[u] Thomas[/u]

It was always good to feel people listened to my ideas. Makes me feel accomplished. I was more than happy when I saw people passing around a book in which to write our names and whatever we were good at. While the list was going around, other people started to speak up as well. A young woman, not much more than a teen in my eyes started speaking about tribes and midwives. Talking about creating children. [i]Dear goodness[/i], I thought to myself ,[i] if things had gone any other way, I might be teaching a girl like her at school now...[/i] Hearing a woman her age talk about that... It made me feel quite uneasy. For the first time, it hit me how far this entire situation had crossed the boundaries of my comfort zone. Of anyone's comfort zone. This was an actual post-apocalypse. These were people banding together in order to survive, just like all those movies I'd seen. [i]Luckily, there aren't any intelligent monkeys around[/i], I thought to myself.

When the book reached me, I filled in the information it required:

[i]Name: Thomas
Skills: 
plumbing (installing boilers, heaters, waterways)
basic metalwork: (welding, soldering)
knowledgeable in exercise and physiology
shooting
patrolling
camouflaging and hiding
[s]planning and organizing[/s][/i]

Wasn't too big a list, but then again, I wanted to be sure I really could do the things I wrote down well enough. I might had added some more, but I wasn't too comfortable about those. It was the same reason why I removed some of the things I wrote down again. I wasn't too bad at planning stuff out, creating lists, coming up with schedules, but then again, anyone could do that and, well, I was horrible at keeping to those things. While adding to the list, it really struck me how little of all the things I had learned were useful at this moment. Some part of me felt like I had wasted my whole life, spending on theoretical studies. All those hours reading philosophical treatises and learning history books by heart. It all seemed so useless.

I passed the book on to the next person and decided to start talking to someone. I needed to talk to someone, in order to get rid of my own thoughts. I saw Brownbeard and noticed that he had two dogs at his side. Dogs were a good topic to start a conversation about. I walked up to him and greeted his dogs by holding my hand in front of their noses. I knew that animals appreciated polite greetings, just like humans did and had been doing that same routine for many years. "Nice dogs you have," I said, looking up at the man, "my name is Thomas." I offered him my hand as well.