They inhabited a town in the middle of nowhere, in a literal sense, for smothering the town was nothing, empty and endless, so much so that neither the sky nor the sun was present, only a white void being visible overhead and in every other direction. Despite the lack of the sky, light shone upon the town as if it were eternally day, in a sick and uncanny way that almost made the inhabitants wish for an eternal dark. One could describe the situation with a diorama of a town and its people in a brightly lit white box, suspended with strings so that it sat in the center, not touching any side at all, no gaps or holes to show the little diorama the world outside of the box. In that case, there might as well be no outside world, because the little figurines that lived in the diorama were contained within the diorama, so the diorama itself was the whole world. And because the diorama itself could not move, could not get closer to any side, there might as well be no end or corners to the box, so the box itself may not exist at all. The same was true for the inhabitants of the town; their world was restricted to the area that they lived in. There was nothing more and nothing else. To live in such a world was not tragic in and of itself.
But how the inhabitants differed from the figurines was this: First, that there was no definite proof that the inhabitants were in a box in the first place. Whereas a human could open the box with the diorama and peer inside, there likely was not a higher being that could open up the inhabitants’ box and see the town inside. So, perhaps the town was trapped, or perhaps everything else had disappeared. The inhabitants could hypothesize and ponder their situation, or pray that a higher being would open their box (if they were even trapped in one) and tell them.
The second difference between the figurines and the inhabitants was that the figurines had known no other life. They knew not that there was a world outside of the box or that they were even entrapped inside a box at all. They could not yearn for more because there never was any more. The inhabitants, however, were different. Things hadn’t always been that way. They recalled a life outside of their cage.
It was May 21st when the world ended, and humanity went extinct soon after.