"There's, there's this rock — and it's hovering! Oh, the hovering! We're doomed."

"Sir— Sir, I need you to calm down. Can you explain how the hovering rock and the doom are related?"

"Dooooomed!"

He coughs.

"Because it's, uh, making everything slightly dimmer."

"Right, okay. And this dimness, is it causing crop failures and ecological disruption? Or would you say it's more of a conceptual dimness that corrodes the minds of mortal men?"

"I don't know! It's just, you know, dim. And it's the rock's fault. Dooommm—"

"Sir, we get a lot of different kinds of emergencies, I'm just trying to work with you to figure out what we need to do, here."

They make typing noises.

"Okay sir, I've put in a request for a Destined Hero to come deal with it, but can you work with me to try a few things while they're traversing the lambent void between dimensions?"

"Yes, yes I can do that. Doom."

"Good. Are you somewhere that is safe right now?"

"Nowhere is safe! Not from the dimness and the rock!

... but yes, I'm not imminently doomed. It's more of a delayed, general doom."

"Okay. As I understand it, the hovering of the rock is the ultimate problem, here. Do you have a blanket or a tarp that you could drape over the rock in order to put it to sleep?"

"Not legally, no."

"What part of that would be illegal? Could it be justified under emergency measures?"

"Putting a blanket over it would be forced naptime — that's been illegal since the third children's convention on appropriate bedtimes. I could be hanged!"

"I see. That's okay, sir. Have you tried placing something very heavy on top of the rock, to force it back down to the ground?"

"No, no, there's nothing that I could put on it. It's just me, the rock, this piece of rubble-strewn battlement, an illegal blanket, and a sort of enveloping, gloaming grey that hides the frightened faces of the evacuation as civilization winds from its comfortable cradle and into the drawn-out drain of the universe."

"I see. My system says you're calling from a surf-tormented shore where all we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. Is that right? Those usually have grains of golden sand. Can you gather the sand in the blanket, and use that to weigh down the rock?"

"No, er. Not anymore. I spent a while weeping before I called you, and the grains of golden sand — how few! — crept away through my fingers while I wept."

"Okay, that's fine. Let's focus on the evacuation. You said that civilization was evacuating to a 'drawn-out drain'. Is the drain safe? Do you know whether the people who evacuate there will be able to escape the dimness?"

"None shall escape! The dimness will come for us all, and the rock will hover, and the seas will be as blood, and the blood will be as wine, and the wine will be as lemon juice, and the lemon juice will be as tequila, and the—"

"Okay, so you need bulk transport that can meet civilization at the drain and transport them to a non-doomed universe. I've dispatched a rescue vehicle, and it says here that it should arrive in the nick of time. Will all civilization be able to make it to the drain by then?"

"They walk through the great and glittering ruins of a forgotten age, pillars tumbled upon sand and sand heaped upon foundations long forgotten yet oft dreamed of. A torporous, timeless march through a place so old that time has forgotten it — or abandoned it, the better to flit through the hands of clockpieces and dance upon the fleeting fancies of the mad."

"A timeless march. I see. I'll tell the evacuation team to bring a clockbreaker, to reach between the ticks and tocks and pluck them from the frozen, eternal beauty of the sands. You're not with civilization, though, right? Will you be able to make it to the great and glittering ruins of a forgotten age, and from there to the drawn-out drain so that you can be evacuated?"

"No, it is too late for me — hence the earlier weeping — my gaze is fixed upon the rock, and it is beyond my power to shift my head and look away. I must regard the rock as I must breathe, nay, as I must feel the pull of gravity. The rock consumes my vision and my mind, my hands clasped before it in a rigid mockery of prayer. ... you're on speaker phone."

"Okay, so civilization is evacuating, but you're trapped by the strange powers of the rock. And you can't cover the rock or weigh it down. Have you tried communicating with the rock? Sometimes entities like this can be prayed to, and it might be convinced to release you."

"The rock is deaf to my cries. And just, you know, deaf in general. It's a rock."