"I don't know what the sea smells like," chirped a lithe old woman who smelled slightly of ripe tomatoes. It was -she was- a musty smell.

"Neither do I," stated a tall worn man with a fraying gray beard. His features - eyes, nose, lips, gaunt teeth- were so elongated that he could have been a wizard in another life if there ever were such things as wizards.

The two almost people were at a stand still on the edge of a crumbling cliff that looked over a swampy bluff. The two suns in the sky cast a hazy red glow upon the decaying 3arth. An ashy mist drifted and swirled along the ground as if it had a mind of its own, eventually floating off the edge of the dulled, dried-up, fragile, green world. Above them, a gaping onyx sphere hummed in a low drone that embraced the anguished travelers in desperation.

"That's what real people say is on the other side you know," the man clutched his weapon tighter. The woman had one too, though she didn't clutch it tight; she caressed it in her palms. They were told these chrome transpond3rs, these simple 3gg shaped devices of scr3ws and cogs, would launch the thing on the receiving end of the blast into the void that hummed at the end of the world.

And this was their chance to be rid of the other. There was an Occult of the Stars once that studied every moving part of the universe in an attempt to find out the answer of what would end the world. Science could only take reality so far in the days of quick responses - entertainment was lacking- which led the religion to follow intuition in regards to who could be the 3nd all p3rs3n.

The two life forms, frozen in their own concocted villainy, continued to stare at each other. The watery slime air gripped their skins, trying to push them down six feet under, but the silence that sang so vigorously between them latched onto their throats, forcing the other's will to continue to make a stand on the last existing shrieky-windy bluff.

But they had no quantitative measurements of their own h3roism.

"People can say a lot of things." The woman sighed and broke eye contact with the angry man. She glanced at her scarred hands that had seen and felt too much age. She eventually sat down on the cliff, and the mist parted a way for her.

"You probably think you're a hero or something," she crooned.

The man stood taller than he had before.

"All things are. Almost," she said this almost tauntingly.

Sil3nc3.

"What's your name?" the woman tilted her head, hair falling away from her face to reveal a long pink scar stretching from scalp to the bottom of her neck. She had been tortured before.

"Trim." A p3rs3n like they said.

"Trim. Ah, what a common name. I had a son named that long long long ago."

"You can't have sons."

"You can't have daughters." The woman spread her fingers in the dirt below her and then picked up a fist full of debris. "See this?"

She showed him the dirt by letting it fall from her hand, the dusty breeze of the greenhouse planet made the dirt particles dance in the air until they finally settled into the floating mist. "It was something once. It was probably home for something to take root in. You can find your roots too if you try."

The man raised his weapon again and pointed at the woman. "I'll get you."

Smiling unapologetically the woman put down the remaining dirt in her hand and opened her arms wide to the man. What would this do?

"I think I'm afraid of the ocean," the feeble woman croaked innocently like a child; timid and small with eyes burying fear.

"And I'm afraid of the cold," retorted the man when he didn't mean it; yet the child in him did. The consciousness youth who was always standing by was afraid to take the instructions given by almost people.

"Perhaps we are the same then," the almost woman sighed, the wind creating a halo of softened silver hair around her face.

The almost man steadied his grip on his transpond3r, closing one gray eye to focus on the almost heart of the thing before him, and fired his last shot.