The most occult tales are those about the cannibalism on the ships. It was not uncommon on the drought time and had surfaced again on the ships. There were stories of children who had eaten their mothers and fathers and tales of men and women of the ships eating their own children. People would disappear and some became stronger every day, without being affected by the famine on the ship. After the Great Fog, some ships were found with the half eaten corpses, cut out legs and arms lying around and passengers with wild blood-filled eyes that proved the cannibalism. The ship-searchers would immediately kill those who would attack them, craving for human flesh since nothing else satisfied their hunger. They had even killed a boy who had mysteriously survived the Great Fog and had eaten three men and two women all by himself, being the sole survivor of the ship. The boy had attacked them like a wild animal, ripping off one of the ship-searchers’ arm and had attempted to cut the jugular veins of another one, when he was killed from behind by the third ship-searcher.

The ship-searchers had spread out on the sea after the Great Fall, looking for other survivors, food, tools and equipment and to figure out the geography of the new world and locate themselves. The earthquakes and the droughts had wiped out around sixty percent of the world population and the death toll of the long rain was incomparable to that of the Great Fog. The end of the rain had once again brought promises of a new era, but the survivors of the storms were taken unawares by a phenomenon that they didn’t expect. The water that had covered the earth started evaporating, creating a pervasive thick fog that spread all over the sea. People, who had survived famine and thirst, now had to face the lack of breathing air. If hunger killed after a few days and thirst after two, it only took a few minutes to die without breathable air, saturated by water.

The submarines had the upper hand, but there were no submarines in the Tehran area, and the lucky survivors of the capital city had taken shelter in the ships. The passengers of the ships that were not equipped with oxygen masks didn’t live to see a next day. Seldom ships with enough oxygen masks had survived the whole twelve days of the Great Fog by using the masks, isolating and air proofing the closed areas and reducing all motion. The anaesthetics had come to help this time; once under anaesthesia, a person would breathe less, needing little air to survive. But not many were keen to be put to sleep. Death was only a few minutes away and as the rain had continued longer than expected, no one knew how long the fog would last. It could have gone on for months and some people scared of running out of oxygen while put to sleep resisted the idea and some preferred it, thinking it as being less painful: suffocating while unconscious. Most of all, it was a trust issue. Who could guarantee that after someone went down; the others didn’t take his or her oxygen mask, leaving them to suffocate? But as the fog continued, they had ran out of choices. Each family had chosen one member to stay awake and look after those who had been put to sleep. As the fog started to thin, people who had finally lived out all the disasters, woke up their family members to the first beautiful sunrise in a clear sky in so many years.