Thereafter Chapter 7: Meeting the Masses
Once they had agreed, the preamble flew past in a blur. Michael found himself hurried into a black metal chestpiece that seemed uncannily light and a frankly overstuffed utility belt over his work uniform pants. Lex had come away from the dressing montage with a deep purple tunic not unlike the one Eltern wore, not the worst, and while Alicia’s heavy fur and lamellar leather armor was a bit extra, she hadn’t drawn the shortest straw by far. No, there was no denying, at least to Michael’s mind, that Felipe’s costume was by far the most ridiculous. The only way to describe it was Striking, with thigh-high boots in dyed yellow leather, some sort of knee-length short pants, wide shoulder pads over what Michael could only described as a leather armor crop top and a cape of honest-to-god peacock feathers. The worst part, to Michael’s mind, was that Felipe was kind of pulling it off. It was like there was a part of this ridiculous man that had always waited to don this outfit, or something very close to it. If only Michael had felt as well about his costume.
“This is going to be a disaster.” Michael said, mostly to himself as he adjusted the under-armor shirt that was chafing his neck. “An absolute disaster.”
After being rushed into their armors by a team of very insistent pages and attendants, whose names Michael vowed to learn one day, they had been taken to some sort of anteroom.
“Oh don’t say that Saint, it might be more of a catastrophe, or perhaps a situation?” Felipe said.
“A situation?”
“Yeah, a situation. A… how do you do?”
“Let’s just smile and wave and make the best of it boys.” Alicia’s voice was tight. Not shaking like Michael was, but it was clear she didn’t love the situation either.
“Speak for yourself handsome,” Lex said. “I am going to strut.”
“Now that I’d like to see,”
“Oh just you watch girlie.”
“Ok, but did Eltern tell any of you what we’re supposed to do exactly?” Michael asked. The room wasn’t hot, but he found himself sweating.
“Just smile and wave basically.” Lex said. “He has a bit of a speech ready, we’re just supposed to look Dignified I think.”
“He told you that?”
“First couple of days yeah, I was getting a bit on his nerves I think.”
“Oh yeah, you were the first one to arrive weren’t you?” Alicia asked.
“Guilty as charged.”
The door to the anteroom creaked, and Michael found himself sitting up straighter. He thought he was sitting up straight already, but apparently there was an ounce of slack yet to tighten. A large woman stood in the door. She wasn’t fat exactly as much as she was built like a power lifter, all functional muscle and core strength. She was dressed in the same kind of leather and furs that Alicia wore, but it was clear the armor had saved her life many times, an impression aided by how her skin had similar color and weathering to the well-worn leather plates, and just about as many scars. This, Michael realized, had to be Deepspeaker Lia. There also was something unusual about her eyes that Michael couldn’t find it in himself to peer hard enough to nail down what it was.
“It is time, Mountain Wind,” Lia said. Michael had expected her voice to be a deep alto, or perhaps even contralto to match her title, but her reedy mezzo alto wasn’t unpleasant either.
Alicia nodded at her. “Thank you Deep Speaker,”
Lia led them through more corridors. After his arrival, Michael had tried to map out the corridors and hallways, but he had lost track of where he was two or three times at this point. It could be, he figured, that the building wasn’t a square like he had assumed. Things generally weren’t symmetrical in Thereafter, it was hard to build things that made sense out of fragments like they did, after all. A final set of doors opened, letting in some pale daylight that all the same overwhelmed Michael’s senses. As Michael blinked the dots out of his eyes, he could see the Crowd.
The human mind, for all its marvels and abilities, is ill equipped to deal with large numbers in general, and large numbers of people in particular. Michael couldn’t remember if Eltern had told him that several thousands people now lived in the expanded refugee camp that was the city of Thereafter, or if that was an assumption he had made himself. At any rate, the knowledge of thousands of inhabitants was one thing, but seeing a crowd that belonged in a soccer stadium squeeze into the claustrophobic streets of Thereafter, and up to the quarter of a city square that Eltern and his Council had cordoned off to hold their announcement, was an entirely different beast altogether.
The crowd was clearly excited, waves of whispers spreading through it as Michael stepped out into the strange sunlight, but there was something inherently threatening to its sheer size. The difference between a small scuffle and a stampede would be slim indeed, and while there were simple wooden barricades to separate Them and The Masses, Michael could tell at a glance they wouldn’t count for gubbins in a crowd collapse or other overcrowding event.
Michael could feel a panic attack starting to bubble as he took his place next to Lex at a sort of attentive rest behind the podium. The panic attack wasn’t appearing, it was already there. The time for preventing it was past, now it was time to ride it out. Taking deep breaths, Michael found himself looking at individuals in the crowd, trying to rid it of it’s massive power by considering it like a gathering of individuals instead of a fleshy wave it would act like if the situation got out of hand.
The crowd contained some molefolk, but their short stature made them hard to pick out from the masses, he could see some bird people, various mages, some people in furs and leathers that looked kind of similar to Lia. There were so many different kinds of people. Some human or so close to human as to be visually identical, others in more fantastical forms. Michael couldn’t be sure, but he was pretty sure he saw at least two people with elephant heads and a lone broad-shouldered rhino man amid the masses.
Eltern stepped out of the massive cube shaped building that Michael had begin to think of as “the castle,” even though only roughly 1/8th of it looked in any way like one. It was more about the inherent authority of clearly being the largest building in the city. Eltern looked grave, but in a way that was hard to not think of as paternal. He had news, and while it wasn’t a miracle exactly, it was definitely good news. Eltern was perhaps no politician, Michael figured, but he knew a thing or two about how to project poise. Perhaps the academic debates of the Magus College had some similarities with political debate like that. Eltern stood behind the podium and cleared his throat before beginning to speak.
“People of Thereafter,” Eltern’s voice rang out, louder and clearer than it had any right to be. Surely, Michael thought, there had to be some sort of magic involved. “The Council of Thereafter,” Eltern motioned for Lia and a disheveled-looking man clad in a cloak partially made out of what appeared to be moss and ferns, “have heard your cries of despair. It is no secret that the times we are going through are tough, and that we struggle in the darkness of the Cataclysm.” A hush had fallen over the crowd, and seeing such a mass being entirely silent was perhaps more unnerving than their cacophonous normality.
Michael felt like everyone was looking at him, even though there was no reason to suspect that. It was just that nervous itch that came over him in public some times, he told himself. Nothing but a nervous itch. The feeling of dread wasn’t tangible, he told himself, it was just hypervigilance.
“Today, I can not offer you a path out of that darkness, but I can offer you a light to lead the way.” Eltern continued. “In the shape of these heroes of legend!” Eltern stepped to the side to indicate he meant them.
The crowd erupted in cheers and other loud celebrations. Michael could swear he heard one of the elephant-people make a triumphant toot with their trunk.
“In the days following this auspicious day of summoning, the Council will work together with these four exceptional individuals in our task which is, as always, to keep Thereafter Safe and healthy, and I hope you will all join me in welcoming The Weaver of Reality Lex Chlebek of Aurol, The Mountain Wind Alicia Thorn of Steppeworld, The Arm of Soars-in-Thermals, Felipe Espino from The Land of Clouds, and The Living Shadow Michael Sørstrand of Caveworld.” The crowd started cheering, as Michael could feel a chill spreading through his body, like a cold liquid draining his senses from him. No wait, he realized, not everyone was cheering. There were screams in there but why would they scream?
A hand, hot as the sun and as firm as the roots of the mountain gripped Michael’s hand, he blinked out of the haze that had started to envelop him, it was Felipe.
“Hey, Saint, we gotta get outta here. This place is going crazy.”
“What’s…”
“Talk later big guy,” Lex chided him as they started moving. At some point, the crowd had spilled over the simple barricades, into the town square. Now, the mass, at this point moving more like a wave than a group of people, pressed up to a clear blue shimmer that prevented ingress. Eltern, still on the podium, held his hands up, seemingly directing the shimmer.
“Please,” Eltern spoke, his voice strained by the apparent effort of this spell. “People, calm yourselves,” but he might as well not have bothered. The crowd was beyond calming now. Whether it was started with intention or by the wrong sequence of events, the cheer had turned into a crowd crush which turned into a panic. People desperately tried to flee the danger that was themselves, tripping and being tripped by their fellow men. Michael could briefly see the Rhino Man standing his ground before something, someone most likely, knocked into him at the perfectly wrong angle to send him sprawling. He looked away, he didn’t want to see who he landed on, or what became of them.
“This isn’t good,” Felipe mumbled. They were protected by the sheer physics of the crowd only by the shimmering force field, but their escape route back into the Castle was similarly crowded with people trampling and being trampled, and if the beads of sweat on Eltern’s forehead was an indication, they couldn’t rely on him forever either. “We’re fueling the fire, we should get the fuck out of here,” Felipe all but shouted, there was an urgency to his voice that made Michael think that he knew first hand what kind of forces they were dealing with.
“Hold on,” Michael felt something constrict him, and for a brief terrifying moment he feared the crowds somehow got to him before he realized it was Alicia that had thrown her arms around him and Felipe. “You good?”
“You know it sister,” Lex replied. “Show the boys what you can do.”
Michael had no idea what Lex was talking about. Alicia took a deep breath, and with one smooth, gracious movement kicked off into a mighty leap, yanking both Felipe and himself off their feet as she shot off the ground. Something inverted inside of Michael as the jump reached its peak. At some point the leap turned into a fall, and the fall, as all falls eventually do, resolved into a sudden and humorless stop from the ground. As Michael found himself examining the fine handiwork of whoever had made the ceiling tiles he was currently laying on, he could hear Felipe scrabble to his feet.
“Holy fuck-damn, Crazy, warn me next time ok?”
“Now where would the fun be in that?”
Michael was in the process of getting up himself, a process that involved a nonzero amount of laying perfectly still and letting the beating the world had just administered to him percolate. Just as he managed to get his arms under himself and push well enough to get his torso off the ground and his legs under him, he was met with an absurd tableau.
Alicia was standing with her back to the street, her outfit somewhat disheveled while Felipe, even from the back, looked like a plucked chicken, his peacock feathers having mostly loosened in the impossible jump. Strangest of all was probably Lex, though, as their serene look of slight concentration looked like it belonged on a virtuoso instrumentalist, not the strange Polish gremlin it now occupied. The fact that they were hovering in the air, seemingly descending, was also a bit odd now that Michael thought about it.
Lex touched down, the serene-concentrated look vanished from their face as if it had never been there.
“Everyone ok?”
“Fucking far from it I’d say.” Felipe
Lex clicked their tongue
“Ok, let me rephrase. Is everyone on team Exalted Heroes mostly unharmed?”
“I’m fine,” Alicia said
“Oh girl you KNOW you are,”
“Yeah yeah,” Felipe muttered.
“I’m OK,” Michael said. The unspoken addition to his analysis built up in his chest until he couldn’t hold it in any more. Now stood up, Michael could see more of the situation they had escaped narrowly. “But Felipe is right, things are pretty fucking far from OK.”
Author Note: This scene changed a lot from its initial conception. At various points this was an otherwise harmless panic attack scene, an attempted assassination hinting at Darker Forces At Play, and even a peaceful (ish) piece of worldbuilding. The version we’re seeing today is the result of one of those moments of epiphany where the author not only realizes what should happen in the scene but what it’s supposed to mean and why. Not to toot my own horn too hard, but I really like where I’m going with this.
-V.S.D-