“Run and don’t stop running!”

They were all trying to escape, all making their best attempts to flee the calamitous tide that devastated the world behind it. There was no other description for it. The line of chaotic energy pursued faster than any of them could move. Fire and ash one second then turning to scalding waves for the next only to shift into tumultuous thunder.

It washed over every fleeing figure and left nothing recognisable behind. The land was twisted beyond recognition. Buildings were reduced to rubble, ashes, or simple glazed craters. Wherever the grim tide washed there was nothing left behind to return to, any living thing erased with no traces at all. Above the tide, untouched by it, a lone figure hovered.

Even on the ground Mei Xiu was small, but so far away, only those who knew her intimately would recognise her. The anthropomorphic red panda had come from such humble origins a few years ago.

A simple woman who had needed to beg help from adventurers to defend her home in the woods. She had always been popular, for some reason, and while many others of the world stayed as they were, she moved onward and upward, enrolling at a magical academy, graduating and being posted to dangerous hotspots throughout the land. She even ended up helping the very same adventurers who had saved her family years later and became a well known hero of the world.

Those few out here who recognised her could only stare in horror and ask a raging sky “Why?” before the tide claimed them. She had been impish at times, maybe a little prone to bullying others, but this destruction… no one could have predicted it from such a paragon of heroism.

The tide that she sent onward consumed everything in her path, but she wasn’t laughing, she wasn’t wielding this terrible energy for her own amusement. Neither was she wracked with anguish, instead it was as though she was disappointed.

None of them would know the reason for her actions, after all, there was no point in telling them.

The world she had grown up in had turned hollow in a single moment, it had seemed so vibrant, a place worth fighting for, to save from untold threats.

That was all before Mei had been enlightened to the real truth. This world had been doomed, all the adventurers had disappeared already a matter of days ago, and the truth she had been given told her that the entire planet would disappear in a few more hours, never to return.

She’d been told she was a ‘fan favourite’, but also her creator’s most prized ‘character’, and given the world was already to be taken offline, he had rewritten parts of her code. To start, he had given Mei Xiu all the powers that had normally been reserved for the developers. Not even the players had had such unrestricted access.

The developer had edited her biography to state that she knew everything about her world, most notably that it had all been part of a game for entertaining players. Every adventurer she had met had been an avatar, every day she lived a fake lie, and finally, the developer had given the limited AI that had fuelled Mei Xiu the knowledge of its own ‘developer powers’.

That knowledge had been the very thing that had led Mei to this conclusion. If her world was going to vanish without so much as a fanfare, she would give it a memorable apocalypse instead.

Mei Xiu stood alone before long, the only survivor of a blasted world. The destruction had been her testing out the developer’s powers to amplify her own magic to untold levels, but there was one more thing she wanted to test. She closed her eyes, her creator, the developer, had even permitted her to edit her own details, and almost as a joke, she had amended it to say she was all powerful, and all knowing.

She hadn’t expected it to work.

The basic thought processes from the strings of programming had been immediately replaced with full, myriad thoughts, emotions… life. As she so suddenly became a living being the weight of the lives she had taken crashed against her and the red panda fell to her knees, staring up at the sky, her body shook with revulsion at what she’d done to the world even as a logical response nagged at her mind, they were all fake creations like she had been, why pity strings of data and mesh models?

She braced herself as she stood, trying to come to terms with it all. “Are you watching me, my creator?” She asked the sky. She knew he was, she knew everything about him now, about his world and importantly its own permanence. Mei took another look at her own statistics, she could just edit things as she wished now.

She found an answer to her sudden guilt and grief. The feelings were variables within her, and so, she simply deleted them.

The world was hollow, there was no point fussing over it.

She looked directly at the developer’s viewpoint, smirked at it, and vanished. Less than a minute later the entire world was gone, deleted. Set to be forgotten about except in archives or nostalgic forum posts. Yet, the impossible had happened.

Perhaps it was her creator’s intent, perhaps he had no idea what he had done, but in the final moment, Mei had stepped out of her universe and into another. She had retained her abilities and the first thing she had done was to upgrade her body from mesh and baked textures to true flesh and fur.

She felt no need to take vengeance for her lost world, nor to remake it, even though she had the power. Instead, she had chosen to live on her own terms. After all, she already knew she had this power, that she could step between worlds, existences and realities. There was an innumerable selection of things she could do next, and it was time for her to get started, maybe she’d even visit that developer one day.