Elaine DeWitt woke up under exceedingly strange circumstances.

As an Archon and elite soldier of the Canadian Freeworlds Alliance, she had woken up in strange places before. It wasn't so much a problem that the place was strange. Nor was she immediately concerned that a giant steel beam was very close to crushing her, or that she was half-naked, or even that there was a strange man and what looked like a Blackhat standing nearby.

No, her internal clock said she had been asleep for more than three hundred years, and she didn't remember any of it. She remembered her life, for the most part, but there were large chunks missing out of that, too.

She definitely had a clear image of being in this place before it was destroyed, but if that memory wasn't so clear, she would not have believed it was the same place. The geometry of the room was the same, but the room itself was so vastly different than it was inconceivable. A wall that should have been plaster was made, in places, out of silver, and in other places made of tar. The steel beam that was crushing her had holes eaten out of it, except someone had filled some of the holes with... something else. Something else that in many cases, ran like melted wax, even if it was solid rock.

So, yes. Strange circumstances.

Instead of asking a series of dumb questions, Elaine appeared another body behind her two gawkers and shifted her consciousness to it, then un-appeared the old one. She was content to find that her new body's wardrobe was intact; the body she went with was wearing a nice gray gypsy shirt, thin enough to show off the Stigma glowing across her skin but not so thin as to be indecent, and knee-length white trousers with sandals. She ran, mentally, through the rest of her inventory--a lot of military surplus, mostly--as she and her two... rescuers? Presumably? turned to face each other.

"Gentleman... Lady." Elaine smiled. "I am Elaine Many, Duplicant Archon. You are...?"

The woman held up a hand to the man, and stepped forward. "Greetings, Miss DeWitt. A lot has changed in the time you have been gone. I assume that you have noticed...?"

"Yes, the clock was the first thing I noticed," she said. "What has happened here? Why did it take so long for the Blackhats to wake me up?"

"The Blackhat organization was destroyed," the woman replied. "The Administrators--"

"What about Domino?" Elaine's voice almost caught. "You can't tell me that he..."

"World history is a ...sensitive topic." The woman glanced at the man, who avoided her look and stared at the ground for a while instead. "Domino Effect is dead. He... an enemy went through great pains to kill him. The destruction that came after has left the world in... a very bad state." The woman cleared her throat gently. "If you would like any more information... Ciddia would like very much to speak with you."

Elaine swallowed and nodded. She half expected the woman in front of her to just tip her hat and teleport the three of them, but instead she gestured. "I should also introduce you. Elaine DeWitt, this is Teddy Helmann. He is the one who discovered that you could still be saved."

Could still be saved? That's ominous. Elaine offered him a hand, and he shook it with something more than relief. "Thank you very much, Teddy. I owe you a debt."

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"No, lady... you don't owe me anything, believe me." Although he was smiling, there was naked pain on his face. "I'm just happy that you're alright."

"We will return to Mr. Helmann's facility for the moment, and then I will take you to see Ciddia." She gestured to some kind of crude hover-sled, one that was clearly not Blackhat-made, and Teddy, looking still quite awkward, took the controls. The woman sat behind him easily.

When Teddy turned to look at her, though, Elaine just shook her head. "Go on," she said. "I prefer to fly." And then, as naturally as breathing, she lifted off the ground, instinctively dematerializing her sandals so they wouldn't fall off, and flew out of one of the many gaps in the ruined building.

From her perspective up here, things were bad. Worse than bad, by far. No building in the area was whole, let alone untouched, and whatever mad Archon had gone around altering the materials near her had done the same everywhere she looked. Mostly, though, everything was just...

Gone. It was all gone. The war had been going on for decades, and Elaine thought she knew devastation, but people had rebuilt. These were lands that nobody had tried to rebuild centuries later. What had tainted these lands so badly?

Below her, the two people on a hover sled who might have answers went off in a generally eastward direction. Elaine looked out in that direction, even flew up another couple thousand feet, but it wasn't clear from here where exactly they were going.

So she just swooped down after them, easily keeping pace with the slow-moving sled. They were going so slowly, in fact, that she barely felt the need to hold her streamlined flight pose; she pulled up beside the woman and twisted around so it looked like she was sitting cross-legged on nothing, and looked over at her. "He's really gone?"

"Yes." The woman shook her head. "It's all well before my time, I'm afraid. I know this is a shock to you, but the world is very different. A lot of people... don't want there to be any Archons anymore. You are a reminder of..." she paused. "Well, a reminder of this. That it's our fault. Humans, I mean, not Administrators. People ...have given up, mostly. They want it to all be over."

"The hell they do," opined the man loudly, as though he were having trouble hearing over the wind (maybe he was; it had been a long time since Elaine was human). "You folks in the sky may want it to be over, but the rest of us are trying to fix things, make them better. Push back the... monsters." His voice suddenly dropped, and he spoke like he was muttering under his breath, although Elaine still heard him clearly. "Trying to find purpose... and meaning in life while picking through the bones of the past."

For some reason, after hearing that, Elaine rubbed the back of her head. It didn't exactly ache; it felt the way she always felt when she had been hit by an attack, and it had healed up. Strange. Had they had to cut her open to bring her back?

"The important thing," said the woman a bit louder (probably for Teddy's benefit, not Elaine's), "is that nobody trusts the Administrators anymore. We don't hand out power the way Domino Effect did. We let things develop on a... more natural timescale."

"Yeah," replied Elaine, "things were pretty chaotic, especially there at the end, but really through all of the different wars. What about the magic folk? How are they doing?"

"I can only offer you a summary," replied the Administrator, "but the system that empowered them was broken in the breaking of the world. All those who could touch magic were driven mad by it."

"I thought everyone could touch magic," she replied. "Except Archons, I mean. All living things."

"Yes, that's true."

"So... everyone..." Elaine slowed to a stop. She looked around at the empty storefronts, the devastated landscape. It wasn't just that the area lacked people, she realized, it lacked plants, it lacked animals, it lacked insects and birds. There weren't even sun-dried weeds left after three hundred years, just wind-blown dirt.

The hover sled came to a stop a little bit further on, and the Administrator's voice crossed the distance between them. "It's getting better," she said. "You'll see."

Elaine felt something deep inside her soul that she couldn't put a name to as she moved to follow them, and Teddy started the sled moving on again.