Everywhere And Nowhere, Including In Your Back Yard, Monday

[endsthegame]

When the Nothing was released, some of its nature was altered. To do the job it was released to do, it would need to have a broader... concept of the universe, in as much as it had anything at all. And so for weeks it had spun around, gobbling up the forgotten, clearing away the unnecessary

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[death_of_hope]

When it had first been spotted, it was dismissed as some random cosmic event, most likely having happened thousands of years in the past and was just now visible on their planet.

Except it kept coming. And then the lights from stars started going out, and something inside Anemone started screaming.

People were thrown into a frenzy. It had been twenty years since the Coralians - barring Anemone - had ascended, but many still remembered the chaos and death that Dewey had brought down upon them all. Some said it was the return of the Coralians, that space was spliting anew again, but Anemone knew otherwise, and had finally, with large amounts of SCIENCE! from the Tresor labs, managed to get the new High Council to listen to her.

Those who had known her at Fandom would recognize the long pink hair and red-on-purple eyes easily enough, but the admiral stars on her uniform would be new, as would the small streak of silver that curled along her face. She was over forty, and still looked twenty save for that one small marker of the years.

In the end, it had been too late, and the 'Star-Eater' had come to their planet, rolling across the skies and devouring anything in its path. The Sages had finally been forced to declare the Second Evacuation of Earth, but there were hundreds of civilians still waiting to board their ships as the darkness bore down upon them.

"Ageha Two and Four, hold your position!" Anemone barked as she banked her Devilfish to the right. "Do not fall back until that checkpoint is cleared of civilians! Five and Six, prepare to escort the launches of the Princess Sakuya and Eureka's Dawn. I want them clearing atmo stat, and I don't want them getting shot down by any of these end of the world fanatics."

"One and Three, you are with me. We are going to play 'chicken' with the Star-Eater, see if we can't get any decent readings off it for the lab rats. I already dealt with one end of the world, and I refuse to let it happen again."

Two of her squad peeled off to follow her as they danced about the Edge of the Star-Eater, feats of breathless flight that kept them from barely being devoured by the creature.

Right up until an SOS started broadcasting on their frequency, and Anemone looked out to see the very last convoy trying to desperately outrun oblivion and make it to the space port. The convoy of those making the last stands. Scientists from Tresor, military personnel;

Her husband. Dominic and Gulliver were both on that transport, along with Eureka's 'kids' (adults, now, but forever children to Anemone) having refused to leave until the last civilians had been evacuated from Belle Forest.

She was the Anemone. A human-form Coralian who could bend physics and reality to her will, should she be willing to risk her humanity to do so. She had the power to end the world or utterly destroy her enemies. And there were still some things she could not do. No matter how hard she pushed the Devilfish, no matter the drugs that she mentally ordered it to pump into her system for the first time in years, no matter her training and her skill.

She was not going to make it to Dominic in time.

It did not matter. Ageha One and Three were devoured by the darkness and then she caught one last glimpse of his face, set in determination and doing his damnedest to get the to the safety of the ships before the Star-Eater surged forward and engulfed him, leaving Nothing in its non-existent wake.

Mistress and Machine screamed as one, throwing their combined power against the onslaught of the Star-Eater. It took Their Dominic, and They would rip it apart until it gave him back. They were wrath incarnate, and the universe held its breath for a moment, waiting to see which way the balance would tip.

Then all - on Earth - was silence. For there was no Earth.

They say that Coralians never die, for what one knows, all know, and all of them had held deep in their consciousness the idea that had been Anemone, even an alternate-universe away.

But you cannot hold an idea that never was, and so the other Coralians slept on, never knowing that their brashest, bravest daughter was gone, or had even been real at all.