MagiStream

It wasn't a terribly usual sort of tower; the city as a whole tended not to go in for heights, preferring instead to burrow into the earth beneath, so as a consequence the tower quite stood out despite the fact it was only two and a half stories tall. Above ground, anyway; it burrowed much further down below as most of the other buildings did. It was a soft sort of tower, looking oddly like a termite mound had decided windows were a good idea and then overdone it a bit. Either that, or the builder had gotten a good deal for bulk orders for curtains because every window sported a riot of colors that completely blocked the view inside.

Nobody had ever seen any of the curtains tied back.

Fortunately, the girl approaching the tower wasn't the usual sort of girl. That is to say, she looked normal enough, having the usual complement of heads, arms, legs, fingers, toes, and orifices, but she was headed straight for the tower. This was unusual, because nobody went to the tower. Not willingly, anyway; you occasionally saw two beefy figures dragging a third, kicking and screaming, towards the tower in the wee hours of the morning but nothing happened during the day.

If you recognized the third figure, the one who kicked and screamed, you closed your shutters and pretended you didn't if you knew what was good for you.

But this girl seemed determined. She headed straight for the tower with her head held high as if daring anyone to challenge her or ask where she was going. Nobody did, of course. They weren't stupid. If they didn't know for sure they couldn't be held responsible for whatever happened and later could answer 'yes' truthfully to questions like "You didn't know about this, is that correct?"

She strode up to the tower and knocked firmly at the door. It opened quietly, with no frightful screams of rusty hinges or groaning of overstressed wood (it wasn't that kind of door), and she walked inside.

Inside, the tower looked perfectly ordinary - as long as you looked at the hallway straight on. There were things that lurked, just out of sight at the corner of the eye, but looking directly at things proved them to be perfectly ordinary (if slightly kitsch). Small end tables supported small porcelain figurines and other tchotchkes, while pretty - if uninspired - watercolors hung at perfectly even intervals along the walls.

The girl strode along the hallway, ignoring the trinkets and the lurking presences with equal aplomb. The stairway was nothing special, save that the light didn't seem to reach very far up or down it; you walked in a section of light that followed you, but the dark was always present just behind and just ahead. the presence of windows at equal distances along the staircase didn't seem to make any difference in this; the amount of light and the size of the lighted section was always the same no matter if you passed by a window or not.

She marched up the steps, one at a time in a measured pace that would get her where she wanted to go without leaving her huffing and puffing at the top of the stairs. One flight, two flights, and she stepped out onto a landing that contained only one door. She went over, pushed it open, and there, in the tower, she came face-to-face with evil.

"Hello, Grandpa. It's good to see you again."

December 25, 3451
It's official. They've won.

All those years ago, the sudden merger of the three states-for the rest of the world was either blanketed in suffocating water or rendered uninhabitable by the scorching sun-the move should have tipped us off. All was not right. After all, I was one of those standing on the boat, watching others' lemmingesque deaths at the stony, unyielding hands of the rocks. Politicians, journalists, leaders, kings. Gone in the 3164 Incident that people speak of in harsh, lowered whispers.

Or spoke,
There's nobody left.

January 31, 3451
They've found me. I'm being sent to the surface soon...

The sky is still dark, toxic clouds impenetrable by the absent sun. It's too cold. They have not taken my book, my only lifeline, for which I am gratefu

l. They have, however, taken my supplies. I suspect this is what was left of Avalon, or Atlantis. The cold is getting to my head, numbing my mental process.

January 36, 3451
They've come back. They've come back. They've come ba