The Childrens Rebellion

Can I say hi to my dead friends, please?

Unfortunately, the mausoleum wasn't made of cold marble that quite matched Tommy's horrible mood—well, it was made of marble, but it wasn't cold. Not at all. Not in the slightest. There was a bit of...well, it was something akin to carpeting on the inside and wooden beams with skylights in every other panel. Red sunlight poured through every clear surface, making the hall dance with something akin to fire. When Tommy had been younger, he had been unsettled by the color of the sky and the light the sun shed upon the ground. He hadn't been here in a while, but it no longer unsettled him.

There were also warm pictures filled the halls to the very end, with glass-paned windows between them. "Who made the artworks?" he found himself asking as he entered the halls, glad that his shoes did not echo emptily upon the flooring.

"Artists," Purpled replied. "Friends of the lost children. Parents of the lost children. Brothers, sisters..." he gestured widely. "Those that felt for the loss of the preventable."

Tommy blinked at the painting. It was relatively unadorned yet meant so much to him at the same time. A red sky, a setting—rising?—sun of orange, and a golden field blanketing the foreground. It was a simple canvas with simple brushstrokes, yet here it was, making Tommy's heart hurt all the same.

How many times had he watched the sunsets with four people by his side? How many times had the sun rose and set since the fifth person joined their group, making the quintet a hexad? How many times had he seen the sun of the Red Planet rise and fall as blood painted the skies as readily as it had the streets?

"What does this say?" he asked, pointing at the small inscription by the base of the painting, written in another language.

"That's Enderian," Techno said behind him, and he jumped slightly.

"Ah, yes," Ranboo said, coughing slightly. "It's the artist's name. Uh—ᓵᔑꖎ !¡𝙹⊣╎𝙹!¡ᒷ."

"Of course," he said soberly, only partially understanding some of the syllables that had poured out of Ranboo's mouth. He didn't bother to ask for a translation—there was rarely one anyway, and sometimes others would change their names to syllables or nicknames to fit Standard. Tommy couldn't actually pronounce Ranboo's Enderian name.

He moved on to the next painting, which was a watercolor rendition of Pogtopia. In flames. The orange lettering of various rebellious sayings on the wall almost blended perfectly with the painted fire. Almost. Tommy could just barely make them out.

There was a solemn silence as the four of them made their way down the mausoleum hall. Tommy, at this point, wasn't quite sure if it was a mausoleum—it probably wasn't—but for lack of a better word and not really wanting to ask, he decided to call it such mentally. He would stop every few paces and tilt his head at the nearest painting, because all of them were unique and different...and somehow utterly fitting.

"I helped pick them out from the mix," Purpled explained, as Tommy stared at a starry-skied mess of paint with children lying on a blanket, pointing at the constellations. He couldn't make out any of their faces, but one of them had wings. "It uh—it was the least I could do."

Eventually, they reached the end of the mausoleum—memorial? Monument?— and Tommy blinked rapidly at what had appeared to be a giant block of grey stone.

What had been.

Now that he was closer, he could see tiny inscribed names in the large grey stone. No, it wasn't just a stone. It was a commemorative stone, and Tommy reached up and tentatively traced one of the names of a child that had died on Pogtopia so many months ago.

K'ah'oujt.

Clearly, Elytrian, if the number of apostrophes and split constants did it any justice. Tommy wondered if they had had family still alive that had sent them to the school and had learned of the mass genocide through a single piece of media that had rankled the core of the Galactic Rebellion.