The Sermon Part 1
Hunched back and dejected, Noe slumps back towards the hall. Feng Mian and Rosalind's robes drag behind him. Grappling onto Daniel's arm, Noe spots Ghost Girl towing the man away towards a place unknown.
Blind and deaf to the flow of Daniel's soul, Noe's worry immediately snaps him out of his stupor. Speeding up, he links behind them and follows their lead.
"How long will this expedition take?" Rosalind whines from a little away.
Feng Mian points to Ghost Girl, "Who's that?" her large, round eyes surge into Rosalind's.
Without pause, Noe continues onward.
Past the rubble and dilapidated buildings of desperation, a blue and red signpost is seen rising up from the horizon:
THE RIDGE PUBLIC SCHOOL
However, where behind it stood pride and joy, there is only a wasteland of ored nightmares, broken dreams, and detritus coffins.
From where they stand, the dome's lead barrier is visible.
"Nehruma."
Noe turns to Ghost Girl but her mouth is clamped shut, glaring at the insincere sign post. She feels nails driving into each crevice on her face and gives a guttural groan.
"Nehruma," Noe hears again.
Slowly he steps towards the yards of debris and steps into a path between collapsed promises.
"Nheruma."
Quickening his pace, he streaks by the piles of grey mass until polka dots of plants hidden behind the last upright wall come into his sight. It has an inky-black blotch marinated upon it.
Confused, Noe advances.
His eyes blow wide.
"Nehruma."
The polka dots are not plants but the black-haired heads of thousands of ghosts clustered within a single square room!
Dusted, frilly skirts and wrinkled suits chafe against each other, suffering the truth of their untimely deaths into each other. Similarly to Ghost Girl, each ghost Noe sees has tiny holes speckled across their bodies and clothes.
In that moment, Noe wonders the meaning of the cruel death the Omniscient has set out for humans; to know you shall never contact those you love but cannot speak your truth. Only, "Nehruma."
Is this why ghosts always ask for forgiveness? Because, in a life of committing horrid acts, the knowledge that solitude may be the only thing left after their Earthly existence is done petrifies them so much. The realisation of the loneliness they imposed on their peers, the different, the disabled, sends them spiralling into uncontrollable regret.
Friction forges the sound of tiny electric sparks shifting around the room. Stepping into the class, the ghosts wade a way for him to move. Each step Noe takes sends gravel grinding and crushing.
The path the ghosts create leads him to the centre of the room.
They form a circle around Noe, as if expecting him to dance.
"Nehruma," they mumble, staring at Noe in plea then casting their eyes to the ground.
Noe tries to decrypt the desperation in their eyes. Looking at them, he follows their eyes to the rubble beneath his feet. A tiny glimmer of light reflects sharply into his eyes.
Bending down, Noe reaches between the silted cement and tiny rocks to find a phone stored beneath a beam. Supported by another fallen rock, the beam acted as a fridge that ensured the phone remained in mint condition.
The moment Noe fishes out the device, the ghosts simultaneously disperse as if a heavy pressure has been lifted from the top of their heads. Daniel, Rosalind, Feng Mian, and Ghost Girl stand a distance away from Noe where a hallway used to be. The sky extends upwards for kilometres, streaks of clouds slicing it.
Rosalind purses her lips. "Why are you different from the others?" she demands of Ghost Girl.
Ghost Girl rolls her eyes and joins Noe in the middle of the deserted classroom. The rest follow.
Inspecting it, Noe taps its screen's central identification. Immediately, he is rejected.
Ghost Girl stares at her hand. Extending it forward, she tries to tap her fingerprint into its system but it slips through.
Taking the phone into his own hands, Daniel knocks on it twice before rapidly shaking it. Like clockwork, the phone blinks on, letting them in.
Rosalind looks at him. "Did you learn this from your days as a gangster?" she asks.
"No, a student of mine, Bodhi, taught it to me. When my fingerprint stopped scanning through in the winter, he showed me this technique - mentioned that it works on all cellphones manufactured before 2065."
"You had a phone from more than a decade and a half ago?" Rosalind scoffs.
Manipulating the oxygen around her body, Noe picks Rosalind up and deposits her in a field of rubble far away.
"Nehruma?" a ghost slowly turns around and tilts his head at the sound of an asteroid colliding with the Earth.
Rosalind digs herself out of the rubble in a puff of grey dust. "Shut up." She sneezes.
With the unlocked device, Noe scrolls through its projections. Study guides and vocabulary builders blink past him; not one social networking app.
Daniel looks over at Ghost Girl in sympathy. She must have had an incessant life, studying hard every day but without a single friend to share the joys of success with.
When they pass by a certain tab, Ghost Girl excites, "Nehruma!"
Searching the screen, Noe notices an anomalous app.
'Cam Recorder'
He taps it.
The only panel that pops into view is filled with screaming faces and burning tables. A huge 'I>' button sticks itself onto their eyes.
Positioning themselves in a small huddle, the two Ephrenes and a human look down at the video while Ghost Girl walks away.
Daniel unpauses.
Suddenly, the scenery shifts to a bright classroom. Sunshine streams through the screened windows.
"Wow, it does work!" the beaming student whose photo was beside Ghost Girl's holds the cellphone. "With how you literally have nothing in your gallery, I thought your phone was hundreds of years old or something. Turns out, the camera still works!" the beaming student smirks, her depthful dimple making an appearance, before pulling a peace sign.
"Hi, to anyone who might be watching this, my name is-"
"Stop that," a hand appears in front of the beaming girl's face. "There's no one else who's going to watch this. It's my phone." Electric fans whir as background static.
The phone rotates violently, revealing the scarce bodies of other students enjoying their morning, until a face finally settles into view. Owning the condescending voice, Ghost Girl's smooth face comes into view. No cracks or crevices dot her skin.
"How do I turn this thing off?" she asks, her textbook's pages flying out of control.
"OMG, you're so ancient. Are you living in the early 2000s or something?"
"They had cellphones in the early 2000s. You'd know that if you ever read books."
"But my eyes hurt from staring at screens for too long!" the beaming girl frowns.
"That's wha-"
"Good morning class!" a stiff-necked voice cuts her off mid-sentence.
"Good morning, Ms..." the audio muffles as Ghost Girl stuffs the phone into her pocket.
Going through the motions of her school day, Ghost Girl continues from History to English, Maths to Physics, taking every lesson as if a robot mechanically processing information.
A whisper breaks the silence during another boring lecture, "Your camera is still rolling." The beaming student reaches behind Ghost Girl and pulls her phone out from her back pocket.
"Hey!" Ghost Girl drops her pen and tries to snatch her phone away.
"But it's still rolling?!" the beaming student laughs heartedly.
"Give it ba-"
"Laura! Do you want to go outside and continue your conversation there?"
Ghost Girl's face blanches. "No Ma'am. I'm sorry, Ma'am," she apologises.
A metallic taste cremates in her mouth.
Disturbing the tension of the room, a piercing screech bangs into the students' eardrums. The door is wrenched open and a stout teacher runs towards the teacher. He whispers unintelligibly into her ears.
Throughout the interaction, the beaming student follows their actions with Ghost Girl's phone.
The Headmistress' voice informs them from over coms speakers, "Flying debris has breached the dome allowing nuclear radiation to breach through. Friction may cause a flame. Until further instruction arrives, please remain seated."
"Do not move until I return with more details," the teachers dart out of the room and sprint down the hallway.
Deathly silent, the students dare not breathe. For ten minutes, the room is stagnant with the beaming student not even allowing a tilt of the cellphone.
The headmistress' coms continues, "Flying debris has ... allowing nuclear radiation to breach through. ... cause a flame. Until ... please remain seated."
"Something's not right," the beaming student speaks up as the taste of metal becomes more and more evident in her mouth. "If they were going to come back, they would be here by now."
"Maybe the radiation took them out. You know how it pierces through skin," a student's concern raises the panic.
"Shut up before your big mouth causes a fire!" another student disdains.
"But, I'm telling you guys," the beaming student continues, "we need to get out of here before it's too late."
"Your mouth is always getting me in trouble," Ghost Girl glowers.
" ... Friction may cause a flame. Until further instruction arrives, please remain seated."
"Can't you just sit still and listen to what you're told for once?" Ghost Girl sneers. "I'm sure the teachers have our best interest at heart."
The beaming student frowns before admonishing. In a dangerous situation, causing chaos will indisputably result in something terrible occurring. "Okay. I trust you."
Little does she know, the kindle of acquaintanceship does not warrant trust.
CRACK!
Hearing the sound from somewhere n the school's basement, "What's that?" the same panicky voice from earlier chimes.
"... please, remain seated."
BOOM!
"Is it just me or did something just explode!"
Like a drone, "Until further instruction arrives, please remain seated."
The walls around them begin to shake.
"Guys, we're right in front of the dome's walls. If there was a breach, we'd be the first to go down," the beaming student brings up. "Laura, didn't you ever read something about how to get out of a situation like this?"
Ghost Girl's eyebrows tighten in thought. "No, nothi-"
CRASH!
The students scream and duck as a window obliterates somewhere on the premises.
CRASH!
Looking outside the door, "Guys! The hallway just collapsed!"
"Please, remain seated."
"We need to get out of here!" the beaming student calls above the commotion. Desks go crashing into the ground as all the students stand. A line forms at the door.
BOOM!
"The explosions are getting louder!"
Surely, from the basements, guffaws of sound advance upwards. Beneath the students' feet, the floor cracks.
"Hurry up at the door!"
"It's stuck under the hallway's fallen roof!" a shout sounds.
"The windows then!" the beaming girl commands.
As she runs towards the screened windows, the farthest wall of the room collapses.
Shock takes over. Beyond the wall, the rest of the school has already fallen to rubble. No bodies lie above it, fallen into the basement below.
BOOM!
The ground quakes viciously and coughs out a plume of dust.
"Please, remain seated."
"Help me get the windows open!" the beaming student calls out to Ghost Girl.
CRASH!
"AH!"
Everyone begins to scream as rays of radiation shoot them in the face, plunging through their clothing, setting flame to the deepest carvings of their bones. As the radiation fries every surface it touches, no blood is left in its stead.
"Hurry! HURRY!" the beaming student cries she picks up a chair and flings it to the seemingly indestructible glass. Ghost Girl does the same.
CRASH!
The window finally collapses.
CRACK!
The floor gives way.
Descending into a blazing inferno, the students are filled with dread when they realize the school's electric fan engine seems to have exploded. The sound of screaming teenagers plagues the air.
"Please, remain seated."
Precariously sitting on the window sill, Ghost Girl's cellular device records it all; the merciless, orange-red flames. The black, choking carbon monoxide that billows forth. A student with a rod peeking through their abdomen.
Ghost Girl tries to push herself off the fallen floor. Miraculously, she is uninjured except for deep bruising. Being the closest to the window, she looks up and believes she can make the jump up and through.
Further away, the beaming student groans, hair fallen over her face. A long concrete slab lies across her back. Craning her, she looks up at Ghost Girl in agony and sees the direction of her gaze.
"Help me," she calls weakly.
The furniture in the room catches fire.
"Help me," the beaming student stretches her hand forward.
Ghost Girl steps toward her. Sparks fly from dangling copper wires.
Suddenly, a student climbing the rubble falls back and splatters onto the wreckage. Protruding metal squelches through their neck. Blood sprays the wall above a startling black against the menacing glow of the flames.
Ghost Girl steps back.
The globular beaming student's eyes stare at her in terror.
BOOM!
Ghost Girl startles. Turning away, she leaps onto the window and pulls herself up and away. Looking back inside, wailing continues to thicken the air. Through the smoke and fire, Ghost Girl sees the beaming student smiling fondly in the direction Ghost Girl has fled from. A pain more debilitating than any metallic beam stabs Ghost Girl's heart.
CRASH!
The ceiling collapses, subsequently burying all the students and their screams.
Ghost Girl turns towards the last remaining green fields in Westville; left undeveloped because of their closeness to the lead dome. Her throat burns as she walks away from the school.
A tiny piece of flying debris hurtles towards her and rams into her temple. Ghost girl falls back onto the window, phone clattering onto the ground and settling beneath a beam of metal.
~
Beyond that point, the recording continues for ten hours more before her phone shuts itself down for battery saving. Only the Ridge's administrative board and staff seem to have escaped the catastrophe safely, never sending the help they promised to bring.
Thousands of students are buried beneath the rubble to remain skeletons in Westville's closet if not for some intervention. Even now, their faces sit in frames back at the hall with their parents and guardians unaware of how they died.
Halfway through the video, Feng Mian left to sift through the ghosts, spreading joy as she steps. Their silence is not evidence of calm but of unspeakable trauma.
Daniel's shirt sleeve is soaked in salty tears.
Ghost Girl stands in front of the beaming student's ghost, waving her hand in front of her face with no response to note.
The only mercy the Omniscient left was for the students' to receive the justice they deserve. Noe understands why only Ghost Girl was left with her sanity; it is a punishment. She must relive the horrors of their incident in order to uncover the truth of their stories.
Stalking into the field, Noe's deep voice reverberates for all to hear, "Whether in one day or one decade, I promise to collect retribution for your lives. Thus is the pledge of Heavenly Host, Angel Noeremous."
"I'm not sure what happened but let's do this thing," Rosalind stretches her arms.
With those words, the three Ephrenes begin their first mission as Heavenly Hosts on Earth: Angel Matka, Ephrene of Comfort, Angel Azrael, Ephrene of Departed Souls, and Angel Noeremous, Ephrene of Forgiveness.