The sensation of warm metal brushing against my hand, a light breeze, and the sight of the blood red sky. These make up my last pleasant memories from before the catastrophe.
I look down at my partner’s hand, sliver metal with black padded fingertips; I take them in my own and look back towards the horizon across from our open balcony.
“Well I guess this is where it ends, eh?” The words escape me - half mumbled, half wisped, “I can’t say I was never curious as to what Magica X reactor would look like when detonated. But who would have thought we would get front row seats to the fucking thing going kaboom?”
Over the sea a great tower on the edge of the horizon visibly crackled with power, light slowly gathered at its peak forming a great sphere that rippled with magical power.
“Drake.” I look up towards the silver chassis the composed his face.
“Yes dear?” His cold voice resounded in the air like it had been echoed through a metal pipe.
“Thank you”
“What for?”
“Everything.” I whisper, pulling myself closer and into his thick coat.
A huge flash lit the horizon and a great beam of crimson light pierced the sky and ground respectively. A ring of compressed air and magic rippled out from the tower, shredding the land in its wake, passing through us and whipping away the calm breeze that had lingered before, stirring it into ferocious winds that threatened to tear me off my feet. Clinging as tight as I could to Drake, I watched as our villa was torn apart by the waves of magic flung from the tower. Great cracks appeared across the land as huge chunks of earth and rock lifted into the Air. Suddenly, the ground beneath us became unstable and I felt myself rising up as the Earth’s crust splintered, uprooting itself from the mantle and rising into the sky.
I glanced towards Drake, paining and a deep fear swelled in my chest. “Welcome to the apocalypse!”
“Brace yourself!” He shouted back, pulling me closer and crouching to take the brunt of the wind battering us.
A huge red wave of energy pulsated trough me, indescribable pain ran laps through my body and I felt my self-slipping from consciousness.
DR4K3 POV
The news had been flooded for days with panic over the new magic reactor, built to take power directly from Gaea’s core and convert it into usable power. This would have been a great step for Human civilisation - if the whole thing had not been hit by radiation from solar flare right before its magic shields and wards were set up to prevent exactly just what happened. Apparently the solar radiation fried the regulators that controlled the amount of power drawn from Gaea’s core, leaving it to draw indefinitely until the whole thing overloaded and dumped it back into the ground.
The Arcane Council had predicted that we would have a week before it collapsed, triggering a cascade of detonations worldwide as it destabilised sequential reactors. A global evacuation was ordered for citizens to leave the planet for the nearest orbital colony’s, a woefully thought through plan taking little into account for the numbers of refugees taking to the skies in a desperate attempt to out run a disaster that would literally uproot Gaea’s crust. But it was when the first capacitor collapsed on the tower prematurely that we really knew we were doomed. A great wave of energy fired the circuits of all the transport ships leaving the planet at the worst possible time, leaving them to fall back to Gaea’s motherly embrace. Distraught and with lifeboats sinking, the collective races of Gaea pulled up their armchairs, looked across the horizon to enjoy what time they had with their family left as ten millennia of global peace and civilisation crumbled in the face of its own technology.
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As a space operating android, I was programmed to repair space stations. My time on Gaea had been merely an accident when a solar panel I had been issued with repairing had been hit by shrapnel, tearing it and myself off and into a crash course with Gaea. I had attracted quite the attention from the media with my fall, particularly with how I survived my dunk in the ocean. Well, what can I say? We don’t get nicknamed Immortals for nothing.
At the time, my company didn’t want me back as it wasn’t worth the money to bring a damaged robot back into orbit, so they issued me an immediate social status upgrade from robot to free android just to avoid responsibly and damage fines from and add few fishing boats caught in my ‘landing’. Bringing me to how I met Alex.
Alex Barkwater, a human as beautiful as a furious black hole consuming everything that draws near enough. Not taking shit from anyone was an understatement in regards to her attitude towards how she wanted to live. There were rumours about how she once sailed into a hailstorm alone just to keep schedule, when I inquired into the matter she replied, “They forget to mention that I raised a banner off the flagpole that read ‘suck it Poseidon’.”
And now here we stand - hands together, watching the world around us end. The ground lifts under our feet and I pull Alex to me, hoping to shelter her from the rubble and winds threatening to separate us. Alerts sound across my sensors detecting a huge pulse of magic energy. I just about hear Alex trying to shout something, but I can’t pick it up over the wind and magical interference. I shout at the top of my volume capacity. “Brace yourself!”
It washes over me and the world becomes silent. My sensors read blank and my power core begins to cuts out. With the last of my power reserve, I take Alex limp in my arms and jump from the balcony to the grass below in the hopes that should I reactive I won’t find myself buried under 400 year old masonry. Darkness takes me as my circets crackle from the magic radiation.