Some thought the world would end with a bang. Others said fires and floods would do it. In the end, however, it was the lone tear of a sorrowful child that brought us to our destruction.

Her name was Pandora. She was an ordinary girl with no special traits. A photo of her wouldn't catch your eye even if you were looking for it. Actually, there were no pictures of Pandora. Perhaps that should have raised red flags in the minds of the public, but it didn't. She was a foster child who moved homes often. No parent ever wanted to photograph her and every year of her eight year life she switched schools right before picture day. Pandora truly did slip through the cracks.

Pandora died. No one knew the cause and it was barely investigated. The fair faced child lay motionless in the center of her latest foster home. Somehow the fosterers went uncharged. The tear was missed. Obscured by locks of her brownish red red hair, the tear rolled slowly down her cheek and through the cracks of the hardwood floor. Underneath the house, the tear found it's way to dirt. After soaking into the earth, the tear caused a faint blue glow to emanate from the area.

It was an impossible occurrence. By all accounts, Pandora was long gone by the time she cried her last tear. Life had left her body, but there was still something in her that needed to get out. When that thing finally escaped, it was chaos.

The foster home was first to fall. The other children housed there began to complain of strange sights. There was a small blue creature with translucent wings and sharp teeth who bit the children on their arms and legs. Of course the adults chalked it up to childhood fantasies. They couldn't see it. None of the children could give clear descriptions of the creature, stating that it only showed up in the corners of their eyes and the edges of their nightmares.

One by one, each of the other foster children caught a mysterious illness. The bumps erupted over their arms and legs with the children calling them "fairy bites". The mosquito bite-like bumps grew steadily until the young bodies were overwhelmed. Their lives ended as tragically as Pandora's and in an oddly similar fashion. Each child was found on the floor of a different room, long gone from this earth. A keen ear might have heard, on the tail of the wind, the name Pandora whispered from the children's mouths at the end of their lives. An even keener eye would have seen the single tears flowing from each child's eye.

As time turned, this illness spread. It took children from loving parents and neglectful ones equally. No one under eighteen was spared. The disease was perfectly evil in it's design. Only the adults were left standing, which mattered none as soon the adults destroyed each other. Wars born from grief raged over the world. Adults, with nothing left to lose, lost their lives. In the end, few adults survived and those that did hid themselves away from the violence. Needless to say, we destroyed ourselves and no tiny blue being could have done it any better.

100 years later

Hope Harbinger opened her eyes and immediately scratched a notch into her stone wall then smiled. 2920 days of life, now that was an accomplishment. In the language of the past, Hope was eight years old today. Time wasn't measured in years anymore, especially not for children. They died so quickly. Every day was counted as an accomplishment for a child. One never knew when the fairy bites would appear. And once they did, death came quickly after.

Hope used to have many friends. They often played together in the town square of their nameless village and Hope loved them all. Now, Hope was the last of her friends left alive. Most of them didn't make it past 3279 days. One friend, the only one to do so, made it to 3650 days before the blue monster appeared to her. Hope was inconsolable when this friend left. She had looked up to her for her entire life. Her name had been Mable Jean and she truly made Hope believe that she could make it to adulthood.

There weren't many adults in the world either. Adults started off as children and children died of fairy bites. Most of the adults who still lived had many children. According to Mayor Howsey, it was necessary to repopulate the planet. Hope hated it. In her mind, the more children that were born the more friends she had to watch die.

Luckily for Hope, she was her mother's only child. She didn't know who her father was and she didn't care. He probably had fifty other kids to worry about anyway. Siblings didn't matter to Hope much. She knew she wasn't long for the world anyway so she focused her energy on enjoying every day as it came.

After marking her new day of life on the wall, Hope hopped out of bed and knocked over an extinguished candle by accident. The noise caused Hope's mother, Charity, to barge into the room. Large, dark bags rested under Charity's brown eyes. Obviously sleep was hard to come by when you feared the death of your only child. Hope ran into her mother's arms. If she was going to die soon, she wanted to have her mom's touch engrained in her muscle memory.

Charity's sides were plump and soft and she radiated warmth like no one else. In years, Charity was 26. Hope looked at her mother every day and wanted nothing more than to show growth to her. She wanted to be an adult so badly.

"I'm fine Mama." Hope assured as, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a blue fairy sitting on her mother's shoulder. Honestly Hope wanted to scream. She wanted to hold on to her mother as tightly as possible and beg the monster to leave her alone. Instead of doing any of those things, she plastered a fake smile on her face. Her mother saw the smile and took a calming breath.

The blue fairy didn't go away. It was always just barely in sight on the outskirts of Hope's gaze. It sat on her bucket as she drew water from the town well and rested on the mantle as she heated the water over the hearth to kill germs. Even as Hope sat on the dirt floor of her home playing with the straw doll her mother made for her, the blue creature was there.

Hope was confused. The fairy was not biting her, it wasn't doing anything. From watching her friends die, she knew that as soon as the fairy showed up it bit the children constantly until they died. To meet the blue fairy was an excruciating experience by all accounts until death finally took the child.

Days passed, many days, and Hope had still not been bitten. The fairy never left her side but the deaths of others did not stop either. Children were dropping like flies every day as Hope slowly aged. She felt guilty and lucky. She believed that she should be dead but she was so glad she wasn't.

In her nightmares, Hope tried to scream out to the fairy and antagonize it. Nothing worked. No matter what Hope did or said, the fairy just sat and stared. Every now and then it smiled, showing off five rows of unbelievably sharp teeth.

On day 3649 of Hope's life, she crawled into bed for the night. Her homemade quilt was warm against her skin as she pulled it up to her chin. The blue fairy sat off in the distance as she snuffed out her bedside candle. For a second, right before she drifted to sleep, Hope thought she heard her name slip from the fairy's lips. In her dream that night, the fairy was there. It was a staple of her life now. But, unlike every other night, Hope didn't have a nightmare.

This night's dream contained nothing but happiness. Her friends were there, all of them. Even the ones who had died recently were there. Oddly, they weren't any older or younger than the last time Hope had seen them alive. They all waved at her and beckoned her to come sit with them at a large dining table filled to the brim with desserts. In the center of the table was the little blue fairy. Finally, Hope was able to get a full on view of the being. It was nothing less than horrifying.

As it stood, the being cocked its head to the right and smiled largely. Fairy was no longer an accurate title in Hope's mind. A fairy was a benevolent creature full of whimsy and wonder. This thing was nothing like that. It's walk was more of a slither as it dragged each step and it's head wobbled unsteadily as if it wasn't accustomed to walking at all.

Even though the thing was awkward in it's steps, Hope was still mesmerized by its advance. She could hear her name escaping from its lips in a slow hiss. The jagged steps stopped as it reached Hope's face.

"Welcome to Playland." The creature hissed. As quick as lightning, it kissed Hope on the cheek and let out a shrill shriek.

"Run Hope, run!" Hope awoke to a voice she knew very well, a voice she had not heard in a very long time. Automatically, her hand flew up to add a notch in the wall in commemoration of this new day. Only, there was no wall.

In these current surroundings, nothing was familiar to Hope. She was in a barren field with nothing around but a few sparse trees off in the distance.

"Move now and keep moving!" The familiar voice spoke again. Hope knew whose voice it was but the impossibility of it kept her from thinking the name. A strange buzzing came from behind her head but when Hope looked back there was nothing there. The buzzing increased steadily and Hope began to see a swarm of some sort in her peripheral vision. They moved like floaters in her eye, never allowing her to focus directly on them. They moved like the small blue creature.

"The Boxxies! Never let them touch you!" Even though Hope's disbelief in this voice's ability to exist was still strong, she finally got up. Not only did she stand up, she ran. Toward the voice she knew so well, Hope ran with all her might. The buzzing grew quicker and louder as she ran causing her fear to build exponentially.

Each step that Hope took changed the landscape. She was running in the direction of flat open fields as she chased the familiar voice. To her right a large statue of a young girl erupted from the ground as she ran past and to her left a bathtub full of bubbles fell from the sky.

"You're almost there." The voice encouraged. Hope put all of her strength into running as the buzzing seemed to be getting closer. At full force, Hope ran forward until the buzzing abruptly stopped. Suddenly, she was inside of some type of barn with each wall painted in a different fluorescent color.

"You made it Hope!" The voice exclaimed with exuberance.

"Mable Jean?" Hope asked, finally admitting to herself that this voice was real.

"Oh Hope! I'm so glad you're here!" The person Hope had looked up to for so long and missed so much was right in front of her.

"What......is.....happening?" Hope couldn't think of anything else to say.

"We need you! The world needs you! Only you can defeat Pandora!"