my name was Thack Sweeney. the world was ending quietly. people were just reaching the ends of their natural life spans a bit sooner than usual, and no one was being replaced. i went and took a walk in the country with some friends, and eventually i was the only person left. i figured i was going to die shortly, but instead i had a conversation with god, in which ze explained that humans had been born and died out several times over, and they kept making the same mistakes, forcing zir to step in and clean up the mess.
this time, ze said, humanity was going to start with a few memories—a few skeletons of cities, for example—that would serve as a warning. and one person was going to remain to help provide meaning to these memories, so that people knew exactly what had gone wrong. and i, being the only person remaining, was going to be that person.
and so i remained, and i remained through the lifetimes of several surges of humanity, serving as some sort of reminder or interpreter of reminders. each time, god tried slightly different configurations to try and get it right, but each time it ended the same way--with a gentle fading away of all humans, the world returned to a near-pristine state, ready to try anew.
the last time, things went horribly wrong. rather than a gentle fading, the world was overrun with giant city-buildings, and people were overcrowded and killing each other.
on the day i knew things were going to end, i tried to get together my companions so that we could get away from the center of things and go for a walk in the country—in each set of humanity, i ended up with the same companions reborn, and this time had been no different in that respect. i found most of them that day, but i was unable to find S. things were in chaos, and she wasn't at the expected meeting place. i looked around for her, and eventually decided to try calling her cell phone. her phone wasn't working, though, and neither was voice mail.
before her phone had died, however, she had left me a voice mail, explaining that she was unable to find me, and that she didn't know exactly what to say on the voice mail message. "what do you say to someone at the end of a life?" she asked. this was all the more complicated, because i knew that we had shared many of her past lives, but all she knew was this one.
i wanted to get ahold of her tell her that i madly, desperately, and platonically loved her, and wanted her to know that before we all died. i wanted to explain how she was just like fresh spring greens with chopped nuts and annie's goddess dressing. somewhere in the run of events, i had realized that this particular ending was one i was not going to live through.
i don't know if my searching for S affected my getting out, but instead of getting out, my companions and i got picked up by some sweep, and were sent off to go fight a dragon in a mountain or something like that. the place that should have been occupied by S was occupied by some other person who was quite powerful. before we left, we were able to ask for 4 things. (at this point, we have shifted into D&D imagery, because the things we were asking for were specific D&D feats or spells, and individuals were represented by dice.) The powerful dude asked for something to increase his power, i asked for something to increase my power, he asked for something to increase his power. we had a small battle of wills around who was going to ask for the last thing, and i won, and i asked for S, using her first and last name. however, the die that appeared after my request was decidedly not her, and i realized that i'd left out a part of her name. so now we had one more party member, but it wasn't who i had wanted.
ok, so we cut the scene, and we find out that S, upon realizing that she wasn't going to be able to hook up with us, had taken my previous advice and gotten well away from town. in fact, she was running a small village that—because of the chaos and war going on in the cities—was serving as some sort of location where people were healed up from battle, or prepared to be sent into battle, or something like that.
anyways, a truckload of people arrived at the village—a mixture of wounded and conscripts. one of the people was one of my accustomed companions, and she saw him and immediately asked, "is thack here?" my companion said that i was not, that we had all gotten separated.
she set about putting whatever wheels in motion to try and find me and bring me to her village. she figured that if she could get me here and assign me as a servant, then we could all ride out the ending that was happening all around us.
and then i woke up.