Ze Polar Express / SCENE 16 - A Few Years

SCENE 16 – A Few Years

What is all this? Utena reaches out at the unrecognisable landscape, but the window is (cold to the touch) just an optical illusion that fizzles when she touches it. Isn't the North Pole supposed to be all icy? She is met with a sensation of vertigo, as though something in her is disagreeing with her present situation.

Around a corner, an android servant. It's dusting off the marble busts on the shelves. Skeletal plates on top of artificial muscle. It befuddles Utena about its appearance, but she has the sense that she could talk to it, somehow.

"Wow, a robot servant! I want one of those at my home!" Stevie pips, and the servant seems too busy in its present chores to care.

Utena walks up to it; "Hey, we need some help!"

Then the servant leaves its dustbrush on the shelf. Its eyes seem like pearls, and when it talks (with a strange, vaguely Eastern European accent), its mouth glows with the words. "Oh, what do you need assistance with?"

Anthy suggests to find out where they're at first – it's silly asking how to get to Saint Nicolas otherwise.

"Do you know where we are?" Shinji goes.

"Assuming you're talking about this building, you're in the private hallways of the gifting management. I don't recognise you. You are probably trespassing."

This building? Utena thinks. So what happens if we're talking about generalities?

"Where are we – on Earth?"

A beat.

"The geostation, Lux, is currently hovering over what used to be Mosk, capital of Russia."

This piece of info just stuns everyone. It's like with one sentence, they have truly left Kansas behind – before, the idea of being strangers in a different time was just teased underneath their awareness. They're not even in the North Pole.

"We're hovering in the sky.." Utena mutters, trying to comprehend. "And all that ocean of lava.. is the planet?"

"It is Earth as it exists now. Nothing else remains from humanity's fallout. Now then- " the auto-reiv picks up the duster. "If you'll excuse my haste, I have to get back to work."

"Wait.." Utena goes, as if desperate for the machine's attention. "What's the date today?"

You can hear the unnatural hums, of distant machinery and infrastructure ventilation.

"It is anno domini 11,906," it says. "December the 24th."

..

Many years have elapsed – generations, lifetimes, an eon – beyond what all of them know, and when you try to comprehend this amount of time, it gets staggering. Like you're just a tiny ant who's faced with an ocean, and it will swallow you senseless.

Everyone who Utena has known isn't just dead, they're forgotten by history. Ohtori Academy.. Wakaba.. Saionji, Touga, all irrelevant. She's racing to understand – the whole hallway becomes a distant blur as she feels her chest pounding, her heart knocking rhythmically. As if her soul is being whisked away into a black hole.

Then she hears Stevie talking.

"We're all here from different times, right? I'm from 2007, Shinji's from 2015 – Nanami and Anthy, you're from 1996.."

Utena gets her mental act together. She nods, joining in on their discussion.

"The Boreal Express train is a time-travelling machine," Shinji says, "isn't it?"

"You got it!" Stevie nods.

"Hey.. you want to get to Santa Claus, right?" Nanami is sorta getting impatient with this time-travel hib-jibby. "Not to be a pain, but they're going to notice that we're missing, and once they're on our tail, we'll be hard-pressed if jolly ol' Saint Nick would roll out the red carpet for us."

Anthy is already on it. "Excuse me, servant? We were looking for Saint Nicholas – do you know where he is?"

The auto-reiv says: "He's in Orbis 3, on the primary lighthouse." Then, holographic imagery is projected from the machine servant's face, and it becomes clear that Orbis refers to the globe-like balls comprising the entire geostation. It zooms out from the very room they're in to the crystalline streets, to the orb level, and shifts toward a different orb, more in the centre of the cluster.

Zooming in, this orb has noticably more convoluted 'crystals' – the way these crystal streets grow out look more baroque and packed together. It's like each orb has its own culture, specialities.

The 'lighthouse' is really a core centre – where the source of the orb's energy is managed.

When the auto-reiv (servant) is done showing the animated map, it ejects a marble from its fingers, where Anthy picks it up and finds that it shows the exact map animation on touch, which is nice since she doesn't have a photographic memory.

"Oh, thank you so much kind sir!" Anthy goes.

Utena consoles herself with the idea that – it'll be alright, they'll go back to their respective times anyway and this'll end like some weird fever dream. But then another idea hits her.. one that reaches through her deepest fear and desire; if they could travel back and forth in time, why not make herself happier?

To restore her lost childhood and mend her pain?

The thought of it, she finds both tantalizing and frightening, as she has no idea where her life would have led her.. only that she would grow up normally, like any other girl.

She glances at Anthy and Nanami, like it was only mere accident that she's known them. Mere accident.. my life dictated by the circumstances I've decided over the given moments. A deep pit wells in her stomach, and it's like a private pain she couldn't bear to share.

Then she recalls the feeling she had, in the confession booth, opening her heart truly to Spike.. was his last name Spiegel? That feeling of real joy. Of deep longing. She thought she'd never forget his face, but in fact it was the first thing over those years that she's forgotten – and try as she might, she could never recall his face. Only the sparkle of his eyes that is from some long-past childhood dream.

Her heart wells. She would do anything for another chance to be with him again..

This is the wish she'd ask of Santa Claus.