Melt raiders are beginning to return to the desert lands after the recent success of their campaigns elsewhere on the continent, and seem likely to run into considerable resistance from the various nomad tribes who've since taken up residence in the near-abandoned mutant camps and settlements. Despite the fact that those mutants returning are comparatively few in number, it's expected they will fight harder and longer than normally with Tomesha's hot season close at hand. In fact this is probably the main reason for their returning at all - scientists believe that the melt biology and physiology speeds up and increases in efficiency during cycles of hot weather; hence their preferred living conditions of desert and otherwise dry, arid terrain. In addition, it's believed that the mutants breed faster and more successfully in such environments, so as a result we may well be seeing lots of little mutants very soon in the future. And you all know what they say about mothers defending their babies. Mind you, knowing your average melt kid - a couple of stone of tusks, warts, tentacles, and disease - who needs a mother to worry people?

The sandstorm covering a good half or more of the province shows no immediate signs of ceasing, for the time being at least. Those few tourists currently here are, of course, bemoaning the fact that it never said anything about this in their holiday brochures and they didn't expect to spend their two weeks of sun'n'fun shacked up in a tent waiting for the desert to stop rearranging itself willy-nilly around them. Meanwhile the locals just sit there slurping at their strange so-called alcoholic drinks and act all inscrutable, even though it's not necessarily their cultural and racial right to do so. Behind all that, most of them are having a bloody good laugh whilst milking the dopey tourist and adventurer types for every shilling they can get.

The war between the Faylass and Dooska nomad tribes is reaching new heights as outright war has occurred in several instances; both sides are claiming heavy casualties being inflicted against their enemies whilst receiving surprisingly few themselves, which seems to be about the done thing in this kind of situation. As far as the various other tribal peoples are concerned, it's no real bother: somebody will win sooner or later, and, whatever the outcome, it'll mean a good sight fewer hungry mouths trying to scrounge a meagre living from the valley floor.

There's still no sign of the supposed 'miracle birth' that various of the desert shamen are expecting at any time now as a sign of a new era, a new beginning and age of contentment, peace, love and free contraceptives: apparently it's all to do with star alignments, weather conditions, natural omens and the amount of sand blowing under the tent flaps, but then you all know damn well how much cobblers your average shaman tends to come up with if there's a chance of a novelisation or biography in the offing. So, they're all just sitting round waiting for the first two-headed lizard to be born, in which event they'll claim they were right all along and then everyone will wonder what the hell all the fuss was about when said lizard proves to be a genetic defect that dies two minutes later.

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