Aftermath and Odd Jobs

The silence was the first thing anyone noticed. Not a peaceful, birds-chirping kind of silence, but a vast, echoing absence where the roars, screeches, and thunderous stomping had been. It was the kind of quiet that made your ears ring, a surreal lull after the most cacophonous opera of destruction the world had ever endured. Dr. Aris Thorne, still clutching a half-eaten fossilized donut, blinked at the suddenly empty street. The Pterodactyl that had been attempting to use his prize-winning petunias as a landing strip was gone. Vanished. As if it had been a particularly vivid, and frankly, rather rude, hallucination.

“Well, that’s anticlimactic,” he muttered, dusting imaginary crumbs off his tweed jacket. He’d been halfway through formulating a rather scathing internal monologue about the scientific inaccuracies of Malakor’s temporal displacement magic when the sorcerer, mid-rant about the offensive nature of 80s synth-pop, had simply whimpered, clutched his ears, and dissolved into a shimmering, vaguely glittery mist. The dinosaurs, with a collective sigh of confused resignation, had then proceeded to… well, to not be there anymore.

Rexy Sterling, however, was far from anticlimactic. She had been in the middle of a dramatic close-up, tears (of the waterproof, theatrical variety) welling in her eyes as she declared, “This… this is the end of an era! But perhaps… the dawn of a new, even more fabulous one!” when the Tyrannosaurus Rex that had been attempting to photobomb her interview suddenly blinked out of existence. She’d whipped around, her sequined jumpsuit catching the sunlight, and then, with a theatrical gasp, had declared, “Did you *see* that? The ratings! Oh, the ratings are going to be *insane*!” She immediately began filing her nails with a custom-made, diamond-encrusted emery board.