You stumble after your rescuer, not sure whether to curse or bless your soggy, frigid boots as you trudge through the dirty snow. You leave the clearing, happy to get away from the river, and cross back into the loblolly forest, the freezing rain making the journey incredibly uncomfortable. Then the forest you are traveling through thickens into a deep cypress wood, dark and damp and quiet. Something crunches beneath your boot- a pile of stark bones and rancid fur, the corpse of what appears to be a deer. It looks up at you and whispers death, until she catches you staring at the bones, and seeing something in your face, gently pulls you away. 

"So, survivor," she says, her voice mixing with the muffled rain. "Do you have a name I can use? Or should I stick to survivor?" You bite your lip and look away, mumbling something to yourself. "Okay, I understand," she says. "You can call me Ivy." The name catches something in your mind- you sit down at your desk, in your room, at a laptop opening a coding platform. Your little sister bangs open the door and demands you come play with her. "I'm busy, Ivy," you say, and then you stand up from the desk and stare at this woman who is not your little sister. She is wearing a thick yellow plaid jacket, heavy snow pants, and for some reason, in the midst of this madness, pink cat ears. She gives you a patient yet concerned look at your stare, then you shrug and keep walking. Thunder rolls in the distance. 

Soon you find yourself in a larger clearing on the side of a hill. An old, rotting, half-collapsed mansion-like building lays slumped on the hill like a broken body, and nearby, the source of the river you fell into earlier feeds a gristmill that seems inexplicably intact. Despite seeming burned, partially rebuilt, draped with tarps and left to languish like a drunken man in a ditch for decades, the shelter seems warm and inviting. The brick and stone parts of the building seem mostly intact, if not a little scorched. 

Ivy gives a theatrical curtsy and opens the door, and you enter, something like a puzzled smile emerging on your face. Inside, the place is lit with Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling like stars, some walls made of plywood with blankets hanging out of the edges, others of scratched up and graffiti'd drywall, yet others of concrete blocks stacked up without mortar. The floor is vinyl hardwood, except where it has been torn open in a corner away from flammables and replaced with tiles to house a small burnt-out fireplace. The entire room reminds you of a pillow fort, hot and stuffy and heaven to your frozen corpse of a body. You collapse on a torn-up couch, thinking you will never move again, until Ivy opens a window and builds a fire, and then you huddle up to that, reveling in the warmth that dries your clothes and lifts your spirits. 

Ivy disappears into a doorway and returns a few seconds later with a blanket, a bandage, two bottles of water, and a pair of MREs. "Whoever lived here was smart enough to prepare for the apocalypse, but they weren't smart enough to work with each other, judging by the two corpses with gunshot wounds I discovered when I first found this place,” she says, washing the dried blood off her hand and bandaging it. You shiver involuntarily, another memory trying to claw its way to the surface. Glancing briefly at Ivy with a smile, you banish the memory, then accept the food. You're not sure what you survived on all those years at Winslow High... impressions of maddened clawing through cardboard boxes stacked in the cafeteria storeroom assault you as you peel open and eat the stale MRE. You quietly ask why Ivy's brought you here. She hesitates, confused. "Because you're alive, and living people should stick together," she recites blandly. Unimpressed, you ask the real reason, and she sighs. "Look, you've been through a lot today. Are you sure you wanna talk about this right now?" You say you have nothing better to do. "I want to get revenge on Mono," she admits. "We thought they wiped themselves out, the bombs were stronger than anyone could have anticipated, but their top people are still alive in a bunker, somewhere, monitoring what's left of the internet. I got a tip from a friend somewhere else that they had found a survivor in a school near where I live by hacking into Mono's camera systems. What's left of Mono bombed him a few minutes ago, he's dead." She looks... scared. Sad. You say maybe she's been through a lot more than you have, then ask about internet. "Yeah, this is the only safe house I've found with a working router. Some of the satellites up there still work, so I get internet every couple of hours."

You ask for your backpack back, and she hands the damp bag to you. You unzip it and pull out the laptop- the crappy piece of garbage won't turn on. Short circuited, water damage, something else- you don't know what but it won't turn on. You sigh and toss it into a corner. "Are you... okay?", Ivy says. You respond noncommittally, saying you had an idea but the laptop's broken. "Are you a coder or a hacker or something", Ivy asks. Images flash before your eyes, video games you modded or hacked for fun, endless nights hunched over lines of code in an interface, stealing money from people's bank accounts when you didn't want to work for it honestly. You're not a good person... but you are a pretty good hacker. So you nod in response. Ivy's face lights up like... well, like the Christmas lights hanging from the ceiling. "Ha! Oreo was right! You are that one guy from Winslow High, the one who got arrested.” You shake and bite your lip again, not wanting to think about it, and change the subject by commenting on the name she mentioned. "Oreo? Oh, he's uh, he's the guy I was talking about. The one that found you. He said his name was Orion but I think that's stupid so I called him Oreo. He was working on hacking into Mono's satellites, and said that if I found you, you might be able to help. He actually sent me some of his code, before... you know. But we could find them and kill them, maybe if we post their coordinates online we can get other survivors to help!" She seems excited, like she's trying to distract herself, and waits for your response.