Beyond Evolution: NPCS (beyond_npcs) wrote in beyond_evo, @ 2018-09-12 01:06:00 |
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Entry tags: | !plot: 2026, amity, anomaly, chamber, dreamer, husk, jaeger, recluse, reverie, verve |
(2018) NIGHT IS NOW FALLING SO ENDS THIS DAY, THE ROAD IS NOW CALLING AND I MUST AWAY.
There was blue light on the lawn that illuminated the evening twilight. A flash that engulfed the school, bled through the walls and shone brightly through the windows and then, where there had been an empty space, the names of those on Layla Miller's list appeared on the grass, clustered together as they had been just moments before in the future; they were a tangle of blood and muck, burned hair and skin, with haunted eyes and shivering limbs, still fresh from a battle they had only just fought a few hours ago. They had been patched up a little, the worst of their injuries had bandages slapped on them but with so few healers and so many of the others gravely injured in the fighting if not outright dead they had been a lesser priority; their lives were not in danger and it was time to go.
An alarm went off int he depths of the school and the medical team that had been mobilising, waiting for the return of the lost souls kicked into action; through Ziggy they had known that their missing friends and family would be returning soon but now when, specifically, there had been no date or time, just the word soon. Hours? Days? Weeks? They had not been able to pin it down and so they had taken a shift system putting themselves on standby, waiting, watching, holding their breath as the whole of the school did, time sliding by them and hope sliding with it. They hadn't been idle, they had searched for a way to help, to get tot he future themselves if they could or pull everyone back, but there was little within their power and so they had been forced to wait and make what arrangements they could for when the time came.
When it did they moved fast, team members and the medlabs moved fast; they grabbed first aid kits and shot out of the school, racing across the lawn to get to those that had finally been returned to them.
Those that had been caught up accidentally in the mission, the missing names that had not been on the list, they appeared much in the same place that they had been when they had gone missing. Their memories were gauzy and soft, the future they had been merged with dissolving from their minds, a half-remembered dream; looking at the date would be confusing: Where had the last month gone? Where had they been? What had they been doing in all that time?
In the middle of the visitors sat the device that they had lifted out of the Hive, the Drift device that had connected Helena and Margarethe as though they had been Sentinel pilots, combining their powers into a mix that was far greater than either of them could achieve alone and with Source kicking their powers past even those limits everyone had been brought back by the pair who were now indelibly linked, inexorably joined. It began to melt the moment they materialised, overheated and began to crumple in on itself. Never to be used again. A door to the future that was closing.
Layla Miller had left with them, saying only that she couldn't stay in the future, but she wasn't on the lawn with them. Butterfly was gone, the future was gone, but horrors of what had happened were not; they were stuck to the skin of the group that stood or sat or lay on the grass outside the school, they were written in blood on their faces, bruises on their arms and legs, in fractured bones and concussed heads. That future might never happen in this timeline, now, they had created a separate, parallel timeline, but it would never truly be gone from this world, either. They had brought fragments back with them, inside them. Who knew how long those wounds would take to heal.