by Captain Kirby

Somewhere, Dr. Rosie Hartlepool gets off a train in front of a monument to monuments. She gazes upon its grandeur, loses herself in its shine, and then takes the next commuter rail home.
Somewhere else, Rosie Hartlepool collapses in front of the Neon God. Her legs give out and she cries. She sees only the distant lights that illuminated her train ride into the city: the sole image she could recall from her sister's funeral. She cannot see anything else.
And then in another place, Rosie charges the pillar. She bangs her fists against it in a futile attempt to crack the outer shell and shatter the neon light within.
All of these things happen in many places. Mirrored a million million times in the kaleidoscope of the Lampeter. And because of that, those places are uninteresting. They are dime-a-dozen realities with no more originality than late night cable TV.
An interesting place would be this universe far off in the north. Way out past the Septulon Systems where the molten cores of planets-to-be dance around unformed stars. Beyond Universe Theta-0332, where the old coliseums still roar to life with automated combat parades.
A place where Dr. Rosie Hartlepool gets off a train in front of a monument to monuments, gazes upon its grandeur, loses herself in its shine and then… nothing. In this one place, and only in this one place, it starts to rain.

The rain starts as a trickle. A light pitter patter that cools off the pounding heat of the neon lights. Rosie looks around for any awnings or umbrellas, but the street is deserted. Just flat walls and right angles all the way down to the elevated train platform. Of course. Her journey out east had been nothing more than a series of suspicious figures and inconveniences. She lifts her briefcase over her head to remain some semblance of dry.
Immediately the rain redoubles its efforts. Its rhythm turns into a constant pounding, riddling the street with liquid bombardments. Rosie's speed increases accordingly. Her casual walk becomes a jog. And then a sprint. And by the time she arrives at the platform stairs, she's hopping between puddles.
Rosie hurries up the platform and looks back at the street. Neon lights ripple and reflect in the already inch of water that has accumulated atop the pavement.
Rosie sighs and looks at the schedule for the station. The analog routing board is constantly flipping over its times. And there's no one here manning the information booth. Again, more inconveniences. She picks a spot against the wall to claim as her own. The tile ground and the concrete wall are hard and uncomfortable. But Rosie reminds herself she's experienced worse. There's no need to get worked up over some rain. Or over another late train.
She sniffles.
No need to get worked up.

Thirty-three stories above, in a glass tower, a family of four sits on a couch and watches their neon television. It's late, and in any normal place a six-year-old and a ten-year-old would be asleep by now. But there's no curtains on the glass walls. Nothing to blot out the piercing lights of the city. So they pass the time watching different lights, but these ones change color and shape. It's so much more interesting than looking outside.
No one in the tower looks outside anymore, despite the glass. They have their TVs inside. They have their meals prepared in the Central Atrium. And the concept of art and literature and progress has simply never been presented to them. In another place, the father is an EMT. Somewhere else, the mother is a marine biologist. But here, they both watch TV.
The rain pounds on the window-walls. It's just louder than the TV, which means that the mother, the father, and the ten-year-old are able to tune it out. But the six-year-old is still developing his pre-frontal cortex. His executive function isn't quite there yet.
So he turns to the window. He's never seen rain splatter with so much force before. He gets up and waddles over the glass, and presses his face against it. He sees the neon lights of the city: the same view that has been here since he was born. But then he looks down. Down at the street, where the lights are the dimmest.
"Mom! Dad!" he shouts.
The mother pauses the TV and rolls her head to face her child. The father doesn't even look away from the screen.
"Yes?" she asks.
The six-year-old points down to the street, "It's a river!"

After two hours the rain still has not stopped, and the train has still not arrived. The rain is probably delaying the train. That's what Rosie figures. She gets up to stretch her legs out. The ground gave her cramps anyways.
She paces up and down the platform, the pounding of the rain relegated to background noise. She has compartmentalized the rain to just weather, since allowing anymore frustrations to bubble to the top of her mind would push her to a place she does not want to go. Especially not when she's all alone, in a train stop, at the edge of the multiverse.
Unfortunately, she makes the mistake of rounding the corner to check on the platform stairs, and the reality of the situation forces itself down her eyes.
The water level has continued to rise. Now at three feet. It surges and whirls. The lights in the water dance and reflect and splash and gasp for air before her sister is swallowed by the flood.
Rosie's sister was swallowed by the flood.
When her sister died she didn't understand drowning. She didn't understand that the river wasn't safe to play in during the rainy season and that her sister would not be coming up for air. Rosie can see her sister's silhouette in the neon ripples.
Rosie's legs buckle beneath her. She collapses to the ground, and her tears join the rainfall.
She wants to go home. She wants to see her family again. Rosie told herself she was stronger than that when she spoke to Titus Quake, but for a glistening moment in the deluge of this lone universe, she is not.
And in that shining moment, when tears erupt from floodgates in the sky to join the plight of a single human, alone and separate from her innumerable counterparts…

The Neon God does not know what a city is. It has seen the shape of a city from afar. It has observed the intricate, interwoven lives of its residents that propel each other, step over each other, and ignore each other. In its Neon Jealousy, the Neon God decided that it too would enjoy the Neon Lives lived in the alleys of New York City, in the dreary cafes of Paris, in the food stands of Tokyo.
But it knows not how those cities came to be. The consideration for hurricanes. The earthquake regulations. The insulation against winter.
It does not understand the sewage grates to evacuate flood waters.
It does not understand the rubber jacket used to keep the copper wires dry.
It does not understand how to withstand a storm.

In that moment, the lights shut off.
The neon, no more.

The ten-year-old at the top of the thirty-three story glass tower screams.

Rosie pounds the ground, hoping to crack the Universe's outer shell and dig her own way out. Like the original Lampeters.

The storm rages on. Its torrential downfall smothering the remains of the Neon God. Drowning it like a little girl caught in the rapids.
It does not stop.
It does not relent.
The storm cries for hours and hours. Until there are no tears left.

By the time the rain stops, the water level has risen to eight feet. It's four in the morning. Rosie has not slept for even a second. She watched the storm, the whole time, waiting for the clouds to part. Waiting to be swept away in the flood. But it did not reach her. She is dry, atop the train platform.
The clouds part from the sky, having dumped all they could upon the city. Rosie expected to see sunshine, for some reason. She'd made it through the storm, she would be rewarded with warmth on the other side.
But that is not the reward for weathering the neon. No, the deicide is instead met with the applause of a thousand smaller, dimmer lights. The previously empty sky is now littered with stars.
In the faint starlight, Rosie can see some silhouettes in the windows. Or rather, a silhouette in every window. The TV is no longer on inside the glass towers. Now the only thing to watch is the death of the neon prison.
There are so many figures. So many faces. None of them resemble Rosie's sister, but that's ok. There's more people out there than one girl who drowned thirty years ago. So, so many more.
It's good there's so many of them, Rosie realizes. She'll need all this help if the city is going to be built again. Built again, to withstand a storm.

This only happens in one place. There are no similar repeats, or near misses. This universe stands alone, and its reflections all aberrations. They create only ripples and fractals of its original throughline.
The reflecting pools of the universe that mirror the mirrors and replicate ad infinitum are no longer still. The water has been met with more water. Their surface has been disrupted.
The Neon God cries its reflections away.

/

Aftermath

God-Knows-Where