9. Expletive Sunset
Previously on 2.17 Seconds into Never, Merlin in the form of a magical bear had just erased Meg Atomic from Time itself, leaving the Green Moth as the only one who remembers her existence and the rest of our heroes stranded in post-apocalyptic Edison City! We resume our story just as the Green Moth has said a really terrible bad-language word!
“FRIGGLE!” said the Green Moth.
“Wow,” said Gaseous Girl.
“Uh,” said the Wombat. “You okay, Mothie?”
“No!” the Green Moth exclaimed. “A person has been removed from the intricate lattices of spacetime! This is bad! Incomprehensibly bad!”
“Well, look, I’m sure we can figure out who she is and how to find her, or him, I don’t know, but-”
“You don’t understand!” the Green Moth shouted, her voice echoing off the shattered buildings around them. “Remove one thread and everything unravels!”
They looked at each other. The Wombat hadn’t seen It’s a Wonderful Life, but Ron Raven and Gaseous Girl had, and they didn’t like where this was going. “How bad we talking?” Gaseous Girl demanded. “Potterville bad, like with Mary working late at the library?”
“Worse,” the Green Moth said. “Do you recall a recent skirmish1 between the Malevolent Med-Student and Titanium-Alloy Guy?”
“Yeah, yeah, I remember, his minion, what’s her name, didn’t get to use her confetti kazoo things, so?” Gaseous Girl said.
“Who won?” the Green Moth said quietly.
“Titanium-Alloy Guy,” Gaseous Girl started to say, then she paused. “Wait. I…well, now I don't know.” A note of panic rose in her voice. “Moth, I don't know!”
“Exactly,” the Green Moth said grimly. “Exactly.”
All at once something shifted in the city around them, so subtle they almost didn’t notice it, like a cloud passing over the sun. It was as if the city had just let out a breath it had been holding for a long time and given up a long fight, and now something was dead that had once been alive. The fires that had been smoldering before now flickered out.
“Hey…” the Wombat said. “What just happened?”
“He won,” the Green Moth said. “The Malevolent Med-Student destroyed the world, timeline destructions cascaded, and now this is all that’s left. I expect reality will begin disintegrating any minute now.”
A nearby skyscraper whispered away into nothingness.
“Oh look,” said the Green Moth bleakly, “It’s started.”
“Well, friggle,” said the Wombat.
Meanwhile, Meg Atomic was just waking up. She was surrounded by light, which was odd. The last thing she could remember was Merlin as a bear shouting something very loudly in Latin. If she remembered her Latin correctly, he had used tempore, and temp she was reasonably sure related to time. “Lovely,” she said. “I wonder when I am now?”
Her voice had an odd echoing quality to it. She looked around, and for the first time she really registered where she was. She was standing on an impeccably white cloud in a bank of clouds that rolled on as far as she could see, except in one direction. When she turned that way, she saw a pair of shining white gates flanked by equally brilliant walls sweeping away into forever.
“Ah….” she said.
“Yeah, well, we’re having problems sorting out you too,” a new voice said. Meg blinked. There just to her right floated a blond woman with wings and a green halo.
“Hi there,” she said. “Constance, I’m an angel with W.I.N.G., that stands for Worlds Interference and Normalization Group. We decided it goes better if we explain first off. Okay, second point. You were wiped from the timeline but you still technically exist because you’re matter and there’s the whole conservation of mass deal so…”
“So…what?” said Meg.
“So you’re kinda dead,” Constance said. “It’s weird. Normally you’re either dead or you’re not, no kinda, but you superhero guys, you’re weird, and so now we got kinda dead. We got rules for dead, you know? Heaven, the Bad Place, Purgatory depending. Kinda dead is something I don’t think we have rules for. By we I mean the Heavenly Hosts in general, you see. It's in these situations that they call W.I.N.G.”
“Oh,” Meg said. It was a lot to take in. She had never been kinda dead before. She knew Ron Raven had some sort of resurrection power, but she didn't think that was quite the same. That did give her an idea. “Could you just send me back and we forget this ever happen?”
“Erm,” said Constance. “Well…”
As seen in The Question, episode 1 of Quarks of the Heart: a Meg Atomic Serial.
Yikes! This is a wee bit on the bad side…