The Resort

The Last Resort News Report is a newsletter for a small post-apocalyptic commune in the far north of New Zealand. Originally a luxury beach and golf resort, it has now been heavily fortified, and the eighteen holes of the golf course have been turned into eighteen plots of intensive permaculture. Regular patrols and fortifications keep the resort itself reasonably safe, allowing the diverse population behind the walls to relax a little and do their best to have a pleasant end of the world.

The Apocalypse

After the publishing of an open-source method to easily create artificial lifeforms, dozens of new kinds of pets, from perfected versions of existing domestic species to unicorns, hippogriffs and catipedes, flooded the market. Though at first their perfect personalities and easy care seemed a blessing, society was unprepared for their sudden turn to violent predation. Now, species like Yorkshire terrors, minimammoths and pugranhas make the new wilderness a dangerous place to live, while the cities moulder into strange and deadly new environments. Only isolation and vigilance kept a few survivors safe, on offshore islands or defensible hilltops and peninsulas.

The Report

With the aid of an antique spirit duplicator, a bundle of sheets from an old tattoo parlour, a few bottles of high-test alcohol from the commune’s distillery, and a barely functional typewriter, the social committee puts together a biweekly report on everything relevant to the community, always with a relentlessly positive tone and an eye to keeping morale high. On off weeks, notes and documents from around the community are presented to fill in some of the details that might be left out of the Report.