"We won," Warren offered, with a wry twist of a smile. "Any help we could get would have been appreciated, but it wasn't really in the cards, you know? And that's... not even the first time things have gone nuts for longer than a week or two. Reality imploding on itself always seems to be the culprit, when it does."

The Nothing, for example, had started off as some inconveniences, weeks before people started straight-up vanishing.