The cave was not a cave, but a deep, sheltered overhang formed by two massive, moss-draped stone plates on the Behemoth's spine. It was dry, relatively warm from the creature's internal geothermal heat, and hidden from the constant, misty drizzle that shrouded their moving island. Derek got a small, smokeless fire going using dry lichen and a focused spark from his hardened knuckles. They huddled around it, steam rising from their damp clothes in the orange glow.
The immensity of their situation settled upon them not as fear, but as a surreal, quiet awe. They were on the back of a living landmass, crossing an ocean. The concept was too large for panic. So, they did something profoundly, desperately human.
"So," Derek said, poking the fire with a stick. "What were you guys doing when all this happened? When the world just... stopped?"
Silence. Not a heavy one, but a thoughtful one. The 'before' was a ghost, painful and distant.
Maya spoke first, her voice soft, staring into the flames. "I was trying to fix a leaking beaker in my dad's lab. It had a hairline crack. I remember thinking I needed a specific kind of epoxy. Then the emergency broadcast came on, and he told me to run. I never got to fix it."
Leo chuckled, a low, warm sound. "I was trying to parallel park. Seriously. This tiny spot. I must have been at it for ten minutes. Some guy started honking. I got out, was about to go tell him exactly where he could shove his horn... and then the first car plowed into him. Didn't even have to say anything."
A small, surprised laugh escaped Jordan. "I was in line at a coffee kiosk. I had calculated the optimal time to arrive to avoid the queue. My calculation was off by three minutes, seventeen seconds. I was recalculating my schedule for the rest of the week to account for the delay when the barista's face... changed."
Eva smiled faintly. "I was watching my little sister, Lily, try to braid my hair. She was terrible at it. It was a mess. I was complaining, but I was letting her do it. The news was on in the background. We didn't really hear it."
They looked at Wolfen. He was leaning against the stone, whittling a small piece of rock with a shard of Umbralite. He didn't look up. "I was asleep. Woke up to a lot of screaming. Very rude."
The normalcy of their last moments, juxtaposed with the cataclysm that followed, hung in the air—not with sadness, but with a strange, shared nostalgia for boring problems.
Derek broke the quiet again. "Wolfen... how does a cow do math?"
Wolfen paused his whittling. He looked at Derek, his golden eyes glinting in the firelight. He deadpanned, "How?"
Derek grinned. "With a cowculator."
A beat of stunned silence.
Then, Leo let out a snort that turned into a full-bellied laugh. Maya clapped a hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking. Even Jordan's lips twitched into something resembling a smile. Eva just shook her head, a real, genuine laugh bubbling out of her.
Wolfen looked around at them, then back to his whittling. "That was profoundly stupid. I'm impressed."
The dam broke.
"My turn," Leo said, wiping his eye. "What do you call a fish with no eyes?"
"What?" Maya asked.
"A fsh."
Groans and laughter mingled.
Jordan cleared his throat. "This is not a joke, but a logical paradox. A man says, 'I am lying.' If he is telling the truth, he is lying. But if he is lying, then he is telling the truth."
They stared at him.
"...I said it wasn't a joke," he mumbled, but he was smiling.
Eva offered, "What's orange and sounds like a parrot?"
Derek took the bait. "What?"
"A carrot."
More groans. Wolfen threw a tiny piece of whittled rock at her. "Worse than the cow."
They spent hours like that. The fire crackled, the immense creature beneath them marched on through the deep, and in their little stone shelter, they were just people. Derek told a long, convoluted story about his mom trying to assemble furniture from a flat-pack box and ending up with a "modern art sculpture." Maya confessed she once accidentally put salt in a cake instead of sugar and served it to her dad, who ate the whole thing with a straight face.
The jokes got worse. The stories got sillier. Leo attempted to do an impression of Wolfen's bored voice giving a lecture on rock formations, which was terrifyingly accurate. Wolfen, in retaliation, told a "story" that was just a list of increasingly improbable things he claimed to have set on fire, including a cloud ("it was being smug") and the concept of melancholy ("it's now cheerful ash").
For that night, on the back of a dragon made of stone, hurtling across a dead ocean, they weren't a Prime, an Omega, a Metahuman, or soldiers in an unwritten war. They were just Derek, Maya, Leo, Jordan, Eva, and the weird, ancient guy who told terrible jokes. They were a family, forged in hell, finding warmth in the absurdity of their own survival. The fire died down to embers, the deep, rhythmic THRUM of the Behemoth's journey became a lullaby, and for the first time in a very long time, they slept without dreams of white rooms or silver masks.