"MAY I SEE YOUR TICKET?"
Jax stirred awake in the void.
There was a dark emptiness around him. The lack of sound, sight, and sensation pressed on him like a weight. He floated there listlessly for a long ti before he gained enough wits to realize he shouldn't be there. The darkness around him was an anomaly that he only now ca to understand.
However, even though he wanted to get up, his body didn't listen to him. He couldn't move. As he hopelessly tried again, Jax realized that, in fact, he had no physical body at all. He was only a consciousness hovering within this void.
Where am I? he wondered, trying to recall the last thing he had been doing. And yet, he knew nothing. His mind was as much a void as the one before him. The only things he had within him were his na and a burning desire to save soone.
"MAY I SEE YOUR TICKET?"
The words returned with a boom, shaking Jax's consciousness to its very core. He was frightened by this strange voice that seed to co from all around him and within him. Within this darkness, it was a harrowing experience.
"Hello?" Jax called out, surprised by how quiet his voice sounded against the darkness and the one who spoke before. "Who is out there? Where am I?"
"I AM THE NAVIGATOR OF THE CELESTIAL EXPRESS. YOU ARE IN THE CELESTIAL EXPRESS. MAY I SEE YOUR TICKET?"
There was a certain degree of amusent to the threatening voice.
Navigator... Jax thought for a mont. The word held aning to him, even though he had never heard of it before. Or had he heard of it and just forgotten? The voice was so strong that he didn't dare ignore it, and yet, what was the voice really asking for?
What the hell was this ticket?
"I'm sorry. I don't know what the Celestial Express is, or what this ticket you are asking of is. I don't know how I even arrived here," Jax replied. Just as he did, light finally appeared within the darkness.
The light ca from him. A soft golden light lifted from where his chest should've been and floated before him for a mont. Jax looked at this strange light, confused. Was this the ticket? Sothing about his understanding of what a ticket was told him it had to look different.
The light before him began floating away, moving further and further away from him. It grew smaller and smaller as it moved, making its way to the edge of infinity. There, Jax saw it—a silhouette more frightening than the darkness itself.
A being stood at the edge of everything, outlined by soft golden light, its body so massive that it filled more than just his vision, and yet clearly so far from him that he couldn't fathom how it could still appear that big to him.
It was difficult to tell what the silhouette belonged to. Even as Jax looked, it changed shape from a human to... another human? It didn't make sense to Jax, and yet he could instinctively tell the shape was changing to any and all humanoid forms possible.
"YOUR TICKET HAS BEEN VERIFIED, ASCENDANT. WELCO TO THE CELESTIAL EXPRESS. I HOPE TO SEE YOU LATER."
Jax now knew the voice belonged to this very silhouette. And as those final words faded away, the silhouette vanished from before him, pushing him back into pure darkness.
Then, a pinprick of light appeared far in the distance. Then another. Then another.
Soon, there were dozens, and before Jax knew it, there were thousands upon thousands of tiny pinpricks of light surrounding him all around, glittering like...
"Stars!" Jax inherently knew what he was looking at.
The stars weren't the end of it; he saw more.
Colorful nebulae. Burning red giants. Pulsars spinning faster than his eyes could ever hope to follow. Exploding supernovas. The bright accretion disks surrounding a supermassive black hole.
Jax saw a galaxy.
And as he watched, it moved away from him, as he moved into the void between galaxies—the empty space that spanned for millions and millions of light-years.
[We are departing from Galaxy 20JC9LX, locally known as the Gormasis Galaxy]
[Next Stop: Galaxy 20JC9LY]
[Estimated Ti of Arrival: 90 Minutes]
Jax looked around in surprise. This was a different voice, in that this was no voice at all. It was as if he suddenly knew all of this at once, and yet it also felt like soone clearly read this information to him.
And then he returned to darkness once again.
Jax wondered what he was to do next. Was he going to have to live out the rest of his life in this darkness?
90 minutes, he thought. Maybe he could see the next galaxy in that amount of ti. But then, how long was 90 minutes? He had no sense of ti, only that ti existed.
"Hello!" a chirpy voice called to Jax suddenly, appearing before him in a blue wisp of light.
Jax was taken aback by the sudden light and sound for a mont, but he focused back on it. The wisp zipped around him, even though there was no him at the mont.
"Hello. Who are you?" Jax asked.
"Greetings. I am T-1388C, one of the many helpers in the Celestial Express. I will be your personal helper during your ti within the locomotive," the wisp said.
Jax paused for a mont. "My helper? Can you tell what's going on?"
"Of course. Do you have any mories?"
Jax shook his head at first, before realizing he had no head. "No," he quickly answered. "I only rember a few things."
"Then you chose to have your mories erased before coming here. That's perfectly fine. Many who co here want to change their life, so they leave behind mories of the place they ca from."
Jax frowned. Had he really chosen to erase his mories of where he ca from? Why did he? And why did this strong desire to save soone persist within him?
"So, if I left my previous world, where did I co?"
The wisp glowed slightly brighter all of a sudden as its voice gained an extra bit of chirpiness. "You are in the Celestial Express, the only locomotive in the universe to change the futures of the lucky few, one galaxy at a ti."
The speech sounded very much rehearsed.
"Locomotive? So, like a train?" Jax asked.
"Yes. You are currently in the place we call the Station. From here, we determine whether you are a Passenger or a Settler."
"A what?" Jax asked.
"Passenger or Settler. Basically, figuring out whether you are going sowhere else or if you will be staying within the Celestial Express for the rest of ti. May I see your ticket, please?"
"I don't have one," Jax answered.
He felt sothing pulse through him, but nothing happened. The pulse appeared again, and yet nothing ca out.
"Huh?" The wisp exclaid in surprise. "That's weird. You really don't have a ticket. How did you get to the Station without a ticket?"
"I think I had a ticket before," Jax said. "But that thing already took it."
"That thing? Did you have a helper before ? I should be the first to get here."
"I don't know if he was a helper. He looked different from you. And he called himself sothing else. He called himself... what was it... A Navigator."
The wisp froze in the void, the light within it not fluctuating at all. Even as Jax waited for it to say sothing, it didn't.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
"Did you just say Navigator?" the wisp asked again, its light seemingly dimming.
"Yes, that large silhouette thing. Is that the Navigator?" Jax asked.
The voice delayed once again.
"You... You spoke to the Navigator?"
"Yes. Why? Is that unusual?"
"Unusual? It's downright impossible."
The wisp fluttered around for a while before saying, "One mont!" Then it completely vanished.
With even that light gone, Jax was thrown back into the void. Only this ti, he didn't feel that scared. Jax didn't know how long a mont was, but the wisp did return.
"Jax, if you were really greeted by the Navigator, he should have called you sothing specific—not a Passenger or Settler. Do you rember what it was?" The wisp sounded so much more serious this ti around.
"Is everything alright?" he asked.
"Please, answer ."
Jax thought for a bit, trying to rember back to the Navigator. "Yes, I do rember. It was sothing like... Ascended? No, Ascendant. That's it. He called an Ascendant."
The wisp gasped, its light fluctuating heavily for a brief period before calming down.
"What's an Ascendant?" Jax asked, curious.
"Soone who made a wish," the wisp quickly answered. "Soone who doesn't want to live here or go sowhere else. You are soone who ca to the Celestial Express for a single reason—a single wish. Should you et the Navigator again, he will fulfill your wish."
Jax felt a stir within him at this ti. A wish... he thought. He had a wish, a great desire. Could this desire of his really be fulfilled?
"How do I et the Navigator again?" Jax asked.
"You cannot. Not so easily," the wisp answered. "There are ten Carriages on the Celestial Express. Once you leave the Station, you will arrive on the tenth Carriage. The Navigator lies beyond the first Carriage. To et the Navigator, you will have to ascend from the last Carriage all the way to the first, and then beyond. Once you do, finally, your wish can co true."
The surprise was strong within Jax, but there was also a hint of doubt.
"Can the Navigator really fulfill my wish? Is he that strong?" he asked.
The wisp let the silence linger for just a tad too long before answering.
"The Navigator is just what he likes to call himself and what we all call him for just that reason. If not for that, we would be referring to him by another certain na."
"God."
"God?!" Jax exclaid. "Gods are real?"
"They are very real. So call them Gods, so call them Wills. So call them Divinities. Most of them are the manifestations of planets, constellations, or even galaxies. The larger the celestial body, the stronger the God."
Jax took in that information with great surprise. He found it difficult to believe that Gods were real for so reason. Did he not believe in Gods before this?
"And the Navigator is a God too? What is he the manifestation of? This train?" he asked.
"No, he is a manifestation of sothing way bigger than just this small locomotive," the wisp answered.
Jax was curious now. "What then? A constellation? A nebula? A galaxy?"
"No, he is the manifestation of the entire universe. He is what they call a Universal Will."
"The God of the Universe..." Jax muttered silently.
It took Jax a long ti to take it all in. He could not believe that he had co to this place in order to et a God. He was even more surprised at what the wisp had said. His wish—his strong desire to save soone—could be fulfilled. All he had to do was et that enormous figure from before once again.
"Alright," Jax said slowly, feeling a strange sense of nervousness and excitent at the sa ti. "Let's go find God."
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