Ann: Ayane, don't you think that everything feels different? After all that happened?
Ayane: Different?
Ann: Yeah... like nothing will ever be the same again.
Ayane: You're worried about the future? I got it all figured out, wanna hear?
Ann: Alright.
Ayane: It's really simple. I just want to have more adventures.
Ayane: Different?
Ann: Yeah... like nothing will ever be the same again.
Ayane: You're worried about the future? I got it all figured out, wanna hear?
Ann: Alright.
Ayane: It's really simple. I just want to have more adventures.
"Nothing is going back to normal."
— Mars, Nebula
"Things change. The cylinder spins. Some stamps get cancelled. We're going to do things differently. There's a time to contemplate, to model actions... there's a time to MAKE action! We're going to rip the wings off butterflies! We're going to flap our own hurricanes! The dark days are gonna be the swingingest whangdoodle of a blow. Let's be mad flappers, you and I! Grab your glad rags! Let's get loaded and jive! [laughs maniacally, then sighs] The Fool's prerogative. We taint our honour with irreverence, because doing the impossible is a rudeness to reality, because respect will get this planet dead. And so we cleave to the sacred obscenities. [chuckles] It's our turn. The barrel puckers. The cylinder spins..."
— Daimon Kiyota, The Secret World
"On that day, the world was changed forever."
"Marvel has taken characters you love more than your own family and shaken them like bugs in a jar. (...) Get used to it, readers, for this is the way these characters shall be forever! NOW!"
The other Conventions talk up how much they lost when the Dimensional Anomaly hit. Try being out in the Void when that happened. Those who made it out tell strange stories: of watching comrades ripped apart as though with invisible claws, hulls melting like crayons on a stove, micro-singularities causing people to collapse in on themselves, marines falling over as though dead but hearts still beating - and those are the saner stories.
We lost good people. We lost ships. We lost constructs, notably the Copernicus Research Center, the very symbol of our pride and dominion over the void. But we lost something more: we lost space. Much of the work we put into formatting Conventional Space was undone. The Void became much like the stories you'd find in the Celestial Masters' archives.
It took months to settle on the death toll. By mid-2000, we were less than half the number we were before the damned Anomaly. And that's just the beginning...
—Mage: The Ascension - Convention Book: Void Engineers (revised)
My eye caught a photo tacked to the cork board over my father's worktable. It was a snapshot of me and Dad, taken by Mom on a sundrenched day several years ago.
Suddenly, reality hit.
I was dead. And this was the end... of school, of dates, of video games. Of everything normal.
The kid in that photo had prepared his last frozen pizza dinner. Had gone to his last math class. Had seen his last movie at the Cineplex. That kid would never even hang out in his own backyard again. Because this wasn't his home anymore. He had no home. He'd made the necessary sacrifice.
Suddenly, reality hit.
I was dead. And this was the end... of school, of dates, of video games. Of everything normal.
The kid in that photo had prepared his last frozen pizza dinner. Had gone to his last math class. Had seen his last movie at the Cineplex. That kid would never even hang out in his own backyard again. Because this wasn't his home anymore. He had no home. He'd made the necessary sacrifice.
—Marco, Animorphs #45: The Revelation
"It's just that this feels like an ending, or something. Like nothing can go back to normal after this. Hey, I mean, what’s normal, right? Is living in old document storage normal? Is losing a friend and not even noticing normal? I suppose you can get used to anything. But this feels different."
—Martin Blackwood, The Magnus Archives, "Testament"
The world doesn't make sense the way it did in the old days, general. There's kids climbing walls in Forest Hills and mutants humbling presidents on live television.
—Wraith, Ultimate X Men
"How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold."
— Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
"Somehow it all got changed around. I'm doin' the same thing I always did. It's just that they changed it around."
" Damn 'em all! They changed it, changed it all around. Smeared it all over with blood. I'm finished with it. It's like roping a dream now. I just gotta find another way to be alive, that's all. If there is one anymore."
— Gay Langland, The Misfits
The world would never be quite the same after 1945: nuclear punctuation marked the start of the modern age.
