Elaine DeWitt honestly thought she was being cheeky and rebellious when she appeared a body outside the station and shifted to it. The last time she had been on a Blackhat-operated space station... goodness, it had been a long time. Saturnalia Station--was the same station still there today? She would have to go see it someday--and its view of the planet Saturn was legendary, and although many archons had come close to dying just because they couldn't find the one tiny speck of light in space that was the station, it was something of a rite of passage for anyone level 3 and up to survive in orbit around something so much vastly, vastly larger than Earth.

Elaine, after having procured a device to point her back to the station, had made a full orbit around Saturn before returning. That was a long trip, and some would have called it very boring, but somehow the novelty simply didn't wear off for her. She had weaved through the planet's rings, visited several moons, taken a cut through the top layer of atmosphere no less than three times, and despite having a tool exactly to find the station, nearly given into despair that she would never find the place again.

She knew what it was like to survive in hard vacuum, to navigate in it, and she remembered the view from space. She could look over the planet's surface and count all of the familiar spatial tears linking the Two Worlds together--they were the same, and she saw no signs of new ones. There was also a crater... Elaine knew without being told that it was where the City had been destroyed, because it looked like an explosion there had consumed many, many square miles of land and breached the planet's crust, probably vaporizing a chunk of the mantle. The cracks in the planet's crust that resulted from the planet repairing the wound reached clear across Africa.

The Blackhats were adamant that nobody had weapons of that scale; Domino himself would personally interfere if anyone showed signs of trying to make one. So if a bomb went off large enough to do that, it must not have originally been a bomb. The City's power plant was the only thing Elaine could think of that might have done it.

Instead of heading back to Teddy's, or finding anywhere else in particular to start fresh, Elaine simply took a lap around the planet's orbit. The moon at least looked normal, she was relieved to find, but nowhere on the planet was untouched. There were, however, plenty of signs of green growth, and lights on the dark side of the planet indicating electric power and civilization. It almost made up for the long stretches of empty tan that should have been green, and empty stretches of black that should have had lights.

Almost.

After one lap, she ducked down into the atmosphere, genuinely unconcerned about her orbital velocity and the friction of the planet's atmosphere, and barely slowed as she passed through a spatial tear to appear in the sky above Draco. This, the other side of the Two Worlds, was supposed to be on a parallel plane, 'a little closer to magic' they had always liked to say, and the rules of the two worlds were always slightly different. The longer the spatial tears had been open, though, the more the rules had mingled, and Elaine had never known a time when it was difficult to survive as an Archon above this planet.

She pulled back up, not quite into orbit, but high enough to see one whole side of the planet as she soared above. No surprise, this side was the same as the other--some places had electric lights in the darkness, some places had green growth in the sun, and all too many places were barren, ruined. There was no scar on Draco to match the one on Terra, but there didn't need to be.

It did, however, show its own unique signs of decay.

Elaine had once or twice fought to at or in the Devil's Maws--the enormous heat vents that connected Draco's Underworld to the surface. Supposedly, those vents were something designed as a power source by the Arch Sorcerers... but that was only a theory. One thing was certain, though: with magic broken, the vents had also fallen into disrepair, and enormous cracks had split from the sides of them, cracks maybe a tenth as large as the continent-spanning cracks caused by the fall of the City.

In other words, huge. Seeing them from orbit, they looked tiny, but Elaine wasn't fool enough to forget the scale of what she was looking at. They had be many, many miles long, and thousands of feet across. None of the growing areas were close to these vents, not that it was much of a surprise; the night lights and other signs of civilization also kept their distance. Generally speaking, it looked like nobody wanted to come near the enormous, now-broken heat vents, which centuries later were still creating huge upwells of hot air.

Elaine eyed one familiar location after another. Of these, the only place she dared visit was the Darkness Temple in Tarmon, former home to the Dark Lord. As she slowed to a stop above it, she found that despite all sense, the barriers the Dark Lord had erected seemed to have mostly survived. The whole continent seemed to be a thriving green jungle, with signs of civilization scattered throughout. In her time, it had always been a sanctuary for those that wanted to escape the War... but only if you could survive and accept the creepy, mind-altering effects of the continent. Even exported fruits and vegetables seemed tainted by the place, filled with a slimy sense that Tarmon was the only place you ever wanted to be.

And after everything, it was still here. Elaine flew above the Temple and found, at its usual height, the barrier of energy that had repelled armies of Archons. Some had said that Domino himself had either failed to break it, or refused to try, although she wasn't sure what to believe.

Some things never changed, she supposed, although this was one thing that perhaps the world would have been better without.

Eventually, Elaine ducked back into another rift and emerged on Terra. Finding her way back to Teddy's was easy, not because she had memorized the location of Teddy's place in particular, but because it wasn't hard to find the ruins of Chicago, and once close enough, she could easily find her way back to the Archon Signboard she had posted--the last and only signboard in the area. These markers were technically not real--they were just beacons that broadcast data to nearby Archons--but they were common enough in her time that she thought very little of putting one up.

She arrived to find that Teddy's compound either was, or had been, under siege. Honestly, she wasn't sure which; she had yet to see the monsters that Ciddia had mentioned, which she said were spiritual somehow. So, not entirely sure what had gone wrong, she pulled an energy lance out of storage and aimed to make a hot landing in the middle of the compound.