you wait at any given train station on a certain date, a train will appear that isn’t on any schedule. If you board the train you will find that the interior, regardless of the battered exterior, will be very elegant and old fashioned.
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Have a seat and enjoy the train ride. The steam engine is beautiful: plush seats, exotic decor, gorgeous windows and elegant color schemes.
The crew are refined and very eager to please. The ticket takers engage you in conversation. Every half an hour or so, a waiter comes by to offer you the most select dishes.
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The landscape rushing by outside is incredibly lush and lovely. Lakes and mountains, deep forests and pristine beaches. Don’t try to recognize any of it. Not a single tree or peak or grain of sand corresponds to any known geography.
You are not alone. The train is full of passengers. Some are dressed like you; some are in clothing you recognize as ceremonial and foreign; a few are dressed very elegantly, in luxurious fashions as least one hundred and fifty years out of date. Others sport fashions you do not recognize, and carry items—electronics? accessories?—that you have never even imagined.
When the train makes its fourth stop (this will take several hours), get off. If you disembark beforehand, you will disappear. If you manage to return—and some do—you will speak a different language, one completely unknown to our world. You will panic, and weep for days on end. You will not eat. You will pine for the world you left behind until you die.
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If you disembark after the fourth stop?
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No one knows.
Do know that every once in a while, a dismembered corpse is recovered from the rails near the boarding platforms. Typically these bodies are rotted masses only vaguely recognizable as human. Despite the advanced decomposition and the mess, they appear very suddenly, often in the time it takes to blink.
Many of the victims remain unidentified due simply to the appalling state of the remains. Those identified, however, all had stained and battered train tickets on their person, dated days, weeks, even months and years prior.
People will tell you the victims tragically fell or even threw themselves into the rail wells.
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