The ref's whistle blows proudly as a blaze crosses the finish line.
A bright red tracksuit blur slows down just enough to give a quick wave to the uproarious audience before running over to the champion's podium. The loudspeakers click on as the stadium erupts in cheers.
She came in with a time of .0001 semi-seconds—a new interdimensional world record for all of history. It's Cardio Minion, the fastest thing alive, and of course, she makes it look so easy. She had been training for this, of course; training so much that her point of view for who she was and what she was meant to do in this life is warped so deeply that her goal has become a cosmic inevitability.
Cardio Minion stands supreme on the 1st place podium above the number 2 contestant: Faster-than-Light travel, who is now groveling in prideful, arrogant frustration. He can't believe that she beat him. The Omniverse-wide community, composed of peoples from millions of countries, worlds, and dimensions, gather round as they deliver to her the trophy, the medal, the title.
There are hugs, kisses, cheering, and there is the champion's cloak draped over her by a group composed of the greatest athletes of history throughout the universes. Finally, she takes a breath of satisfaction. Truly, a dream is what a person needs to be able to do anything.
Long ago, she decided that all she was when it came down to it was not chemical processes or magic or ether, but belief. It's belief that constructed her entire body, and belief is what got her the one greatest gold medal that history will ever know.
Amazing.
And then a contract is presented to her from the side. Past her beloved audience, she peers to a strange hatted man, the brim of his cap curling over a furrowed brow.
"Well done, ma'am. Perhaps you'd like to make this a permanent occasion."
"Permanent occasion," she thinks out loud. Amidst the cheering, she looks over the contract: it is a piece of paper with some words she can't read, but there's a signature block.
She knows what this is.
And even though she has no clue what the language is or what the words are in particular, she can make out the message as if the words' meanings seep directly into her mind.
"Infinite speed forever" is the term of the bargain for her… and for the granter of this infinite speed… he receives…
She focuses on the contract, and her antenna, somewhat bunny ear-like in appearance, begin to droop.
"I… can't give you that," she says with a tone, a quick shift from the prior sunniness.
The man, slim, tall, and his face well concealed somehow by such a small hat, forms a long curling grin across his face. His teeth are inhumanely large, and have a bit of yellowness to them. It's not as if he weren't brushing his otherwise white teeth It's more so as if the yellow is the actual natural color of his teeth.
Yes, rather than yellow upon white, it is white upon yellow. An appealing falsehood bleaching over the truth. It is not layers pulled away to show its brilliant gleam; it is layers added to conceal the decay within.
"I…" Cardio Minion shakes her head. "I don't think I can do that. I don't even know if I have that thing to give away," she says.
The man smiles again. "Suit yourself." He disappears into the crowd, but the contract and the pen for signing are still in her hands. She tosses them aside. No way she is going to go through with something like that. After all, she got all this by herself. It was her own effort that got her here.
"What the hell?" she mumbles to herself the very moment that the sky begins to turn a hot red, just like her track jacket, and the moon to a dense, insidious black, kind of like the stripes on said jacket. Her adoring fans, those that look up to her and want to emulate her and become her, her fans all look up to the moon instead of at her… and they begin screaming. They scream as if nothing she's ever done mattered, and that she is just another insignificant bystander awaiting her destruction. She looks on with her audience as they shout and cry up at the moon.
It's becoming larger, and it's headed right for them.
Cardio Minion, in a regular moment, would know this doesn't make sense, but in her moment of dreamlike delirium, she realizes that this massive black moon's headed right for the stadium, and it's going to kill everyone unless she can get them out. She can move, but she can't move particularly fast. Everyone else has slowed down to a molasses-like crawl as they all turn for the exit of the stadium, even though they can no longer run and have slowed practically to a halt.
The screams are still at full speed and full volume, like a demonic nightmare, and it sends a chill down her spine of the kind that she's never known before. This is the first time she's felt to be in the clutches of something that's both overwhelming and yet unrecoverably malicious.
She's trapped in a world where she cannot be the hero, a world where, despite how fast she is, it doesn't matter. She can't save everyone. She's the fastest, but she's nowhere close to fast enough.
Even so, she's going to try.
She picks up a pair of kids and sprints for the entrance. The sky lightens up, and the moon, despite still descending, does not look like it's coming towards them. Again, dream logic, she puts down the two kids frozen like statues, and she turns around for the next group. "Only two billion left to go," a voice says in her mind.