What does it feel like to be pared down to the core, to the frequently irrational base notions of a human mind that are so often buffeted by a soft jacket of compassion and empathy? It’s a raw, red nerve, a string under constant tension, like a stomach full of hot oil that threatens to leap up and burn those nearby.
Guillermo walks to the sixth terminal, the one labeled ‘future’, not pausing to care about those who came before or behind him. Hands in his pockets, it’s more of an angry stomp than a true walk-- when you don’t have empathy you stop really giving a shit about other people, and that includes what they think about you.
He is passed, he realizes with a delayed click, like a lightbulb down a long circuit, that he’s passed by the same blue-haired dumbass that got the question wrong and fucked everything up for them, to begin with. Maybe if
mint frost had a fucking brain they wouldn’t have had to fight Zacian
and Zamazenta
and a rampaging train and then maybe
Alexei Ivanov wouldn’t have gotten messed up and maybe--- maybe--
--he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes with a groan. He felt like a miswired engine: something kept trying to click (a pilot light struggling to live in the deep recesses of his mind) but it would just spark and flare out again, and it was making him nauseous.
Meanwhile, back in (what villain!Memo would lovingly dub as Loserland, if he could feel love) Zuza can tell that something is wrong with Guillermo, but she can’t tell what. She just knows, in her heart of hearts, that he wouldn’t just act like this, out of the blue. She’d been with him for almost ten years, now. She kept her neck pressed against Alex, catching him in the slight cup of her shoulder, and going slow so as not to lose him. She hung back and kept pace with the sightless man and Kaida, knowing that, in the end, Memo-- the
true Guillermo-- would want them to be kept safe at all costs.
Once again, the world begins to change and warp, and Guillermo has to cup one hand over his right eye to stop from falling over; he
really did not feel well. With his next step, the ground beneath him shifts, the scrape of his shoes over the silver silt like a sigh. The air is as dry as his mouth. He makes himself take another step and his boot scrapes a thin film of soot off what appears to be the curve of a human skull, sloughing like a second skin.
“What the shit?” he stumbles back, unbalanced weight stepping on something hard, something that snaps with a sickening sound. His stomach lurches and he has to cover his mouth, not in horror (who gave a fuck about these sad sack dead people?) but from nausea. A human hand, bent at an impossible angle, protrudes up from the ash, like a macabre parade wave.
He hesitates long enough in that sprawl of cinder-covered corpses for Zuza, Kaida, and Alex to catch up, somehow. His eyes flick up from whatever dead body he’s standing on just in time to see one of the first meteorites to go burning through the atmosphere in the distance, hot trail a red gash in the bruise-purple night.
In what can only be described as a mercurial happenstance of karmatic chance, Memo gets stuck out in the wilderness under the falling stars; denied protection from Kaida’s Araquanid’s Wide Guard and Gabe’s Protect, he makes a mad dash for the only other source of cover:
Greyson Connors’s Comfey’s Hospitality shield.
Whether he makes it or not is up to his own athleticism and desire to live.
PNWCbvCb
t l ; d r- memo is still sans his
compassion and since it makes up such a large part of his personality his body is. rejecting his current ethos.
- makes it to terminal six and steps on some dead people.
- when the meteors start falling he gets stuck between Kaida and Alex's protective sphere and Greysons and tries to make a dash for Comfey's Hospitality dome.
-
zuza the galarian rapidash is still with Alex and Kaida.
- wow i didn't mean for this to get so purple. *australian voice* how about get fucked, mate
