I Want to Believe

Link to article: I Want to Believe.

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I thank my critters [[*user Heck_Tech]]. [[*user Civil Western]] and [[*user Uncle Nicolini]].
  
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text= All they lost was points on a map. But like any map, there was land under that tiny dot, and with it, people.
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Blurry, overexposed, in desperate need of a proper flash; Whoever shot this picture had anything but a steady hand, definitely a drunk wobbling in the woods after an outdoor party. Whatever. This’ll do, the pinboard still has plenty of space left, same goes for string. After lunch I’ll do some calls to fact-check the shot’s location. If I stumbled upon another “legit” Mid-Western, I’d find myself a solid trail.
 
I put out my cigarette in the newly bought ashtray. Time to heat up some frozen fish sticks.
 
The taste isn’t bad at all, but it lacks a little something. It’s something I can’t quite put into words but it’s still something I can feel in every little thing all the time. In the breaths of air I take during a morning stroll, in the sunlight that hits my skin, and in the small talk I have with neighbor and coworkers alike. The magic is gone, literally and figuratively.
 
The folks at the Foundation and at the Coalition have confirmed it beyond any evidence as they were eager to prove it again and again. I didn’t see any of the enthusiasm I’d come to expect from the latter especially. But I did see the painfully predictable coldness we had all come to know the Foundation for. How could I blame them? What they had was a slick and clean list of anomalies, each was treated as unique, a single ripple of nonsense in a world that otherwise made perfect sense.
 
All they lost was points on a map. But like any map, there was land under that tiny dot, and with it, people.
 
The erosion of Portlands was quicker than wind and current could allow.
 
First the sky faded, revealing the static void of the Outside that had crept at its borders until that very day. Then the laws of physics made their triumphant return on the dimension, commanding its concave horizon to crumble and flatten under its own weight. The world of logic and order made its next move by deciding that thaumaturgy and ghosts and golems and scrying and paradrugs were not things that had a place in the new age of Normalcy.
 
We of the UIU were scrambled across every nook and cranny to gather survivors. What was the scenery of pleasant morning and late afternoon patrols was now a nightmarish landscape, the kind of nightmare that forces you to stay in one spot unable to scream. The loudness of Prometheus Plaza was replaced by the stillness of defunct automatons. The architecture in Little Avalon never fancied my eye, and as it stands, building stability norms were on the same page as I. ICSUT Portlands was now host to a collection of useless wands and scholars who desperately swung them to no avail. Deer College was never there in the first place. The many fish displayed at Portlands’ Yeren Street Market were the stuff of legend, and in this day and age legends have nothing to do but rot into nothingness.    
 
We found survivors, hundreds of survivors who reluctantly joined the thousands that had resigned themselves to evacuate their homeland. We found no corpses, not a single corpse was found crushed under rubble or killed in some panicked stampede.
 
The Fae, the Yeren, the Pixies, the Finnfolk, the Lycanthropes, the critters WWS nourished in its enclosures. They were gone without leaving a trace. Had most of them, all of them, them and them alone found a way out before it was too late? Had they managed to escape on their own terms, or was the erasure of the unusual this ruthless? How come all retrieved Portlanders were or had become, from first to last, all ordinary humans?
 
None of these doubts concerned UIU Administration, we had the largest and most mundane allocation crisis in history. There was no war or explainable cataclysm to justify it. The denizens of Three Portlands, Backdoor SoHo, La Rue Macabre and more had all become denizens of a world that the day prior would have never known of their existence.
 
As for Portlands itself, the Outside claimed it. We have no definitive proof as Ways stopped working as well but looking at the direction things were heading, I'd say it's an educated guess. I bet the Outside has vanished too, but that name doesn't mean anything to us anymore.
 
Going back to work was harsh. Right after the Foundation and Coalition had helped to provide a convincing cover-up for the crisis, we were all left waiting. We expected something to come out of this, we expected the much broader organizations to shed light on the affair, if not to solve it to at least tell us why things went down the way they did.
 
The truth was that things had happened and we'd never get any explanation whatsoever.
 
So we went back to work. Most quit, most transferred to do regular FBI work as the UIU had become nothing but a silly title for silly people that thought magic was still out there in the world. Things did go back as they were in a way, in the sense that the UIU had become laughingstock for the formerly anomalous world once again.
 
I'm eating an entire pack of fish sticks in front of a half-assed pin board on the far end of a rundown federal facility, no colleagues in sight. Was this worth it? I sure as hell don't know, but if there's something I can be certain of, it's that I've lost too much already to be taken back.      
 
My search for legends will proceed undisturbed. Thousands and thousands of my citizens are out in the world, hiding. We failed to protect them and now they've been left all alone. Believing that they're truly gone for good would be the ultimate betrayal of the trust we asked from them decades ago. Pretending we live in a world that is utterly mundane would be a crime.
 
They are out there. They must be. I-- I want to believe so.
 
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I Want to Believe

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