The stage curtain dropped halfway, wobbling awkwardly because Rosario tied it wrong.
A few candles flickered near the front rows, glowing against the cracked bunker walls. The survivors were still giggling, some wiping tears from their faces.
Tom walked offstage, still wearing his dented pot-helmet and holding his bent wooden sword like it was holy. He let out a long sigh. "I swear, whoever wrote this script was high on cosmic soup."
Grace was sitting on a wooden crate near the stage, laughing so hard she couldn't breathe. "That 'Spirit of the Sandal' part wasn't even in the script, Tom. You made that up!"
Tom looked confused, scratching the side of the pot. "Wait.... so the sandal wasn't real?"
Vera, standing behind them in half his armor, his fake mustache drooping, crossed his arms. "No, genius. Grace and I wrote this scene to be serious about loss, courage, and self-reflection."
Tom blinked. "Well, I reflected a lot. Mostly about how heavy this pot is."
Grace buried her face in her hands, laughing again. "You turned tragedy into a cooking show, Tom!"
Rosario jumped onto the stage with a cup of water in one hand, waving his other arm like a ringmaster. "I'd say it's a masterpiece! The crowd nearly died laughing, literally. If someone chokes tonight, that's on you, Tom."
Elior was sitting off to the side, quietly watching everyone with a grin. His golden eyes reflected the flicker of the candles. He shook his head. "If this keeps up," he murmured, "we won't need enemies to kill us. The laughter will finish the job."
Johan lay flat on a bench nearby, still wearing his tattered ghost sheet from earlier. "Good," he mumbled lazily. "If I die laughing, at least I'll die happy for once."
Arlong, who had just changed out of the ghost costume looked at Johan and sighed. "You do realize you still have the sheet on, right?"
Johan sat up, his face blank. "Oh. So that's why everyone kept handing me their confessions."
That earned another wave of laughter from everyone.
Grace grabbed the edge of the script she and Vera had written, flipping through the messy ink notes. "Okay, for the next act," she said, still smiling, "we were supposed to add something meaningful. Something that makes everyone feel proud of surviving this long."
Vera nodded seriously. "Hope and determination. Like a message that says like even in ruins, people can laugh."
Tom snorted. "Yeah, except our 'message' includes ghosts losing sandals and knights with pots."
Grace smiled faintly, leaning back. "That's the point, though. Even absurd things can give hope. People need to laugh before they remember how to live."
Tom paused, looking at her quietly for a second. Her words hit somewhere deep, the kind of quiet truth that stays long after laughter fades. He smiled a little. "Alright then, Commander. Let's give them hope with almighty sandals."
Rosario clapped once, dramatically. "Well said! The philosophy of footwear! I'll write a book about it."
Vera smacked him lightly on the back of the head. "You can barely spell."
"Exactly," Rosario grinned, "it'll be abstract poetry."
Elior chuckled quietly from his seat, stretching his arms. "Let's not forget, we've got another act coming. If we make it funnier than that spirit scene, I'm sending you all to the moon."
Tom squinted. "Which one? The broken half or the missing half?"
Elior smirked. "Whichever kills you first."
The survivors laughed again, the warm vibes bounced across the cold bunker walls. For a moment, the world outside, wars, the monsters, the ruins felt like a distant dream.
Grace closed the script, stood up, and smiled. "Alright. Five minutes break, everyone. Then back to the stage. Act Three begins."
Tom groaned. "Let me take this pot off first."
Rosario pointed dramatically at him. "You take that pot off, you lose your character!"
Tom sighed, dead serious now. "Then this pot dies with me."
The bunker exploded with laughter again, warm with the rarest thing they had left, joy.
....
Scene 3 — "The Emperor's Last Dawn"
The candles had burned lower now, their light soft and trembling against the bunker's wasted ceilings. The audience sat quiet. Just the kind of silence that meant every heart was listening, something important.
On the stage stood Tom, still wearing his knight's armor, dented and scuffed, the pot-helmet gone now. His face was uncovered, raw, earnest.
Across from him stood Johan, dressed in a tattered royal robe stitched from old bunker curtains, a makeshift crown tilted on his head. Behind them, Grace, Vera, Rosario and Arlong played the royal court, silent witnesses to the fading glory of an empire that once ruled everything.
The curtain of rags swayed slightly as Tom's voice rounded through the dim bunker,
"Your Majesty… I have slain the spirit that haunted your kingdom but the they still cry. They still starve and die. Their hearts still rot from fear."
Johan turned his head slowly, eyes heavy, the weary Emperor. His crown glimmered faintly in candlelight.
"Fear cannot be slain by steel, Knight. You can kill ghosts, but you cannot kill what lives inside men."
Tom stepped forward, his armor clinking softly. "Then what good is justice if it sees only the sword? If those who suffer most are buried under silence and lies?"
Grace, as the queen, spoke from the side. "Justice is blind, Sir Knight, not because of it being pure, but because it refuses to see what does not fit its scrolls. The law doesn't search for truth. It hunts for proof no matter it is true or false."
Her voice trembled, but it carried the strength of truth.
Vera, still in his comedic side role as the court advisor, raised his staff slightly and said softly:
"A man once told me that truth bleeds slower than lies. That's why the world always looks away before it heals."
The audience was quiet. The laughter that filled the bunker before had turned into stillness. The survivors, those broken souls in worn clothes and dusty faces, now watched as if they were seeing their own stories unfold.
Johan, the Emperor, stepped forward, eyes looking past the stage as if gazing into something far away.
"I built an empire on faith. On hope that my people would find peace under my name. Yet every time I tried to save them, they knelt to another god, gold, power, deceit. Tell me, Knight, what is a king to do when his people no longer wish to be saved?"
Tom's reply came quiet but impacting.
"A king must stand a stand seal. Even if no one follows. Because that is what makes him human."
Johan smiled faintly, "Human…." He looked down at his hands. "What a cruel, beautiful curse that world is."
Grace took a step forward, her role was forgotten now, voice soft and trembling,
"Humans.… we're both the kindest and the cruelest beings that ever existed. We build cities only to destroy them down. We pray for peace while sharpening our swords."
Vera whispered, his tone unusually serious, "We still reach for the light."
Hmm
Johan nodded, his voice was a slow tide of weariness and hope.
"Perhaps that's what makes us divine. Not our power…. not our wars…. but the fact that we keep trying, even when everything we love turns to ash."
Tom knelt, his wooden sword planted into the ground.
"Then let this empire fall. Let the world start anew. If man cannot live with respect, then he must learn again what it means to live at all."
Johan took off his crown and the stitched, broken symbol of a fading age. He looked at it for a moment, then held it out toward the invisible horizon.
"Let the old world sleep," he whispered. "Let it decay in silence. From its spine, we'll build a new one, not ruled by kings, but guided by compassion."
He turned to his court. "Prepare the ships. We'll sail beyond the stars, beyond the noise. We'll find a new dawn one that no god, no law, no judge can stain."
Behind them, Elior as the ship captain raised his torch high. "Then the Emperor sails tonight," he said, voice trembling with emotion.
The lights dimmed. Tom stood and looked toward Johan one last time.
"If the next world asks who we were…. what shall I tell them?"
Johan smiled, faint but full of something warm of the smile of a man who had lost everything yet still choose to hope.
"Tell them we were humans."
The survivors who had lost homes, families, dreams, didn't know where they belong or whatever their destiny is, began to clap.
Grace quietly stood in the backstage. Veradidn't expressed his inner thoughts, just a simple nod. Tom stood there, staring into the dark, his chest heavy with something he couldn't name.
Elior bowed his head slightly. "The curtain falls," he murmured.
A promise that even in the ruins of a dying world…. humanity still had one last dawn left to find.