It was strange, watching my planet die.
I wasn't on Tauria when the core fully collapsed. Nobody was. Everybody left on the planet had made their way into one of the four evacuation ships, and were all going their separate ways. The Barren Oasis had dropped out of contact a few weeks ago, but that wasn't something people were really concerned with. The only thing anybody was paying attention to was how soon Tauria would come apart, or at least that's how it was on the Empty Metropolis.
We didn't have any sort of scientific charts or sensor readouts to let us know how long our home had left. All the important scientific tools had either been packed away or installed in the command or medical decks, and any sort of sensor data from the satellites that hadn't been knocked out of the sky yet was being routed to command as well so they could get the ship as far away as possible as soon as possible. The only things that the billions of us had to see our only home come apart were the high-fidelity video feeds from the sensor satellites. Most of us did almost nothing between evacuation and breaching the heliopause except watch and wait for the planet to not be one anymore.
There were a few false alarms-no, false alarms is a misstatement. False alarms would imply that everything was safe afterwards. There were two events that were almost the planet coming apart before it actually did.
What creates wonder can also create fear. What creates fear can also create insolence and ignorance of that fear. Blake doesn't buy the sign, even though he and Jackie have been exploring the strange parts of this empty, desolate boardwalk town since he arrived six months ago. Jackie tells him that "some shit you just do because when it doesn't follow your rules, you follow it's rules. What we don't know can hurt us, Blake, and there's a lot about this place nobody knows…Curiosity doesn't kill the cat here, it drowns it…sometimes it's safer to wonder from a distance." She explains how the sign appears on its own, her and Blake have an argument about it, and they don't come to a resolution. Later that night, Blake sneaks down to the lake and sees how red it is in the moonlight. As he tries to use a charm to make him both not get wet and be able to breathe underwater, something(unsure what yet) attempts to get him and drag him down to the bottom. He manages to use the light trick he used to get out to turn the water around him not red anymore, which also means that he won't be able to investigate what happens when the lake turns red anymore. Jackie pulls him out by just roping the boat in, and he concedes the point as they both realize how wonder and fear can be so intertwined.
"Red is water the when dive not do?"
Jackie and Blake stared at the shoddy-looking sign lashed on to the gate, and then out at the beach beyond it.
"Is this like a local tradition prank thing, or does somebody just really want to be a microfiction writer?" Blake joked. Jackie shook her head and turned around, walking back towards the sand-covered parking lot.
"Seriously? Come on, this has to be some sort of joke. Has the water ever actually turned red here?" He yelled back. "You can't tell me this place is haunted now when you've spent the last six months telling me how lame it is!"
Jackie didn't respond, only starting back down the footpath leading from the parking lot. Blake chased after, grabbing his pack from its position leaned against the fence as he kicked up sand behind him. He was too slow to make up for her head start, though, and Jackie quite literally vanished into the beachside grove. A shimmer passed through the air drew a line in the now more dirty than sandy ground directly in front of Blake, which he immediately ignored and stepped over.
The shook and shifted, sending dunegrass and grains of sand flying as another path was exposed. Smoke wafted through from the end of it, covering up the smell of ocean with that of burning pine. The sound of crashing waves was suddenly silenced as Blake entered the shade of the grove, his shadow remaining at what was essentially the doorway as an uninvited guest. Jackie was at the end of a sort of hallway of beachfront trees and grass, shifting through a mass of scribbled notebooks and torn paper on top of a log serving as a stand-in for a table. Whether she heard him approach or not didn't seem to matter, as she didn't react to anything that wasn't a hastily jotted down note. He stood there for several minutes, waiting for her to acknowledge him at all, but didn't engage in any sort of interaction until she tossed a crumpled piece of paper at his head.
"Do you have any respect for those who came before us?" Jackie asked out of the corner of her mouth. "Of course," he replied. She didn't respond for a few seconds before slamming a leather journal down on the log and turning to look him directly in the eyes. "Then show it, and don't go doing stupid shit like jumping in the lake when the sign's up."
"Jackie, I've been stuck here the last six months. Every single thing you've been told was dangerous or not good for us we've found, recorded, backed up with the notes we've salvaged, and stashed. There is nothing we've seen so far that would validate any of the fears anybody here has, so why would this be any different? You can't go back on half a year of calling this place tame with one event."
There wasn't a sound save for Jackie's slow, attempting-to-calm-down breathing for several seconds until she snapped. "Look, some shit you just do regardless of what you know or have seen. The other stuff we've seen hasn't killed people on a god damn annual basis!"
Blake blinked in surprise, turning back to look at the direction to lake was in. "