The last thing you bought before hunkering down for the evening was a pair of new headphones. Though they cost seven times as much as your mangled ear buds, these were over-ear, better quality, and featured noise cancellation. The traffic rumbling by outside now rode on silent wheels. The only sounds in your ear were NPC barks and digital gunfire.
The weekend rolls on, but your barely notice. The only times you get up are to use the restroom, grab something from the fridge, or go to bed. There’s a rotting comfort in fully isolating yourself from the outside world for a few days, staying off the usual social media snares and simply losing yourself in your backlog of games. Sudden unemployment had its perks.
Dawn breaks Monday morning and you begrudgingly reintegrate into the internet. Twitter is awash with melodramatic hashtags: #Rapture, #EndOfDays, and #GodsJudgement. You assume this is in reference to some holy war lighting up the other side of the world, or a viral season finale of a show you’ll never watch, but all the related articles are, unexpectedly, showing candid shots of trees and plants.
While trying to decipher the connection, you click through some relevant videos. A wide, panning shot from the passenger door of a news helicopter shows a great scar of flame burning through the forest. The heavy thumping of the helicopter’s blades drowns out the camera man’s commentary, but you don’t need a play-by-play to understand the damage. The fire rages like a sea from Hell, the sky-swallowing smoke cloud apparently visible from multiple countries. It glows with a concerning purple hue.
You scroll further. Many of the trending thumbnails show a lineup of severe-looking executive types. You click on one with thousands of comments titled: ‘Never forget these assholes started it all!!’.
The upload date was from two days ago. There’s a panel of suits, all old white men, sitting behind a long table with their hands folded on the surface. The one in the center, broad-shouldered with glassy eyes, leans forward into a half dozen mics. The snaps and flashes of cameras throw his shadow back and forth across the company logo-plastered backdrop. He clears his throat. “Last Thursday there was an accident in our South American manufacturing plant. During a routine transfer of materials, an unfortunate human error triggered a catastrophic failure within one of our holding units, and lead to a minor explosive reaction. There were no casualties.”
He continues like this for a while, assuring everyone that the damage isn’t as bad as it seems, and how their employees were operating perfectly within safety protocols, and how cosmically unlikely the whole affair was. Public relations 101.
A young reporter in the second row stands up and shouts above the general commotion. “Do you have any plans to control the fires? They’re still burning as we speak.”
The executive turns up his hands. “We’re working closely with the local governance’s fire department. They’re making excellent progress on controlling the spread and expect to have it walled off within the next few days.”
Another reporter fights her way through the noise. “And what about the ecological impact? Experts are reporting that the chemical compounds burning off the complex could make the area uninhabitable for decades.”
The executive responds with a thin smile. “Those studies are still on-going, so I ask everyone not to jump to any conclusions. We’re very conscious of the effects our work has on the environment. Our top analysts have determined that the eventual impact to the surrounding jungle is comparable to naturally occurring wildfires. Our planet is resilient, and I have no doubt the plants and animals within the affected area will endure this small upset.”
His voice is starting to annoy you, so you click off and scroll down to another video: there's a svelte newswoman standing in front of a two-story suburban home with the resident family standing beside her. The mother's clutching her daughter close with a wild look in her eyes.
"God help me, I thought a bomb went off in our bedroom," the mother says, making a great show with the hand that wasn't occupied. "I yelled out to my husband, I said 'Dave, what the hell was that?' and I could see he was just as terrified as I was. So we gathered up Sam and ran outside. We were waiting for the whole house to come crashing down on us."
"And we're all happy to see you made it out safely." The reporter looks at the camera as it pans up and to the right. “Behind me you can see the cause of the Wilson’s hectic morning. A massive tree hit the side of their house their morning just as they were getting their daughter ready for school. The Wilsons and their neighbors are still baffled as to how it got there.”
The camera cuts to a heavyset man in a white polo. He squints against the sun. “Damnedest thing I ever saw. Folks calling it tornado damage... Hah! Buddy, what forest would a tornado take that tree from? If you haven’t noticed, we’re in the middle of nothin’ but cornfields and asphalt.”
Back to the reporter now. She’s walking away from the scene and preparing to hand things over to the desk. “Our meteorologists are still investigating what exactly lead to this freak accident. Botanists from the local university have gathered around the site of destruction and are asking for a closer look. This is Casey Sellon with-“
You click off and the audio cuts. There are hundreds of these videos, enough to have their own category and auto-generated playlist, so there’s a lot to shift through. “Miracle”, “Curse”, and “Rapture” keep popping up. The stories and images are becoming more unbelievable as you catch up to the current date. Hotel lobbies are bursting with oak trees. Dozens of abandoned cars line the highway, filled with soil and wild ferns. A fourteen-foot-wide cable of white flowers pours down the face of a skyscraper. There’s a growing panic in the voices of everyone interviewed, a few respondents broke down into wild accusatory yelling before the screen cut to black. There’s an emergency summit of scientists from all disciplines being held in Poland to hash out what exactly is happening.
As you click on the latest report, you hear a shrill beeping that barely registers through your headphones. Your cell phone is blaring a warning message with bright orange text across the home screen.
EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION
SEVERE WEATHER REPORTED IN YOUR AREA
EVACUATE TO NEAREST UNDERGROUND SHELTER IMMEDIATELY
scrolls by in bold letters. You slip off your headphones, the wall of sound wailing from your phone is like a pocket-sized fire alarm. Your basement is probably fine as far as underground shelter goes, but it’s strange they didn’t mention what kind of weather. You decide to head upstairs to check the conditions.
You make five steps towards the stairs before the earth lurches and throws you off your feet.
You slam into the wooden banister, a dull crack almost pulling your shoulder from your socket. The walls and ceiling toss violently like a giant scooped up your house and was trying to shake the furniture loose. Cabinets full of silverware fling open and spew their metallic bile across the floor before toppling over and crashing to pieces. Liquor bottles dance and jive off their shelves and explode on the tile in foamy gore. Your hands grip tightly around the banister to anchor yourself in the chaos of shrieking metals and splintering wood, but your handhold snaps off the wall and throws you to the floor. Plaster crumbles off the ceiling and hammers your body in a heavy choking rain. You close your eyes and cover the back of your head, praying nothing heavy or sharp slams into your spine.
It sounds like thousands of tons of earth is colliding with itself; like the planet had found a new source of gravity and was ripping itself apart. The air-shaking roar drones longer and louder until the sound fills your chest and rattles your teeth. More debris strikes the back of your hand, and you feel a funny certainty that these were going to be your last moments alive.
Then, stillness. The din of destruction cuts out with the immediacy of flipping a light switch. Your heartbeat is rapid and loud in your ears. Your tensed muscles slowly relax as you open your eyes.
Every inch of carpet is buried under a substantial layer of dust and debris. There’s a couple of smaller tremors that sift the dust on the floor. A few surviving bottles tip, roll, and drop lazily to the ground to join the inch-tall puddles of broken glass. Aside from the first vicious jaunt against the wall, you’re free from any serious injury. Checking your pockets, your hand pulls out a bent cellphone with dozens of spiderweb cracks patterning the screen. A few silent taps on the screen confirms its death.
You pocket your husk of cell phone and make for the stairway which is, thankfully, still somewhat intact after the quake. Some steps have collapsed on themselves but most of the banister has held strong. The electricity’s been knocked out, leaving the stairway shrouded in darkness, but there’s a sliver of white daylight coming in under the doorframe at the top. You trudge upwards over the collapsed steps and piles of crumbled wall.
Fumbling a bit, your hand finds the knob and turns. The door gives slightly but there's something in the way; it won't budge past the first half-inch. You brace on the steps, drop your good shoulder, and ram forward. Something on the other side cracks and more light spills in alongside a flush of fluttering green particles and a strong earthy scent. Another tackle forces the door wide open with sharp crack. The momentum carries you forward over the top step and onto the kitchen floor, bruised, bewildered, and out of breath.
The rich smell of vegetation fills your nostrils. Beneath your hands is a dense carpet of tiny green clovers growing atop masses of twisting roots. You sit up in disbelief, unable to rationalize the scenery.
All around you are plants. Huge ferns like helicopter blades cover the ceiling, creepers thick as pythons drape the countertops and fill the sink. Weeds, thistles, and dark green vines sprawl and infect every surface from floor to ceiling. Only small specks of white countertop and stainless steel give any indication you’re inside what used to be a modern kitchen.
You pluck a clover from the floor and roll it between your fingers. The slightly waxy texture feels as real as anything else. Turning your head, you’re still able to make out the doorway that leads to the living room, though it’s much narrower with all the plant life choking the frame. You get your feet, feeling a fern brush the back of your neck, then angle your body to shuffle through the green passage. Cool leaves whisper across your face along the way.
In what was supposed to be the living room, great lily pads the size of kiddie pools lie atop a shallow crystal blue pond. Brilliant yellow frogs croak and leap and splash around the scene, a few taking residence atop the moss-smothered entertainment center. Your walk across their domain to the front door splashes the serene water’s surface and sends a humming ball of gnats swarming to another corner of the room to escape your footfalls. If this were all a dream, it would be the first you experienced the sensation of wet socks to such an uncomfortably vivid degree.
You finish crossing the pond and reach the front door, bullfrogs still croaking in your ear, dragonflies still patrolling the stagnant water for lunch. With some hesitation, you tease it open. There’s nothing obstructing it this time, so the door swings wide open on the first push. A strong draft catches the broadside and pulls the door from your hand, slamming it to the opposite wall. Sunlight warms your face. Despite rapidly acclimating to the absurdity of the situation, your breath still catches in your throat.
The modern skyline overlooking your suburb is buried under what must be millions of tons of vegetation. Unimaginably massive trees billow from the earth within the city and shade the rooftops of skyscrapers. A 747 could comfortably use one of their leaves as a runway. Trailing downwards from the tree trunks, scores of smaller plants bleed together in enormous swaths of greenery that cling and spill over the concrete surfaces like natural murals, car-sized white flowers in full bloom speckled down the length. There’s a tiny, fluttering movement along the green. Whether those are simply the plants swaying in the city’s heavy crosswinds or something more active, you’re unable to tell.
A seizing, primal awe holds you in place while you stare. The breeze lifts your shirt, whips it fiercely around your torso, then settles back down to a soft whine. What you’re seeing is impossible, your brain insists, but every other sense forces you to confront it. You’ve stepped into some kind of apocalypse, though with significantly less ash and hellfire than you expected.
Feeling somewhat numb, you make your way down the three concrete steps (now lined with unnaturally tall prairie grass) that lead to your front door. You look around the immediate area. Like the skyscrapers on the horizon, everything around you has been thoroughly reclaimed by nature. Driveways, vehicles, playgrounds, houses, sheds, telephone poles; all wearing a thick coat of plants and budding flowers, content to sway in the breeze and ebb towards the unspoiled afternoon sunshine.
You cup both hands around your mouth. “Hey! Hello? Hello? Anyone out here?”
Insects chirp and the wind sighs. You start down the sidewalk and continue your campaign. The wind tries to snatch away your calls as they leave your mouth. Every house you pass looks blanketed in greenery and plainly devoid of life, some sunken deep into the earth and leaving nothing but the front porch jutting up from newly formed hills. If you didn’t live here, you would have guessed this area had been abandoned for decades.
Nothing human breaks up the monotony of green. Even a dead body would have provided some twisted reassurance since corpses are at least expected at the sites of violent natural disasters.
That’s what this is, right? Something natural. You turn the word over in your mind as you reach main street and pass through the intersection overhung by traffic lights dripping with thick bundles of morning glories. The storefronts at the corners are ruptured by giant tree roots weaving in and out of the glass displays like rough wooden tentacles.
A strangled cry from behind grabs your attention. You turn around, seeing nothing but obstinate verdant hills, then focus on the sound. It’s coming from somewhere behind the grocery store parking lot. You double back and circle around the building’s rear entrance, wading through a patch of knee-high dandelions along the way.
In the middle of the road, flanked by long rows of destitute-looking store fronts, a squirming body lays prone among tangles of short grass splitting the asphalt. Several blades of grass are wet and drooping with blood. A large serrated wound traces down from the stranger’s calf to the back of his foot. As you approach, their cries get smaller, and they manage to turn themselves towards you.
The stranger’s eyes are bloodshot and manic. His forehead is sweaty and matted with dark brown hair. “Are you armed?” he whispers, eyes frantically scanning the sky above you.
You kneel by his side, heartbeat rising. “Armed? No. I just walked outside and found this-“
“Quiet!” he hisses and grabs your pant leg. “Stay low and keep your voice down. It’s still out there. Or maybe it’s busy with someone else.” He licks his chapped lips. “Can you get me to the garage across the street? I work there. The manager’s office should safe.”
You follow his gaze. There’s an auto repair shop across the street. The front entrance is grown over with gnarled branches, but the garage door is open wide enough to slip under. “Sure,” you whisper. “Can you stand?”
“I can stand. Don’t know if I can walk.” Using your shoulder, he pulls himself up and leans against you. His shirt is damp with sweat. He winces through clenched teeth and nearly tips both of you to the ground. “Thanks. Sorry for being an asshole. I’m just scared. Please, let’s just get off this street.”
You nod and the two of you hobble towards the garage, his bad leg trailing behind like a stuffed sock and smearing blood along the grass. From what you can see, the lacerations cut up his achilleas pretty bad, but didn’t go high enough to rupture any major veins. It’s like he dropped his leg on a buzzsaw. The matter of who can treat his wounds or what did this to him in the first place would have to wait.
Halfway to the garage, you start to wonder about his condition. His breath is short and raspy, and he’s leaning more heavily into you with every step. The paleness in his face suggests the leg wound’s worse than it looks. He may not be conscious in the next few minutes. A sudden flit of movement in the corner of your eye halts your stride.
“Hey,” he gasps, “why did we stop?”
On the far side of the street, an enormous crow perches atop a moss-ruined sedan. The creature looks to be at least twenty feet tall, its head larger than an engine block. Monstrous talons spear the passenger window for purchase. After a brief preening of its mangy chest plumage, it hops down and lands on the street, eerily silent for its size. The crow’s head twitches and tilts, though it doesn’t seem confused. Only curious. A few scraps of red-pink meat dangle from its beak.
The man you’ve been dragging is silent. A whimper escapes his lips, and his working leg twitches involuntarily against the soil to push the two of you away. You eye the distance behind you, seeing at least another thirty feet until the swath of grass gives way to concrete and the bottom lip of the garage door. The distance feels impossibly long, even without your cargo. And once there, you realize, he’ll need to be set down and dragged through. Would the crow-thing politely stand by to let the two of you orchestrate that?
Keeping your eyes trained on the bird, you inch backward, every muscle tense, adrenaline quietly screaming through your veins. The crow hops forward for every step you take backwards. A horrid, choked caw creaks open its beak. It leans forward expectantly.
Ten feet to the garage and the crow’s close enough to touch your feet with its shadow. It’s nearly on top of you, the beady dark eyes in its skull glossy and unreadable. The crow stops and puffs out its chest. A guttural shriek cuts the air, and it dives forward in a flash of black feathers. You leap back with all your strength as a giant beak slices through the man’s shoulder, sending you to the ground with his severed arm falling next to you with a muted thump.
There’s nothing you can do. You tuck your arms and roll under the garage door as the crow pins the man with its talons. His shrieks turn to blood-filled gurgles as the crow’s beak plunges into his chest and neck to pull sheared chunks away from the main body. You can feel the impact of its pecks through the earth. If you’re not quick, you’ll be next.
The garage is unstaffed, and the overhead lights died with the rest of the city’s power grid, leaving you blindly feeling for the exit among oil-smeared racks of auto parts. The ravenous tearing of flesh and meat outside stops, and the crow postures in front of the garage. Sharp pecks puncture the garage door as the crow tests its integrity. It’s looking for a way inside. There’s a moment of silence before it rashly jams its head under the garage door, twitching and straining and gnashing as it pulls upwards with the rest of its body. The heavy chains begin to slowly creak open as the cawing monstrosity below starts to wriggle inside. Its massive wingspan crashes against the untended workstations and stirs up the stale air.
A panicked sprint towards the back of the shop shows you the dark Exit sign hanging behind a row of wheelless cars. You fly towards it and hit the door at full sprint, barging out into daylight. The crow launches through the window above you, beak gnashing with thousands of needlelike teeth as a blizzard of glittering shrapnel falls through the air.
Thin branches whip past your face and arms as your legs pump forward, crashing through uneven planes of dirt and cattails. The crow is louder in your ear, its beating wings disturbing the air across your back. The sunlight in front of you grows dark as it swoops low for the hunt’s finale. You instinctively curl up and try to make yourself a smaller target, hoping to buy at least a few more seconds of safety from its talons.
Something flashes on your right. A loud report booms across the sky and the back of the crow’s skull explodes into a dark red mist, taking chunks of brain matter and white skull into the air. It gurgles another caw and collapses into the grass, splashing a group of ferns with its mortal wound. Its legs twitch, straighten, then lie still.
Death doesn’t seem like enough to stop such beast, but for now you feel safe. You pat down your body, certain you’d find a wicked slash running deep into your abdomen that adrenaline had been working to conceal, but you’re in the clear. Footsteps push through the grass behind you.
The sun is at their back so it’s hard to make out their form at first. Some kind of dark sand is swirling at her feet. They step closer. A young woman with two large ponytails nearly reaching to the floor smiles down at you.
“Oh, hi!” she says. “I’m Mumei.”
--
You take your savior’s hand and let her hoist you to your feet. She’s stronger than she looks. Mumei looks over your body with short quizzical glances. The way her head tilts is uncomfortably reminiscent of the crow. “Are you okay? I ran over as soon as I heard the commotion.”
“Just some cuts from the chase. Thank-”
She holds up her hand. “We should get somewhere safe first. Follow me.” She turns and jogs off towards an alley painted with bright pink wildflowers, apparently certain you would be willing to follow a complete stranger.
She’s right, of course. Because while the situation is strange, and there’s not nearly enough time to form a trusting relationship, the simple fact remain that you want to get away from the crow’s hulking corpse and unnerving stare. You fall in step and follow her through the alley, diligently keeping your gaze from the resting on the bounce of her short skirt as she moves.
“Where are we going?” you ask, ducking under another overgrown fern.
“There’s a restaurant on 8th Street with an underground storage room. The plants don’t like that place for some reason.”
The two of your reach the remains of an upscale restaurant somewhere downtown. It’s hard to tell with all the vegetation, but you may have seen it whirl by the bus windows on the way to work. The outdoor seating is largely subsumed by plant life, leaving only a couple iron chairs jumbled up in the landslide of roots and yellow flowers. Mumei hops over one of the larger roots, then ducks under an overhang. You follow on her heels into a dank stairwell with damp moss crawling down the sides.
“You’ve been here before?”
“Once or twice. It’s a good thinking space.” Mumei pulls open the door at the bottom of the stairwell, loosing a creak that rebounds horribly loud into the enclosed space.
Inside, as promised, is a storage room no bigger than a studio apartment. Two shelves clogged with cleaning supplies and paint line one wall, the other a bare, cool slab of concrete. A single daisy stubbornly pushes through a crack, though it’s otherwise devoid of vegetation. Humming to herself, Mumei unfastens the small lantern from her hip, sets it on the dingy table in the middle of the room, and lights the flame. The soft yellow light spilling from the burner is the most comfort you’d had since the emergency notification first went off.
Mumei sighs. “Okay. We should be fine, now.” She takes a seat, and you do the same. The heat of the lantern timidly warms your chest.
There are too many questions clambering for priority. You lean forward and set your elbows on the table, picking the most pressing option. “Who are you?”
“Mumei,” she replies, taking a dagger from her belt and scrubbing it down with some cloth.
“Do you live here?”
“On Earth? Yes! And for quite a while.”
Quirky. “What do you do? I mean, before all this.”
“I’m the Guardian of Civilization. Most of my time is spent making sure you guys don’t completely kill each other.”
“Uh…like a Coast Guard of something? Armed Forces?”
Mumei finishes polishing her dagger. Its short blade catches the light and gleams like a knife of pure sunlight. “No, I mean, I’m the aspect of Civilization. The avatar of every human and all their accomplishments. There was an official definition that went on and on, but I don’t really remember anymore…”
“Sorry, is this a joke?”
Mumei frowns. “Why would I joke about that?”
You stare at her a little while longer, until it’s clear that she’s serious. You run your hands through your hair. Your savior is clearly in her own world-- maybe the quake knocked her brain around a little too much. Regardless, she just saved your life and doesn’t seem dangerous, so you indulge her fantasy. “Well, it’s good to know humanity has an ally in times like these. And thank you for saving my life.” You nod at the door, trying to continue the conversation. “What do you think is happening out there?”
Mumei crosses one leg over the other, apparently deep in thought. “Hmm. What’s the best way to explain this…” She rummages through her pouch and takes out two pencils and a rubber band. She lightly stretches the rubber band between the two pencils, enough to hold the rubber band without much tension, then holds them up.
“Nature and civilization have this kind of relationship.” She tugs one pencil to the right and lets the other follow along, allowing the rubber band to go slack once more. “They keep each other in check. But if one of them goes too far, too fast…” She stretches one pencil way to the right and lets the other one go. It slingshots across the room and snaps against the wall. “Then the other one catches up. And I mean really catches up.”
You sit back and ponder her explanation. There’s an easy enough through-line with the massive chemical explosion that apparently happened a couple days ago. “So, this is basically trees taking revenge for that huge forest fire?”
“It’s not as petty as ‘revenge’, but sure, I guess humans would see it that way.” Mumei stands up and gestures to the whiteboard, a mess of diagrams, drawings, and runic symbols. Some of her sketches hold a deeply sinister quality and you try not to look at them for too long. “Basically, the balance between Nature and Civilization has shifted way too far. I need to bring it back in line, or the rest of humanity will be wiped out, maybe permanently.”
You have to admire her confidence in delivering these grandiose, ridiculous assertions. “Wow. The rest of humanity, huh? You’re saying this is happening globally?”
Mumei nods. “And humans haven’t advanced far enough to fight back against a threat like this. It’s too bad, three hundred more years and they’d have plenty of options.”
You study the diagrams-- drawings of Earth buried under a thriving sea of plants. If what she said was true, humans would have a hell of a time fronting an offensive. Chemical agents to kill plant life were off the table. Even if every factory on Earth weren’t overgrown to uselessness, there wouldn’t enough materials on Earth to produce herbicides at that scale. And fires would be out of the question; how would you maintain a controlled burn when the flammable material spans from coast to coast? The skies would darken with ash and continent-sized forest fires wouldn’t leave anything behind. It seemed impossible.
You’re curious as to what her solution is, but you throw out one of your own. “Then I suppose humanity could always live amongst them. Return to nature and pick fruits and laze about on beds of grass.”
Mumei laughs. “Huh? Wow, no, the world is super hostile to humans. I thought you would understand that after your little run-in with the crow.”
You throw up your hands. “Alright. Well as an American, the only thing I have left to suggest is nuking the forest.”
Mumei snaps her fingers. “Exactly!”
“Sorry?”
Mumei walks over to the whiteboard and erases the bottom half. Uncapping a marker, she quickly scribbles down a humanoid shape. One with shoulder length hair adorned with flowers, a long dress, and two antlers sprouting from her head.
“This,” she exclaims, tapping on the portrait, “is Fauna. I’m the Guardian of Civilization and she’s the Keeper of Nature. She’s got godly power and stuff, but she still has a physical body. And if we do enough damage to that body, all of nature will weaken, and balance will be restored…or at least mostly restored.”
Her delusions even have a named antagonist. Nice. “Then, you want to attack the Keeper of Nature to drive back the plants and save the world?”
Mumei nods aggressively. “Guns and explosives will do the trick. A nuclear weapon might be overkill now that I think about it. The hard part is getting close to her without everything else noticing.”
It’s dangerous to continue indulging her, especially when you should be looking for a way out of whatever ecological disaster enveloped the town, so you get up from your seat with an exaggerated grunt of effort. Trying not to sound too dismissive, you say “Hmm. Yep. Sounds like that’s going to be a huge battle. I wouldn’t want to get in your way.”
“Huh? Oh, no, you’d be a huge help! Having two different angles would make it much easier to land an attack.”
“Mumei, listen. I’m thankful for what you did back there, really I am, but I need to get going. I don’t know where my family and friends are, and-”
Mumei narrows her eyes. “You don’t believe me.”
“No. I don’t,” you admit. “And honestly, I think it’s dangerous for you to be playing pretend out there with those creatures moving about.”
“Then what killed that huge crow, huh? Was that the power of playing pretend?”
She had you there. You had watched the back of the beast’s head explode, smelled the blood wafting off its corpse while it died. Something beyond a vivid imagination had done that.
“I can prove it.” Mumei moves the lantern off to the side and spreads her hands across the table. Her eyes are set with determination.
You owe her this much, so you sit back down, a little uneasy and a little excited. “Alright. Show me.”
Mumei flexes her hand. A sharp teal glow radiates from her palm, shimmering black sand drifts off her gloves and hovers within the cage of her fingers, swirling, contracting, and solidifying into a sleek rectangular obelisk. She splays her fingers and the object suddenly grows heavy and thunks down to the table, motionless.
Leaning forward in your seat, you reach out and take the object in your hand. A pocket lighter. A few quick swipes with your thumb across the gritty ignition wheel sparks a tiny jet of flame. You wave it around, slowly, feeling both the coolness of the casing on your palm and the faint heat on the inside of your fingers. You set it back down while Mumei smiles broadly, like a child who just brought back photographic proof of Big Foot.
“That,” you start, “was impressive.” Mumei sits up a little straighter in her chair. “Probably the best sleight of hand I’ve ever seen.” You slide the lighter back across the table.
“Sleight of-?” Mumei frowns and stands up. Working both hands together, the teal light returns with a fierce glow, fully illuminating every dark corner of the room. The sand swirls and churns like a handheld hurricane, and darkened forms with complex geometry spill out onto the table. A gleaming, metal abacus. A nautical compass faced with plate glass. Three different kinds of motherboard. A cherry-red E7 guitar.
At some point you’ve stood up and backed yourself into the wall, watching but not believing the miracle of inanimate construction taking place. Mumei’s final trick: a long, heavy-barrel anti-tank rifle takes form and drops onto the table, its weight nearly collapsing everything to the ground. Transfixed, you walk over and touch the scope, the barrel, the rail. The unreality reminds you of your walk through the living room of frogs.
With a wave of her hand, the assembled materials shudder and instantly fall apart into piles of dark sand.
Mumei welcomes your astonished silence, taking your wide-eyed stare as a concession to her abilities. Her stance spells “Told ya!” in big glowing letters.
“That shouldn’t be possible…” you manage, which is a trite thing to say after personally witnessing trees overshadow skyscrapers and giant crows hunting humans in the streets.
“For humans, no.” Mumei lowers her voice. “And technically creating matter out of nothing is 'an affront to the natural laws of the universe', but that’s someone else's problem.”
You ponder this while letting the black sand slide through your fingers. Never mind the technical construction-- matter had been created from nothing. That’s not how physics works, at least, based on contemporary understanding. What Mumei did can only be interpreted as the most important breakthrough of science, or pure magic.
“So you can create anything?”
“Anything that humanity’s invented. Larger, more complicated stuff takes longer.”
You sit down and try to process this. Try to process everything. Nearly dying in your basement during the quake. Waking up to a world overtaken by nature. Watching a man die by the claws of a giant bird. And here, now, witnessing the miracle of creation at the hands of some kind of god.
Mumei walks in front of you and gently prods your shin with her boot. “You believe me now, right? I could make a laptop or something if you want.”
You hold your hand up. “I believe you. I’m just…trying to put everything together here. You said we have to find Fauna.”
“Yep.” She guides a long line across the whiteboard. “It’s not super far away, but the forest will be working to slow us down every step. And the deeper we get, the harder it will be to move without catching Her attention.”
“Wait, she’s in the city?”
Mumei nods. “Central downtown was the epicenter of Fauna’s ascension. That’s what brought me here in the first place.” She turns to you and points. “And you’re the first person I’ve run into that wasn’t already dead on the streets. You survived a run-in with the local fauna long enough for me to save you, so you seem good enough.”
“Say I join you. What exactly do you need from me?”
“A distraction, mostly. You’ll hold Fauna’s attention and I’ll strike from behind. She won’t get close enough to harm you.”
“That’s it, then.”
“You mean you’re coming?”
The words feel ridiculous coming out of your mouth. “I don’t know what else to do. Let’s take back Earth.”
--
Mumei leads the way back up the stairs and scouts the area. She reappears at the doorframe and beckons you up. “We’re clear. Stay behind me while we move.”
The sunlight is refreshing but holds a subtly sinister quality. You don’t hear any approaching beasts but the plants at your feet feel more activated, like an important rumor has passed unheard through their roots. The flowers turn towards your face as you walk by—no, that’s surely an illusion—and even the wind seems to be pushing you back no matter where you turn. It’s only been a block, but your body feels an unnatural strain.
“What’s stopping you from manifesting a plane and flying us over to Fauna?” you ask, pushing through another overhang of vines. “Do you need a pilot’s license or something?”
Mumei steps atop a fallen billboard strewn with dark green weeds. “The presence of civilization glows like a beacon in a world dominated by nature. Creating anything more sophisticated than a pencil will draw Fauna and her servants’ attention. That’s why I immediately disassembled my rifle after I shot the crow.”
You consider this for a moment. “So, using technology here is like setting off fireworks in a zombie apocalypse?”
“Yeah. Close enough. We want to stay as low-tech as possible unless it’s a matter of life or death.” She looks up into the clouds, a small shudder running through her body. “Besides, the sky isn’t much safer. Now c’mon, we’ve got a long way to go.”