition.
They are heavier but believe me, they sure as hell work wonders. We've noted the difficulty of taking down Grade As as mostly being in their tough skin or hides. This weapon solves that problem as it can fire the new Crazy Utility Armour Piercing rounds at high enough speeds to deal massive damage.
With this, we should stand a better chance in our fight.
Also..." he promoted Rena again and the image shifted to show a marvellous black combat suit.
It had a metallic collar that covered all the way up the jaw. The fabric was drastically different from the ones we used.
At least 80 per cent of the suit was covered in slim slates of a gleaming silver alloy except for the joints. It looked bulkier than our current suit but I could see that a lot of effort was put in to make it a whole lot lighter than it looked.
"This is our latest combat suit model. We call it the Kinetic Super Charge.
The suit was made with the help of the technological department. The fabric has mini electronic plates within it that absorb impacts and convert the kinetic energy into electrical energy for the suit.
On its own, the suit can improve your physical attributes, though only by a little bit.
When you have enough charge, you can improve the performance of the suit significantly.
We burned through a lot of resources to make this suit, so I hope that they will be put to good use," Mr Alexander said as he gave an almost threatening gaze to us all.
I was so hyped when I saw that suit. It felt wrong to be happy about it, but just for a moment all I thought about was donning that suit and heading to war!
Mr Karmov sat down and Mr Newman stood again.
"With that out of the way, we must now discuss the latest developments.
The strange blob of flesh identified by Our team and the attack on Safe Zone 4," he said.