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Simon turned the dial on the portable hand crank radio as he walked, hoping against hope that he would find something on the other end of it that wasn’t empty static — an emergency broadcast, a music station, anything, really — but he got nothing… Just as he had the day before and the day before that and the day before that and so on.
He stopped walking and glanced around the ruined city with an anxious huff, reluctantly taking in the sight of the damaged buildings that looked as if they’d jumped straight out of a post-apocalyptic horror film. He scoffed at that: at the comparison of his current reality to that of fiction, but it was hard not to make said comparison standing where he was now. It had been months since the bombs had gone off and he hadn’t seen a single person since. Everything with a pulse sans himself was just gone. Poof. No longer existed. It was almost as if the magic that protected him had sent him to another dimension entirely.
In the first couple of weeks following the bombs he was sure that there were others like him who’d managed to survive the blasts and that they were just hiding, afraid to come out and risk exposure to possible radiation, but the longer things went on for the more he started to doubt that, as there were no signs of human life anywhere, just empty streets and hot glowing air that he did his very best to avoid in his bi-weekly pursuit of supplies.
He started walking again and began to mess with the radio some more, muttering a few nasty curses under his breath when he once again found nothing. Feeling his agitation with the damned thing start to grow even more, he quickly shoved it into his bag before he did something stupid like fling it. Just because it wasn’t getting a signal now didn’t mean that it wouldn’t tomorrow, and so he needed to avoid breaking it in a fit of impatient rage.
He needed human interaction, or at least something akin to it in nature, as the lack of it in combination with the crown hanging from his hip was doing horrible things to not only his mood, but his personality, it seemed. He found himself growing increasingly temperamental with even the smallest of inconveniences and it worried him to no end that said change might be becoming permanent the longer he went on like this, but what could he possibly do about it? Make up a friend to talk and vent his frustrations to?
He paused his walking once more.
That… That wasn’t that bad of an idea and it wasn’t actually that different from what he’d been doing with his video diaries, was it?
He quickly shook his head.
No, no, no! If he started playing make believe, especially with how the crown constantly whispered to him and made him see shit that wasn't there even when he wasn’t wearing it, he feared that he might lose touch with reality entirely, and then what? Social interaction would be the least of his worries if he allowed himself to go down that specific rabbit hole. Instead, he needed to double down on his efforts to find other people, perhaps even start a written diary to make up for the fact that he’d run out of empty tapes to record on a month or so back.
“Yeah, that's a great idea,” he told himself as he adjusted his backpack. “I don’t have a notebook to start one in right now, but I’m sure I could find one around here somewhere.”
Surely the nonexistent populace wouldn’t miss a notebook or two if he were to snatch one from one of the many abandoned stores in the area, right? Yes, stealing was wrong, but he also doubted that him yoinking a notebook of all things would be one of the many things any fellow survivors would have any concerns about if they were to find out about it or catch him in the act.
With his new goal in mind Simon quickly changed his current objective from locating canned goods to finding writing supplies, not noticing the muffled sound of a voice cutting through the static of his radio in his bag over the sound of his own humming.