SPRINGBOUND SUMMER COUR

I ordered a side of boing with my dings and zooms

Ana had never been on a train before, but being in such a fast moving object while standing still gave her a feeling of power against the constantly changing scenery that ran past the windows. One moment, through a tunnel and to the next small town, the autumn foliage turned dead but the next bit of scenery became bright green with summer. The trees were trying to decide for themselves what they wanted to be in that portion of the world.

Buzz had been released from the depths of his music-box imprisonment, with an apology from Ana with the guilty accusation of saying that she locked him in there due to feelings that she had never experienced before. He of course could read her mind and already knew her apology beforehand, so he accepted it with all four hands. Ana breathed a sigh of relief at that. He clung to her tie like that of a baby gripping onto the finger of its mother.

The cold dead grass of Snow-man turned into fields of green tall grass with a few occasional flowers, yellow with red star-burst-esque patterns in the middle of each petal and surrounding the pistil. A few others were cloistered together, purple flowers that were accompanied by dandelions that swayed in summer breezes. Once again, she had never seen such things before, more used to the cold barren desert that was Snow-man. The only flowers that grew there were snowdrops with the occasional cluster of primrose or camellia.

However, as quick as the train was, the sight that she was met with once they ended up in Reindeer was not that of purple flowers and the famed 'sunstrike' flowers. Rather, there was no coronation to ending up in Reindeer at all.

Reindeer station was quiet, and pretty much deserted. The only sound that Ana could hear once she had gotten off of the train (that left right after her other foot collided with the floor), she was greeted with the empty silence and slight darkness. The lights turned off, with the creaking of floorboards underfoot were the only thing to welcome her. There was no nice bellhop-looking man to greet her or any villager.

"I can already sense that something is not correct.", Buzz buzz muttered.

She looked down at her tie, letting Buzz clip off and fly up into the murky air, hovering just in front of her in the empty void of Reindeer station.

"I can see that. People were talking about Reindeer as if it was the place to go to. And it's just down the highway to Merrysville, isn't that not a place of high tourist interest?", Ana asked, which granted a mechanical nod from Buzz.

Their conversation ended shortly as Ana walked out and down the steps. The grass was completely dead underfoot, and houses broken apart and leaving husks with pieces of scaffolding touching the sky like some weird, creepy trees. A town completely barren of life, both in the past or present.

"This is not normal.", Buzz stated.

He slowly hovered upwards into the sky, then looked back down at Ana, who looked back up at him with a look of slight unease and trepidation.

"I will scout around the place for you! Please stay safe and don't wander too far.", Buzz yelled down at her before zooming off in a blur.

She watched the blur that was Buzz Buzz zoom off, zig-zagging across the barren ghost town. Tall buildings that Ana imagined were hospitals and hotels, now tall remnants of what they once were, pieces of rock and pavement that flew up to the sky and made mock mountains and sprawled out branches of scaffolding that nested magpies and crows here and there amongst the wreckage, picking at the pieces of trash that littered the dead streets.

If Ana could describe the place, it would be akin to the apocalypse talked about in the book of revelations. People were simply nonexistent, no matter what broken house she peered into, as if the rapture had begun and moved on to the next town. She carefully picked up broken walls and hoisted them up against the other broken walls, and found remnants of people, but never did she find a name. All of the names had become squiggles in time, to never be read by anyone again.