Marcus lay on the bed in the small room of the Vault that had been allocated 'his' for the last twenty years, thinking. It had been a long time, hadn't it? A long time both since he'd been able to just sit in quiet contemplation, but more pressingly a long time since he'd stepped foot into the open air. He longed to be able to feel sunlight, rather than cold sterile fluorescent lights, and to maybe feel some wind for the first time in a while.

 The lights dimmed; an announcement blared, and Marcus half-listened. He had friends in the upper workings as well as the engineering of the vault, and they'd had a vague idea that /something/ was going to happen. This was something. He stood and walked stiffly to the meeting hall, and arrived in a crowd of maybe fifty or a hundred people. 

Something something red-blooded Americans, basic tools, rebuild civilization, end speech. With any luck there were more than just this fifty people around to do it -- probably half of them had spent most of their life inside of this cramped nuclear shelter, and the other half had been teenagers or children when they'd gone in. Marcus was the eldest person in the room, by... Ten years, maybe? One or two people at least looked thirty or forty. 

The announcement died down and the lights shone once more on the rather pitiful crowd assembled. Marcus wondered what anyone's odds of surviving were. The announcement had said something about farming tools and water testers, but even if everyone was a master farmer, and even if the streams were clean and the rainwater wasn't acidic, that was still a good half a year before anything started to pay off. Idly, he wondered if there was enough food left for everyone to last that long. Marcus wasn't a farmer and he wasn't any sort of hunter of scavenger -- he was a lawyer and, recently, a teacher. 

Anyways, enough thinking. Things would work out or they wouldn't; there was no point stressing about it. Marcus stepped out of the doorway and into the crowd of the meeting hall, looking for a familiar face to discuss with -- one of his former students, maybe. A lot of them had been teenagers going into the vault and he'd taught them something at some point or another.