With her final statement, worldwide everyone fell to their knees in supplication. And as they did, the first glimmers of the impact of Her appearance made themselves felt.
In 90 minutes, the length of a full episode of Tonight!, worldwide deaths average around 9,000 total. During her appearance, they topped 900 million.
The first of the deaths that could be laid at her feet occurred before she appeared on the show. As the show started and screens everywhere became a vehicle for Her debut, the first death was Lyosha Popov. Popov was undergoing open heart surgery when the Ascension began, and when the screens suddenly shifted and the doctors turned to watch, he bled out in seconds. He was only the first by a hair, as the same type of death played out over and over worldwide.
A close second to the deaths by botched surgery were the deaths by car crash. Dashboard screens, electronic billboards, highway safety signs – all became a vector for the Ascension to be seen, and all became a deadly distraction. Within minutes of the Ascension beginning, and still before Anastasia had taken the stage, travel by car would have been impossible anywhere even if people had been able to focus on driving. Hundreds of incidents worldwide dwarfed the previous record holder – the Salang tunnel fire – although most will never be known. The single largest event happened in Turkey where a tanker full of gasoline exploded after being struck and the resulting fire destroyed the city of Kahramanmaraş, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths over the next hour.
Perhaps surprisingly, plane crashes were not a significant cause of death during the Ascension. Some of the smallest planes were the luckiest, with no screens on board to distract them. Only some, because in a world of smart phones, most had a screen available even then. Passenger airliners mostly survived as well, with only those that were already preparing to land when the Ascension started crashing. For them, it was a matter of fuel. Autopilot programs continued to work without issue, so when the pilots regained control a lot of them were not impacted at all. Shorter range planes that did not carry enough fuel, or that don’t have as robust autopilot systems, were the most impacted. Reports of a dozen or so people dying in a plane crash would have dominated every news program in existence had there not been more important things to worry about.
Of course, of those 900 million deaths, only about 1% of them could be attributed to Anastasia. And She would be the first to tell people that those other deaths that were not due to her would have been much worse had she not Ascended. Had She stayed away and waited out the end, allowing history to take its course, that 900 million would have been close to another full order of magnitude higher as the entire world burned, rather than just what would become known as the Bharata Waste.
