Within pitch darkness, unhealthy, ethereal light began to shudder in. The mirage forming, it struck Jackie that this was her vision.

Cold, crisp. Prickly ground, dead leaves. Wilting away, gray.

It was Pell Forest. Jackie saw herself, the one before all of this—the person that didn’t go through anything.

The worse injury she had back then was pulling muscle. Or getting a massive bruise that took a week or so to heal?

Before siVis. Before… immense trauma. Before complete and utter ego death.

She was wearing her old high school track coat, pants… The first of the last of the strings of humanity, that she never knew how value until it turned into warped threads, a patch, nothing.

“Are you a cop or something?” Maddie said from afar, perched on the ground, looking up at her.

Did it go that way? On that night…?

As soon as “she” saw Maddie, the others rose from the bramble-covered dirt. Aiko hits the ground running, darting from the hollow trees. River settled within the ground, as she tapped away on her worn keyboard. Tracy squirmed in place, digging her boots into the crushed leaves. Biting her lip, a deer in multiple possible headlights.

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“—Why are you all here, out of interest?” Jackie heard herself skip past the conversation she vaguely remembered.

Next thing she knew, she was looking down, as the others looked at her.

“I need… To make everything right. I need… To bring clarity again. I can’t do it if I can’t use the madness against them. I just want life back—my life back.”

“To get it over with,” Maddie spat in a whiplash—mirroring how it felt at the time.

“To do even more super cool stuff!” Aiko rushed by as a blur.

“A third option out…?” River mumbled, Jackie could barely hear and debate if she meant that.

“What’s the harm in extra security…?” Tracy followed that up with one of her nervous laughs—literally spliced in from a different context.

Jackie stood there, alone. Looking around, despite having people around her, still alone.

Then the winds kicked up. The color began to fade. And the trees to the very air around them, as if they were being scrutinized by the universe itself, broke down structural—into the cosmic white wisp of a Shift.

She felt the emotions again, as it faced them. Horror, curiosity, pain. And yet it was yards away from her.

But it missed them. It turned left. Fate confirmed they did not matter, and will continue to do so.

“—This is a sign,” Jackie turned towards the others. “We got our near-death experience. We can get by this, without the need for space superpowers.”

Construction of a smile ensued. “Let’s look out for each other.”

But she had to turn around.

She had to walk forward.

Jackie fell backward, at the force at their reality being torn to pieces.

She wanted to stop this. She wanted to somehow change history. But she can’t. No more than she had any control over her life.

A solemn look across her face, as she watched her and the others spiraled into literal nothingness. The very start of their crazy, sad journey of theirs.