|-WARNING-|

Jordan Baxter has been eliminated.

|------------|

In his wake, all the wet floor signs have fallen on their backsides. Barriers painted with hazard tape have pried their black and yellow jaws to admit one. And overhead, an encaged lamp yells out to an empty amphitheater; it's warning raw-red but mute.

Any onlookers would say to themselves, "Now there is a man who has become tangled up in trouble."

His eyes flicker southwest, crestfallen, getting a glimpse of the terrifying monument in vibrant color. 'Maybe they'd be right," he thinks. Then he weaves the frame of his glasses between his fingers, removing the filter and holding it in tight tension, even as he drops it to his side. He has to tilt his head all the way back to take in his creation, and there, at the molehill of squeezed earth which borders the ichor mines and all their squalor, he stands like a son before father.

The theater around him is silent, all the employees who would have been around have just been fired. So it goes. It is the main extraction point for the ichor which powers the entire city and usually is a bustle of freneticism, but the only movement now is gas moving up the needle, flipping like a switch between liquid and vapor.

Then there is another. Through the flow of lifeblood and the staticity of the glass that restrains it, Enio is startled by the image of a creature. A distorted image of a hare with the antlers of a stag, no larger than a house-cat. Watching through the pump, it looks as if it will attack him, but the rabbit takes a leap to its left and seen clearly, it is obvious that the creature pays him no mind.

Enio instinctively puts his glasses back on and sniffs the air. "You," he says, talking to it like a human being, "You have been here all my life. This is not the first time I've seen you lie in wait. And I've been told that you span eons before that as well. Always observing. What are you, God?"

The rabbit mimics him, nose twitching.

Enio coughs with angry jest. "And I suppose this will be your flood?" he say, bowing his head to the weapon at his feet.

The rabbit chews, but not on this. A deathly Calliandra slumps out of the crevice between two stones and God, or, the jackalope, slurps it down like a string of spaghetti. Then it turns its back to Enio and ambles away.

"No, I suppose this is nothing," Enio says. He watches as the jackalope bounds down the earthly rubble around the planet's wound, and the cryptid rounds its arc until the man can once again only see it bloody and stuttering through flowing siphons of ichor. It is in this test tube that the animal's hind legs buckle and it falls still and sudden onto its back.

Enio falls to his knees, but neither to weep nor genuflect. He does as he always has done, and gets to work.

Each step of the process requires him to plug in a different password. Only sixteen people have been told the number that allows you to change the rate at which ichor is pumped into the distribution system, as far as he's aware. He cranks that dial to the max. Four can control the safety release valves, powering them down in case they erode and become danger themselves. It happens from time to time. Only one person knows how to shut down exportation without fully killing the extractor in simult. That is he. How serendipitous.

Cracks scream through the glass sooner than should be possible. Nobody knows more about ichor than Enio, but even he cannot tell whether the anti-substance is causing an explosion or an implosion. After a thundercrack of pressure, pitched hissing fills the room as completely as silence. Rust replaces every inch of air, rushing around with a gale-force. The glasses fly up and off of Enio's face and he howls, covering his eyes with the palms of his hand. He squeezes until everything becomes over.

Outside, the once Idyllic sky flushes. Clouds circle as crowds gather underneath to watch them. All of the consumption in the world precipitates out of the stratosphere and hangs there a glinting second before dumping violently upon the metropolis.

It continues until the neon skyscrapers only poke through the dunes like Calliandras, and the city is idle once more. 

|-FINALS-|

Become the end.

|-WORD LIMIT-|

None.

|-STAKES-|

Everything. Most of your fate lies in the hands of your fellow competitors now. I will also have a vote, but it will be the same as theirs. Judging will be based on a combination of both your performance on this task, as well as this competition overall.

|-DEADLINE-|

Sunday, August 24th, 11:00 PM EST

|-THE_HACKER-|

The Hacker: Wish Bone Lean

The Victim: Jordan Baxter

The Crime: "It brought a tear to [pronoun] eye to think about the Great Irish Reunification when beer filled the streets, pubs ran out of brews, and even the sheep celebrated."

SilverBowAndArrow: 5 (+0)

Delilah: 6 (+0)

Marigold Estes: 4 (+0)

Jordan Baxter: 7 (+3)

Fiddle: 1 (+0)

Wish Bone Lean: 6 (+2)

Aleki Young: 2 (+0)

!!YOU HAVE BEEN HACKED BY JORDAN BAXTER!!

Congratulations to our winner!