MORITURI TE SALUTANT!! [S!4] ROUND 3- OPHIDIAN JADE!

In one future… well, of course there was only one future, considering that in the other one Antonio was a moldering corpse.

Well, it turned out in this future there were a lot of moldering corpses too, all fallen with the death of the twisted False Angel - and possibly, though no one could have known this, with the departure of the Third and her own animate magic. Some stories say that even the living dead clapped when the curtain came down at last, their last act a salute to the masterwork they gave their lives to build.

The last of the water drained from the bottom of the bathtub. It was over.

When the last of the applause faded away, when the calls of ‘Bravo’ had finished and when the underwear had stopped flying onto the stage, each player stood in silence for a moment: a perfect, still moment where something ended and another thing began.

Slowly, Antonio removed his moth-eaten beret, and clasped it to his chest. “Mio Dio… It is done.”

Now denuded of angels, the warring followers dropped their weapons, one by one. “What… what do we do now?”

Antonio took a step back, and seemed to take in their surroundings for the first time. Rotting wood, moldering carpet and smoldering scenery, broken lights and abandoned, broken props. Wincing, he reached inside his nightshirt and removed six people’s worth of fake blood packets. They had an expiration date of three decades ago. How could he have convinced himself for so long that this was finery, that these were the greatest halls in the universe?

“Mi fratelli... we rebuild.”