[ WP ] Every planet with sentient life has a set growth limit . More info below

After the eruption, nothing was the same. 
 
 Of course, the news focused on the colossal loss of life in the region, the magma flowing, disaster zones to be evacuated. Not the ash, which was almost as it should be, but not quite. The ash made it over the earth, but seeing as no one felt they suffered any ill effects, only the conspiracy theorists, environmentalists, and the occasional angry politician made any big deal about the ash. 
 
 They should have listened. 
 
 The hospitals were the first to notice -- an unprecedented level of stillbirths, miscarriages, and psychosis in pregnant mothers led to only one in a hundred pregnancies resulting in a child, in the beginning. Next, the schools, when the entering first-grade class of the United States of America was not even 300,000, when it should have been far higher than that. Soon enough, the media took notice, and with that, pharmaceutical companies began pushing new fertility methods -- but by then, it was too late. 
 
 It's been twenty years since that eruption. Women who can still reproduce successfully are revered, but their numbers have begun dwindling as those immune have become infertile due to age. None of the new generation is fertile -- one in a hundred thousand, they are, and their descendants will number zero. 
 
 We are it. We watched our grandparents die, waiting for our parents to die so we can die behind them, so we can watch the legacy of humanity decay upon the earth we once tortured. We are the last generation, and we can not win.
