Fanfic / The Sun Will Come Up, and the Seasons Will Change

Fanart cover by Cherry_Bomb_Bees

A fanfic of Infinity Train written by SaoirseParisa, the focus is on an autistic girl named Mary Summers. One day, after she learns her mother hates dealing with her autistic daughter and sees something on her blog that absolutely terrifies her, Mary decides to run away from home. Suddenly, a magical train appears in front of her and she climbs on, ending up on the Infinity Train.

Back home, Mary’s sudden disappearance causes things to go out of control as Mary is declared a missing person and the town starts a desperate search for her.

Unlike most Infinity Train stories, this one is unique in that it focuses on an original character instead of basing it off one from the show or crossing over with another fandom.

Can be found on Archive of Our Own and FanFiction.net. The fic concluded on January 28th, 2024.

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This work of fanfiction contains examples of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • While Todd is a very good father to Mary, Dana is a complete and total nightmare, emotionally and even physically abusing Mary whenever she displays any signs of her autism and badgering her to act more “normal”. It extends even further than that, with her trying to “fix” Mary by sending her to various programs meant to fix or cure her and her claiming that "Mary ruins everything" on her blog.
  • Irene (Dana's mother) abuses her daughter any chance she can get, whether it's forcing her to grow up into the 'perfect' housewife or ruthlessly insulting her for anything and everything she has "done wrong". The abuse turned out so bad that Dana moves to another state just to get away from her, but Irene moves anyways just to abuse Dana more.
• Accentuate the Negative: Whenever Dana talks about Mary, even amongst her own family, all she ever focuses on are her flaws and supposed behavioral problems, almost willfully ignoring or refusing to acknowledge anything truly good about her, like her personality or talents. She did make a blog solely for the purpose of complaining about her to anyone who would listen—primarily for sympathy and solidarity from other parents raising autistic kids.
• Adaptational Villainy: The ducks in the Cross-Eyed Duck Car never attack passengers or other denizens in the actual show, and are mainly portrayed as being dopey. Here, several of the ducks attempt to attack Vic because rodents are a food source for birds.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Despite Nora's monstrous behavior and violent tendencies (trying to kill Mary several times), Mary, Blanca, and Vic are all horrified when she allows herself to fall onto the train tracks and be crushed to death by the wheels. Part of the pain Mary feels comes from knowing that the McDonald family may never know what happened to Nora. Six years later, when Mary meets Julius, he confesses that even though Nora tried to kill him twice on the same night, he still loves who she was before she met Xander and is still upset that she was found dead with no answers on how her body got so mutilated
• Allegorical Character: Dana Summers represents how toxic those Autism Warrior Parents can be. At her best which is not often, Dana treats her youngest daughter Mary Summers, who is autistic, like a baby that can't think for herself. At her worst, she's utterly abusive to her daughter and obsessed with making her normal and curing her daughter's autism. While Dana ultimately thinks she's in the right of her treatment of her daughter, everyone around her, including her husband Todd and eldest daughter Reagan, sees that her behavior is unacceptable, and while Dana may complain about her daughter acting out, she is the one making a scene. Things come to a head when Todd and Reagan read Dana's blog and discover to their horror, how much she hates Mary, that not only does Dana not miss Mary when she ran away, but she also considered forcibly sterilizing Mary once she turns 18. According to the story's author, Dana is based on parents of autistic children who have written memoirs on how much of a burden it was to raise their children and how they don't respect their children.
• All of the Other Reindeer: Vic the hamster is not very well-liked among his hamster kin, because he's much more blunt, brave, and genuinely interested in exploring life outside the Hamster Car, whereas the rest of the hamsters are easily frightened and can't fathom why he would want to study beings that almost destroyed their home.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parent: Dana treats Mary like a baby, insisting on buying her a picture book meant for toddlers and saying the book her daughter wanted seemed too advanced for her. And that’s when she’s in a good mood with Mary.
• Anthropomorphic Food: All the denizens in the Sweets Car are this. Blanca, a giant talking marshmallow, joins Mary on her train journey.
• Animal Motifs: Rabbits for Mary. She has a rabbit plushie named Mimi, a lamp with rabbits on it, and her dad calls her 'bunny'.
• Arc Words: Seasons. The story starts in the autumn, the subtitle of the fic is "The Seasons Will Change", and Mary's last name is Summers.
• Armor-Piercing Response: In chapter 16, when Todd finally tells Dana that he wants a divorce, Dana wastes no time trying to place the blame on Mary, which starts yet another argument. When Dana tries to claim that Mary is destroying their lives, he fires back that Mary isn't the one doing that, Dana is...which stuns her into silence.
• Artistic License – Law: Nora’s mother tells her they can’t leave her brother Julius home alone for the afternoon, telling her “It’s against the law to leave a child under twelve in the house all by themselves, even for a short amount of time.” In reality, only three states have an official minimum age requirement to be home alone, and the requirement is treated as more of a suggestion. Furthermore, it isn’t the act of simply leaving a minor home alone that’s illegal, but leaving them alone extensively, such as for several days at once.
• Ascended Fridge Horror: While canon does confirm that the families of the Passengers do notice when they go missing, the series never really puts any focus on them. This story's subplot is dedicated to Mary's family discovering she's gone missing, and the fear that comes along with it.
• The Atoner: Blanca is revealed to have been abusive to her son because she was prejudiced towards Passengers and other denizens and Shiro wasn't, to the point that she tried to confine him to the Sweets Car against his will. After she learns the error of her ways, she leaves the Sweets Car not only to keep Mary safe, but in the hopes of seeing Shiro again so she can apologize to him. After a rough start, the two of them do reconcile to an extent.
• Awful Truth: Chapter 9 reveals that Dana plans to get Mary sterilized without her consent, which was what was on the blog entry that convinced Mary to run away, even though at the time, Mary thought the word sterilize was another word for murder. When Mary learns what it really means in chapter 12, she is understandably horrified that her mother would think of putting her through that.
• Axe-Crazy: Nora, by Chapter 22, has gone completely off the deep end, mistaking Mary for Julius and trying to kill her, blaming her for all of the problems in her life.
• Believing Their Own Lies: Dana always tends to assume that everybody else is out to get her and that Mary is always acting up when she's the one who always creates a scene. For example, after the bookstore incident, Dana complains on her blog that people were staring at her in horror, and most likely thinking "what the hell is wrong with that kid?". As Edith points out in Chapter 5, all of the witnesses were actually horrified that somebody was abusing a girl who wasn't doing anything bad in public and were most likely thinking "what the hell is wrong with this lady?". In fact, Chapter 7 reveals that most people who know Dana refer to her as a Karen because of her behavior.
  • Chapter 9 reveals the blog entry that made Mary run away. The Carnegie incident was shown before (Greg knocked down Mary's lunch tray, Dana snapped and yelled at Mary, almost hit her, then Dana yelled at Edith (who was trying to help Mary). The blog entry, however, makes Mary into a violent asshole.
• Beneath the Mask: Greg started off the story as a bully, a thief, and an overall jerk who acts out without hesitation. Later in the story, however, when talking to his teacher, it comes out that Greg has actually been emulating his favorite video game character to look cool to his friends. Deep down, he's just a kid who wants to look cool but, in the process, drove his friends away from him.
• Benevolent Boss: When Todd’s boss at the casino he works at heard about Mary’s disappearance, he gives Todd a week off with pay so he can focus on helping find Mary.
• Berserk Button: While Dana is already not a very cheerful person, she gets especially angry when Mary stims, to the point where she physically hurts Mary to get her to stop.
• Big Sister Instinct: Reagan loves Mary with all her heart and makes sure to always defend her from Dana. She also passes out several missing posters when Mary goes missing to help find her. Furthermore, despite Todd reassuring her she doesn’t have to get involved in him confronting Dana about the blog, Reagan still does so anyway because she does NOT want Dana to get away with it. Reagan even goes so far as to print off every blog entry as evidence against Dana.
• A Birthday, Not a Break: Around Mary's seventh birthday, Dana is needlessly cruel to Mary (only buying a gift if Mary promises to stop being autistic).
• Bitch Slap: At one point in chapter 7, Edith reaches out to Dana at the park to try and show compassion to a mother whose child is missing. But when Dana goes on a diatribe about how Edith's methods of raising Lianna are incorrect because she'd rather accept her for who she is rather than try to cure her, and makes one snide comment too many, Edith is so angry at her that she slaps her across the face and calls her out on not only degrading her daughter but for her treatment of Mary.
• Bittersweet Ending: On one hand, Mary successfully manages to get off the train and reunite with her family, with the Time Skip revealing that she's doing well for herself in light of Dana's absence. On the other hand, the McDonalds lost their only daughter, will likely never know the truth behind her death and how it happened, and will have to find a way to cope with the fallout for the rest of their lives.
• Break Them by Talking: In an attempt to both get back at the trio for looking through her memories and blackmail them into becoming their bodyguards, Nora plays into Mary's insecurities by guilt-tripping her into believing that leaving Nora behind in the Haunted House Car out of self-preservation makes her no different from a murderer, along with threatening to show the blog to people at her high school. Sadly, despite Blanca and Vic's attempts to call Nora out, it works.
• The Bully: Greg is a big jerk to almost everyone at school, but especially to Mary, mostly because she had gotten him in trouble for stealing things from his classmates. He threatens Mary with violence, insists that no one actually cares about her, and later expresses delight at her having gone missing, outright stating that he hopes Mary is dead. Subverted in that it's revealed he was trying to emulate a video game character's personality and acted like a Jerkass because he thought he could impress his friends. But when Mr. Bryant explains that people in real life would find a person like that intolerable, linking it to his treatment of Mary, Greg feels remorseful when he realizes the full gravity of the situation.
• Bullying the Disabled: Chapter 19 reveals that Nora got suspended for two weeks for beating up a wheelchair-using classmate because "she was hogging the entire hallway", and she almost kills her younger autistic brother, Julius, twice on the same night ^note  She and Xander locking him out of the house without proper clothing when it was -2 degrees out when he came home early from a movie and saw them; thankfully, he had his phone on him and was able to seek shelter at a neighbor's house. Then, she shoved Julius into a table when attacking him for telling their parents, resulting in her getting arrested for assault .
• Brutal Honesty:
  • Vic tends to do this a lot. For example, he tells Mary that she doesn't know for sure that Todd and Reagan know about Dana's blog unless she asks them about it and that she's jumping the gun with her assuming that her father and her sister also hate her.
  Blanca: Vic, did you really need to be so blunt? You could have said what you did a little more gently.
  Vic: Come on, Blanca. Some truths can't be sugar-coated. I'd rather someone be straight with me and tell a harsh truth than a kind lie. Stuff like that just makes things worse in the long run.
  • Taken even further in chapter 10, where Mary attempting to cheer Vic up results in the latter telling her that he doesn't want to be cheered up, leading to Mary being frustrated and claiming that he "enjoys being miserable." Since that turns out to be a Berserk Button for him, he rips into her, telling her that she shouldn't dismiss or dictate his feelings, claiming that she's no different from Dana.
• Call-Back: In chapter 2, when Mary watches the video in her passenger transportation pod, One-One says this line, "Statistically, you're more likely to fall off the train and die alone." In chapter 22, that's exactly what happens to Nora, with Mary even remembering it as she mourns her death.
• Cassandra Truth: Defied; Mary knows nobody would believe her about the Infinity Train, so she doesn’t even bother trying to tell anybody about it. Instead, she claims that after running away, she survived out in the woods, met Nora and lived in the hut the latter had created for a while, and then when Nora had tried to kill her after finding out that she was autistic she ran out of the woods and decided to go back home. She also told the police what she knew about Nora’s neo-Nazi ideals and her ties with Xander, but didn’t tell them about her Spiteful Suicide as she thought her body would have remained stuck in the Infinity Train’s realm. The story does come under scrutiny between the lack of physical evidence that Mary was at the hut and nobody being able to figure out Nora’s cause of death after her body was returned to Earth. However, as there was no evidence disproving Mary’s testimony and since Nora’s memories gave Mary details about the hut that she would only have known if she had actually seen it, the police decide to just close the cases on Mary and Nora’s disappearances.
• Central Theme:
  • Perfection Is Impossible, especially from children, and it’s cruel to force people to conform to your definition and standards of perfection.
  • Your children deserve all of the care and support in the world, especially if they have special needs that need to be reasonably accommodated in order for them to be successful in life.
  • Don't succumb to people who abused you in the past and accept help from those who want to truly help you stand up to your abuser. If Dana hadn't caved into Irene's demands and sought approval from her, as well as sought therapy to come to terms with her abusive childhood and accept the help of those who stood up to Irene, she could've been a better person who didn’t alienate everyone who could have possibly wanted to help her and not abused Mary. Meanwhile, Mary’s Character Development involves her learning to stand up to ableist characters in her life, accepting the kindness and care of those who truly love her, and being done with seeking Dana’s nonexistent approval.
  • There's nothing inherently wrong with being autistic. Just because you are autistic, doesn't mean you can't have a meaningful life.
  • Sharing private information about autistic people to the public and making life-altering decisions for them without the autistic person's consent is not only morally reprehensible but a violation of their autonomy. Autistic people have just as much a right to privacy and their bodily autonomy as anyone else, and if you share intimate details about them on the internet without their input, you're not only putting their future in jeopardy, you're contributing to their stigmatization.
  • An individual is only responsible for their own actions, decisions, and their consequences, and should never put the blame on others. Mary comes to realize that her being autistic and her general existence didn't ruin Dana's life or make her do all that she did, and Dana realizes that her own crusade to cure Mary damaged her relationships with her family rather than Mary herself. Nora kept trying to blame others for her own destructive actions rather than admit responsibility, and her refusal to take accountability resulted in her Spiteful Suicide.
• The Chain of Harm: Irene, Dana’s and Mary’s relationships to each other are a cycle of abuse and heartbreak: Irene physically and emotionally abused Dana, even as an adult. Dana struggled to break free despite Irene harassing her. Eventually, her desperation to be perfect and seen as better resulted in her becoming Irene and abusing Mary. Mary in turn starts realizing this when she uses some of Dana’s verbal abuse during an argument with Vic. Mary is at first desperate for Dana’s love and approval, but the events of Chapter 12 result in her deciding to stop making herself miserable for something she’ll never get, and washes her hands of Dana.
• Cheerful Child: Despite everything she goes through with her mother, a school bully, and some of the terrors of the train, Mary remains a very sweet, optimistic, happy little girl.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • When Mary is packing her backpack with things she needs when she decides to run away, she accidentally brings along a cell phone Todd gave her for emergencies. In chapter 6, Reagan realizes that Mary must have brought it with her, so she and Todd start texting it in an attempt to reach out to Mary. In Chapter 8, Mary uses it to tell Reagan she’s still alive and about Dana's anti-autism blog (something that the older girl had absolutely no idea about) and the date of the particular blog entry that made Mary realize that Dana does truly hate her. In Chapter 9, it's revealed the blog entry details how Dana is so convinced that Mary will grow up badly and only make things worse as time goes on that she has considered getting Mary forcefully sterilized once she turns 18.
  • In the Black Slug car, Vic buys an umbrella spear for Mary. In chapter 9, she uses it to defend herself and Vic from a flock of ducks. In chapter 15 she uses it to defend Blanca from a Ghom.
  • Some of the items Vic buys in the Black Slug car help him, Mary, and Blanca view Mary’s memories in Chapter 12 and later Nora's in Chapters 18-9
• Chekhov's Gunman: Nora McDonald is a teenager stated to go missing in the first chapter. She later appears in chapter 13, having also ended up on the Infinity Train, and joins the trio.
• Childish Pillow Fight: Mary, Vic, and Blanca engage in one in the Doily Car, though instead of pillows, they use wads of yarn, as the Doily Car has no actual pillows to speak of.
• Cliffhanger: Later chapters end on one:
  • Chapter 13 ends with Vic noticing a certain symbol in the soles of Nora’s boots. While he doesn’t remember where he’s seen it before, he starts to feel distrustful of Nora.
  • Chapter 14 has the quartet encounter a Ghom.
  • Chapter 18 has Mary discover Nora is friends with Neo-Nazis, and dating one at that.
  • Chapter 19 ends with Mary, Vic and Blanca abandoning Nora in the Haunted House Car after seeing how much of a horrible person she is...but after deciding to not go through the next car itself after seeing how dangerous it appears to be, they find a very angry Nora blocking the way behind them.
  • Chapter 20 ends with Nora shooting Mary in the shoulder and then kidnapping Blanca to use as a Human Shield for the next car.
• Close-Call Haircut: Near the end of the Kaiju car in chapter 20, Nora gets into a huge and violent fight against Mary, Blanca, and Vic. Near the end of it, one of Nora's gunshots causes one of Mary's braids to fall off. It happens again with Mary’s remaining braid during the climatic confrontation between Nora and the trio.
• Colorful Theme Naming: Both Blanca and her son Shiro have thier names derived from the word "white", with "blanca" being the Spanish word and "shiro" being the Japanese word.
• Continuity Cameo:
  • Ben Greene, one of the denizens shown in the Train Documentaries, appears in the second chapter and helps Mary through the Green Car when she first wakes up on the train.
  • The Cat makes an appearance near the end of chapter 12 when she finds the trio in her study, though all she does is immediately shoo them out. She even brought Simon's book with her.
  • Khaki Bottoms makes an appearance in the beginning of chapter 16.
• Control Freak: Bar none, Dana's biggest problem is her intense need to control the life she leads. When she learned from Dr. Goldman that she needed to be hypervigilant and control every aspect of her daughter's life, lest she run rampant, she didn't hesitate to start looming over her daughter, trying to control her and keep her in line to the point of hurting her in an effort to control her. Vic even says that it sounds like Dana's treatment of Mary seems like a horrible way to get validation from others who don't know the full story behind it.
  • Dana's mother turns out to have been the same way, being a Housewife who absolutely prided herself on making sure everything was perfect and adhered to the values of the fifties, even though seventies and eighties values were in full swing. In fact, her control over her family was so suffocating that as soon as Dana graduated high school, she moved out of the house and in with a friend out of state.
• Cool Big Sister: Mary’s sister, Reagan, is a loving, protective older sister who does her best to keep her little sister safe and happy. She’s even willing to bring Mary to her boyfriend’s house to get her away from their overbearing mother.
• Cool Teacher: Mr. Bryant, Mary's fourth-grade teacher, is a kind, friendly, supportive man who defends her when Dana gives her a hard time about her stimming and is quick to punish Greg for bullying her. He even calls out Greg's apathy in regards to Mary's disappearance, and although he also has to punish Mary's friend Caitlin for fighting with him, he's at the very least fair. He also volunteers with the search parties to help find Mary. He later helps Greg learn how his bad behavior comes off to others, causing Greg to reach a Heel Realization. After Mary returns, he offers to have some after-school sessions with her to help her catch up on her schoolwork with permission from Todd.
• Crapsack World: The Kaiju Car in a nutshell. The giant monsters constantly battle one another or destroy everything they see, leaving nothing but destruction and death in their wake. What few denizens there are are always in fear for their lives.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Nora’s method of Spiteful Suicide is to allow herself to fall underneath the Infinity Train’s wheels and let her body be destroyed.
• Cute Bookworm: Mary is an adorable young girl who loves reading books.
• Daddy's Girl: Mary and her father Todd share a strong father-daughter bond, and he makes it clear he accepts Mary for who she is. Same goes for Reagan.
• Darkest Hour: Chapter 20 as a whole. Mary is subjected to one Breaking Speech after another, almost fed to a Kaiju, shot, and stomped on, while Blanca is weakened from transforming so much and gets kidnapped as a result, leaving Mary and Vic to deal with the fallout.
• A Day In The Lime Light:
  • Part of Chapter 17 focuses on Greg and his journey to becoming The Atoner.
  • Chapters 18 and 19 showcase Nora’s backstory and her descent into The Bully.
• Deadly Euphemism: Mary assuming the word "sterilize" was one was what prompted her to run away.
• Death of a Child: The seventeen-year-old Nora lets herself be crushed under the train rather than return home.
• "Dear John" Letter: In the penultimate chapter Dana decides to leave one for Todd, explaining that she’s leaving because she knows he, Reagan, and Mary will never forgive her for her actions and she’s moving somewhere secret where neither Irene nor anybody from her old life will never find her, as well as seek the therapy she so desperately needs and discover who she truly is.
• Despair Event Horizon: Mary spends much of Chapter 21 in a depressive state and screaming about her self hatred as her number goes up.
• Disappointed by the Motive: Mary is horrified and disgusted that the reason Dana started hating her is simply because she had a meltdown at her great-uncle’s funeral because the organ music was too loud and she took Irene’s condemnation of Mary to heart even though Todd stood up for both of them.
• Disowned Parent: After Dana moves away, Reagan and Mary (especially the latter) are much happier without her around and have no interest in any sort of relationship with her. Dana herself seems to be aware of this, as she has only sent them child support checks in the six years between the present day and the Distant Finale.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • When the police is interrogating Dana about her abuse of Mary, the detective leading Mary’s missing persons case asks Dana if it’s possible Mary saw the blog. He deliberately leaves out that Mary (or most likely somebody using her phone) contacting Reagan about it is the reason why the police know about it in the first place, leaving Dana to believe Mary still doesn’t know about it.
  • When Todd and Reagan confront Dana about her blog, Todd claims that one of the detectives on Mary’s missing persons case told them about it, because as far as he knows it might not have been Mary who texted Reagan about it back in Chapter 8.
  • While Mary and the readers know how Nora really died, she doesn't tell anybody about it when she returns to Earth because she knows that nobody would believe her about the Infinity Train. She doesn't even mention that Nora had died to the police since she believed the Infinity Train wouldn't send her body back to Earth. This means when the police do find her mangled body, nobody can figure out what happened and are forced to close the case without any answers for her family.
• Dr. Jerk: Dr. Goldman, whom Dana had consulted, is the one who "confirmed" her fears of what Mary being autistic meant for her, insisting that she had to be controlled lest her "primal desires" take control of Dana's entire life. Chapter 9 makes it even worse when it's revealed he has recommended Mary be put on a sedative after a cursory examination and once hit and screamed at Mary when she tried to ask him for some water. According to Todd in Chapter 13, every single review of his practice has one-star ratings, demonstrating how harmful he is. Chapter 20 shows that he's been slapped with several malpractice suits, tried to go on the run, and ended up on the Infinity Train. The second he climbed out of the pod, he was held at gunpoint by Nora, who tried to rob him.
• Deadpan Snarker: Lianna makes barbed retorts when Dana tries to justify her misguided actions.
  Dana: I also read a lot of informative articles put out by Autism Speaks that detail how to deal with raising an autistic child. They also have some very good videos—
  Lianna: Citation needed.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Irene's beliefs are from out of the fifties i.e. a woman's only role is to be a pretty housewife and mother to her children, disabled children need to be locked up and out of society, divorce is wrong and always the woman's fault. Todd calls her out on her outdated behavior, but she refuses to change her mind.
• Dirty Coward: In Chapter 22, Mary and Vic find Nora robbing Dr. Goldman, who had recently ended up on the Train, at gunpoint. When Mary and Vic save him by temporarily trapping Nora in a passenger pod (and Mary holding back her anger and spite in order to save Blanca once she recognizes Dr. Goldman), he doesn’t stay to help fight Nora despite Mary clearly being younger than the violent teenager, instead choosing to flee to a safer car.
• Distant Finale: The second half of the final chapter takes place six years after the events of the story.
• Doesn't Know Their Own Child: Dana has no idea who Mary is as a person and her refusal to try fuels many conflicts with the people in Mary’s life who do.
• Doublethink: Thanks to Dr. Goldman's influence, Dana simultaneously infantilizes Mary, like trying to force her to choose a book intended for children much younger than her, and believes that Mary's autism means that she's a born manipulator always trying to get her way. One of the ABA doctors, who is clearly having second thoughts about ABA, in the flashback Mary's tape shows even sums it up by asking Dr. Goldman "How can you possibly claim a four-year-old with absolutely no concept of manipulation is manipulating you?”.
• Drugs Are Bad: Nora drinks, smokes cigarettes, and snorts cocaine (Chapter 21 reveals that she threatened a talking castle—implied to be Morgan—to produce even more drugs for her when she ran out of her current drug supply). Her drug use is used as another symptom of her downward spiral, and she spends Chapter 22 hallucinating Mary as her brother Julius. Mary even comments that she's seen many anti-drug PSAs and watches movies that feature "alcoholic fathers who beat [their children] and wives."

  Mary: That stuff’s called alcohol. It’s a drink that messes with your brain and turns you angry and mean if you drink too much of it.

• Earn Your Happy Ending: Mary is reunited with her father and sister, heals from her mother’s abuse with the help of therapy, and gains new friends and hangs onto her old ones throughout middle school and high school (including Greg and Julius). Furthermore, she’s pursuing her dreams as an author as a fifteen-year-old, writing fanfictions and having the short story about her adventures on the Infinity Train published in a short story anthology as part of her winning a contest. The latter earns her several fans from readers, who all sent her emails telling her how her story helped them feel seen and accepted, especially from the ones who are autistic themselves.
• Easily Forgiven: Downplayed with Blanca. At the end of chapter 17, when Blanca apologizes to her son Shiro for all that she did to him, Shiro tells her that he's not ready to forgive her yet, but does acknowledge that she's changed for the better and wishes to rebuild his relationship with her in the future.
• Epiphanic Prison: At the end of chapter 22, Mary comes to accept that she shouldn't hold herself responsible for the actions of those who have chosen to hurt her and that she does have value as a person. It's this realization that makes her number drop to zero, resulting in the train generating a portal to her home.
• Evil Counterpart: Nora is an evil counterpart to two other teenage girls in the series:
  • Like Lianna, Nora is a teenage girl with red-adjacent hair who also wears a hoodie. But while Lianna is introduced as nice towards other people around her, Nora is cynical and constantly puts down Mary.
  • Like Reagan, Nora has a boyfriend. But while Oliver is a sweet caring guy towards Reagan, Xander gave her a gun and possibly instilled her anti-authority viewpoints.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Tyrus, one of Greg's friends, doesn't like Mary, but he's horrified when Greg expresses happiness that Mary is gone and hopes that she got killed. Then when Caitlin attacks Greg in response, Tyrus quickly tells Mr. Bryant (who rushed over to break up the fight) what Greg said so he would be punished for it.
  • In Chapter 5, Reagan invokes this on behalf of Dana, saying that while she doesn't like Mary being autistic she would never want her dead. But she can't help but wonder if Dana really did have a hand in Mary's disappearance and starts to suspect so during Chapter 9.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: In Chapter 9, Dana wonders on her blog why Todd and Reagan are still searching for Mary instead of "moving on" like she has.
• Expy: Nora is one to Amara, from Juliko's previous story A Marvelous Journey. Both are brunette teenage girls with hair-trigger tempers, accuse their parents of playing favorites despite evidence suggesting otherwise, dyed their hair as part of a delinquent streak, and have younger siblings with similar names (Julia and Julius, respectively). But while Amara is acting out due to not handling her grief properly, Nora acts out because she fell in love with a Neo-Nazi who manipulated her into running away from home and going off the grid, all while filling her head with hateful and ableist behavior.
• Failed a Spot Check: Dana strongly believes that Mary is a willful, disobedient, even violent child who will never mentally mature thanks to Dr. Goldman's influence and stereotyped views about autism. Despite lots of evidence to the contrary, she keeps believing her own personal narrative about Mary even after being told by practically everyone—including her husband, older daughter, and the mother of one of Mary's classmates—that Mary's nothing like Dana is convinced she'll grow up to be, bordering on willfully ignoring her real personality and actual progress due to her own paranoia and Dr. Goldman feeding her lies about what autistic people are like.
• Family Portrait of Characterization: In Chapter 11, Mary shows Blanca and Vic a professionally-done Christmas photo on her phone of her family at Phipps Conservatory during the previous Christmas season. While Mary, Todd, and Reagan are all happy and smiling, Dana is scowling and Vic points out it looks like Dana doesn’t want to be there. It demonstrates how Dana is unable to enjoy and accept her youngest daughter, and to a lesser extent, her life.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Greg’s desire to be seen as cool, which backfires horribly. He acts like a video game character—with said character behaving in often cruel, callous ways that were praised in the game but would be considered unacceptable in real life—and ends up driving his friends away due to doing things such as making light of Mary's disappearance and saying that he hopes Mary winds up dead. He learns from this and vows to both be a better person and apologize to Mary.
  • Dana’s desperation for perfection and her inability to stand up to her mother result in her being manipulated by Dr. Goldman and being resentful of Mary, to the point where she barely sees her daughter as human and Mary is shocked to see her mother love her as a baby in a past memory. By the current events of the fic, a once sweet woman has become a miserable monster.
• Fate Worse than Death: Mary initially thought the word “sterilize” was another word for murder, making her believe her mother wanted to murder her, which is why she ran away from home. Once Vic explains to her what it actually means, she considers that a lot worse than the possibility of her mother murdering her.
• Fiery Redhead:
  • Downplayed with Edith and Lianna. The former only lets her temper get the better of her when Dana makes one snide comment too many about how she raised Lianna, in which she reacts by slapping Dana across the face and calling her out for how she treated Mary.
  • Played straight with Greg: he has a short temper, fiery personality and picks fights with the other kids.
• Finale Title Drop: In the closing scene of the story, Lianna asks Mary to read the short story she had published in an anthology as an award for winning a short story contest out loud to the guests at the former’s birthday party. After agreeing, Mary introduces her story to the In-Universe audience by first stating the title: “The Sun Will Come Up, And The Seasons Will Change”.
• Fingore: A flashback in chapter 19 reveals that when Nora was confronted over locking her brother out of the house in negative two degree weather, she tries to make a break for her room, with her father chasing after her. When he tried to force his way into her room, she slammed the door on his hand, causing it to be "reduced to a bloody red mass, his fingers bent and contorted in unnatural angles."
• Flashback: In chapter 10, Vic tells Blanca about his reasons for why Mary's Innocently Insensitive statement made him so mad: He and his family were already shunned by the other hamsters due to not letting the Apex's actions cloud their view on humans and passengers, but at one point, a group of hamsters, led by a gray one named Nils, attempted to strong-arm him into changing his views, to the point where they outright destroy his property because they can't stand even the idea of one of their own not hating all humans.
• Freak Out: In Chapter 12, when Vic explains to Mary what "sterilize" actually means, she freaks out once the full implication of what her mother wants to do to her sets in and ends up having a rage-induced meltdown.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Chapter 8 reveals Dana was abused by her mother for wanting to take on “masculine” interests in computers and robotics. Several characters point out that this does not excuse her abusive behavior toward her own daughter, as Mary is fully well aware. Having witnessed how his wife gets treated by her mother, Todd is supportive of Dana to the point of having stood up to Irene on multiple occasions, but does point out to Dana that she ought to accept help from people who genuinely have both her and Mary's best interests at heart instead of lashing out at others. Dana's refusal to acknowledge her issues finally leads to Todd's decision to ask for a divorce.
• Foil: Dana Summers and Edith Kesserling. Both are mothers with an autistic daughter; but while Edith is caring and supportive to Lianna, Dana has nothing but contempt and disgust for Mary.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Mary wishes there was some way for her to show Blanca and Vic her memories of how horrible Dana is to her in Chapter 8. She gets the opportunity to do so in Chapter 12.
  • In Chapter 10, Dana doubts that Mary has actually seen her blog and also doubts that Mary knows what “sterilize” actually means. Chapter 12 reveals that Mary believed that “sterilize” was another word for “murder”, which is why she was scared into running away in the first place. Once Vic explains to her what it actually means, she doesn’t take it well.
  • In Chapter 13, after Mary views her memories and realizes that Dana has truly never treated her well, she uses a hair ribbon Reagan bought for her after Dana cruelly refused to decorate a snowman because she can't bear herself to have that item around anymore because of the bad memories of Dana. Chapter 21 reveals that she has grown to resent Mimi since Dana only got the stuffed rabbit for her to keep her quiet at a store. Though Vic helps her remember the good memories that Mimi gave her (which helped lift her out of her Despair Event Horizon) she still gives Mimi away as a parting gift to Blanca to help comfort future kid passengers.
  • In Chapter 18, when Mary, Blanca, and Vic are viewing Nora’s memories, one of Nora’s friends warns her to stay away from Xander because he got kicked out of her chemistry class for making racist remarks to the teacher. The end of the chapter reveals he’s a Neo-Nazi.
• Foul Waterfowl: The cross-eyed duck car is full of ducks who attack everyone who enters.
• Generational Trauma: The main conflict stems from generational trauma and abuse. Mary, the main protagonist, is abused by her mother Dana for being autistic. Dana was abused for years by Irene, her hyper-controlling misogynistic mother, for not wanting to be a perfect housewife à la The '50s. Dana refuses to get help from the trauma of her abusive mother and ends up ruining several things in her life, including her relationship with the rest of her family to the point where, in the end, she knows she has nobody to blame but herself for all of it.
• Gentle Giant: Mr. Bryant is a large person who looks like a rugged mountain man, but he's a very nice and good teacher who all of his students, both former and current, like.
• Giant Flyer: The yellow pterodactyl-like kaiju from the Train Documentaries appears in chapter 20, with several of them attacking Blanca as she tries to protect Mary, Vic, and Nora and help them exit the Kaiju Car.
• Gingerbread House: The Sweets Car that Mary visits contains quite a few of these. Blanca lives in one, and Mary spends a night there.
• Greater Need Than Mine: After Mary’s exit portal forms, she gives Mimi to Blanca as a parting gift so the stuffed rabbit can comfort other kid passengers that come through the Sweets car, just like how Mimi gave her comfort throughout the years.
• Hallucinations: In Chapter 22 Nora, who had spent a few hours prior drinking and doing cocaine, hallucinates Mary as her younger brother Julius. Mary plays along with it during their confrontation in the house-sized pumpkin.
• Hate Sink:
  • Dana. An abusive mother who humiliates her daughter in public, refuses to accept her daughter's autism, and sees nothing wrong with violating her daughter’s privacy and spreading lies about her online? Yeah, what a likable character.
  • Greg initially starts out as a vicious bully who claims that Mary gets "special treatment" when he gets punished for his bad behavior, when Mary disappears he laughs about it and says that he hopes she was kidnapped and murdered. This is subverted later when it's revealed he was just trying to emulate a character he liked, as well as when he comes to realize how mean it was to wish Mary dead. He promises to be better later.
  • Dr. Jacob Goldman was only seen in flashbacks for the longest time, but he became one of of the most despicable characters in the story. Feeding Dana's fears of Mary being uncontrollable due to her autism? Check. Taking a barely cursory examination of Mary to insist she should be put on a sedative? Check. Responding to a two-year-old Mary attempting to ask for some water by smacking the cup from her hand and screaming at her until she cried? Triple check! When we finally meet him in Chapter 22, he runs off to a safer car rather than help Mary fight Nora.
  • Irene (Dana's mother). She's short-tempered, abusive to her daughter, constantly insults her son-in-law and is the reason Dana became an awful human being.
  • Nora's boyfriend Xander is a Neo-Nazi who slowly corrupts Nora into becoming a juvenile delinquent who frequently gets into fights at school, argues with her parents, and eventually nearly gets her brother killed twice.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • If somebody can't love you and accept you for who you are, they're not worth your time even if they are a family member, and trying to gain their approval will only make you miserable. It's best to be with family and friends who care about you and cut ties with those who hurt you, especially if the people who wronged you don't plan to make things right. If Dana hadn't caved into Irene's demands and sought approval from her, as well as sought therapy to come to terms with her abusive childhood and accept the help of those who stood up to Irene, she could've been a better person who didn’t alienate everyone who could have possibly wanted to help her and not abused Mary. Meanwhile, Mary’s Character Development involves her learning to stand up to ableist characters in her life, accepting the kindness and care of those who truly love her, and being done with seeking the nonexistent approval of anybody who doesn't value her. Blanca perfectly sums it up in Chapter 19:
    Blanca: Kindness is an irreplaceable virtue to have, but showing it to people who have only ever been cruel towards you will only be a detriment to you rather than a boon. You shouldn't feel obligated to extend a helping hand to someone who will only repay it with hatred and cruelty.
  • Just like Book Three of the canon show demonstrates, some people won't change their harmful views or ways even with every chance of redemption and sadly, all you can do is watch as they self-destruct.
• Heel Realization:
  • Through having a talk with his teacher, Greg comes to realize that his mocking of Mary’s possible fate was extremely hurtful and promises his teacher to be better in the future and apologize to Mary once she’s found.
  • Dana starts having doubts about her treatment of Mary after a call from her mother.
  • During their argument in chapter 16, Todd tells Dana that she's become her mother. After taking some time to think about it, Dana realizes that this is indeed true.
• Hollywood Autism: Despite this trope being thoroughly averted in the fic itself, Dana is a firm believer in this trope, which is part of why she's so emotionally invested in making Mary "normal" through quack therapies.
• Honor-Related Abuse: Dana's mistreatment of Mary is a modern Western variant of this trope, where Dana is thoroughly obsessed about how her family is viewed by others, and sees Mary's Autism as a threat to her family's reputation. Literally every other character in the fic (besides Dana's own abusive mother Irene), thinks Dana's obsession with her family's reputation is deranged.
• Hope Spot:
  • Dana’s horrified and tearful reaction to Mary’s disappearance seem like she does love her daughter deep down…but then shortly after, she blames Todd and Reagan for "babying her" (as in treating her like a human being) and soon stops looking for Mary all together.
  • In Chapter 15, Todd and Dana have a calm moment together. Then Dana expresses confusion as to why Todd would want Mary back, and it all goes downhill from there.
  • In Chapter 20, Blanca offers to Nora that if she doesn’t want to be with them, she can leave. Nora calms down and starts to accept the offer…only for the car to trap the group inside together. It quickly goes From Bad to Worse.
• Horrible Judge of Character: Despite his continuous displays on how horrible he is, despite everybody pointing out how much of a quack he is, and despite every single review of him being extremely negative, Dana still insists Dr. Goldman is “the best hope we have” to “cure” Mary of her autism. This infuriates Todd to no end.
• Humans Are Cthulhu: All the hamsters in the Hamster Car, sans Vic and his father, are terrified of humans, namely because a group of them, implied to be the Apex, ransacked their home a while before the story starts. They don't even talk to Mary or Blanca until the latter shapeshifts into a hamster to make them more comfortable.
• Hypocrite:
  • Dana claims that Todd and Reagan babied Mary, making her more vulnerable to predators, but she once attempted to buy Mary a book intended for three-year-olds and loudly reminded Mary to thank somebody when she was in the middle of doing so. Dana also claims that Mary is always being embarrassing in public but she is always the one who’s making a scene.
  • In chapter 5, Edith (Lianna and Greg’s mother) tried to stop Dana from being cruel to Mary on a field trip they supervised, but Dana fires back at her, demanding that she not tell her how to raise her daughter. In chapter 7, Dana winds up doing exactly that when she runs into that same mother, Edith, at the local park, claiming that Edith is letting Lianna control her life by accepting that she's autistic.
  • Chapters 8 and 9 reveal that Dana grew up with a mother who abused her whenever she showed "masculine" interests, which she realized was terrible to do. It doesn't seem to occur to her that she has grown up to be exactly like her own mother, with her refusing to allow Mary divulge into her own interests.
  • In Chapter 13, Dana complains about Todd and Reagan invading her privacy when they confront her about the blog. Reagan viciously retorts that Dana has been the one invading Mary’s privacy by sharing intimate secrets and telling lies about Mary on the blog. Furthermore, if Dana really wanted it private, she wouldn’t have made the blog accessible to where anybody with internet access can read it in the first place.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Chapters 9 and 10 demonstrate that there are very good reasons why Dana has done her hardest to cut her own abusive mother out of her life.
• Improvised Weapon: In the duck car, Mary uses her stuffed rabbit toy to fend off a duck.
• Innocent Inaccurate: Played for Drama in Chapter 12. It turns out that Mary thought that “sterilize” was a synonym for murder, which is why she ran away from home when she saw the blog post where Dana considered doing that to her. But the fact that Mary recognized that it was something bad that Dana wanted to do to her still means that those in the human world don’t blame her for running away once she saw the blog post. Furthermore, once Vic explains to her what it actually means, Mary is more horrified by that than the prospect of Dana murdering her and has a rage-induced meltdown. Afterwards, she decides she’s done trying to gain her mother’s nonexistent approval.
• Insane Troll Logic:
  • Nora constantly complains that by having joined Mary, Vic, and Blanca on their travels, that she's stuck babysitting yet another autistic kid because of the train. Never mind that not only do Vic and Blanca repeatedly point out that she was under no obligation to stay with then, that she could have just rejected Blanca's offer to invite her with them without issue, and that if she's unhappy with traveling with them, they have no problem with her leaving, and that she blackmails the trio into being her personal bodyguards in chapter 20 just so she can ensure her own safety while going through the Kaiju Car. Her backstory shows that by the time she went on the Train, her mindset had become this.
• Internal Reveal:
  • In Chapter 8, Mary explains to Blanca and Vic her mother's abusive behavior, the bookstore incident, and discovering Dana's blog, which is what prompted her to run away from home and end up on the Infinity Train. In Chapter 12, she reveals to them the exact blog entry that prompted her to run away in the first place.
  • At the end of Chapter 8, Mary uses what's left of her phone battery (or so she claims) to text Reagan to let her know that she's still alive and to tell her she found Dana's blog... something that Reagan had no idea about.
  • Todd and Reagan find Dana's blog in chapter 9.
  • Chapter 12 has Mary explore her old memories to learn about what she was like in life, wanting to confirm if she was a bad kid or not. Dana's constant insulting and doubting Mary resulted in her not realizing that she wasn't truly to blame for many of the things Dana blamed her for, something that everyone else knew perfectly well.
  • In Chapter 14, Todd reaches out to Edith and Mr. Bryant out of desperation of having somebody to talk to, with all three adults meeting in the latter’s classroom once school wraps up for the day. Todd tells them about Dana’s blog, leaving Edith and Mr. Bryant both disgusted and horrified, and making them realize that Dana’s a worse mother than either of them thought. Todd also tells them about him and Reagan learning about the blog from a text from Mary’s phone, giving Mr. Bryant the idea of Todd attempting to reach out to Mary though it.
  • In Chapter 21 the Clairvoyance Car shows Mary how her friends and family reacted to her disappearance, showing her just how everybody who truly loves her is missing her. This, combined with Vic’s earlier You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech to her, lowers her number to 4 and strengthens her resolve to save Blanca from Nora and return to the real world.
  • In the final chapter, Mary learns that Dana had abandoned the Summers, something that Todd, Reagan, and the readers learned in the previous chapter.
• Internet Jerk: Subverted in Chapter 12. After Blanca and Vic read the blog post that made Mary run away, Vic suggests to Mary that she should read the comments on that post. Mary initially fears that they’re from people endorsing and agreeing with her mother’s views, but she’s pleasantly surprised to discover all thirty of them are reprimanding Dana on her treatment of Mary. One comment is implied to be from an autistic adult, who is particularly angry at Dana, and another comment correctly accuses the post about Dana’s desire to violate Mary’s reproductive rights of being the reason why Mary ran away. Furthermore, half of those comments were made before Mary ran away, demonstrating to her that even those who have never met Mary or Dana could always see through Dana’s bullshit. In the next chapter, Reagan uses the comments to demonstrate that everybody views Dana as a horrible ableist mother (not that Dana listens, of course).
• It's All About Me: Dana's entire blog consists of nothing but complaining about how Mary's actions affect her, along with blaming her for everything that goes wrong, even when she herself is responsible. Plus, whenever she's called out for her actions towards Mary, with Lianna at one point telling her to listen to Mary for once, she says "Why can't anyone listen to me for once?!". Then when the cops point out in Chapter 10 that her treatment of Mary is abuse, she complains about what would the cops know about child abuse since as far as Dana knows they never experienced it despite tons of people having experienced child abuse. She's basically consumed by the ideas Dr. Goldman put into her head about autistic people and reacts violently whenever Mary engages in stimming, tying into her being a Control Freak. This quote sums it up best:
  Todd: Can’t you see anything except in terms of how it affects you?!
  Dana: No! I can’t! And I don’t see why you won’t!!
• It's All My Fault:
  • Reagan blames herself for Mary's disappearance because she feels as if she could have done a lot more to stand up to Dana if Mary decided that running away was the best option. This culminates in Chapter 21 when she faints and then breaks down crying from all of the stress she has from Mary being gone.
  • In Chapter 9, after Todd finds out about Dana's blog, he blames himself for everything Dana has done to Mary. In Chapter 14, he confesses that he hates himself for not noticing the worse things Dana has been doing to Mary until after they happened and wishes he could tell her he was sorry for not protecting her from Dana. This gives Mr. Bryant the idea for Todd to send Mary a message explaining everything since if Mary’s phone did tell Reagan about the blog, she’s still likely alive.
  • As part of her Heel Realization above, Dana realizes that she was the one destroying her family, not Mary. She ends up secretly leaving the family in shame with no contact other than child support checks, even six years after Mary returned.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Dana’s mother Irene is a horrible person, but her blame of Dana for Mary’s disappearance does have some truth to it, though her mother's point has less to do with treating Mary with respect and more about Dana's parenting not conforming to the parenting style that she herself preferred.
• Kaiju: The Kaiju Car from the Train Documentaries appear in chapter 20 and cause the quartet no small amount of grief.
• Kick the Dog:
  • In the blog post where Dana states she wants to have Mary forcibly sterilized to prevent her from getting pregnant by a guy who'd want to take advantage of her, she states she doesn't know why anybody would want to take sexual advantage of Mary other than her being a "vulnerable easy target".
  • After Irene hears about Mary going missing, she calls Dana. Not to give her comfort over her youngest disappearing but to blame Dana for it.
  • Nora spends all of chapter 20 blackmailing Mary by threatening to show everyone at her school the blog if she doesn't bodyguard her, taking advantage of her insecurities by claiming she's a terrible person for wanting to leave Nora behind and comparing her to a school shooter, laughs at her for not knowing what the word mutiny means, tries to feed her to a rampaging kaiju to ensure her own safety, kidnaps a weakened Blanca, shoots Mary when she tries to save her, stomps on her, and rubs salt in the wound by telling her that she's a worthless piece of shit and that her family has low standards.
• Knight of Cerebus: After Nora joins the group, the story gets far darker, to the point where the author put up a Content Warning starting at Chapter 18.
• Knight Templar Parent: Deconstructed: Dana Summers sees herself as one, fighting Mary every day to help her blend in with the world and fight her autism. However, to Mary herself and everyone except Dr. Goldman and her mother Irene, she's an abusive Control Freak mother with a self-righteous attitude who refuses to take any responsibility for her actions and treats Mary like garbage simply for existing.
• Lack of Empathy:
  • Greg insists that Mary is given special treatment even though he gets himself into trouble by acting like a bully. Later, when Mary disappears, he laughs about it and expresses hope that Mary is dead. Subverted in that it's revealed he was trying to emulate a video game character's personality and acted like a Jerkass because he thought he could impress his friends. But when Mr. Bryant explains that people in real life would find a person like that intolerable, linking it to his treatment of Mary, Greg feels remorseful when he realizes the full gravity of the situation.
  • Nora has absolutely no empathy for what she puts her family through while missing.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Chapter 21 reveals that Xander got arrested for attempting to buy beer underage and assaulting a security guard. Later on after Nora’s body is found, he gets charged with negligent homicide for her death (as he did give her a gun and encourage her to run away), and he’s still in jail for that and his other crimes during the Distant Finale.
  • Dr. Goldman ends up on the Infinity Train when he tries to go on the run to escape malpractice lawsuits from several of his former and current victims, and the first thing that happens to him when he awakens is that he's attacked and pinned down by Nora, who refuses to hear his pleas for mercy just like he refused to show mercy to so many of his victims. Given the fact that he proves himself a Dirty Coward by running away as soon as Mary and Vic save him, it's unlikely he'll be able to get off the train anytime soon. Also, it'll very likely his practice will get shut down without him around, and since his phone was stolen by Nora, he's no longer able to share any of his harmful views about autism with anybody anymore.
  • Dana ends up alienating herself from her family and everybody else who would want to help her or have anything to do with her for her abuse of Mary and her refusal to even take responsibility for her actions or learn true facts about autism. This results in her leaving town after her Heel Realization with nothing but the misery she had built up for herself over the years and her former husband, her ex-daughters, and several of the Summers' friends much happier without her.
• Level Ate: One of the cars Mary visits is a land full of sweets and candy, and its denizens are Anthropomorphic Food, including her traveling companion Blanca.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: Greg is a bully who finds joy in Mary's disappearance and hopes that she got killed. His mother, Edith, on the other hand, is a nice woman who approaches Todd with information about the abuse she saw Dana do to Mary on a school field trip two years ago and apologizes on behalf of her son's behavior in case either of those two things had anything to do with why Mary ran away. Though it's subverted later on, when Greg has a Heel Relization about his behavior after it alienates his friends and becomes a Reformed Bully as a result.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Chapter 9 reveals that Dana kept a lot of things from her husband, from the blog she made to the fact that she continued to consult Dr. Goldman, a quack autism specialist, knowing that Todd hated him and did not want him near Mary after the way he treated her. She even kept the fact that she took Mary to ABA appointments a secret from him for three years knowing that he would be against it, taking advantage of him working long day shifts at the casino to do so.
• Mama Bear: When Edith and her daughter, Lianna, run into Dana while walking their family dog, Edith invites her to walk with them. Edith privately tells Lianna that she doesn't support Dana's actions towards Mary, but is still trying to show compassion to a fellow mother whose child is currently missing. That changed when Dana insults and degrades Lianna for also being autistic, which prompts Edith to slap Dana, tell her off for her abuse towards Mary, and then ditch her.
• Maybe Ever After: When Julius and Mary have a chance encounter with each other at a park and after having a conversation about how both of them were affected by Nora, they start bonding over their shared interests, exchange phone numbers, and then Mary invites Julius as a plus-one to Lianna's birthday party. While Caitlin does make a joke about Julius being Mary's "secret boyfriend" and Mary does find herself being physically attracted to him, whether or not their friendship will remain platonic or blossom into a romantic relationship is up in the air.
• Metaphorically True: While Mary knows nobody would believe her about the Infinity Train, several aspects of the story she gave to the police (she ran away after finding out Dana wanted to sterilize her, she had met Nora and stayed with her for a while, that Nora had tried to kill Mary after finding out she was autistic, that Xander had given Nora a gun before she ran away) were true.
• Mood Whiplash: In Chapter 11, Todd discovers a pile of Mary’s drawings under her bed. They start out by showing pictures of Mary and her family and friends having fun and her hanging out with animals… and then they show Mary being abused by Dana and the ABA doctors.
• Motherly Side Plait: Dana is a mother who wears her black hair in a side ponytail, but she is anything but motherly.
• My Beloved Smother: Dana acts like this towards Mary, convinced that she has to be hyper-vigilant 24/7 and thinks Mary will have a meltdown if she do much as does anything. In Chapter 9, the most recent blog entry stated that she was happy Mary was gone so she didn't have to worry about her anymore.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Both Vic and Mary deal with this in chapter 10. Vic gets angry at Mary for an insensitive comment she made, and the two of them get into an argument. It's only after an incident where Mary almost drowns and after Blanca talks to each of them privately that the two of them realize where they went wrong—Vic realizing that Mary really did mean well and that it would have been better to explain his request more clearly rather than blow up at her, and Mary realizing that she had gone through the same thing once, repeated the same actions her mother took with her, and how horrible she made Vic feel.
• My Name Is Inigo Montoya: Played for laughs in chapter 7, when Vic and Mary get into their yarn-pillow fight and reveal their full names in an attempt to make their playful yarn fight more epic than it is.
  Vic: Hear me, mortals! I am Victorino Achilles Isidoro Liberatore VIII! Son of Victorino VII and Sandrilene Elizabeth Philippa Liberatore! Fall before my wrath!
  Mary: Oh yeah? I’m Mary Andromeda Summers, and I just beat you!
• Mythology Gag:
  • The book Dana tries to buy for Mary features the Pig Baby from the Pig Baby car.
  • The main trio trek through several cars that were in the show, with some either getting more time devoted to them than the TV show, like the Doily Car, or mentioned in passing, with chapter 7 having Mary mention that they went through a car full of flying golden snakes, referring to the Canyon of the Golden Winged Snakes Car. Chapter 15 has the quartet spend the night in the Jungle Car—the same one where Simon and Grace meet Hazel and Tuba.
  • The scene in Chapter 12 where Mary realizes that she rewrote her memory of the day she got her bunny to make Dana more loving than she was in reality parallels the scene in season 1 where Tulip did that with her memories to block out her parents’s marriage problems and make it look like the divorce was worse than it actually was.
  • Chapter 18 begins with the quartet in the Musical Car, the exact same one that was featured in season 3 episode one, including the song "Empathy Goes" that Jesse wrote, only nobody attacks the car this time around.
  • Nora says that she threatened a talking castle into refueling her supply of drugs and beer, implied to be Morgan from season 4.
• Never Found the Body: Subverted in the final chapter, where Nora's corpse is returned to Earth after her Spiteful Suicide on the Infinity Train and found by the police near the hut she had built, but her family will never know what really happened to her.
• Never My Fault:
  • No matter what she does or what effect it has on those around her, Dana NEVER believes that she is the one in the wrong. She basically blames Mary for all the problems in her own life even when it couldn't have possibly been her fault or it's pretty blatantly her own. All her efforts to “cure” Mary aren’t helping? She insists it’s because everyone else is enabling her "bad habits". Causing a scene in a bookstore when she tries to stop Mary from stimming and actually hurting her, much to the horror of Todd, Reagan, and all of the other witnesses? She blames Mary and everybody else without hesitation and even rewrites things in her blog to make herself look like the one in the right. Mary runs away because of the abuse Dana heaped on her? She believes Mary must’ve actually been kidnapped by a predator and blames Todd and Reagan for making her “vulnerable”. Everybody else rightfully calls her out on her actions? She believes they’re “disrespecting” her and not appreciating all of her “hard work”. The cops interrogating her about her blog and showing disgust at Dana wanting to forcibly sterilize Mary? Dana complains that they had no right to invade her privacy like that even though she shared her thoughts on a public blog and didn't even bother to hide anybody’s names. Even after her Heel Realization, she still refuses to own up to her actions directly, cutting off contact with her family except for child support checks in the mail and not deleting the blog or confessing that she lied about Mary's behavior.
  • Greg claims that Mary gets special treatment from Mr. Bryant, despite the fact that he often bullies her. Subverted later on in Chapter 8, when he and Mr. Bryant talk, and the teacher explains the difference between giving people special treatment and accommodating other people's disabilities. In the same chapter, Greg also realizes that his actions were wrong and decides to apologize and make amends to those he hurt.
  • Looking through Nora's memories reveals that she is an ableist due to being corrupted by her Neo-Nazi boyfriend. As a result of this, she refuses to believe she did anything wrong by Bullying the Disabled, and refuses to even consider that the reason her parents and everyone around her are being hard on her because of her own terrible behavior. She even tries to kill her own autistic younger brother for telling on her to their parents, all while ignoring that the reason he told on her was because she locked him outside the house in -2 degree weather with insufficient clothing. All in all, she blames everyone around her for her misfortunes but herself.
• The New '20s: The fic is confirmed by Word of God to take place in a Distanced from Current Events October of 2020.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: In chapter 11, Todd finds some disturbing drawings in Mary's room. The drawings? Mary being abused and tormented by Dana and the ABA doctors.
• Not Helping Your Case:
  • When the cops confront Dana about her wanting to forcibly sterilize Mary, Dana gets angrily defensive and claims that that was just a bad thought she wrote out to get it out of her system. However, the fact that she wrote this on a public blog and how that same blog showcased how much she truly hates Mary doesn’t make her look good to the cops at all.
  • In Nora's past, she was brought to the principal's office due to beating up a disabled student. Her response of how said student was "hogging up the hallway" did absolutely nothing to defend herself, if anything making her appear unrepentant (which she is).
• Not in Front of the Kid: Averted. Dana and Todd have no qualms swearing in front of Mary or Reagan when they argue, and Nora isn't bothered by swearing in front of Mary either. Vic also drops a Precision F-Strike in front of Mary in chapter 12.
• "Not So Different" Remark: In chapter 10, when Mary's attempts to help Vic fall on deaf ears, she gets frustrated and makes an insensitive comment. This makes Vic furious with her, calling her out on refusing to listen to him and respect his feelings and need for space, saying it makes her no different from her mother. When Mary reflects on her mistake and remembers an incident where her mother said and did the same things to her, she's horrified to find that Vic turned out to be right. Fortunately, Blanca comforts her by pointing out that, unlike Dana, Mary feels bad about what happened and wants to make amends.
  • In chapter 16, Todd states that Dana is a lot like her mother. This leads to Dana having a Heel Realization mentioned above.
• Obnoxious Entitled Housewife: Dana is the epitome of a Karen, throwing fits in public and at home whenever Mary displays signs of her autism, namely stimming. She will always insist that Mary is being embarrassing, but she’s always the one making a scene.
  Reagan: You really give new meaning to the words Karen and drama queen, Mom!!
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Dana frequently brings up Mary's past 'incidents' in order to control her more (like not letting her do fun things like visit her friend Caitlin or ride a pony). One of these incidents is a toddler Mary having a meltdown during a funeral, which Irene still brings up to Dana years after what happened.
• Once More, with Clarity: Chapter 12 has Mary go into her own memories to see for herself if all the things Dana said she supposedly did were true. In particular, it turns out the incident at Carnegie Science Center did play out the way Edith described it and not in the way Dana claims in her blog entry about it.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Mary finding Dana's blog and discovering that Dana wants to forcibly sterilize her prompts her to run away even though she's never even walked to school all by herself before.
  • In chapter 20, Nora tries to twist Mary's reasons for leaving the teenager in the Haunted House Car in an attempt to guilt-trip her into doing what she says, claiming that Mary is no different from a school shooter, which makes the normally gentle, compassionate Blanca so enraged that she screams at Nora, the first time she was ever shown being openly emotional or angry.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot: Played for Drama in chapter 10. Upon seeing Vic is afraid of water, Mary tries various methods to cheer him up. Vic tells her to give him some space, and she does, but gets frustrated and is at first unable to understand that Vic can't relax until he's out of the Venice Car. When he tells her again to give him some space, Mary, in a moment of frustration, says out loud that she thinks Vic enjoys being miserable. Of course, she had no way of knowing that this was Vic's Berserk Button, and although she quickly realizes what she said was wrong and is remorseful, he not only bites her in retaliation but furiously calls her out on not respecting his boundaries and feelings, saying it makes her no different from Dana.
• Original Character: Many members of the main cast, and some incidental ones, are this, though canon characters, such as One-One and Ben Greene, make cameos, and some canonical cars do get more fleshed out.
• Outliving One's Offspring: Because of Nora’s Spiteful Suicide in the penultimate chapter Brooke and Harley end up losing their daughter without even being able to know what exactly happened even after her mangled body is returned to Earth since Mary knows nobody would believe her about the Infinity Train unless they experienced it themselves. This is one of the reasons why Mary is upset about Nora’s death despite everything she’s done.
• Overly Long Name: Vic's real name is Victorino Achilles Isidoro Liberatore VIII.
• Papa Wolf: In chapter 12, when Mary goes through her memories, she sees two instances of her father Todd fiercely defending her. First, when Irene berates Dana for Mary's Sensory Overload induced meltdown, interpreting it as deliberate misbheavior, Todd furiously lays into her for not even trying to give her any support and continuing to cling to antiquated views of parenting. Second, when Todd discovers what Mary is going through in ABA, he manages to save her from almost being suffocated by the doctors restraining her and calls them out for their actions, even threatening to sue Dr. Goldman. Vic even calls him a badass upon seeing the first memory.
• Parental Obliviousness: The reason why Dana has gotten away with abusing Mary in the past is because she deliberately hid ABA and her blog from him, while Todd didn’t think to look closer. Todd ends up hating himself because he knows that if Mary believed that Todd couldn’t protect her from ABA or Dana’s lie-spreading blog, he couldn’t protect her from Dana’s eventual plan to forcibly sterilize her.
• Parental Substitute:
  • It's clear from the start that Reagan was a better maternal figure for Mary than Dana ever was, as she always looks out for her little sister, stands up for her when Dana harasses her, buys her things she likes (manga, hair ribbons, etc), and encourages her hobbies. One of Mary's earliest memories even show Reagan as a little girl feeding baby Mary.
  • Shortly after arriving on the Infinity Train, Mary meets Blanca, who is kind to Mary and becomes a maternal figure for her during her journey on the train. Considering how Blanca admits to being a mother of twenty, it makes sense that she wouldn't want to let a little girl wander the Train all on her own.
• Politically Incorrect Villain:
  • Dana is incredibly ableist towards autistic people, which leads her to abuse her own daughter just because she’s autistic. One chapter has her lash out at Edith for actually caring for and accepting her own autistic daughter and sees autism as something to stomp out and forcibly cure.
  • Dr. Goldman is a Jerkass who uses his career to force autistic children through harmful and potentially fatal quack therapies to “cure” autism. According to Todd, he suggested forcibly sedating the three-year-old Mary after nothing more than a half-hearted and cursory examination and then screamed at her to shut up after she non-verbally asks for a drink.
  • Dana's mother Irene is a Female Misogynist that abuses her daughter for not being the “perfect housewife” even in adulthood, and claims autism is something invented to excuse bad behavior.
  • Nora's boyfriend Xander is a Neo-Nazi that corrupted Nora with his ideals, causing her to start Bullying the Disabled, mainly her autistic younger brother, to the point of locking him out of the house in -2 weather.
• Poor Communication Kills: Played with in that Mary ran away under the incorrect assumption that Dana planned to kill her, as she didn't know what the word "sterilize" meant. Downplayed in that the true meaning is no less horrifying.
• Precision F-Strike: Vic's first response to Autism Speaks's infamous "I am Autism" "PSA", as seen via Mary's memories in Chapter 12, is to shout "That's bullshit!".
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • In Chapter 11, Todd is digging through the kitchen cupboards for a snack when he suddenly finds Dana’s “Cure Autism Now” mug. As he stares at it, he reflects on all the abuse Dana forced Mary through in the name of trying to “cure” her autism and how unnecessary it all was, making him angrier and angrier. Todd then throws the mug against the wall (destroying it in the process) and vows to finally confront Dana on everything she’s done to Mary the next time he sees her in person.
  • Mary herself hits it during chapter 12, when realizing what Dana actually meant by the word "sterilize", having mistakenly believed it meant killing her. She proceeds to angrily beat at her backpack and scream in anger.
  • Blanca hits it in Chapter 20, when Nora is bullying Mary.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Edith gives a huge one to Dana after the latter degrades Lianna:
    Edith: Don’t you ever, EVER, degrade my daughter like that and suggest that I basically abuse her and mold her into some kind of puppet!! I really thought you were just misguided, that you just needed a hand. I even tried to reach out to you in your time of need. Clearly, that was a mistake on my part! What the hell is WRONG with you?! Honestly, I feel more sorry for Mary than I do you, what with how I’ve seen you treat her! I’m surprised the police don’t suspect you of being involved with her disappearance! And you’d rather just sit here, whining about how she makes you soooo miserable, and have a pity party than actually go out and search for her! You need to pull the wool from your eyes, woman! Even I can see that Mary has never been the problem! You’re the one going off on her for absolutely nothing! I think it's time I told you straight: yes, you did fail as a mother, but not for the reasons you think! Instead of trying to turn Mary into your so-called perfect child and whining about how she needs to be cured and disciplined, why don't you try to understand her and love her for who she is?! Punishing her and shaming her for being autistic is NOT the way to help her live a successful life! And you've got a lot of nerve, trying to tell me how to raise my daughter when she's doing just fine, thank you very much!
  • The first half of Chapter 13 involves Todd and Reagan confronting Dana about her blog, dishing out a lot of this as they ream Dana out for spreading lies about Mary on the internet and telling the whole world how much Dana hates Mary.
  • The Earth scene in Chapter 16 is Todd tearing into Dana for her constant abuse of Mary and her inability to get help for her problems, culminating in bluntly telling Dana that she’s become her mother and telling her that he’s considering a divorce because of her behavior.
  • Shiro gives a scathing one to Blanca in chapter 17, calling her out for everything she put him through before he left the Sweets Car, showing that he's still angry about it.
  • Nora gives Mary a cruel and undeserved one in Chapter 20, ripping into every single one of the latter’s fears and insecurities. Mary returns the favor in Chapter 22, pointing out that nobody, especially her, chooses to be autistic and she is not responsible for Nora’s self-inflicted problems or her throwing away her loving family.
• Redemption Rejection: When the two of them are dangling over the train tracks, Mary tries one last time to reach out to Nora. She refuses to take responsibility for any of her actions, claiming that she's "free" as she lets go of Mary's hand and falls to her death.
• Resentful Guardian: Dana, over years of being hypervigilant and overly controlling in an effort to keep Mary's autism from "ruining her life", has come to greatly dislike her daughter and see her as a nuisance. It got to the point of creating an entire blog to complain about her daughter and stated that she was happy Mary was gone during in her most recent post in Chapter 9.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Everyone, except for Dana, thinks that Mary ran away because of Dana's abuse. While that was a factor towards her getting picked up by the Infinity Train, what prompted Mary to do so was finding out about her mom's blog and seeing something that terrified her into doing so. The something is that Dana wants to sterilize Mary once she turns 18.
• The Runaway:
  • Mary sees something on her mother's blog that convinces her to run away from home despite normally being too shy and safety-oriented to even attempt such a thing. She only gets as far as the local park before the Infinity Train picks her up. Everyone assumes Mary ran away because of her mother's treatment of her. Chapter 9 reveals the details behind the blog entry that convinced Mary to run away: Dana is planning to forcibly sterilize Mary.
  • The end of Chapter 16 conforms that Nora ran away from home. She abused her little brother and coldly deletes texts that her mother sends her, begging to come home or at least talk.
• Secret Test of Character: It's strongly implied in Chapter 19 that the Train deliberately set things up so that Nora would meet Mary, in the hopes that interacting with her would force her to rethink her views. She fails to do so.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Mary running away to escape Dana’s abuse and prevent being sterilized (even though at the time she thought that was a synonym for murder) is what kickstarts the whole story.
  • In Chapter 19, Mary, Blanca, and Vic abandon Nora in the Haunted House Car after realizing how dangerous she truly is. Unfortunately they only get to the next car before a pissed-off Nora catches up with them.
  • In Chapter 22, Dana leaves the family, giving a non-apology in the form of a letter saying that she's never coming back. Part of it may be a Heel–Face Turn, and part of it may be Dana acknowledging that the family's issues are her fault but simply not wanting to try and fix them. Reagan and Todd are furious and heartbroken.
• Self-Serving Memory: When going through her memories, the one where her mother bought Mimi for her seemed off, as Dana was smiling in it, which made static cover Mary's feet. When she realizes it was wrong, the memory plays out how it actually did, showing Dana only buying Mimi for Mary in an attempt to keep her quiet. Mary, with Vic's help, realizes she was so desperate for any sort of happy memory with her mother that she changed that particular one to make it seem happier than it really was.
• Shout-Out:
  • An abusive parent writes a blog complaining about their autistic child, like in The Amy Virus.
  • Both Mary and Reagan are fans of Yuzu The Pet Vet, an actual children's manga.
  • Mary cites A Little Princess to be her favorite book, and it comes up several times throughout the fic. She leaves behind her abridged copy to Vic as her parting gift to him.
  • Greg's favorite video game is based on a hybrid of Triangle Strategy and The Vision of Escaflowne.
  • There's several references to With the Light through the story:
    • A mother is constantly pressured to be the perfect housewife, with a misogynistic figure scolding the mother for letting their baby watch television.
    • Chapter 12 plays out similarly to one scene in the manga: an autistic child has a meltdown at a religious building, while their abusive grandmother constantly lashes out at their mother for not "raising their child right".
  • The Musical Car has a future production called Yoshiwara Lament.
  • The Time Skip starts with Mary mentioning she wrote a Jack Jeanne fan fic, and later reveals she owns two pit bulls named Noe and Vanitas.
• The Shrink: Mary starts seeing one at Todd’s suggestion after she returns home, to help her heal from Dana’s abuse. Mary is hesitant at first, fearing that the therapist would be like Dr. Goldman, but she turns out to be a nice woman who knows what autism is actually like. Mary’s sessions with her help her heal from Dana’s abuse and help her with the other changes in her life, too.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Nora has no problem with cursing like a sailor, even around children.
• Slumber Party: In chapter 7, Mary states that she's technically having one with Vic and Blanca when they spend the night in the Doily Car. She also tells them about a time her friend Caitlin held one and invited her and two other friends over to her house, where they played games, watched movies, ate food, and had fun.
• Spiritual Antithesis: The main protagonists are a foil to the trio found in another Infinity Train fanfic, Infinity Train: Blossoming Trail.
  • Mary to Chloe: A young girl who runs away and has a distant relationship with their parents. The main difference is that both of Chloe's parents truly loved her but didn't know how to address the problems she had with the bullying (and her father had promptly ignored some helpful advice to get Chloe to therapy), whereas Mary's mother is downright abusive (at least Todd sticks up for Mary). Both of them initially have braided hair and their disappearance is marked by a hair decoration left where the Train picked them up. They also get different weapons: Chloe gets a blunt weapon in her donut holer, while Mary gets an umbrella like a spear (amusingly Chloe did use an umbrella once). They're also hoping to be writers in the future.
  • Bianca to Lexi: A shapeshifter associated with the color white. Bianca is a giant motherly marshmallow while Lexi is a living book — with later stories revealing he's actually a prince — who acted as Chloe's confidant.
  • Vic to Atticus: Small quadrupedal animals with Vic seeing himself as a knight and Atticus already a king of a car of talking corgis, both of which are responsible for giving Mary/Chloe their weapon.
  • Mary is also a foil to Julia from Pokémon: A Marvelous Journey, Saoirse's previous work. Both are young autistic girls who go on a journey after a conflict in the family and are associated with rodents (Mary befriends a hamster, Julia owns a Pikachu named Hikaru). Both stories begin with a member of the family running away from home (Amara and Mary, respectively). Mary and Julia even have the same family dynamic (father, mother and only one sibling: an older sister). However, Mary is more outgoing than Julia and unlike her, starts the story with several friends and gets along with her sister.
• Spiteful Suicide: Nora, in a drug-infused haze, chooses to not let Mary (who she’s hallucinating as Julius) and Blanca save her when she falls over the edge of the train, instead pepper-spraying Blanca so she can fall under the train’s wheels and be destroyed rather than go to jail or become her brother's "slave".
• Start of Darkness: It is shown in Chapter 7 that the person that caused Dana to become as hypercontrolling and paranoid as she is was Dr. Goldman, whose "words of wisdom" and pamphlets only fed into Dana's latent fears, allowing them to take control of her. Potentially subverted, however, depending on whether he was the first she spoke to or he was the first to confirm what she already believed.
  • Dana's true start of darkness is revealed in chapter 12, when Mary had a meltdown due to the loud organ music playing in a church during a funeral, which resulted in Dana getting yelled at by many people, including her abusive, smothering mother. The humiliation was too much for her and caused her to become more controlling.
• Stay in the Kitchen: Dana's mother, being a staunch believer in the gender norms and values of the 1950s, was a big believer in this, to the point of physically harming a young Dana over wanting to pursue masculine interests like taking computer classes and building robots rather than solely becoming a housewife. It got so bad Dana moved out of the house to live with a friend out-of-state as soon as she graduated high school. And then Irene found out where Dana lives, and it only gets worse from there.
• Take That!:
  • The fic has absolutely no qualms about taking the piss out on organizations like Autism Speaks, Autism Warrior Parent memoirs, and snake oil therapies that claim to cure autism.
  • Chapter 9 reveals that Dana and Todd's first date was going to see American Beauty after one of Todd's relatives gave him two tickets for it; both of them didn't like it, and Todd points out how creepy it is that a middle-aged man fell in love with a teenage girl.
• Teens Are Monsters: The main antagonist for Mary to deal with on the train is Nora, a high schooler who does drugs, drinks, and has fallen in with neo Nazis, and later tries to murder Mary.
• Tempting Fate: When Blanca tells Nora that she's allowed to leave the group if she hates being with them so much, Nora tries to do just that...before a monster makes a building collapse, trapping Nora with the trio, to their horror.
• The Mentor: Blanca serves as this for Mary, giving her advice and helping her when she needs it. Ben Greene serves as this when Mary meets him in the Green Car.
• The Reveal: Chapter 9 reveals the details of the specific entry that resulted in Mary running away: It was about Dana wanting to forcibly sterilize Mary once she turned 18.
• Therapy Is for the Weak: After Todd tells Mr. Bryant and Edith about how Dana is copying what her mother did to her in how she is treating Mary (though he doesn’t delve into the details because unlike Dana, Todd actually respects other people’s privacy), Edith asks Todd if Dana ever went to a therapist to help her process and deal with her past. Todd admits that he suggested it a few times, but Dana always rejected it because she believes that therapy is for “crazy people”. When Todd tries to bring it up again in Chapter 15, Dana refuses further, resulting in Todd’s reluctant decision to divorce her.
  Todd: She thinks it’s somehow shameful or a sign that she’s a failure of a human being.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Greg at first started off as a bratty bully who was mean to Mary, even going so far as to claim that she hopes she dies when she goes missing. It's eventually revealed that his behavior is the result of trying to act like a video game character he idolizes, but he doesn't realize that emulating the character's actions make him come off as callous and cruel in real life. It's not until he talks to Mr. Bryant that Greg realizes his mistake and makes an effort to become nicer, culminating in chapter 17, where he helps his friend Tyrus and apologizes for his earlier behavior and decides to make an apology card for Mary as part of a class project.
• Toxic Friend Influence: It is VERY easy to pin point the exact moment Nora went from a nice girl to the terror she became in the main part of the story. Not long after meeting Xander, Mary (and the audience) see a memory of her lashing out at her brother Julius for the first time. And that was FAR from the last time she did something horrible to him, NOR was that the worst thing she did...
• Toy-Based Characterization: Mary owns several stuffed animals (including her rabbit Mimi) and is a friendly young girl who takes good care of her belongings. Her classmate, Greg, is more rough with his toys and games and his mother Edith has to supervise him when going on a field trip.
• Trapped in Another World: Mary finds herself on a magical train, but doesn't want to go back home, as she's deathly afraid of her mother and the particular blog entry she saw on her mother's blog. However, as she spends more time on the train she realizes that it isn't the escape she'd thought it was.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The story's chapters are divided into two parts, with one focusing on Mary's adventures in the train, and the other focusing on her family and friends in the real world and how her disappearance affected them.
• Understanding Boyfriend: Oliver, Reagan's boyfriend, is perfectly willing to have Mary hang out at his house to help Reagan keep her away from Dana. After Mary's disappearance, he helps Reagan distribute missing posters and comforts her when she breaks down crying.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Despite Todd standing up to Irene for the sake of his wife and youngest daughter during the funeral flashback, Dana still decides to blame Mary for making her look bad in front of Irene and her friends instead of doing things to force Irene out of her life, which is the start of her being the abusive mother to Mary that she’s known from her earliest memory.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid:
  • Chapter 9 shows that when Todd first met Dana when they were both in their late twenties, she was a kind woman who surprised her coworkers with donuts one time and arranged a candy basket for a coworker who was getting married. But after years of Irene's abuse, Dana becomes a miserable woman that takes her anger and issues out on Mary.
  • Nora’s memories in Chapter 18 show her to be a Nice Girl who doted on her little brother and had a normal and happy life until her relationship with Xander turned her into the asshole she is now.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Blanca is a sentient marshmallow who can turn into basically anything and everything she wants, though she can't change her color, as chapter 5 shows.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: At first, Mary wanted nothing more than for her mother to love and accept her as she is, but Dana only cared about making her less autistic at the expense of both their mental health and any relationship they might have had. When Mary realizes the true depth of her mother's hatred for her, she decides she's had enough of hurting herself to receive approval that she'll never get.
• Wedding Ring Removal: After telling Dana he plans to divorce her, Todd takes off his wedding ring and places it on the counter.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 9 reveals the following: Dana plans on sterilizing Mary when the latter turns 18.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Since Dana had cut herself out of the Summers’ lives outside of child support checks, it’s unknown where she is now or what happened to her during the six-year time skip.
  • Irene is also unmentioned, leaving it unclear if she had died, left town trying to track down Dana again, or if she’s still in Pittsburgh. Either way, the Summers appear to have no relationship or interest in one with her, considering what a Jerkass she is.
• What You Are in the Dark:
  • While Dana already wouldn't accept Mary being autistic, her blog shows how deep her revulsion of Mary goes to the point where she wants to get Mary forcibly sterilized. Both Todd and Reagan are hit with a full dose of horror and disgust once they see what Dana really thinks of Mary. Edith and Mr. Bryant also take the blog’s existence as evidence that Dana is a much worse mother than either of them had thought.
  • In chapter 22, Mary and Vic rescue a new train passenger from Nora, but Mary recognizes the passenger— Dr. Goldman—upon seeing his name tag. As soon as she realizes who he is, she is overcome with anger over all that he did to her when she was young, even coming up with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech in her head and seriously tempted to rip him a new one. By all means, she had every right to be angry at him, because he not only convinced her mother to believe all the negative stereotypes about autism in an attempt to cure her, he terrorized her during ABA for three years straight, giving her a heaping helping of psychological trauma. But Mary manages to keep her anger in check, knowing that rescuing Blanca is the more pressing issue at the moment, even allowing him to escape by directing him to go to a safe train car.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: While she doesn't use the phrase outright, Dana makes absolutely no attempt to hide the fact that she can't stand Mary being autistic.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
  • Mary is extremely uncomfortable with slugs, which ends up making her increasingly uncomfortable as she and her group stay longer and longer in the Black Market Car.
  • For all his bravado, Vic is shown to be terrified of birds, as shown in the Cross-Eyed Duck car, due to birds being predators that prey upon rodents. So when the ducks in the car try to eat him, he curls into a ball and hides in Mary's dress pocket for safety.
• Win to Exit: Chapter 16 has the quartet stuck in a train car that looks like a school classroom, and each of them have to answer seven out of ten questions correctly in order to move on to the next car. Unfortunately for the group, Nora refuses to even try to answer any of her questions.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The ABA doctors trying to "help" Mary do nothing but put her through abuse. The same goes for Dana, who watched them do it.
  • Nora threw her brother out of the house in freezing cold weather ^note  he got out of it okay because he had his phone on him and called his mother, who told him to go stay with a neighbor until his parents got home , later managed to crack his head on a table (showing no remorse for it), and (upon learning that Mary is autistic like her brother), threatens to kill her. And we thought Simon was bad...
  • In Chapter 20, not only does Nora attempt to use Mary as bait for a Kauji, she shoots Mary in the shoulder and leaves her for dead.

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