March 15th, 8:46 PM, 2062.
Serena woke to madness.
"Ma'am? Are you awake, Ma'am?" the man in her face yelled, his face hidden behind the glass of a hazmat suit, tinted with the colors of flames reflecting in the background.
She jolted awake, looking around confusedly. "What's happening?" she asked, stiffening as she noticed the rifle in the man's hands, pointed right at her.
"Check your implant," the man said calmly.
"...Alright," Serena said, recoiling slightly—but her emotions were taken over by shock instead as she scanned the text popping up in her mind. "Is this... real?"
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PRESIDENTIAL ALERT
According to reports, people all across the globe are being transformed or obtaining hyper-natural abilities. If you are one of these people, please do not use your abilities and wait for the National Guard and Army to reestablish order.
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"Yeah," the man in the hazmat suit said. "Now follow us. We'll get you someplace safe," he said, gesturing to the group of soldiers around him. He hung his rifle back over his soldier and stretched out one hand; the others kept wary, staring down at her with weapons drawn.
She took it and he pulled her up with seemingly little effort. They nodded to each other and started moving in formation, with Serena behind the majority. One stood behind her, however.
"Is this happening everywhere?" she asked.
"Should be," one of the soldiers replied dryly. "People are saying all sorts of things, all over the world. Check Twitter. Nutcases are saying something about government superweapons."
"Sounds like Twitter," Serena muttered darkly. "What kinds of..."
She paused as they turned the corner, leaving the park, and came upon... devastation. Cars lay upturned or in burning wrecks; buildings lay in pieces or with gaping holes in their walls, bricks splintered and shattered upon the concrete ground.
Stone statues of people, caught in screams or terror, lay scattered across the ground.
"The hell happened here?" Serena asked.
The soldiers glanced around and at her. "Some madwoman," one of the soldiers offered at last, "went around, asking people if she was pretty, and if they didn't answer immediately, turned them to stone."
"At least it's better than what happened down in Austin," another said darkly.
"What happened there?"
"It's all over the news, kid," the soldier said grimly. "Almost two thousand dead already; some kind of a necromancer showed up there, I think. Just started throwing around death and raising corpses."
"Necromancer?" Serena giggled, a little hysterical. "Like something straight out of a novel."
"Yeah," one of the soldiers—a woman, Serena thought, said tiredly. "We should be making it to our temporary base in a few minutes."
Nearby, a scream, long and strangled before cutting off in as it crumpled in on itself, twisting and folded into a distorted screech, like the scream of static on a broken television.
When the scream cut off, it was not a sound a human voice could make.
Serena shivered quietly, her blood slowly turning to ice. She'd never heard anything that sounded like... that. "What... was that?" she whispered in the sudden silence that followed.
The soldiers glanced at each other before shaking their heads. "Nothing good. Come on. Faster we go, the faster you'll be safe."
They began to run, equipment clanking and clunking with every swift step. Serena kept up, surprising herself—for some reason her body felt lighter, easier to move than before. Earlier, when they were just walking, she hadn't noticed much difference, but now, as they ran, she found herself easily keeping pace with trained soldiers.
They noticed it too, throwing her odd looks, but kept moving. It appeared that whatever had made that... sound... had spooked them enough that they didn't question it. Perhaps they were even thankful that she wasn't slowing them down. And that that thing probably wouldn't catch up.
Right?
Serena glanced back and frowned, staring harder, her footsteps slowing in confusion. "What is... what is that?"
There was something standing there in the distance, amidst the burning cars and under the flickering, shattered streetlights. Something in the shape of a man.
Except for the fact that there were too many spaces in him.
The woman soldier glanced back and her eyes widened in primal terror. "Run!" she shouted immediately, bringing her rifle up to bear and opening fire.
The man turned his head. Was it a head? He didn't have a face. Black tears ran down hollow skin, open with impossible wounds, weeping shadow and nightmares. A ragdoll mouth tore open from where his face should have been, stretching into a screaming smile, stitched of skin and sinew and black void.
The bullets hit the man-thing like hitting cloth, making the twisted sack of skin sway back and forth, opening new wounds—but ultimately doing nothing.
Slowly, it began to walk towards the group.
Then it began to run.
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"To be honest," Vivian said dryly to the empty air, "I did not entirely expect this."
She stood in the devastated ruins of a cafeteria, looking around at overturned tables, abandoned meals, and scorched walls. The smell of smoke hung heavy on the air, and the walls were scorched ashen black; save for the northern wall, where, in some kind of blackish ink, words were scrawled in a desperate, mad hand.
On her shoulders sat a white lab coat, fetched from her apartment.
The lights flickered dimly, shattered and broken as twilight cast the world in a burnt-orange glow.
In maddened, scrawled, nigh-illegible letters, there on the wall was written: "what happened to me?"
Beneath them, the wall oozed a terrible, bright scarlet from its cracked plaster. The faint, crude painting of a girl with pigtails sat under the writing on the wall—but the girl didn't have a face.
And she had too many eyes.
She sighed. "Or perhaps I did. Perhaps this is all just a necessary, calculated sacrifice." She frowned, smacking herself in the side of the head. Mortal bodies. "If only I could remember..."
Still, she had the oddest feeling that she would never have done something like this. The System was supposed to assist humanity in its ascension, not... bring it to its knees. The change should have been far less drastic—so what had happened?
"Where did all those plans go so wrong?" Vivian mused, walking over to the mad words scribbled onto the bleeding wall. "Did they go wrong? It would be nice if I knew. Should have left notes somewhere."
As she stood, staring at the wall, there came the sound of footsteps behind her. She turned and looked; an old man in a black jacket, in utter contrast to her white lab coat, stood there in the entrance.
"Vivian?" he asked after a moment of trying to place her face.
"Professor Jenkins," she said dryly, nodding to him. "What happened here?"
"What happened to you?" Jenkins asked, staring at her pale-white hair, the color of quicksilver moonlight.
"I died," Vivian replied succinctly, her eyes glowing with a faint, prismatic light, nearly invisible in the fading twilight piercing through the soot-stained windows. "I died, gazed upon Infinity, and walked to the cusp of apotheosis before turning back. What happened here?"
"You... what?" Jenkins shook his head, as if he hadn't heard her correctly.
"What happened here?" Vivian repeated herself. "What the hell is... this?" she asked, pointing at the mad scrawl of black words on the wall.
"I... don't know," Jenkins replied. "I was hiding in my office earlier when I heard something walking down the hallway. Sounded like Professor Banks; he was ranting to himself about something. Not sure what. I caught a glimpse of him through the window..."
He paused there, considering. Or composing himself. "He didn't look right."
"Look right?" Vivian questioned. "What was wrong with him?"
"He had too many spaces in him." The old professor's voice trembled slightly.
She frowned. "What's that mean?"
"Just that," Jenkins said darkly. "There were too many spaces in him. I don't know how else to describe it—a nightmare? A mad, insane, fever dream? Maybe that's it. Maybe I'll just wake up..."
"And maybe the Sun will rise from the West," Vivian replied dryly.
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Serena ran.
Her heart pounded like a thunderous drum, sounding through her ears. Her feet slapped painfully against rough concrete. Her eyes flicked back and forth between looking ahead and throwing fearful glances back to make sure there was nothing there.
"Is it gone?" she hissed.
"Should be," one of the soldiers whispered. He clutched his rifle in a white-knuckled grasp, eyes wide and bloodshot with hysteria edging on madness.
Serena couldn't blame him—she didn't need a mirror to know her own eyes looked the same.
"What is happening?" she whispered to herself, curling into a ball to hold back the panic. "What is happening?"
They hid in the shadows of a ruined building, great, impossible roots crawling through its shattered mortar and stone. Serena recognized it; just hours earlier, it had been the University of Nova City's West Campus Building, housing hundreds of students as they laughed, learned, and studied under the watchful eye of their professors.
And now... it looked like it had been abandoned for centuries. Ivy coiled high over the red stone walls, in and out of the shattered stones. The bell tower lay on its side, broken off from its foundations, its once grand dome now a ruined mess upon the indifferent earth. Trees stood impossibly tall, their vast canopies shading the ground in deep darkness.
Desolation pervaded the air; the land seemed more like some ancient, twisted ruin than a thriving university just hours ago.
Serena sat in the shadows, thinking quietly to herself. It was the pulse—the shockwave thing. Everyone was talking about it. That was the thing that had brought this mad change to the world, the thing that changed the world utterly beyond recognition.
But nowhere seemed to have been affected so badly as here, Nova City. To the South, towards Texas and other southern states, people were welcoming those changed—save for in Austin, of course. In the North, people were being celebrated as superheroes!
But in Nova City...
Serena shuddered to even think of the thing she saw, shambling through the shattered streets. Was it only Nova City that had been affected like that? Or was the entire world crumbling beneath their eyes, and had nobody noticed?
A low shiver went through her, like ice pulsing through her blood.
"What do we do now?" she asked softly.
The leader of the soldiers—the woman, she'd figured out—sighed, glancing around at the frozen, silent soldiers and at the ruined, desolate courtyard. "I'm not sure, honestly. We should be—"
She paused, tilting her head as if listening to something.
For a moment, Serena heard nothing. Then it was there, a faint whisper on the wind, gradually growing closer, as if whatever—no, whoever was talking was coming closer.
It was a low, monotone drone; a male voice, empty of inflection, passion, or emotion.
She could only just catch hints of it... what was it saying?
And then she heard it, a maddening drone on the edge of her mind, somehow between hearing and an intruding thought. The voice spoke, ceaseless and unending; a cold, lurching unease born of rusted metal and ice twisted in her stomach.
The voice crackled and shifted, an odd sound, like the tinny, pitch-shifted, distorted monotone of warnings over a hand-cranked radio, reciting:
"One. One. Two. Two. Three. Four. One. Four. Four. Three."