middleofsomewhere | Crashing Down: Conclusion

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Crashing Down: Conclusion

Time ticks down, five hours turn to three hours, turns to one hour, turns to mere minutes. All the while the Voidtreckers rush to tether people to void craft. All efforts are now on reaching the furthest communities.

The effort is monumental, an evacuation that was improvised at every stage and yet was successful. The planet quietens as its citizens vanish off into the void, villages emptying, creatures gone too.

By the final half hour they can be pretty confident that on Osiga at least the only people left are those who have chosen, for whatever reason, to do so. Even now it might not be too late to save them, the right word in the right ear could change everything.

Minutes tick down, and the question becomes: Do the voidtreckers evacuate, or do they stick around to try and convince that last person? Do they save lives by force? Leave them to their chosen fate?

Whatever their choices, time is rapidly running out.

CRASHING DOWN: CONCLUSION

HOUR ZERO

As their timers count down into the last two minutes, their SCA's begin to flash amber. Danger is approaching.

Some of the remaining citizens hunker down, awaiting what comes. Others gather, weapons in hand to face this foe they have been told to flee from.

Danger is indeed approaching. In their peripheral vision they will see a darkening of the sky as strange shapes begin to fill it; too weird to be clouds, nothing that can be accurately described. For those inside, even those with Anan in a space station, they will sense this shadowing. Almost as if shapes are crowding in on reality itself. An extremely unnerving experience. The shapes fill the sky, fill the system, and their SCA's flash red.

It is time to go.

It might be they try and fight, just to see if they can. It might be that they scramble to tether the last couple of people, people who have just rapidly changed their mind about staying here. The train lets them. Anyone who doesn't evacuate themselves will be allowed to stay until the last possible second, as their countdowns click down from 00:01. Then their world glows gold as the train yanks them back, landing in the luggage carriage with barely time to draw breath as the train lurches into the void violently.

For the first time, anyone looking out the window as the train enters the kaleidoscope of the void will see other void craft. Trains, ships, planes, weird orbs. Just for a few moments these craft fill the space, and then they move, the train as well, bringing colour back to the void once more.

OOC NOTES

OOC Post ~ Questions ~ Shenanigans ~ Tasks Check-In & Rewards

This post can be used for any last minute rescues as well as their return to the train and any reactions and debriefing that characters need!

If your character wasn't wearing their SCA during the very last second, please notify us of their death over here.

Art Credit: Header

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Last Five Minutes

As the crowds of people thin, Thomas shifts his effort to observation. Anything they can find out about these World Eaters might help the next planet. He has a notepad and pencil out, and his normal senses, and whatever awareness he has of various sorts of magical energies.

He's also trying not to panic because he has no idea if the device on his wrist will actually pull him back in time, or that it will work at all. This might just be an expensive way to commit suicide.

Post-Mortem
Thomas Price was sitting in the library, writing.

It's been a while since he's written up anything, let alone something that other people might read. Paper was a luxury that he hadn't had in decades, and for his last decade on Earth, any notes he left were for Alice and their children, the same way Alice's grandparents were meticulous in documenting what they could for their progeny. He'd edited, but only to organize his thoughts.

Now he was trying to write what he'd observed for the Void Ministry, before he forgot it, because it was easier than trying to sleep after witnessing the destruction of a world. By all accounts, the emergency rescue had been a success, but... someone had to be proactive about making sure an emergency rescue wasn't needed next time, or that they had more warning or evidence to convince more people.

(He also wasn't thinking about what it would mean to evacuate the bottle world he'd been trapped in. Asking people to leave their own bodies behind and live on as... whatever they all were now was a lot. It was something you could do when they were literally hours from destruction and no one knew enough to stop it. Harder when the destruction was coming at some near-but-indefinite time in the future due to the world's life-energy getting too scarce to support life.)

After having seen so many people react badly to the end of this mission - and with good reason, really - Madoka can't help but wander around the train and see if she can help people.

Even people who don't necessarily seem like they might need help, like Thomas over here. But on the other hand, Thomas is her room mate, and he's also new enough that Madoka is pretty worried about the impact of this having been his first mission on the man..

So she can't help but slowly approach him, even though he seems to be writing.

"Um.. sir..?" She softly speaks up.

Thomas looked up from his work. "Hello, Miss Kaname," he said. It's not near lights-out is it?"

She shakes her head.

"Not yet."

It's why she's still wandering around the train, after all, rather than getting ready to go to sleep. She's pretty tired after everything that happened, so it's not like she's going to push herself to stay up as late as possible.

"I just.. um." Madoka stops for a moment, suddenly feeling unsure about her intentions here. What if he's fine, and he'll only feel bad or patronized that she's checking up on him, especially since Madoka is just a kid?

...

"I was wondering.. if you're okay, sir."

She sounds unsure about it, even as she asks the question, but does manage to force the words out of her mouth.

Was he? Well, probably not. There was a spike of adrenaline that hadn't faded, and the nagging sense that they should have been able to do more, even as he'd seen how few people weren't either in pods that tethered them to a voidcraft, or had SCAs near the end.

"I don't think any of us are entirely okay," he admitted. "It was the best we could have expected, but that's not the same thing."

"Yes.. I understand that."

If this was someone she was a little closer to, Madoka might have insisted on knowing whether they are okay though, rather than the way Thomas is making this about them as a group.. But she's not close enough with Thomas yet. She's a little too shy to be that pushy with someone else in this case.

So instead Madoka just slowly nods, seeming to consider his words.

"This mission was.. um, it was a lot heavier than the stuff we usually do. So I'm sorry you immediately had to go through something with this many heavy choices.."

Thomas smiled, a bit bitterly. "The last two weeks have been the first vacation I've had in decades. If it had to happen, at least I had some chance to actually rest."

Actually, he'd never had a real vacation. The closest was his decade in Buckley, Michigan, where there were periods when all he was dealing with was a house that he was certain hated everyone, and being a disgraced Covenant agent in the woods that was a fascinating example of a natural ecosystem not strongly influenced by humanity, but that also occasionally killed people. He'd had time to get bored, at least.

She slowly blinks.

"Your first..?"

In decades, even. A period of time that's absolutely impossible to even imagine for a girl like Madoka, who has only lived fifteen years - and wasn't exactly slated to live on for much longer than that, if the train hadn't taken her here instead.

She can understand adults being busy. Sometimes her own parents are like that as well, after all. But not having a single vacation for that long..

That's.. a little odd, isn't it..?

"Was your job back home that busy, sir..?"

Thomas smiled. "I don't know that I've ever had a job as most people think about it," he admitted. "But for the last fifty years, I've been in a world that's slowly dying."

Thomas Price does not look 50 years old. He looks in his 30s.

"Between the problems from the world itself and the problems from other people, there's a lot to do."

He can delegate a lot of it. But he put himself in charge AND is the only sorcerer in the group, so some tasks can only be done by him. It means that while some rest is required to keep him functioning if he slacked off, people would die that didn't have to.

Now, this last crisis was the first time that had been the case for days. And he'd been one of many people, and not the lynchpin of any operation.

.. yeah, the fifty years thing.. is a little odd. But then again, it wouldn't be the first time Madoka ran into someone who is actually ageless in some way. Maybe people age in different ways in the world Thomas has come from. Maybe something about the way in which the world is dying is causing people's ageing to slow down. Maybe it's something inherent about Thomas himself.

Whatever it is, Madoka decides to not question that part. Not in the face of everything else he's saying here - the things that make her frown in sympathy.

"I'm.. so sorry to hear that, sir."

It's a lot, after all. Madoka can understand the burden of a world that might be destroyed if you don't work hard enough for it resting on your shoulders very well.

Probably more than a girl her age ought to.

"But.. what about the fact that you're here now then? Isn't that a problem for your world..?"

"Hopefully the world can tolerate my absence for a few months," Thomas said. "I don't exactly have a choice here." But he is feeling guilty about abandoning them, even if it wasn't his choice. "I'm told that it looks like my body is just asleep, which is at least some explanation."

Ah, so thankfully it seems like the entire world's existence isn't relying on him being there.. That's a bit of a relief to know, at the very least. Madoka is so tired of hearing about worlds that got all messed up, just because the train pulled people out of them.

She seriously hopes that Thomas' is still more or less the same, ready for him to return to his body.

"Yes, it does seem to be that way.."

Not that Madoka would know, since her body is gone, but. You know. Other people were saying it was true, after their little outing back to their worlds.

She gives him a tiny smile, though it's a little sheepish and worried at the same time.

"Hopefully it means that you will be fine right away once you return, sir. You can just get up and get back to work, and back to the people you care about."

This gets a sad smile. "Only some of the people," Thomas admitted. "I've been away from three of the people I care about most for a long time before the train found me." Or four, but Alice had still been pregnant when he'd been pulled away; Thomas assumed he had a second child, but the child was still an idea to him, not a person. Even Kevin had been young enough that Thomas didn't expect to even recognize the adult he'd become.

"B-But..!"

Madoka can't help but protest. There's still a little bit of hesitation in it, because she knows some situations are just too big or too important to overcome so easily. But even so, she can't help but hope.

"Couldn't you go see them once you go back? Even if it's just for a little bit..?"

If Thomas taking a break from his work due to this kidnapping won't destroy the world, then surely him going to see the people he loves for a day or so couldn't destroy it either, right?

"Oh, that one is not because of responsibilities. Not directly. When I was a much younger man, I made a bargain because I couldn't accept that Alice -- my wife, though she wasn't at the time -- would die. Part of the cost was that at some point in the future, I would be pulled somewhere that she couldn't follow and I couldn't escape. Which is one of the reasons I am still working on it."

.. oh.

Well, isn't that awkward. For multiple reasons. It'd mostly just be sad, but given Madoka's own experience with stuff like that, it just puts an entirely different layer of awkward right on top of it.

"You.. can make bargains like that where you come from? Like-- Like making a wish to something or someone?"

"Yes. Do the Crossroads exist in your world?" Because this is a concern. Thomas knows damn well that the Crossroads will try to cause as much misery as possible with its terms, and even having Mary (who was far more anchored in humanity than most of her peers, to hear her tell it) rather than another crossroads ghost had only helped so much.

She shakes her head.

"No, or.. um, at least, I don't think so.."

After all, it's entirely possible that Kyubey - or whatever the species he belongs to is called - is called something else out there in another world. It could be that they aren't just present in the world Madoka comes from, after all.

Hence why she bites her lip, before adding: "What is it like..? That.. Crossroads?"

She thinks a description would help her figure out pretty quickly whether or not they are talking about the same thing. Or even a similar thing.

"The guardian... imagine something that looks like the heat haze on asphalt, but has a presence stronger than any living or dead thing should, that speaks with a voice that sounds more like locusts' wings than anything a human throat can make."

And he catches himself, realizing that this probably wasn't appropriate for a child, but like Hell he knew what that even was. And seeing the loss of Osiga had rattled him. That at least hadn't felt malicious the way the Crossroads had. "It usually uses ghosts as intermediaries, but the bargain itself is made with the guardian."

Don't worry, Thomas. Madoka has seen enough disturbing things by now - both here on the train and back home in her own world - that this description isn't the thing to send her over the edge.. even though she's still having a bit of a hard time forming a mental image with that kind of description. So he's saying it's kind of like.. special air? Some invisible guardian that talks to you with an odd voice?

It.. doesn't really sound like Kyubey, but on the other hand, Thomas is also saying it uses intermediaries.

So who knows?

"I don't think I've seen anything like that, but.. where I come from, there are also creatures who make bargains with young girls for their wishes, so maybe it could be something similar, sir.."

Though that's not necessarily a good thing, she thinks.

"Tell me about them." Because Thomas Price doesn't trust anything that reminds him of the Crossroads, even tangentially. And at least he had been a grown adult when he made his choice; people like Mary or Sally had been teenagers. Teenagers often had fewer other options than adults, and beings that targeted them were inherently suspicious.

"Um, they're a little bit like cats.."

.. yet not at all at the same time. But Madoka doesn't know how else to start her description. How does one describe a Kyubey to someone who might never have seen one before?

"They're entirely white, with pointy ears and red eyes and a very fluffy tail.. But at the same time you realise they're not actually a cat, because they have a second pair of longer, floppy ears growing out of their pointy cat ears. And they can talk in human speech too.."

Madoka looks a little sheepish as she tries to explain, like she expects Thomas to think that she's talking about something totally ridiculous here - even though she's just telling the truth. The weird, weird truth.

Thomas's mother-in-law once named a creature a 'fricken' because it was a feathered frog. 'Like cats, but...' is what he expects from people who aren't naturalists or monster-hunters.

The physical description soudned perfectly reasonable. He pulled out a separate page in the notebook to write this down. "Any other special abilities, beyond speech and whatever they can do to grant wishes?"

Just wait, Thomas. There's a storm of information about these things coming your way.

Like the facts Madoka decides to open with here. To her credit, she definitely sounds more than just a little bit awkward as she's summing it up, since she knows that it sounds like - and it's not like any of it is a good memory for her.

"They can take people's souls out of their body.. And they can also replicate their body and eat the old one after it gets too injured.."

Fun little creatures, clearly.

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Crashing Down: Conclusion

Thomas Price -- OTA

post-mortem

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cw: mention of.. self-cannibalism, i guess