SCENE 18 – Traversing the Distance, pt. 2

The EMP missiles whizz past, left and right, and when they explode, a little more of the bubble is shredded. The accuracy of the missiles is increasing. The security bubble is honing in on the way Utena is piloting.

"We won't last long against their barrage!" Utena goes. "At this rate, they'll pulverise us!"

Shinji eyeballs her. The sweat running down her brow, the way her hair wavers with each maneuver and her look of fierce determination in her eyes – not unlike when Asuka would run Unit 02 down the fields in a practice session, running only with five minutes of battery, shredding the dummy targets with her rifle. A thousand thoughts fly though his mind, of her, and he's trying to focus on what would keep them alive just so he could breathe the rest.

Beyond Utena, the crystalline cityscape as refracted through the bubble.

"Utena, bring us closer to the buildings!" Shinji says.

So she brings the bubble deeper into the labyrinthine city. The streets and buildings are flooded with liveliness – the security team are left unable to fire their missiles.

"What the heck do we do?" the partner says. "They'll have our butts nailed to the wall for any casualties!"

"Watch and learn, kiddo."

He floors the thrusters and the on-board computers lock onto Utena's bubble. It's like zooming in on an image, and by then, they collide – like two bubbles melded onto one another. Their cockpits fused, Lt. Krews and his partner are now in the same area as the renegade kids.

Lt. Krews whips out his taser, his partner following suit. "Stop the vehicle and surrender yourselves, you kiddie scum!"

The tensions ring high. Nanami goes into a panic, yipping and cowering away, while Anthy stands stoicly – as if unfazed by the security's pathetic advances.

Utena only hears the powering up of the tasers behind her, but her heart trepidates, as she's trying to concentrate on manouvering the bubble around the high rises.

"STOP THE VEHICLE NOW!" Lt. Krews barks, hand tensing on the grip, like one of those American police officers. "YOU DEAF?"

Ahead, there's nowhere safe to stop as it's a network of trains and other bridgeways.

Shinji catches Stevie's eyegaze, and he nods at Stevie that he's about to jump on one of the guards.

"If you're going to shoot me," Utena goes, "then you go on ahead and SHOOT ME. But I'm not ever going to stop for the likes of you!"

And Utena floors the thrusters through the tangle, and everything happens in a split-second.

The sudden acceleration throws the guards off-balance.

The passageways zoom past in a blur.

Stevie and Shinji, adrenalin rushing through their guts, lunge for the bulky guards, trying to pry the tasers off their grubby hands.

A taser clatters to the ground. The partner tries to reach for it, but Chu-Chu hops off Anthy's shoulders and gnaws at the guy's hand, making him yelp.

The fused bubbles have burst forth into an open plane now – nothing except for the curvature of the orb and the avalanche of other crystals in the horizons.

Inside, the tables have turned. Shinji, panting, holds the taser against Lt. Krews and his partner.

"Terry, what's your status? Why haven't you nabbed those varmits yet, over?" you faintly hear from his earpiece. He slowly raises his hand to his ear – "Sir.. I'm in a hostage situation, over."

"Well that serves you right, ppft!" Nanami taps her foot on the proned partner's back.

When Utena lets go of the controls, the bubble continually thrusts itself forward. She turns around. "Do you know how do we get out of here?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, out of this Orbis world thing, and to where Santa Claus is at?"

Lt. Krews and his partner exchange worried glances. "Santa Claus..? Oh.. you don't know? Going over to St Nicolas is suicide!"

/

"Terry Krews is reporting a hostage situation," the chief of staff says.

In the management foyer, the gnomes and elves are scrambling. Trying to juggle so many things at once, like the kids' tour, the runaways, the health and wellbeing of the citizens, and delivering minute reports to Hap Strickland. It's a bustle.

"Wait, wha? Hostages?" a manager goes. "We haven't had that in a long time.. everyone, repeat, we have two security staff taken custody.. by the runaway kids, crazy as that sounds!"

"No, please keep this under wraps!" the chief of staff goes. "You know how Hap gets when it doesn't go according to plan." He closes his eyes, wincing at the memory of that unnerving, billowing intensity from the last talk he's had with Hap.

The chief of staff felt the weight of a thousand elephants, crushing down on his mind. Hap gazed at him, weighing his worth. The throne room used to be the most royal and inviting area, but over Hap's rule, morphed into a place fulled only with dread. The gloominess leeching from the muted, unmaintained tapestries. You either came out unscathed or let Hap's hand cajoule you into a fate far worse than death.

In this case, the list of good and bad children had been muddled.

"Special surveillance," Hap said, "has been put into learning which of the kids in which times we pick to go visit the North Pole. Fingers. Informants.. a very expensive intelligence worked up that list. An important list. And you lost The List?"

The chief of staff said nothing. The blame was put onto him, seeing how Hap made scapegoats of the leaders for each department, and every word he could say could be torn apart, twisted into the worst light.

Hap rose from sitting on the throne. He approached the chief, footsteps steady, yet reverberating in the vast emptiness of the chambers, and before the chief realised, he was in the air, throat choking in the Vizier's mighty grip.

"What the fuck did I handpick you as chief of staff for? Something simple as keeping two lists of names – A, B, C to Z – ones to reward, and ones to PUNISH, and you fuck that up!"

The chief was gurgling, and Hap let him gurgle for a minute or so, until his eyes were red and bulging out, and his face was purple. It was there that the chief really saw how the wrinkles accentuated this steely coldness in Hap's eyes; how the squarish proportions of his face made him look like a military grunt.

Then Hap let him fall to the ground, like some doll.

"You tell me, Chuck, one GOOD reason why I shouldn't send you to follow your recent predecessor's footsteps as a living subject? Hmm? ANSWER ME!"

Chuck was shivering, and he raised his head and said, "I'm the only one left with global managerial experience, m'lord. It takes ages to get experience for this role – you can't pull someone lower down in rank to my position and instantly expect them to perform better!"

"Hmm.. you know. You might actually be right on this count." Hap lunged down and yanked the chief back to being standing.

The thing that stood out to the chief was how much he had missed that genuine kindness of St Nicolas, with a smile that reached out deep through your heart and understood you as much as you wished to be understood.

This was a day before they sent out the Boreal Express on its time-spanning mission. And now, the Chief of Staff is only thinking, he could bury trouble under the ground as before, and hope to God the situation resolves itself before Hap realises the truth.

"Get me the scribe," the chief says. (The scribe writes up the minute reports.)

/

In the bubble, Utena listens to how the guards recollect Hap Strickland's cruel reign, and how it relates with St Nicolas.

"For five years.." Lt. Krews' partner goes, "we've lived with him, always, always on top of us, a whip to our hearts. Through his harsh reasoning, he's had St Nicolas declared mentally incompetant – stirring up the cynics and the hopeless. 'People are too soft and impressionably stupid,' he'd say.

"What you see out there, the beautiful vistas – in this world and beyond, we no longer feel like it's home. Merely a generational prison, which we're born into, live out our lives as fuel to his plans and either die from being worn out, or go mad and try reckless things."

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.