Consider The Implications Of Gravedigging
By Kermie
You are Gabriel Kwan, alias Wolong. Once again, you're having a headache.
This isn't too much of a foreign situation to you, it comes with your power. But for once, this headache isn't coming from overuse. Rather, it's a headache of anticipation. While she hasn't woke up yet, you
felt whatever Ellie was doing, and the little of what you've been able to dig up from Nora Kim's notes is right, it has to do with something called the Stage. Apparently, it's where everything psychic comes from/goes…? Does that include human minds? Perhaps. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Valiant Silver left detailed notes. Whether because of her Rebound or because of some unmedicated ADHD you don't know.
Faced with such a daunting mental task and the fact that Monarch's been disconcertingly quiet this past week, you do the only thing that makes sense:
You lean your head down and immediately start taking a nap, while vaguely pondering what this Stage could do.
When you open your eyes, you're immediately greeted with what seems like the QZ. While you weren't on the front lines of the Movement, the stench of Behemoth blood still lies heavy in the air, and you can distantly hear some R-Train units stomping across the rock. Almost as if someone else was moving your body on puppet strings, your head turns and you see—
Yu. Heavenly Astrologian walks across the rocky shores of the QZ, seemingly unhindered by the fact that there's a huge bite mark where her entire torso should be. You reach out, but it's no use. Instead, your head turns again and you see Yelena, walking down the shores as well. Lloyd. Ami. All your old comrades (and for a second, you see Arc out of the corner of your eye, but something in the rational part of your head reminds you that she's under Alice's care) are walking with injuries that should be fatal. No, injuries that were fatal.
As your body turns on invisible puppet strings, you see something, but much more importantly, you hear
someone— Nora's voice, carried over the waves but still recorded-sounding.
The Stage is a massive psychic conduit, but it doesn't house souls, exactly. It's not really an afterlife, it's more of a… place of every story ever told. You'd never be able to take anybody back from the fucking Stage, how could you? If there's somewhere where people go when they kick the bucket, it's anywhere but there!
Against everything in your mind that tells you to not, your eyes focus in on the thing in the distance. Your eyes see traditional Chinese clothing, purple. It's Lady Leizi, walking down towards the Leviathan for more Goldnine, amongst these corpses that you once called friends. Somehow, impossibly, you feel the pain of everyone walking despite their injuries and despite their need to rest, and you feel the look in Leizi's eyes as she looks back at you.
It's the look of someone who always believed that she was a monster.
You open your mouth to scream, but somehow no words come out. Instead, the corpses
scream in your place—
You wake up and—
Nopenopenope. Don't use the Stage as a necromancy tool, got it. Leviathan's Blood, you knew that you shouldn't have taken a nap without taking some Advil first.
Author's Note:
If I had a nickel for every time a new person came to this thread and expressed an opinion that the majority of the thread seemed to disagree with heavily, I'd have two, maybe three nickels. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it's happened that many times.
