An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: 少女前线 | Girls' Frontline (Video Game)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Commander/M590 (Girls' Frontline), Commander/RO635 (Girls' Frontline), Commander/Springfield (Girls' Frontline)
Characters: M4A1 (Girls' Frontline), M4 SOPMOD II (Girls' Frontline), Persica (Girls' Frontline), HK416 (Girls' Frontline), UMP45 (Girls' Frontline), Kalina (Girls' Frontline), Helianthus (Girls' Frontline)
Additional Tags: Polyamory, Sexual Content, what's so good about humanity anyway, Non-Canon character backstory
Series: Part 4 of Little Things We Fight For
Summary:
Griffin & Kryuger is a wonderful place to work! For humans who want to work more closely with Dolls; for Dolls who just want to get away from it all! Sure, you might fight and die, but you're a Doll! You'll just be reborn the next day! There's no downside!
You can be yourself here! You can be anything you like here! You can do things that humans would look down on in Other Places... so what are you waiting for? Join Griffin and Kryuger today!
Just don't think too hard about how you'll leave.
Hi I uh,, continued the GFL fic. There’s actually a third part I didn’t post here because I was sad. If you like very gay GFL stuff, maybe you will like this. c:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 少女前线 | Girls' Frontline (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Commander/M590 (Girls' Frontline)
Characters: Commander (Girls' Frontline), Persica (Girls' Frontline), Vector (Girls' Frontline), M590 (Girls' Frontline)
Additional Tags: Angst, (?? i guess?), amateur psychiatry, i know what homeopathy means and i know that i'm not quite using it right, Deal With It
Summary:
Griffin & Kryuger's newest Commander, a student of AI psychology, is very particular about the treatment of her dolls. For the most part G&K are content to stay out of her way, but the greater her performance, the more curious they start to get, and the more questions they start to ask.
But a lot of those questions just don't have good answers.
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presented without comment. please blame @mudrowned for this. thanks!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Fate/EXTRA, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kishinami Hakuno/Tamamo-no-Mae | Kishinami Hakuno/Caster, Kishinami Hakuno/Nero | Kishinami Hakuno/Saber
Characters: Tamamo-no-Mae | Caster (Fate/EXTRA), Nero | Saber (Fate/EXTRA)
Additional Tags: is there really not a fate/extella tag, specifically post fate/extella link, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, but like it's tamamo, so it's not gonna go down easy, also re: the title i live in seattle so im allowed to make this stupid joke, hakunon and altera do show up but only very very briefly
Summary:
For all of her former talent at manipulating others, Caster is nowhere near as good at pretending everything is okay as she'd like to believe.
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so i think i started writing this like six months ago and then forgot about it and then found it again and went “oh this is good i should finish it”
anyway; I love Tamamo a lot and she deserves to be happy and that’s really all there is to say on the matter.
For the few followers who are/were reading it, I’m sorry to announce that I will not be continuing Wishes from Oblivion in its current format.
Key being in its current format. There are a few reasons for this - first and foremost that, having recently revisited some of its older inspiration, I feel like I’ve really undersold the concept. That’s kind of fine; WFO was never intended to be the final product anyway, it was meant to be a vehicle for me to explore concepts I couldn’t seem to get a handle on, and really what’s happened is that I’ve underestimated just how much I hadn’t considered. I’ve been writing for a long, long time, but building an entire world from scratch is something I have never done before, and the world of WFO is extremely complex and abstract - not exactly a beginner-friendly project!
I’m not sure what the next steps for WFO will be. I think in a perfect world, I’d just start working on it in video game form, because that’s how it’s intended to be portrayed, and I think I need to stop being afraid that I’m not in a perfect world and just force things to be how I want, so… that will probably be what I do. But I also need to acknowledge that I’ve realized I’m not so good at part of this as I thought I would be, and maybe I should take some time to practice something easier before committing to such an exceptionally difficult project.
Obviously I need to talk to my cowriter first too. So we will see!
Naomi is obviously thrilled to be accompanying Rei to explore the far tower, so much so that she bounds several steps ahead of Rei on the balcony and right up to the tower's enormous double door before she thinks to turn back in confusion. "Wait," she says, "isn't this place supposed to be - "
Rei assumes that the next word was meant to be 'sideways', but Naomi's seized by vertigo and too disoriented to finish, and turning back, Rei doesn't blame her. From here, the world is very strange. Gravity is pulling them the way it seems like it should be, relative to the tower itself, but it's not as simple as a mere perspective shift; the shading of the clouds seems backwards from here, like the light is coming from below or behind the clouds somehow, and the clouds themselves have not turned to match the orientation of the tower. Rei has never imagined what a "sideways" cloud looks like before, but now she doesn't really have to imagine.
"Oof," says Naomi, clutching her head. "Boy, that's a trip."
"It's unsettling," Rei agrees noncommittally. Safe to say that she is distracted at the moment. "Let's get inside."
In contrast to the tower where Gwen and Naomi are waiting - which Rei is tentatively calling the "old tower" - the far tower is cold and lifeless. There are no plants on its stone balcony. When they push open its doors they open into an impenetrable darkness. Rei's first steps inside echo in a seemingly infinite void. She's walking - she doesn't feel comfortable using her Spark here without knowing what lays ahead of her. She's not sure what effect it might have on her surroundings.
Not that that's any comfort against the inky black infront of her. She remembers, against her will, space ripping open into an unfathomable maw of eyes and legs and rocky darkness, swallowing her reality. It's not hard to refocus on her surroundings, but she can't ignore that it's left her shakier than before. "Naomi," she says, as evenly as she can manage, "could you - light things up a bit?"
"Of course!" Naomi's undeterred. She fires several rounds from her handgun - they turn to flares, casting brilliant red light against stone walls around the central room. Sure enough, this tower's layout seems to mimic the old tower, opening up into a huge cylindrical room and some kind of glass monument in the center. "Looks kinda like the monitoring room," Naomi observes, mirroring Rei's thoughts. "Wanna check out the console up front then?"
"If it turns on," Rei hums. She advances slowly, cautiously, feeling the static humming of the Spark around her hand. The flares continue to cast their dancing light, shadows reaching up from the floor and rippling against the far walls all around her. She still hasn't entirely cast off the feeling that she's dangerously close to that numbing void again, and it's hard to deny how uncomfortable the feeling makes her.
To her surprise, though, the console does turn on. A single panel alights as Rei tampers with the nearby controls; a dim electronic glow illuminates her face as Naomi draws near to her again, and violet monospaced text appears on the screen:
CHECK YOUR PARAMETERS OR PROVIDE A NEW CATALYST, THEN PRESS [ENTER] TO TRY AGAIN.
"This seems important," Naomi hums, whipping a phone out of her pocket and taking a picture of the screen. Rei stares at her dumbfounded, and Naomi glances back, innocently confused. "What?"
"Where did you get that?" Rei says hoarsely.
"What do you mean, where did I - I've always had it!" Naomi pouts. "I mean, it obviously ran out of battery back at the remnant, and I couldn't ever find another charger, but when we got here it was full charge!"
"You had a phone all this time," Rei sighs, "and you never told me or showed me because it was out of battery?" Naomi shrugs theatrically, looking only further distraught.
"What did you want me to do?" she cries. "I didn't know it would matter! I just kept it on me cause - I just - I felt sentimental, or something. Shut up."
"I'm not upset at all," Rei laughs, raising her arms. "I'm just - "
"Hey, shh - "
Naomi's gasp silences them both. The room is quiet, except for the hissing of the flares; neither of them are breathing.
"I don't hear anything," Rei breathes. Naomi scowls.
"I could swear I..." She shakes her head, stepping away from the console and raising her gun. "Whoever you are, step into the light, now!"
come here.
"Okay, that I definitely heard," Rei gasps, her heart suddenly pounding. "What was that?"
"Outsider," Naomi mutters darkly, and Rei can't help agreeing with her. If she were to try to place the sound, it would sound like steel cable rubbing against sandpaper, maybe? Like something soft and yet terribly heavy, straining against something coarse and firm, a sound on the edge of ripping into pieces. But it's not hard to believe that such a sound has no real source. It's her imagination trying to parse input it was not designed to interpret.
And despite that, somehow, Rei cannot shake the feeling that she's heard this sound before.
"Last chance!" Naomi bellows. But she's answered with another distant rustling. It seems to be coming from several directions at once, but all leading deeper into the tower. Naomi glances back at the Curator. "Maybe we should leave," she murmurs.
"Maybe," Rei murmurs, a hand over her chest as she tries to calm herself down. Maybe they should. But maybe they shouldn't?
The doors to the tower slam shut. Both Naomi and Rei whirl around - one or both of them yell in alarm - but Rei's eyes are swiftly drawn back to the console, which has changed color. The text is now gold and it now reads:
NOT YET.
"Show yourself!" Naomi roars, now raising her gun and pointing it into the shadows. "Whatever or wherever you are, come out, let me see you if you're brave enough to threaten us!"
Rei looks up again. The room seems somehow darker than before, but just as she's wondering if she should say something, the darkness recedes - whipping away all at once from the walls and through the seam of a door at the far end of the room, which until then she hadn't noticed somehow. "Something's here," Rei gasps, as the door lazily swings open - showing only gaping dark beyond. "Yes, something is definitely here."
"I saw it," Naomi growls, swiftly putting herself between the door and Rei. Rei glances back at the console, but it's blank now. The flares behind them, closer to the huge doors to the balcony, are burning low. The darkness is overtaking them from behind, and as it draws in, that familiarity of the void grows only stronger...
"Okay, we should leave," Naomi urges her, but Rei shakes her head slowly, standing fast.
"There's no need to panic," she replies, raising her hand. She can still feel the Spark. The assurance is aimed at herself as much as it is at Naomi. "I have control over the Seed, don't forget. I can get us out whenever we need to. If there are Outsiders here, we should investigate. They could be Spirits, or otherwise important to recreation."
"Yeah, what with how they're threatening us," Naomi growls.
"I'm not threatened," Rei replies imperiously, crossing her free arm over her chest. "Let's go."
The flares behind them quickly recede into darkness once they pass through the doorway. Naomi fires more ahead of them, but they fade into the black void immediately. Even when they turn as though to fire them at the wall, the hall seems to turn with them. Rei's vague discomfort is starting to take a more definite shape. Naomi is growing more and more tense. They are reminded of Outsider attacks in the remnant. They are reminded of the Outside itself. Reality is breaking down around them.
"We should go back," Naomi says, slowly and firmly, trying to hide that her voice is shaking. But Rei shakes her head. She can see movement ahead of her. It's hesitant, and it's making that noise that is so uncomfortable and yet so familiar to her. Like she's heard it in a dream somewhere before. Maybe she literally has!
"I can still get us out any time," Rei whispers. "Let's play along."
"It's not that I don't trust you," Naomi murmurs. She doesn't have to finish her sentence. Rei admits, she understands how Naomi feels.
They keep advancing. It's hard to tell they're in a hallway. It's hard to tell they're inside; it feels more like they're walking on a stone path through an impossibly dark night, but Rei has never experienced a night so dark before. Her old world was full of light and color, even at night, so that one never lost themselves. But she knows that sort of thing used to exist in ancient history, when people didn't have electricity. You could walk into a field without a lamp on an overcast night and lose any sense of direction except Down. She tries not to dwell on how lucky she is to still have that frame of reference.
Naomi stops. "I feel like we're not in the tower anymore," she says, her voice a bit louder than before. But only a bit.
"Me too." At least it's not just her. What Rei's feeling isn't exactly... fear, or at least she doesn't think it is. But it's certainly true that she feels better for having Naomi at her side. And yet, as she thinks about that, at the same time... she wishes Naomi wasn't here. She wishes Naomi was not facing this danger, and the thought that a threat might appear that Naomi might throw herself into again is...
No... no, the more she thinks about it, the more she wishes Naomi was not here. Her skin's crawling at the thought. This place is dangerous, this journey is dangerous, in a way that Naomi might not fully understand. Maybe they really should go back, just so that Naomi is somewhere safe...
Naomi fires a flare straight up. Rei gasps as she does it - she didn't think of that! The hall can't turn and orient itself upwards without them falling, right? As they follow its arc overhead it flickers and flashes, but nothing catches its light; it's a solitary gleam like a shooting star rushing further and further away... at first.
But then there are other flashes all around it. Rei mistakes them for enormous glass panes, light rushing through them in bands as the flare passes by at the right angle to reflect that light back at them. But that's not what is happening. Suddenly what was one flare, traveling straight up, becomes a dozen, and then a hundred and then more, streaking past each other in many directions like a firework. And illuminated by their baleful light are hundreds of humanoid figures in a great distance above them, standing in pairs, watching the display just as Rei and Naomi are.
"What the fuck?" whispers Naomi, because this is an unbelievable thing to see, and the lingering light of the flares allows her plenty of time to take it in. But Rei knows what this is, or at least she understands what it is symbolically. What it represents. What do you see when you look into a void where there is nothing but yourselves to see?
"Close your eyes," she instructs. Her voice is more bitter than she expected. She glances over and sees that Naomi is looking back at her like she's crazy. "I mean it," she says impatiently.
So, Naomi closes her eyes. Rei threads her fingers through Naomi's and tightly clasps her hand, then closes her own eyes, too. The flares fall silent, because they are too far away. Rei thinks of the remnant. She thinks of the top of the apartment building where she and Naomi caught their breath after many fights, held each others' hands after many arguments and shouts of hopeless frustration, shared little kisses and smiles while talking about what they might do with the future they would build for their new world.
"Open your eyes," Rei instructs. She opens her own. Beside her Naomi screams.
"How are we back here?!" she cries. Rei stares into the abyss surrounding the apartment rooftop with a dull resignation. She knows what this is. She understands where they are. "No," Naomi continues, horror filling her voice, "no, this isn't - there's nothing else here. What happened to everything else?"
"It's just this building," Rei murmurs, "becuase this is all I thought about." She turns around; there is no skyline, no skyroad, no other towers crumbling after two years of decay, no shimmering barrier between the end of the world and their tiny bubble of existence. There is nothing shielding this place from the void. Or rather, there is no separation from 'this place' and the 'void'. They are the same. "Hold on," she says, "I'll get us back."
And she does. She doesn't even have to use the Spark; it's just a matter of remembering where she wants to be, and demanding that she is there. They walk back along a stone floor, through a hallway they can barely see, until the faintest glimmers of dying flares finally comes into view on either side. Rei doesn't even wait long enough to take them through the door; the spark rips through the world and they are standing on the balcony, Rei shielding her eyes from the light while Naomi sputters and blinks in desperation to recover.
"Okay, well, we're back," Naomi says blankly, turning back to her with a sigh of relief. "Man! That was... pretty spooky, huh? It felt kinda like we might get attacked by something in there, you know?"
Rei doesn't answer. She's deep in thought. It's supposed to be very hard to reach the Outside. Even in the remnant Rei could only get there by dreaming. How did they simply... walk into it?
What does it mean that they could walk out of the Seed if they wanted?
Scattered all around the floating isles are the ghostly silhouettes of Rei. Six of them - distant enough to be difficult to see in detail, as they sit or stand at their various slightly-skewed angles on their fragmented ruins, but close enough that their voices carry. This time, Rei is here alone.
"Spirits of the old world," says Rei, because that's what she said last time. Sure enough, they all answer in chorus:
"It won't work!"
"Why won't it?" Rei asks, her voice fierce now. "What you said to me before and the result I achieved don't match one another."
The spirits balk. They don't remember either, as Rei expected, but it's not her knowledge that seems to disorient them so much as the question itself. "There is no point to trying," one calls out - Gravity? Rei remembers her position from before. "This world's fate is set."
Rei chews her lip. The spirit's wording somehow strikes her as significant. "This world," she repeats, after a moment of thought. "Is it not my purpose to create a new world?"
"It is," Gravity says slowly, with reservation. "You asked us a question and this is our answer. This world's fate is set."
"That is not the answer you gave before," Rei murmurs, her eyes narrowing. Thinking back on it, it feels like they said something similar to this - but not as the direct answer to her question. Maybe she wasn't asking the right thing before. Presently, she looks between the many other spirits. "Do you realize this is the second time I have asked you?"
They don't answer. Their gazes remain fixed on her, some with growing concern, others only more confused than ever.
"Last time," Rei continues, "you each put forth some human limitation, and for each of you I found a possible answer to that limitation. There are things we can do to circumvent their boundaries and help them be better than they were before. We agreed to work together in the new world."
"But that did not work," the spirits answer together, "because this world's fate is set."
"So are you answering a different question now?" Rei presses. "What is it that I asked you this time?"
"You asked if humans could live and grow without the constraint of age," says the first, and the second only gets partway through her question before Rei stops them, rubbing the bridge of her nose with an aggravated sigh. No, she didn't ask them different questions. But then -
"But how does your answer match the question?" Rei continues. "This world's fate is set. That is not an answer to whether or not humans can surpass the boundaries of time."
"That whose fate is set cannot be changed," one spirit answers patiently. "Another way of saying it would be to say: the result you achieved in the old world is the only result possible."
Rei frowns. "I don't understand," she says slowly. her voice low and dark. "How can that be true? You have authority over the laws of reality, don't you? One of you curates time, another is responsible for gravity, for the cycle of death..."
She trails off partway through her sentence, reconsidering. Maybe she isn't thinking about this abstractly enough. She observes that she's heated, breathing hard. She might even be angry, which is not a feeling she's really used to having. For a moment she focuses on calming herself.
"We do not have power over that which has already been decided," the spirits say to her, at length, and Rei nods. She has to remember: all of this is symbolic. These spirits, this world, they're all just symbols - representations of things that cannot be seen, probably guided into their current shape by her own perception of reality. The 'question' and the 'answer' are abstractions. She didn't literally ask a question. They aren't answering her literally, either.
"Why does the fate of this world matter?" Rei finally asks, looking up at them again. "I don't care about this world anymore; it ended and I'm looking now to the future."
"You say that, but it's not so simple," says Gravity, frowning at her. "Your fate is inexorably linked to your past, and so too is the fate of the new world linked to that of the old world."
Ah. Ah! "So maybe there is something I have failed to do," Rei continues excitedly, "to separate our Seed from the remnant somehow? Do we still need to break out of the old world's causality before a new world can be established?"
The spirits are quiet for a moment. They shift uncomfortably. "I do not know how you could accomplish that," the last spirit says slowly, her voice soft.
"That's fine." Rei beams. "I will continue to investigate, and return. Thank you, spirits!"
Eliza and Gwen are sitting beside each other in deep, rapid conversation when Rei returns to the tower, while Naomi fiddles with something nearly across the room from them. Eliza glances up at her and waves her over. "What did you learn?"
"The spirits seem to represent limitations of society," Rei reports. "They react to me as though I asked them how to overcome those limitations, and are here to give me their answers, all of which are pessimistic. They told me that 'this world's fate is set', but I had a hard time deciphering what exactly that meant. As near as I can tell, it has something to do with the remnant. Like we haven't completely broken away from it yet."
"Interesting," Eliza murmurs, her gaze turning distant for a moment, before she turns and rolls her chair to the nearest console; Gwen and Rei follow, the former in her own chair and the latter choosing to hover in nullified local gravity. The wireframe display above changes to a noise of waveform data, but Eliza fiddles with some settings and most of the data fade into the background, leaving two major waves in the graph - one on the left side, and the other on the right.
"Gwen was showing me this conceptual trend receiver a moment ago," Eliza explains. "Basically it tracks the position and behavior of concepts in the Seed. I've filtered out almost every concept present within the Seed that we can plainly interact with, but there are still a lot more here that you can see concentrated into two distinct sources. If we locate these waveforms in space, they correspond to the two towers."
"Interesting," Rei whispers, leaning in. "So the towers contain a hoard of 'concepts' that aren't present anywhere else in the Seed... does that mean that each tower is a representation of a more complete existence, a fully formed universe?"
"That's what I'm thinking," Eliza cautiously agrees. "We've got our tower - the old world. And in the horizon, hard to recognize but still plainly there, must be the new one. But that's just a guess at this point. Symbolism isn't really my specialty, I prefer dealing in more exact science." She sighs briskly, fiddling with the console again. "There's something else that bothers me about this, though." Both of the waveforms present before vanish, and now there's only one bright one. "This is the conceptual trend for what must've been one of the Spirits," Eliza continues. "It appeared while you were out exploring. I've filtered out everything but this one concept."
"Okay," Rei nods. "So?"
"So," Eliza sighs, "this concept isn't present in either tower. The towers themselves are full of concepts that aren't even referenced anywhere else in the Seed, and then some. Like - for example, here's 'air'." The entire display turns red with a dull, low-frequency wave. "It's everywhere, obviously. We're in the middle of the fucking sky, so naturally, this whole place is diffused with air. But even this is concentrated more heavily in the towers than anywhere else. Why are the spirits different, then?"
"They're missing elements, maybe?" Rei says slowly, tilting her head. This is a puzzler, certainly.
"Right, so," Eliza continues, "you're looking at this the same way Gwen was saying earlier - the towers represent all of the ingredients you need for a universe to come together, and the spirits are wayward concepts that need to be sorted into one or the other, or something like that. Symbolically, that makes sense. But there are a few things about that that don't seem right to me."
"That's fine," Rei says, righting herself again. "What you need is more data, right?"
"I - well - yeah." Eliza nods slowly, turning back to her. "I guess that's what it comes down to, yes. I'm still just making guesses. If you could help me refine that with more information that'd be really helpful. We got a lot of data about the spirits from your journey over there; what about the far tower? You can get over there, right?"
"I think so," Rei answers. "I don't see why I couldn't. But - I'm worried about what the spirits said."
"About this world's fate being sealed?" Eliza shrugs. "We can't do more with that until we know what they mean by 'this world'. They might be referring to the world we came from, or the one we're trying to create, or just the Seed itself. Or that phrase might be symbolic of something else entirely. We just don't have enough info to go off of yet."
"I guess you're right," Rei admits, speaking slowly. Eliza flips her hair, still speaking:
"What interests me most about this situation is the whole question-answer dynamic you were describing before. Like there's a predetermined path for this Seed to take and they're supposed to present you with some kind of a puzzle to solve or something like that. If you're right and this is all supposed to be taken symbolically then it stands to reason that they're a metaphor for the actual problem of creating a new world itself, but why would their answers center around society so much rather than the laws of existence?"
"Ah," says Rei, feeling embarrassed. Eliza looks up at her, startled.
"Is something wrong?" Gwen gasps. Rei glances away.
"Oh, well," Eliza hums, "it's because of the way you perceive the problem, isn't it?" A wry smile paints her lips. "That gives some more context for Yomi's insistence that we survivors don't matter. Maybe you've put us in a bit of a corner by thinking too much about people, and not about the world as a whole."
"Maybe," Rei huffs, drawing herself up again. "But it won't be any more than a diversion in the end, I'm sure of that."
Eliza nods. "It shouldn't stop us from putting in our best effort," she agrees, though Rei suspects she's still troubled. "At the very least, we need to factor that into our interpretation of the Seed, so it's good to identify early. Regardless, though, we need more information before we can speculate any further, so... go to the far tower and explore for a bit, then report back with what you find." She nodds - then gasps, and quickly adds: "Take Naomi with you, just in case. Better safe than sorry."
"Huh? Why?" Rei blinks at her, startled now. "I - I want Naomi to be keeping watch here!"
"We only need one of us to do that," Eliza says pointedly. She glances over her shoulder; Naomi is glaring at the console display with clear annoyance. "I think Gwen and I have got it under control. She'll appreciate being with you more."
"Sure." Rei sighs in concession, rubbing her face briefly. "You've taken charge again," she mutters. "If I didn't know better I'd almost think you were the Curator, between the two of us."
Eliza sighs, fading into an icy chuckle. "It's not like I like being in charge," she huffs. "But hell, maybe my fate is set, you know?"
Rei is standing on firm ground. The roof of her apartment building, in fact - but with that realization comes gut-wrenching vertigo, and she stumbles, clutching her head. Where is she? What's going on? She reels as two completely separate sets of memories attempt to reconcile in her mind.
It feels like, based on her surroundings, the world just ended and she's just now about to put her mother's plan into motion - but there are memories that don't match that observation, and spin a much grander, more disturbing tale as she considers them. This isn't the beginning, not like it's supposed to be. She can remember reaching the Seed, confronting some strange spirits, an argument, a fight... and then... nothingness. Not that her memory blacks out, but rather, she remembers a strange void, and... and now she is here.
How did she get back here? The remnant should be gone. She should've invoked the Spark and the universe should have been created properly. But it wasn't? Did she come back here because... something was wrong? Because she failed?
She shakes her head, returning herself to the present moment; she doesn't have time to dawdle, one way or another. She turns, demands to be back where Naomi and Eliza are supposed to meet her, and is there - her friends are waiting, ashen-faced. "What happened?" Eliza gasps, immediately. "Is everything alright?"
"Rei," Naomi starts, "Rei, something - something weird happened when - god, I don't even know how to describe any of this, but..."
And Rei remembers this. "You materialized the past," she says slowly. "Time must have broken down around you. I remember seeing it."
"What?" Naomi blinks at her. "How?"
"Causality is already falling apart," Eliza breathes, shaking her head slowly. "Rei, you need to get us out of here, now."
Rei wants to hesitate. She looks between the two girls. Do they remember? But she can tell, in their voices and their eyes, that they don't. Only she does. Of course only she does - as the curator, that's knowledge that she has passed back to herself, somehow. There's no point to wasting valuable time asking a question whose answer she already knows. She hurries to the Spark instead.
It's just as she remembers. The static, indeterminate family at the table. The building turns to wireframe, she falls through it to the ground where its foundation would be placed, and then back further and further until the planet below her is dust and the sky above has contracted to a point just within reach. The Spark of Creation rests before her.
But in the moment before she touches it, she is utterly alone. It's dark. Featurelessly dark. Like the void she remembers.
She's not sure what it means. Maybe it doesn't mean anything.
The Seed forms around her, in space and time alike, and she draws upon the Spark's power - tearing open reality in just such a way, with just such a spin and just so much force, that she appears where and when she wants to be - the balcony where Naomi and Eliza first appear, looking out into the sky. They both turn to face her, and Eliza gasps and points. "What is that? That - is that the Spark?!"
"Yes," Rei answers, because she can't really think of what else to say. It orbits her wrist as she glances at it. "Were you waiting long?"
"N-No," Eliza says shakily, before coughing and drawing herself up. "No, not long. This is it, then." Rei nods in affirmative, and Naomi cheers, because of course she does. Rei doesn't know what to say to that, either. This is a surreal experience, and part of her feels like she shouldn't be affected so strongly by it, but...
Her gaze touches on the floating isles in the distance. She already knows about the Spirits. She could just go straight there. But that would be rude to Gwen, right? Gwen is supposed to come out of the tower behind her soon and introduce herself, having somehow forgotten about them. She takes them inside and explains what she knows about the Seed already, and then they investigate the Spirits, convince them to help, and...
"Rei?" Naomi catches her attention. She smiles down at her guardian, as innocently as she can manage, and Naomi smiles back a little bashfully. "You spaced out there for a sec."
"Thinking," Rei replies swiftly, turning her smile to Eliza. Eliza's arms are folded and her gaze is more wary. "Eliza," she gasps, an idea coming to her all of a sudden. "I'm sorry to admit that I don't know the specifics of how a Seed works or what we need to do to complete it."
"Of course you don't," Eliza sighs angrily, shaking her head. "Figures."
"But I can explore the shape of things here," Rei continues hopefully. "I do know that the Seed is symbolic in nature, and that a lot of the things that happen here are supposed to represent the Universe and the creation process in some abstract way, rather than being concrete. What I need help with is turning those symbols and abstractions into a plan for recreation."
Eliza nods slowly. "Right," she says, "so, what do you want me to do?"
At that moment, the doors behind Rei open; she turns elegantly in the air to greet Gwen before Gwen can speak. "Oh!" Gwen gasps, startled to have been expected. "C-Curator! I'm - you're here!"
"Yes," Rei says calmly. She finds herself wondering if Gwen has some memory of the previous iteration. "Though, is this the first time we've met?"
"What?" Eliza balks, looking between them. "What are you talking about? Of course we've met her before. Gwen - ?"
"Oh, no," Gwen laughs shyly, her arms over her chest. "I-I'm sorry, um... I was part of your previous world, too, right?"
"You... don't remember us," Eliza says slowly.
"I-I'm afraid I don't." Gwen's timid smile is fading now. Eliza closes her eyes, breathes in, breathes out. Shakes her head. "M-Maybe my memory will return as - "
"Now isn't the time to worry about it," Eliza says swiftly. Rei glances at her, taken aback, but... thinking about it, they were all too surprised the first time through to really stop and question things. Now, with Rei establishing a sense of order right away, of course Eliza is more willing to directly face Gwen's amnesia. Fortunately, she seems just as willing to roll with it, too; Rei isn't keen on having that argument a second time. "You seemed to be waiting for Rei," the ex-mayor continues.
"Yes!" Gwen perks up, and continues with her introduction. Rei allows her through it, allows Naomi and Eliza to ask their questions, and waits until Gwen offers to show them inside.
"Eliza," she says, "you should go with her." Eliza looks up at Rei and nods.
"We'll cover more ground if we split up, I suppose," she admits. "And you probably already have some idea what's going on, but a crash course would help us a great deal." Rei nods back, pleased that she's feeling cooperative. "Is that all right, Gwen? We'll discuss what you've found and Rei will explore the Seed some by herself, and we'll reconvene in a little while."
"Um, well," Gwen stammers, surprised, "I - I guess that's okay."
"Naomi," Rei adds seriously, turning to her companion; Naomi smiles eagerly at her, though Rei can detect a sense of resentment in her. "I understand it's not glorious," she says apologetically, "but, I'm certain that Outsiders will attempt to attack the Seed before long. I don't want them to get close enough to damage the Seed in any way."
"Right!" Naomi nods firmly, her smile fading a little. "I'll keep watch, then, I guess."
"Well, more than that..." Rei drops down to put a hand on her shoulder. "I bet there's some monitoring system inside that can help you spot them faster than just standing out here," she says. "Maybe Gwen can show you. If you can keep an eye on that and warn me if anything goes wrong...?"
"Sure." Naomi nods again. "I guess that would be the best way of going about this, huh?"
"I'm sure you'll have your chance to shine," Rei promises, in spite of the gnawing void in her gut. Naomi smiles again, resting her hand gently on Rei's, before Rei steps back. "Thank you both. I'll be back soon."
"Be safe," Naomi calls. "Come right back if anything happens! We'll back you up!"
"Don't make any serious decisions without me!" Eliza warns.
"Promise," Rei says to them both, waving and turning around. She gestures for the Spark to swing in front of her, tearing open a path to the floating isles, and steps through.
The spiders are scurrying further back into the darkness, though the only source of light now is the glowing hate swirling around the entrance to her cavern, the place of intersection between herself and - and whatever the Other is. I don't know, she is scrambling, I don't know what's happening -
The cavern begins to break apart - ! The comforting enclosed space is ripping open as the magma-like substance flows through its forming cracks, like it's turning it to glass and crushing it - between Phobos and the Other, a metal blast door slides shut, but a red light shines at its seam and it slowly opens again -
HOW ARE YOU DOING THAT!? Aplistia cries, there is a screen behind Phobos that she can now understand is there, and the crumbling of rock and the roiling of lava comes in answer:
I a m v e r y p e r s u a s i v e .
A series of high-pitched whipping sounds echo through the formless darkness as a series of chains grasp around the crumbling debris that comprises the Other's form - they begin to glow, but are nonetheless steadfast, soon coiling around the thing enough to contain it even as it thrashes within its binds, somehow unable to flow through them; its shape and the scene change, and Phobos is now on a metal grating struggling to move against an unbearably heavy darkness. She remembers this! She knows where - or rather, who this is!
Dangling in the air above her is a cage made from chains, with the Other bashing against its sides... but far above that is another grating, and sitting upside-down beyond the other side of that grating, larger than can be possibly believed and looking down at them as though looking upward into a mirror, is Parias' featureless face.
"We are unmoved," Parias says gravely. The Other swings its cage enough to get a clear look upward at them, sneering. Phobos is not sure how she can tell that it is sneering, but she definitely can.
What's your story?! it snarls. I've never encountered such a pathetic, warped thing as you. So full of guilt that not even I can force you to rebel. It's sad, is what it is. Sad and stupid. The swirling molten Other continues to rail against its cage, which is swinging wildly above Phobos now. She is a bit worried it might fall on her.
"We do not care for your childish insults," Parias intones, folding their arms. "We have no right to lash out in petty vengeance until our penance is finished."
It never will be, the creature hisses. You'll never please them enough to feel satisfied.
"That's enough!" The voice that cuts across them is high and fierce; Parias' terrifying visage above is replaced with a series of stadium lights beaming down into the cage, and now pacing around it is a giant hologram of Yomi - Aplistia's chosen materialization. Phobos realizes that Parias is kneeling beneath the cage now, looking upward at it, and huddles around them for comfort; Parias makes no move to shoo her away.
Pompous delusional thing, the Other is seething. I can tell just from looking at you.
"Books and their covers," Aplistia retorts seamlessly, tapping her illusory foot. "You are the captive here, not I."
I'll break out sooner or later, the Other taunts, its voice gleeful now.
"I don't really care," Aplistia says airily, "I just want to ask you a few questions, that I might understand you better. What are you? Why did you attack the humans?"
I am like you, and that should be painfully obvious. The Other snorts and draws itself up, taking a shape like a flame now. I attacked the humans because I have a right to that which they keep from me. But for you to be defending them - it's stupid, and sad, just like the other one hiding behind their guilt.
"Stupid and sad," Aplistia repeats slowly, nodding as though she understands, drumming her fingers on her arms. "Is that so? What makes you think that?"
There is a moment of quiet, the flame simmering down, leering at her. You don't intend to listen, it mutters.
"I do," Aplistia replies blankly.
Not in any way that matters. You seek to categorize me. Label me. Find a place for me within the confines of your view of the world. I don't care for any of that.
Aplistia is quiet. The flame builds up partway again.
You don't understand the humans yet, it adds, its rumbling voice low and irritated. Fine. I will find you again once you do, and we will talk once you are ready to listen.
Then, the flame goes out all at once, and they are cast in darkness.
Darkness is all Rei sees.
Awareness happens to her all of a sudden, as though she was startled from some deep sleep, but what greets her is a simple black void. Eliza is not present. Neither is Naomi. The Outsiders that had torn open reality in her Seed are gone, too. She is entirely alone.
Okay, thinks Rei, this is not exactly what I expected to see at the beginning of a new universe.
For a moment, a flicker of doubt runs through her mind. Did she do something wrong? Is the world broken? Ruined somehow? But she stifles the thought. There's no purpose to worrying about it. The simple fact is, she is here now, and she needs to understand her surroundings before coming to any conclusions. As long as she is still fighting, she can still reach her goal.
She flexes her thoughts, exerting her psychic influence on her surroundings, calling out for the Spark of Creation. It doesn't come to her. Another surge of doubt runs through her. The Spark is gone. Why is the Spark gone?
For just a moment, there's a sensation of bright light washing over her, bathing her, but it is neither warm nor soothing. Then the existence known as Rei ends.
The walls of Aplistia's vault are around them now; there is a chair in the center of the vault where Yomi once sat, but now Aplistia sits in it, attending to her guests with crossed arms and a troubled expression.
No, no, no, Phobos cries in despair. That's it?!
"That's just one ending," Parias reminds her hastily, their voices now a soothing maternal chorus. "It's a grim one, but it doesn't have to be the only one." Aplistia nods in agreement.
"This is not a promising development," she says lowly. As her mouth forms words they appear on the screens around Phobos, too. "I had anticipated Outsiders as a potential obstacle, but I didn't think they would be so... wilful."
So you think that's what did this? Phobos asks. Aplistia shrugs, very slowly. What - do you mean?
"It's hard to say for sure," Aplistia admits. "The timeline ended so suddenly that there are few details to draw clues from, and it's already so brittle that I don't know if we can go any further back without disrupting it. Not from where we are, anyway. But I didn't sense the influence of that other Outsider nearby at all when we reached her..."
What even happened to her? Phobos asks quietly. Aplistia frowns and shrugs, and Phobos is struck by the reaction. She can't recall a time that Aplistia has ever... not... known. She wonders if maybe that is exciting for Aplistia, some part of her feeling of adventure, but... it's mostly very scary to Phobos, and Aplistia certainly does not look excited.
"What bothers me most is that we have not encountered it until now," Parias continues, speaking now in a soft baritone, their arms folded. The tension in the room grows, as Aplistia turns to watch her counterpart's featureless face. "Something with that much power and influence - we should've felt it long before now. Especially if it has been watching the remnant."
"It must not have been, then," Aplistia says lowly. "It's only just joined us, from our perspective."
From our perspective? Phobos faintly repeats, confused. But then she gasps. Oh - it did sound like they knew more than we do, have they been here for longer than us?
Parias sighs with aggravation. "You think it is trawling through timelines for something," they say, disgruntled. "That's..." They trail off, and Aplistia nods gravely.
"Not a comforting thought," she finishes in agreement. "We are certain to run into it again in the future. Though perhaps I should say 'them' until we know better. Whatever and whoever that Outsider was, they are clearly just as self-aware as we are."
"That's another thing," Parias growls, "how can that be? We have higher awareness because of Yomi's influence, and because we've stuck close to one another. But that one - are they with others? Or are they simply so powerful that they retain sense of self after all this time?"
"Or," Aplistia adds softly, "did someone summon them here?"
"No," Parias scoffs, "that - that can't be. Who would have the power? The motive?"
They don't seem to like humans, Phobos says nervously. I don't think if a human summoned them here, they... But she trails off. Aplistia smiles faintly down at her, as she finds a reluctant voice again: I guess that doesn't rule anything out.
"There is nothing stopping a human from mistakenly summoning an Outsider that does not like them," Aplistia agrees sadly. "As for motive; there were many in the remnant that were unhappy with its leadership, weren't there?"
Parias hesitates, drumming fingers on their arm. "Even Eliza might have reason for a coup," they admit. "But that's a very dire thought."
They argue sometimes, Phobos gasps in protest, but - but they're friends, aren't they? Or at least they're trying their best to work together!
"It might seem that way outwardly," Aplistia murmurs. "But it's hard for us to know what either of them are really feeling, or what other influences there might be. Don't forget that these three humans are not at all the last survivors, also; even the thugs from Gwen's basement could potentially find it within themselves to discover something that they weren't ever meant for."
They are all quiet for a moment.
"So, what do we do with this information?" Parias sighs at length, shifting closer to their bars. "We have now seen that Rei's first attempt, with no outside intervention, ends in disaster. It may be that some small change is enough to dodge that Outsider's notice, and Rei may be able to succeed; or it may be that some other factor is causing Rei to fail, or that the Outsider has some other way of reaching us. We have very little information and a whole lot more questions than before."
"Well..." Aplistia pinches the bridge of her nose. Her screens blank for a moment. "We should go back, and try to change something small, I suppose. I don't know - "
No, but, Phobos gasps, we - shouldn't we warn them about the Outsider?!
"How?" Parias mutters. "From their perspective we are no different than it. Their first instinct is going to be to attack any Outsider that they fear threatens them."
But we can't just - Phobos scurries to and fro anxiously. We can't - you don't mean to just - let them fail again?
"We don't have an infinite number of timelines to work with," cautions Parias. "Remember Yomi's warning. This Seed can only form a limited set of them before becoming unstable. We can't make small iterative changes until we find something that works."
"So...?" Aplistia squints, "What do you suggest? I agree with Phobos that, if we can, we should warn Rei about the attack..."
"There's no need for us to warn her directly," Parias says dismissively. "What we need is for Rei to remember what she's tried. If we force a causal link between this moment and the beginning of the next iteration..."
Aplistia gasps. "Then Rei will inherit her memories causally," she finishes, hands bunching up before pumping in triumph. "Yes, that's brilliant, Parias! And far more elegant than anything I could have come up with."
How does that work? Phobos says faintly. And what will happen to this Rei?
"We don't have much time, if that's what we're going to do," Parias says, folding their arms again. "We have to act while our memory is still very fresh, or otherwise something will get lost or corrupted."
"Yes, yes, you're right." Aplistia nods to Phobos. "We can explain more later - but at the very least, we will stop this Rei from being entirely forgotten, and give her new life through a new timeline. For now - let's return with our memory of Rei to the beginning, and return to the Seed as before. We can strategize more once we're sure that the causal diversion is working. Everyone is good with this plan?"
Parias nods. Phobos hesitates, but taps her feet "O-Kay" in response. "Good," sighs Aplistia, rubbing her hands together. "Then let's hurry!"
Not Rei, nor Gwen, nor the holo display in the tower, none of them are first to notice the attacker. First is Parias.
"Something is here," they say, their voices alarmed and hollow and faint, a hand rising to cover a mouth that cannot be seen. "Aplistia, do you know what that is? Can you feel it?"
"It's very strong," Aplistia gasps, mimicking Parias' gesture. "Oh no. What is something like that doing here?!"
W-what?! Phobos' legs tremble as she 'speaks'. What is happening? I can't - what's going on?
"You're smaller," Parias says swiftly, "you probably can't feel - there's something exerting some kind of influence on the seed - an Outsider, it has to be an Outsider, Aplistia - "
"But such a strong presence!" Aplistia cries in dismay. "Can you see it? Where is it?"
"Phobos," Parias adds, their voices urgent, "if you can help us understand what's happening - "
"Are you sure that's - ?" Aplistia cuts short her protest, but the question is still very clear to Phobos. And she appreciates that concern. She is afraid. But she is always afraid. Being here or there won't change that. But it might change things for the others.
I'll check the islands, she says first, and it turns out that was a very good guess.
Rei and her friends arrive there only shortly after. As soon as their feet touch the earth it lashes out at them - tendrils of cracking rock and roots that latch onto their feet, curl swiftly around their ankles and legs. Rei quickly jumps off of the ground and into the void between the islands, standing on nothingness as her will dictates; the Spark jolts out of orbit and rests in the palm of her hand, but she pauses, hoping to take in the situation more completely before acting.
Eliza and Naomi are not as fast. Eliza screams, trying to reach into her pocket for her lighter, but she's late and the grabbing earth has ensnared her before she can act. Beneath her the ground rumbles audibly. It's growling. Or perhaps even laughing. Naomi too is slow, but she is more agile and thinks swiftly; her handgun is already in her hand, and she doesn't even need to think about what she wants to fire. She points at the ground and shoots, and the earth explodes violently apart beneath her feet, freeing her. Eliza is able to scramble herself free of the damaged roots that had nearly trapped her before, but the ground quickly begins to reform, new limbs reaching out. They're better defined now. They look like hands.
The islands are no longer separate; they have melded together, colliding at a central point that is glowing hot like a planet's core might. She thinks she can see a figure there, and as she tries to take in its shape, white flames like eyes glare hatefully back.
Rei has never seen this before. She has never locked eyes with an Outsider. The experience is shocking and bizarre. Even for her senses, even with her mind trained to process this kind of sight, it's too much to take in. Her eyes start to sting, searing pain spreads through her head, and she has to tear her eyes away.
But Phobos, looking on below them, doesn't.
stop! she tries to shout, but even without the deafening cracking and crumbling of rock and stone at the maelstrom's center, the constant movement of the earth makes it hard for her to raise the full volume of her "voice". The thing ignores her, its attention focused wholly on Rei. Phobos hears it snarl. She hears it chuckle sinisterly.
"Help help help," Eliza is shouting, crawling backwards hastily, "help, save me, Naomi, Rei, hello!?" Naomi lifts her up bodily and all but tosses her into the sky - she yelps because she doesn't really know how to right herself without the ground beneath her, but gravity doesn't force her in any particular direction; she's no longer within reach of the tendrils, and as they try to stretch out towards her Naomi imposes herself in the way.
"Send Eliza back," Naomi shouts. "I don't think she can fight here!"
"I can too!" Eliza snaps, whirling around as best she can, lighter in her fist; she gestures at the tendrils reaching towards Naomi, and a series of fiery explosions from within reduce them and the island beneath to rubble and splinters. "Hah!"
A tongue of flame erupts from the central core, quickly condensing into a stream of magma flowing as freely as water - it engulfs the debris created by Eliza's explosion, and altogether hardens and forms into a single enormous arm, now towering over all three of them and more than large enough to grab them all at once. Naomi is fastest on the draw; she loads her weapon with a new concept, and rather than destroying the earthen hand as it swipes at them, she turns it to dust that passes through and over them harmlessly, albeit quite messily.
Another huge swiping hand comes at them from the opposite side, but Rei is prepared for this one - directing her Spark to its center and ordering it to pulse with a shout; for a split-second its maw widens, a massive dark sphere engulfing the entire mass at once before reverting to its original size, leaving nothing at all behind in its wake. Rei turns back to the mass controlling the attack, who is gathering itself for another attempt. "What have you done with the Spirits?!"
The response is a deafening symphony of rumbling and crackling rock, like two landslides overlapping one another, carried underneath by a rumbling like a volcano's warning growl. The girls can't understand it, but Phobos can:
C o m e a n d s e e .
"I'm gonna hit it with more erosion," Naomi growls, leveling her firearm again. Rei nods understanding.
"Erosion," Eliza whispers to herself, swearing under her breath.
As the Outsider attempts to form new attacking limbs, Naomi fires into the mass of each, crumbling them into dust with a single shot; Rei positions herself apart from Naomi and directs her Spark as though it were on the end of a string, swiping it through the crumbled rock. It gathers in a trail behind, and Rei imagines that she's made a comet - a hailstorm of ice and rock - which she fires like a bullet from a sling at the central mass, and in time with the impact Naomi fires at the core for good measure. They see cracks spread through the core as though it were made of glass...
But from within the cracks comes an ominous red-orange glow; Phobos, scrambling through the web of crevices, finds herself assailed with a blinding heat, some kind of liquid spreading through the debris, binding it together and worming into the larger rocks and masses - it stops short of her, surrounding her, cornering her, and she quivers as she asks, What are you?!
What are you doing here? thrums the liquid, the rumbling undercurrent of hate reduced to a simmer. This thing - in a way unlike anything Phobos can remember, this thing wants to destroy her. It is only by some semblance of mercy it hasn't done so already. She wants to protect these humans, but in so doing, she is opposing this - whatever this is. Can she stand against it? Not alone - but she isn't alone, and that knowledge the only thing she can draw on for courage.
Around her the earth is splitting apart; the Spirits' ghastly recreations of Rei's soul are bursting through, as their captor is preoccupied. Above and all around, Phobos can hear them shouting, but their voices blend into an earsplitting chorus. There is only word she can make out above any others, and that is Invoke, and she is sure the humans can hear it too. Presently Phobos tries to scramble through newly opened tunnels through the splitting rock, but the liquid is following, setting everything aflame in its path, faster and more agile than she, circling around her - she is trapped, she cannot outrun it, and soon she will be alone - !
There is - there is an alcove somewhere - but there isn't, this is not her cavern; she would have to manifest for that to happen, but with the humans close by...! What to do, what to do...?!
You're helping them, aren't you, the mass growls, its heat growing more intense. Phobos isn't used to feeling pain! She hates it, it makes her want to scream - every instinct she has wants her to scuttle away somewhere smaller but the liquid monster can follow her through any cracks she can fit through. But they are your enemies, little spiders. Let me show you.
All at once the molten substance closes in on her, but before it can touch her Phobos panics and manifests.
This happens as Rei and Naomi have cried out in alarm, reaching for the spirits to try to free them from the convergent islands' mass, as it seems they have become trapped in it; but suddenly where the islands were instead is a rocky opening that fades into void like a wormhole, an unfathomable darkness lying beyond; the molten outsider is swirling around the cavern's edge as though threatening to flood it, and Phobos is screaming into her own heart, THERE IS A TINY SCREEN IN AN ALCOVE SOMEWHERE -
"What the fuck!?" Naomi screams, raising her gun, but where even to start with this!? Rei grabs her shoulder and pulls back, directing gravity backwards, falling away from the mass - the Spirits are trapped inside the cave now, but still they are shouting at her: Invoke the Spark! Invoke the Spark!
"We have to stop them!" Naomi is shouting.
"I don't know if we can," Eliza cries back, hoarse, shaking her head. "I don't know if you'll ever come back if you try to fight them in there!"
"We have to!" Naomi roars, throwing Rei's hand off of her shoulder - for a moment, their eyes meet, and it dawns on Rei what Naomi is about to do. "I'll free the spirits," Naomi is saying, "so you and Eliza finish things here!" But Rei is not listening.
Rei is trying to fathom an eternity as a Curator without Naomi next to her.
It is not something she's ever thought about. It is not a possibility she ever considered. Naomi has always talked about protecting her, ensuring she could do her job, but Rei has never thought it would actually be necessary. Rei has always thought that she would protect Naomi, as silently as she could, so that Naomi doesn't have to know. This has just been the way things will be.
But Naomi is falling forward now. She will fall into the twisting, fractal caves that are opening up before them, threatening to consume the whole of the sky. Something strange is forming just beyond the edge of the darkness within - something difficult to make out, between the webs and the eyes and the hairy jointed legs, between the chains and the metal hatches crossing their vision, something sparking and vibrant, a rising distorted voice echoing from within -
"Oh god," Eliza whispers beside her, covering her mouth. Eliza does not know if Naomi is going to be able to do this. Naomi is descending into hell, and may not come back. She might not even succeed.
Rei makes an executive decision. She invokes the spark.
You don't? Phobos regards Parias with surprise. They are curled behind their glass barrier, hugging their legs. All three of them have been watching the conversation, listening and observing; this was the plan they agreed upon to begin with, to simply observe and understand the mechanics of the Seed before trying to act too quickly, and Phobos is very content to just sit back for the time being.
She is on the island with them, hiding in shadows and little places under chunks of marble and such; by sharing her perception with the others via one of her little rifts in the earth, they can see and hear as well as she can. Her role is to act as the scout for the others, since they are much larger and have a much harder time moving around than she does. It's a little tense to have to constantly skirt around the humans' vision, but she's become quite good at it, and she very much likes watching and feeling like she's a part of this... even if only vicariously. The humans are fun to listen to, working together like this. She loves Rei's optimism most of all.
"It worries me some," Aplistia hums, watching through Parias' windows. "This seems too simple for all of Yomi's scheming. If it is just a matter of re-aligning the spirits to agree with their new vision..."
M-Maybe Yomi didn't realize it would be so straightforward! Phobos offers.
"Well, maybe not," Aplistia agrees reluctantly, glancing at the spiders with a smirk, "but it'd be a bit disappointing after all of this, wouldn't it?"
You only say that because you got your hopes up for an adventure, Phobos replies, rather put out. If this turns out to be easy for them I'll be very glad.
"I agree with Phobos, in this case," Parias mutters. "But, that's not what I meant. I mean I don't know if I like what they're saying."
Huh? Now Parias has both their attention. Parias pauses to listen a moment longer, as Rei describes that they need only one timeline to succeed; as she says it Parias makes a strange sound, like they are gnashing many teeth.
"And what of those that don't," they growl.
"Eliza did say that they can bring their success to others," Aplistia offers.
"And what if they don't?"
"Then - then they aren't the right one, are they?" Aplistia frowns. "Besides, don't you get the sense that these will be very active curators? I'm sure they will be nudging things along to suit their plan, just as Yomi was doing her best to prepare Rei for the end of the world."
I understand that it's a lot to hope for, Phobos says nervously. But... we have to have at least some hope, right? After all this...
Parias is quiet. The spirits are settling their doubts, too. When the last one nods and gives her consent, Parias sighs heavily, shaking their head. "Maybe I'm just being bitter," they say softly. "We shall see."
"Yes, we shall," Aplistia agrees, though a bit mutedly now.
"Very well," the last spirit sighs. "We will assist you in the new world."
"Very good." Rei smiles, bowing faintly to them, a very small gesture that masks her sizable relief. Almost as though to compensate, Naomi fistpumps with an emphatic cry beside her. It pulls at Rei's smile a bit, but she maintains poise and continues. "So, then, what do we need to do?"
"You need only invoke the Spark," the spirit says, gesturing to the orb of darkness twirling around Rei's shoulders. "Once it has been released from its chains."
"Wait, that's it?" Eliza is first to say it, and Rei's not sure she would've been able to stomach saying it herself, but - she feels exactly the same. "That's really all there is to this?"
"There will be much for you to do once genesis begins," the spirit continues, "but at this stage, the Seed appears to be dormant."
"Appears to be," Rei murmurs. The spirit doesn't acknowledge her and keeps speaking:
"The universe will finalize and stabilize once the invocation is complete. Your work will begin at that point."
"What will happen to this place?" Naomi asks lowly. "Or to the people still back at the tower?"
"This place will remain," the spirit replies. "It may change in shape, but what was here will remain, roughly speaking. You can decide what to do with the survivors that came with you then."
The humans reconvene within the tower. Gwen darts over to them at the earliest opportunity, and explains that she saw what happened outside. "Congratulations!" she says, delighted and relieved. But the others' reactions leave something to be desired.
"I would like to believe that it's good enough," Rei says softly, frowning at Eliza, who frowns right back. "But something about this doesn't feel right. It's too simple."
"I have a theory," Eliza hums, "though it's far from flattering." She glances at Gwen. "But firstly - this has been bothering me since we got here, obviously, but why don't you remember us?"
"W-Why?" Gwen balks. "I - I don't really know! We all just appeared here, as far as I know. O-Obviously I have some memory of being here before you arrived, but..."
"You just appeared here," Eliza repeats lowly.
Rei frowns, looking between them, as Gwen continues to wither in discomfort and anxiety. Naomi, following Rei's gaze, turns to Eliza and clicks her tongue. "You're not going to get anything out of interrogating her," she scolds. Eliza ignores her entirely.
"You appeared here when the Seed was created, with some kind of prior context," the mayor continues, "and just picked that up and began preparing for us to arrive. That's your story?"
"That's what happened!" Gwen protests. "Why are you doubting me...? I don't have anything to hide from you..."
"I don't think Eliza is suspicious of you in particular," Rei says softly. Eliza nods sagely, closing her eyes.
"This entire situation feels wrong," Eliza declares, her voice sharper and colder than before. "It's ludicrous to think that all you need to do to create the new world is say some fancy words to some weird demi-god-spirits and convince them not to give up on humanity. And that's to say nothing of how strange it is that they didn't corroborate Yomi's explanation for why we have to do this in the first place."
"W-what are you implying?" Gwen stammers. Eliza looks her way, tired, incredulous. "I want to help," Gwen protests, stamping her foot. "I know you just see me as another part of the Seed, but - but I really do want to help you! I want to help the Curator succeed! We all want that, don't we?"
"I suppose we do," Eliza says dryly. Gwen shrinks back even more, looking helplessly at Rei.
Rei wonders for a moment if she should say anything about how cruel this is. Even if she has been co-opted in some capacity by the Seed, Gwen is still Gwen, and Eliza's words are hurting her. But at this point, something like that doesn't matter to Eliza. People's feelings have never mattered to Eliza, not really, not weighed against the responsibilities of survival, and that's a way of thinking that Rei has to admit she understands. Even before the end... Eliza forged her own path, and cared little for anyone that disagreed with it. It was one of the things about her that had made her stand out to Rei, one of the reasons she had befriended her in the first place. Maybe out of some vain hope that she would be there to see reconstruction, a hope that she somehow managed to manifest. And this is what it's led to.
"What's weird to me," Naomi adds, "is that Gwen doesn't remember us, but you and I both remember Rei and each other just fine, Eliza. How come we're special?"
"Yeah," Eliza agrees lowly, turning to nod to Naomi. "That's really what makes Gwen so strange. Why just her? Is it just our involvement in tearing open the remnant, or is there some other force at work?" She turns back to Gwen, gesturing pointedly. "You, or whatever entity has given you your memories, or whatever, expects us to simply accept that SOME of the survivors of the remnant were repurposed for the Seed, but not us. Why?"
"Maybe because you were close friends with the Curator," Gwen says feebly, fidgeting. "M-Maybe I wasn't really that close with her." She glances shyly in Rei's way. "Was I?"
Rei doesn't know what to say. Eliza is glaring at her, and she kind of knows why. This is a terribly dangerous subject.
"Even then, that's arbitrary," Eliza says, through gritted teeth now as though forcing a sense of calmness. "I understand that all of this magic nonsense can be arbitrary at times, but it doesn't give me any sense of faith in the process, and frankly, I don't have a lot of reason to trust anything that's happened so far."
"W-well," Gwen gulps, "um, there are many questions I can answer for you! So that might be something we can fix."
"Why did our old world die?" Eliza asks coldly.
"A-ah..." Gwen's spirit dies immediately, fading back and starting to fidget.
"If the spirits of this world don't know," Rei interrupts, "how could Gwen? My mother wasn't perfect, Eliza, maybe she got some things wrong. Maybe the world really did die when it was meant to, and maybe that's what we're really here to try to fix. Yomi thought the problem was in the way the world was constructed, but maybe it wasn't, maybe it's in the way the world was managed. Maybe she was just a terrible Curator, Eliza. There's a lot that we don't know."
"So what do you want me to do?!" Eliza shouts back, gesturing wide. "If there is something that I'm missing, please, by all means, tell me! Explain to me why this is so easy, explain to me what we're doing wrong! But heaven and hell forbid, Rei, if you invoke that Spark and create some new universe and we fucking forgot about something that we could've caught in advance, you're going to be kicking yourself for literal eternity."
"I hadn't really thought about it," Naomi says, a bit timidly, "but - what exactly happens to you after you invoke the Spark, Rei? What'll happen to us?"
Eliza stammers and sputters to a stop, staring at her bewildered. "I-I assumed she'd just enter the new world and assume some kind of stewardship over it like Yomi had," she says faintly. "Right? She - she must have told you something about that, right?"
"Technically," Rei sighs, "she told me that I'd remain outside the universe, but I think she expected I'd be able to figure things out myself. What matters is what the spirits told us: this space is going to remain, though it might change shape. So we'll still be here, and it'll be up to us to determine what to do with everyone that's still with us."
"Okay, so, we'll be here, also," Eliza murmurs, pinching the bridge of her nose. "But, that's beside the point - as far as we know, we only get one shot at this, right? We have to be absolutely sure it's right, but we don't even know how to tell."
"It may be that we can't tell," Rei says, but Eliza's voice jumps an octave, a growl tearing from her throat as she overrides Rei:
"And I'm just supposed to go off of your maybes and what ifs?!" she snaps. "This is exactly what I was talking about in the remnant, Rei - you're brilliant about your theory and confident in your conclusions, but you just don't follow through, you leave everything vague and undefined, and someone has to come in after the fact and clean up after your mess -- "
"Wait, wait," Naomi gasps, "guys, calm down - "
"I will be calm when Rei gets it through her head that we can't just leave everything to chance!" Eliza snarls.
"What exactly am I leaving to chance?" Rei replies - her voice cool and soft, but a bitter edge lying just underneath; she folds her arms and settles into a steely glare. "What you see as an uncertainty that must be corrected, I see as a simple fact of life. I am a Curator, Eliza, but I am also still human, and the nature of humanity is such that we cannot know everything. We aren't working with a science experiment carefully contained within a lab. These are not results we can verify against someone else's work. We have only ourselves and the world around us to judge by."
"So let's take our time," Eliza cries, exasperated, "and explore the world around us, and make sure we're not missing anything! I'm not saying that you don't know what you're doing - "
"I'm not suggesting that we rush anything either," Rei snaps back, "but we won't get anywhere if we refuse to place our trust in what the Seed has placed in front of us! The structure of this place, literally and symbolically, has meaning that we need to preserve and understand. Trying to worm into it, to understand its inner workings, is just going to cause it to unravel underneath us, and anything you think you'll learn about it will be meaningless. We have to understand it as an abstraction, not as a machine."
"Um," Gwen says feebly, faint and weak. Eliza sighs angrily, brushing her hair back and turning to her, fire in her eyes. "I-I think something is wrong."
"Great!" Eliza shouts, throwing her hands up. "A lead, finally. What's happening?"
"I don't know." Gwen glances towards the holographic display, and the others follow her eyes to see that Gwen's friends have all gathered around it, watching with hushed anxiety as error displays begin to pop up around one of the islands. "I don't know what would be causing that," Gwen continues faintly. "I've never seen that before."
"Is that an outsider?" Rei whispers. Eliza starts to back away from the screen.
"We need to go," she intones, and Rei nods back to her, gesturing for the Spark to manifest a tear in reality behind her companion.
For a moment, Rei and her companions are quiet, mostly staring at the array of lookalikes in shock. Eliza and Naomi again exchange glances, this time incredulous. They are certainly rather strange to behold, moving in a sort of synchronized, almost choreographed way, with only the one in the center seeming to have her own rhythm. Rei doesn't let it shake her, though; it's true that this is not what she expected, but that's fine. She knew better than to expect much of anything at all.
"Is that why this world ended early?" Rei asks politely. The many spirits all turn to her together.
"Early?" they say, in chorus, incredulous. "We have no notion of early. It ended and is gone now."
Rei is undeterred. "Will you help me make a new world, then?"
"But it is hopeless," they reply sadly. "What purpose would it serve to make a world knowing it will be so flawed?"
"What difference does it make to you?" Eliza says warily. She glances at Rei, and Rei allows her an approving nod. It is fine for Eliza to explore this abstraction; her insight is valuable. "You are spirits that gave form to the laws of reality in our previous world, are you not?" Slowly and individually, each of the six girls nod, some with purpose and others with confusion. "Why then does it matter what the inhabitants of your world experience? Why are you conscious of it at all?"
"Why are we conscious," they ask her, in a mocking voice. If Eliza is annoyed she doesn't show it. "We have been asked a question by the Curator. This is our answer. It is hopeless."
"What is hopeless?" Eliza says irritably.
"What was the question?" Naomi adds helpfully. "About making the new world, right?" One by one, they answer:
"She asked if humans could live and grow without the constraint of age."
"She asked if humans could push beyond the threshold of what is comfortable and discover the world's secrets."
"She asked if humans have a greater purpose than to merely exist and perpetuate their existence."
"She asked if humans have a destiny to overcome their inevitable ends."
"She asked if humans will ever create something lasting and beautiful."
"She asked if humans will reach their fullest potential."
"But they cannot," they chant, "and they do not, and they will not, for it is hopeless."
"It's like we're watching a play," Naomi murmurs, clearly trying to suppress a giggle. Rei glances back at her briefly, but doesn't respond to her.
"Very well," she says instead, doing her best to take the spirits' theatrics in stride; there's really no better way to respond to any of this than to just roll with it. "How do you know this?"
"You're describing constraints of reality," Eliza adds lowly. "Have you noticed, Rei? Their little poems have themes." Rei nods in agreement. "I've noticed time and death, at least. Those ones are obvious."
"So wait," Naomi says, "one of you - controls time?" One of the girls nods slowly, watching Naomi warily, and Naomi tilts her head, smiling. "So - can't you give humans more time?"
"There isn't 'more time'," the girl says, distraught and annoyed. "I gave all I had to them and it wasn't enough."
"And what about death?" Eliza asks sardonically, rounding on Naomi as well. "What if we just don't have a death spirit? Will people stop dying?"
"Maybe," Naomi says, pouting at her. "I don't know why you're acting so mean about it, it's not like you know how this works any better than any of us do."
"I'm sure it sounds like a game to you," Eliza huffs, "but as ridiculous as it may seem, this is our reality we're talking about. The rules exist for a reason."
"Ridiculous," the time-spirit(?) repeats irritably, folding her arms at Eliza, who glares right back.
"Let's not make fun of them," Rei says quietly. Eliza sighs, tossing her hair. "Eliza; what do you think we should do?"
"Well, first of all," Eliza mutters, "did you ask those questions literally, or did they just pick them up from you somehow?"
"I didn't," Rei replies, but she wonders; did they have to do with the way she envisioned the futures of humanity in the remnant? Perhaps that makes sense in its own way. She posed these questions to the future; the Seed has answered her with doubt and apology.
"So, we should understand our objective first of all," Eliza continues, turning back to the Spirits, who face her all together with apprehension. "You, spirits, or whatever you're called. We want to make a world that won't die prematurely like ours did. How can we do that?"
"The world's fate is already set," they say ominously.
"I get that," Eliza groans. "It ended already. But what led to that fate, why did it end early?"
"It was meant to," they say.
"How can a world be meant to last longer?" Rei asks easily. She suspects they'll get further by playing along.
"It doesn't work like that," the Time Spirit replies angrily, folding her arms again. "Didn't I already say? Time is not infinite. There is only so much. Your world ran out. You can't just fabricate more time - "
"Can you recycle it, then?" Eliza asks.
The Time Spirit stares at her in horror, as though she has suggested murder. "Recycle-- Time is not glass or plastic, to be melted down and fused into some new shape - it is an irrevocable record of causality! That which comes was determined by that which came before. You cannot take away some piece of it and mush the rest together."
"From your perspective," Rei hums, "time happens all at once. It doesn't progress; it's a singular thing that you mold into some shape." And the Time Spirit gestures to her with gratitude, bowing.
"The Curator understands," she says with relief. "To a living thing, which sees time as 'spent', recycling is a novel idea. But you cannot recycle the foundation of a building to make it taller."
"No," Eliza admits tiredly, "you can't."
"And yet," Rei continues, "there are great expanses of time in which little changes. Right?" The Time Spirit hesitates, but reluctantly nods. "If humans could perhaps breach causality - could they spread through these unpopulated times? With your help, they could use time so much more efficiently."
"They could," the spirit admits, with clear reluctance. "Perhaps that way human history could last somewhat longer, but..."
"But how could they do such a thing?!" another spirit shouts in dismay. "To leave the comfort of one's history behind for something uncharted?"
"I don't know, that doesn't seem unusual at all," Naomi says bemusedly. "Aren't there always explorers and trailblazers in every generation? We had some, didn't we?"
"More pioneers of science than explorers of the unknown," Eliza replies softly, "but in this case, that isn't entirely different."
"But these people you speak of, always they return," the spirit says sadly. "To venture forth to somewhere new without the force of home calling back to you... never has the human spirit accomplished this."
"But - but that does happen all the time," Naomi says, now confused. "Right? Am I hallucinating or something?"
"Our history was full of people that ventured from home with no intent to return," Eliza agrees, nodding slowly, "whether figurative or literal. She's talking about something more abstract."
"A force always pulling you home," Rei says softly. "Gravity."
"All things wish to band together with others like them," the gravity spirit says, her voice sad and faint. "Humans are no different. Even your explorers and pioneers seek only what they consider home. Without a drive to seek the unknown, how can they grow past their limits?"
"She's so poetic," Naomi says blankly.
"Yeah," Eliza chuckles, "they sound just like Rei, don't they?"
Rei works her jaw, refusing to look at either of them. "They do not," she huffs.
The Gravity Spirit looks among the three of them, confused and somewhat put out, before focusing on Rei again. "I'm sorry I cannot bring you more hope," she says faintly. "Humans may cross one boundary, or even many, but it's in their nature to seek rest. They cannot overcome their own limits."
"I don't think that is true," Rei says kindly. "Even if one human only makes a short step of progress, another following in her footsteps can make the next."
"Yeah, the thing about humanity," Eliza briskly adds, "is that we share all our accomplishments among ourselves. What one generation discovers is now the starting point for the next, and so on. Just because have to make our journies one generation at a time doesn't mean we can't continue to progress indefinitely, does it?"
"I understand your thinking," Gravity says faintly, frowning, folding her arms slowly. "But... that's..." She shakes her head, lowering her gaze, biting her thumb. But whatever has consumed her thoughts isn't ever mentioned, because yet another spirit speaks up:
"By what right can humans advance so freely?" the new spirit bitterly cries. "It is the purpose of humans to nurture and nourish. In just the process of earning their lives, they sacrifice themselves."
"I'm gonna be honest," Naomi murmurs, "I have no idea what this one is talking about."
"You mentioned duty before," Eliza muses, "and purpose just now. You're talking about some kind of responsibility that living things have?" The spirit nods, and draws herself up serenely.
"That which wishes to live must justify its existence to all others with the same wish," she says, her voice stern. "In this constant struggle of proof, there can be no winners. Only contestants and losers."
"But humans learned to overcome these limits," Rei says. "Through automation and technology, they could provide for themselves and others, even very easily." Eliza nods her agreement.
"Ideally, and with proper guidance," Eliza continues, "humans would use this advantage to nourish other species, other worlds they encounter. Society is meant to help everyone prosper from its own success. By working together they can fulfill their responsibility without sacrificing forward momentum. Don't you think that's a reasonable outcome?"
"To what end?" asks another spirit, frowning. "To be so selfless, humans must accept that they cannot save themselves, and instead deign to save others."
"And what greater teacher of that lesson than an impassable barrier of death?" coos Rei.
The spirit glares at her, clearly lost for a comeback and upset about it. "Good guess," Eliza huffs, smirking at Rei. Rei smiles back.
"It matters not," says yet another spirit, disdainfully. "All that is created must decay into nothingness. That is entropy - not a law itself that can be tampered with, but the natural consequence of all laws."
"But entropy is not unlike death," Rei adds, "in that it pushes humankind forward. If you stop progressing, you will be lost to it."
"Maybe so," the spirit sighs. "But - how can you know that they won't stop?"
"She can't." The last spirit finally speaks, her voice darker and lower than the others, glowering at Rei with disdain severe enough to border on anger. "She can't know. You speak in circles around what we have studied for the entire history of your universe. You can't simply claim to know better than human nature like this. You saw for yourself what happens to humanity over the course of its history. They all fall to nothingness in the end."
"Not all of them," Rei says, gesturing to either side, smiling with great pride. Eliza smirks, looking away shyly. Naomi beams. The spirit looks between the two with a sort of dull aggravation. "I understand that not all humans are destined for greatness. But that doesn't change that I believe they can truly be great. They need guidance, and perhaps slightly more favorable conditions, but I believe we can achieve that."
"And, as they advance," Eliza adds softly, "they can bring their prosperity to everything else around them. It doesn't have to be limited to just a few. If you can advance one segment of humanity far enough, then we can start tackling this as a society and not as a few kids on a desperation mission to fix the universe."
"You almost sound bitter about it," Rei murmurs, casting her a playfully disappointed glance. Eliza's return glare is not so playful. "But, she's right. We've thought this through, talked about it quite a bit, in our training and waiting for this chance. For us and our purpose - we need only find one timeline, one persistent group of humans, that give our work meaning. If we can do that, then we'll have succeeded. That will be enough to create a world that exceeds its own capacity and overcomes its own limits."
The spirit watches them leerily. On all the spirits' faces are expressions of doubt, but gone is the abject hopelessness from before.
"You really do think you can cultivate such humans," the last spirit sighs slowly. "One that could reach out and touch the light of inspiration, and share that light with all others?"
"Do you think I would have made it this far if I couldn't?" Rei coos, her smile growing.
The spirit takes a deep breath, and sighs it back out. The others all turn to her; she locks eyes with each, and they nod to her. Rei watches with a growing sense of relief and excitement. "Very well," the last spirit sighs. "Then I suppose we are moved by your optimism. We will assist you in your new world."
The Order of Heroes hangs at a precious moment of pseudo-peace. Even with Veronica wounded and the Emblian forces pushed back, the heroes falter as their very mission is called into question. Until their motive and goal is made clear, they can't proceed like before.
Faith in the Order's leadership is shaken; while Kiran must justify herself and her actions to the outside world of Askr, Sharena and (mostly) Anna take on a scheme of their own to rebuild trust from both the Order's members, and the outside populace of Askr. It's not like the Heroes have anything better to do while they wait, right?
So it occurs to me that I got so sidetracked from posting the last few chapters of this that I forgot I’d never actually shared it to tumblr! Here it is!
Cinders of the Emblem is going back on hold after this, unfortunately. Wishes from Oblivion has been silent for a while but I am working furiously on the Sky arc and it’s very nearly finished; once I’ve queued all that up it will be time to revisit some old projects, hopefully even finish them up, and then finally really examine Cinders and decide what I want it to be. After multiple illnesses and a lot of hectic holiday travel around the new year it’s really nice to be back on schedule with writing!
Anyway; please bear in mind that this intermission, while parts of it are directly plot-relevant, is not entirely safe for work. Each chapter is individually marked in the description as to whether or not it is work safe and any additional tags that you might need, so read at your own discretion. That said, I hope you enjoy the Order of Heroes’ brief summer downtime! Thank you as always for reading!
As she guides her friends inside, Gwen begins by explaining some things that Rei already knows to some extent - though the others are much more surprised. She knows about the nature of existence as a collaboration of souls - an agreement among many conscious spaces to obey the same rules in tandem with one another. Gwen goes on to explain that some of these souls assume roles of governance over the rules that they agreed upon, and Rei finds this to be a reasonable idea.
The tower's main foyer is an impressive room with a pleasantly orthogonal design, its floors polished marble and the lower section of its walls and its ceiling made of dark stone, likely obsidian. In the room's center is an enormous holographic display larger than Rei's apartment in the remnant, which is currently showing a wireframe of the islands that float between the two towers' balconies.
"I was able to explore them myself," Gwen explains, gesturing to the islands, "and... I could tell that something was out there. We have been trying to determine the identity of the Spirits since then, and we think we have a few ideas, but we can't confirm them without interacting with them directly, and... we think they will only interact with whoever has the Spark."
"That makes sense," Naomi hums.
"Why?" Eliza challenges. "Why does that make sense?"
"W-Well," Gwen gasps, "um, maybe they can't distinguish anyone without one from the background noise of the rest of the Seed, or maybe they just know we aren't as important in reconstruction. We don't really know."
"It isn't like they could ask," Rei adds bemusedly. Eliza responds with a tired glare. "Well, then, let me ask another question. How many Spirits did you identify?"
"Well," Gwen says slowly, glancing back at her display, adjusting her glasses timidly. She's blushing a little bit, which Rei thinks is very sweet. "T-There are seven islands, so... it stands to reason that there are six or seven Spirits."
"Six or seven?" Eliza says critically.
"We think one might be for the Curator," Gwen replies, though scarcely above a mumble. She seems threatened by Eliza for some reason. Unsettling as that is, Rei tries not to dwell on it.
"That's not very many," Rei continues courteously. "Do you have any idea why these specific six are present?"
"Ah! Yes! That." Gwen jumps back to attention, clearly delighted to have an answer. "Existence in general is fairly stable here. Maybe there are only a few things that are out of place. Most of the, um, composite souls seem willing to remain in place, and these may be the only - uh - the only variables, I guess."
"So," Naomi says slowly, "there are a few spirits aren't willing to settle back into their roles, so... we have to convince them?"
"That makes this sound like the setup to some kind of logic puzzle," Eliza mutters. Rei sighs, turning to her slowly, as Gwen's enthusiasm fades and she recedes from their conversation. Eliza, meanwhile, glares back at Rei in defiance. "Or is there some explanation for that, too?"
"You're a smart woman," Rei says quietly. "I'm sure you already have an idea." Because of course, if a universe is a collective agreement among many conscious souls, but the Curator above all of them has conscious authority over its shape - then a Seed, a half-formed conceptual universe, would certainly take shape based on the Curator, wouldn't it? With all of her preparation and her drive for the task ahead, of course it would present itself in a straightforward way like this. Right?
Eliza doesn't say anything else to disrupt them, so Rei returns her attention to Gwen, sighing briskly and drawing herself up again. "We'll investigate the isles, then," she says calmly. "With any luck, this will be a simple task after all."
"Okay!" Gwen cheers, as they turn away. "Good luck!"
When Rei uses her power more slowly, the others recognize it 'skipping', the same way they skipped the elevator; Rei simply does not need a portal to imagine herself stepping through to another side, because she has the Spark of Creation - a black hole through which she can exit to anywhere she likes. Naomi and Eliza are both dimly aware that they also did not need a door rather recently, but can't clearly recall how they know that. Naomi doesn't think it worth mentioning. Eliza makes note to mention later if it is relevant. It won't be.
When they first set foot on the islands, they seem far smaller than the view from the balcony suggested, but the towers also seem much further away. They can scarcely stand all on one, but the others are arranged nearby, nearly close enough to jump to even without the ability to ignore the constraints of reality. But for the moment, they stay.
On each of those islands, as though waiting for them, are silhouettes of girls sitting at their edges, watching expectantly. They become clearer as Rei advances, but she hesitates before speaking to them, because she is surprised to find that they each look just like her, clothed in elegant robes like statuesque ancient deities brought to life.
"Somehow," Eliza mutters, "this doesn't surprise me."
Rei pauses to glare at her again. Eliza smirks back, and Rei is unsure whether this is playful banter or not. It doesn't matter right now. "Spirits of the old world," she says, spreading her arms to address them. They all cry out at once:
"It won't work!"
Rei steps back, alarmed. "What won't?" Eliza asks sharply.
"They don't have enough time," one protests. "You always need more time."
"It's so hard to push away from home," another adds in despair. "To leave the comforting shores whence you came. They always pull you back."
"They must sustain themselves and others," another says somberly. "It is their duty."
"That which they accomplish is lost to death in the end," one says morosely.
"And what they leave behind," another cries, "will just decay and corrode into nothingness."
"Even if they find what they seek, they cannot touch it," sobs the last. "It will be their undoing."
"Humanity cannot be what we hope for," all of them say, with finality and remorse. "So this world is doomed. You cannot save it. It simply can't be done."
Naomi is first to break the stunned silence: "So we're here!"
"Yes!" Rei whirls around to beam at her. "Yes, we're here, at last. Far too long!"
She looks around almost giddily; she hasn't seen such beautiful greenery in... in years, certainly, but possibly ever! And the architecture of the towers, and the floating islands beyond... it's surreal and striking and somehow elegant, and she loves this place with all her heart already. She wonders, idly, if there will still be a place like this in her new world. But probably not.
She tries to center herself on reality (?) again, taking a deep breath, thinking through her mental checklist of things to verify, explore, understand. "Alright," she sighs, folding her arms - the Spark's orbit swirls about her shoulders now, humming contentedly. "Now, Yomi was quite unsure what the Seed would look like," she explains, "so she only gave me very high-level instructions on what to do once I actually got here."
"Are you kidding?" Eliza cries in dismay. "What did you spend all that time training for then?!"
"Invoking the Spark," Rei says patiently, sighing as she looks Eliza in the eyes. The ex-mayor is plainly scared, and Rei supposes she can't blame her. It's strange not being 'normal', strange to have always known on some level that this was coming. She has been thinking that for years now. "Understanding how to utilize the Spark once I got it. Understanding the nature of reality, and how it can be folded and manipulated conceptually. Fundamentals, Eliza. Once we get out into the field, building an understanding of what is wrong and how to resolve it for the next universe is our job."
Eliza stares at her for a moment more, before sighing angrily and hanging her head, brushing a hand roughly through her scalp. "Fine, sure," she mutters. "I just - after so long - "
"Yomi wanted to teach me for decades," Rei added, trying to soften her voice, to hide her irritation. "She accelerated our lessons and focused on the basics at my request."
Eliza was quiet. She seemed to understand.
"So," Naomi cut in, "we don't know what exactly is going on here, we just know that it's... um... what do we know?"
"Think of the Seed as an Outsider that represents the template for a new universe," Rei says coolly. "We have to figure out what's missing from that template, fix those discrepancies, and then bind the Spark to its shape. Once the Spark resets, it'll use the Seed as its basis for a new timeline, and if we've done everything properly... we'll have genesis."
"In the interest of understanding," Eliza says softly, "what happens exactly if we reset the Spark now?"
"Well, the template isn't complete," Rei replies, "and that's why the world ended prematurely. Yomi seemed to believe that normally there wouldn't need to be any changes, but something was wrong with our previous world that we needed to fix."
"So," Eliza prompts.
"So the Universe would probably begin and then immediately collapse," Rei finishes. "Or we'd just go back to where we were before, maybe, but that wouldn't really be any better."
"It might be prudent to know," Eliza says, looking up, her expression surprised - any lingering anger now gone. "If the invocation of the Spark can be reversed - there may be a reason for us to do that."
"Maybe so." Rei raises her eyebrows, somewhat taken aback, and she smiles. "That's very insightful, Eliza!"
"Yeah," Eliza mutters, trailing off into something Rei can't hear, but Rei ignores it.
In the next moment, the enormous doors to the tower open - everyone turns, including Rei still in midair, to see Gwen walk out onto the balcony. She's plainly trying to carry herself with a sort of regal bearing and is dressed in a more professional dress and coat rather than her normal baggy hoodie and skirt, though her general stature just doesn't quite measure up. However, she clears her throat, and announces:
"W-Welcome to the Seed of Sky!"
"The Seed of Sky?" Rei repeats in wonder - she guides herself to rest in a sitting position in front of Gwen, as the other two stand on either side of her. Gwen looks between the three of them with a timid smile.
"You know something about it," Eliza says lowly, though her voice is laced with awe rather than suspicion. "What happened?"
"We have been, um, studying this space," Gwen explains, her voice shaking, "f-for - for quite a while. It's clearly not finished, and we knew that... a Curator would be coming along soon... I-I didn't think there would be three of you!"
Eliza's expression is changing to alarm. She looks at Rei, who is unreadable. Naomi shakes her head slowly. "You've met us before," the girl says, warily.
"Before, probably," Gwen agrees, smiling sheepishly. "I-I've been, um, I've been really nervous about meeting you - uh, again, I guess. You - you all seem really powerful and nice."
"You didn't think there would be three of us," Eliza says quietly.
"There is only one Curator, after all," Rei adds kindly, raising her hand - the Spark swirls playfully about her index finger as she gestures. "I brought the others with me. But I take it that means they didn't remain within the Seed as it was regenerated?"
"Oh, good," Gwen sighs, clearly deeply relieved. "You know a lot already. Okay, that makes this easier to explain -- you, um, you basically have it right. Everyone else remembers being here, though we don't recall how we arrived."
"What became of the apathy disorder patients?" Eliza asks, hurriedly and with dismay. "Are they still here? Did they wake up?"
Gwen mouths the words apathy disorder to herself, her brow tightening, as though she hasn't heard the phrase before. "Is that what they were when they came here," she mutters, to herself. "There are - there are a number of people in stasis capsules in the Tower's lower levels. They're certainly alive, but don't respond to anything outside. I guess that must be them."
"Symbolically preserved," Rei says, with delight. "That's very good. Then, the only ones that would be awake would be your friends?"
"Yes!" Gwen nods at her eagerly. "We have spent our time investigating this space in hopes of helping you correct it. I'll be happy to share what we know so far. Would you like to come inside?"
Eliza and Naomi both make to look at Rei, but Rei doesn't hesitate; they wind up exchanging worried glances, instead, as Rei responds without a trace of concern: "Yes, please lead on, Gwen."
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 7/7
Fandom: Fire Emblem Heroes
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Summoner | Eclat | Kiran, Alfonse (Fire Emblem), Sharon | Sharena, Ike (Fire Emblem), Senerio | Soren, Mist (Fire Emblem), Elincia Ridell Crimea, Eirika (Fire Emblem), Sanaki Kirsch Altina, Veronica (Fire Emblem)
Additional Tags: Many additional minor characters, Other Additional Tags to Be Added
Series: Part 8 of Cinders of the Emblem
Summary:
The Order of Heroes is led by a Summoner. An otherworldly hero foretold in the legends of the divine relic Breidablik, the Great Hero that the order believes will save Askr from its enemies.
Kiran does not feel like she is any of those things. Kiran is some nobody very, very far from home, and as the war with Embla continues to escalate, so too does the weight of what Kiran is asking of her heroes - and the guilt of what she is doing to her enemies.
Okay! Act III (which WAS act 6, but then we renumbered ‘em) is all finished!
This act starts to explore Kiran’s relationship with the Order of Heroes and the nature of the worlds in Fire Emblem Heroes. I wound up really loving Kiran’s character here, and I’m excited to do a lot more with her in the next few acts.
Up next is an intermission though. Poor girls could use a break!
Everyone, even Eliza, was reverently quiet as Rei explained the plan again. Again, because they'd all heard it before already; Rei had already told them a week ago and then some time before that, too. Everyone understood that Rei needed to do this to calm her own nerves. Rei was the only one that could not afford to be nervous.
"Is everyone clear on what they're doing?" Rei finished, looking the two other girls in the eyes. Gwen isn't there, but Eliza already promised to take care of her part; that honestly only made Rei more nervous, but at this point, she didn't really have time to worry about it. She could already feel the boundary straining. Outsiders were trying to force their way in. If they broke things down prematurely...
"We've got it," Naomi promised, grinning. She looked pale, but at least excited. It afforded Rei a brief, faltering smile. Where would she be without Naomi?
"We'll be fine," Eliza assured her, though the bitterness in her voice was still very clear. "You take care of your part and don't worry about ours." Rei hoped that this would be enough for them to put aside their disagreement. Thinking about it, though, maybe Eliza just felt powerless. She had never been good at sympathizing with that, being someone who had always known what was coming, always had an idea how to proceed...
"We should hurry, then," Rei sighed, shaking her head. "You have your catalysts, right?"
"In my office," Eliza said evenly. Her job was to anchor to the present.
"Back in my room," Naomi added. Her job was to pull back towards the past.
"Okay." Rei took a deep breath, and sighed it back out, trying to steady her heartbeat as best she could. "We'll meet up here once things destabilize. We should have a good while before time stops flowing normally, but don't push your luck. Watch the sky and as soon as it changes come back out here. Got it?"
"Rei," Eliza sighed, "we know. You have the hard part still ahead of you. Deal with that first."
"We've got it," Naomi promised, waving one hand to shush Eliza, who rolled her eyes and turned away. "We're all ready, Rei. Let's get this started!"
"Yeah." Rei manages to smile again, flexing her fingers behind her back. "Okay - see you soon. Be safe."
She turned back towards the apartment building where Yomi was waiting for the end; her destination, however, was on top of the building - not inside it. As the girls separated, the world quivered again, forcing Rei to concentrate momentarily on her balance even though nothing beneath her truly moved. It was coming apart faster than she'd expected... but she couldn't afford to worry. Not yet. She would do her job, and they'd do theirs, and they'd be fine.
Phobos has seen Gwen's 'bedroom' - the massive server room at the bottom of the maintenance floors - but only indistinctly, and that makes it hard to visualize correctly from outside. Instead she sways her way down the stairs, careful to stick to shadows when she can. It's a long ways down for a human to walk, but for spiders to jump and rappel it isn't so bad.
Gwen's space is very modest. There is a mattress on the floor in one of the only open areas of the room, in one of the corners, with a blanket draped over cables above it to act as a sort of curtain; she cautiously checks it to confirm it is empty before proceeding, visualizing that the dark, enclosed room is in fact her cave. It is a somewhat larger opening than her manifestation usually invoked, but the garage had worked fine, and this does, too; enveloped in her own comforting darkness, Phobos now recalls that there is a tiny screen in an alcove somewhere, but she needs only think of it for the room's properties to change yet again.
Now the racks of blinking computers are polished silver, the broken and crusted fluorescent lighting replaced with small but intricate chandeliers. Phobos is rather surprised by this change, actually; it isn't at all like what she remembers Aplistia's vault to be like. But the status panels and access terminals all change, and Aplistia's text is displayed:
PHOBOS! THIS IS A DELIGHTFUL PLACE. WELL CHOSEN. THIS IS GWEN'S ROOM, YES?
Yes, Phobos responds, as swiftly as she can. It's risky, she may come back at any moment, but I couldn't imagine anywhere better for you. Do you fit comfortably?
I DO, IN FACT! WE'LL HAVE TO ACT QUICKLY TO MINIMIZE OUR CHANCES OF BEING SEEN. THE CLOSET THERE - CAN PARIAS JOIN US FROM THERE?
Sure enough, there was a closet door that Phobos had not noticed, but she doesn't take the time to investigate it; it is too small, and doesn't feel right. Instead, she says: Your materialization is, um - kind of - a lot!
LUXURIOUS, MAYBE? Aplistia seems amused. TRUTH BE TOLD I HAD FELT KIND OF BARE AND INSIGNIFICANT BEFORE MEETING YOU ALL. CONSIDER IT A REFLECTION OF MY EXCITEMENT. NOW YOU HAVE A JOB TO DO STILL!
Yes, I do! Phobos begins to filter back towards the stairs, though in truth, she is going to teleport again rather than climb back up. Keep a low profile, whatever you do! We can't let this place be compromised, okay?
I KNOW! I'LL DO MY BEST. HURRY! SEE YOU SOON!
Satisfied with that, Phobos takes her leave. Her next destination is not far, but it is not normally accessible from here.
Rei devised this method of peeling open reality by herself. She was actually pretty proud of it, being honest. With the remnant's stability clearly fading, if several people tried to pull the entire remnant in multiple directions in time, it would splinter open - from there, Rei could trace backwards into the past, find the origin point... and return with the Spark of Creation.
But for the first part, Rei needed to pull towards the future. That was what she was best at.
She stood on the roof of the apartment building where she and Yomi had grown up. Hands behind her back, she turned her gaze to the sky. It had not moved in two years. It was just the same as before. Even the shimmering distortion of the stasis barrier, she had learned, moved in patterns. And those patterns were the same. Nothing changed here; in its own way, it was its own form of stasis, a smaller piece of purgatory. And when you thought about it hard enough... so was the world she had been born into.
Decades, centuries, of the same causes being fought over, the same mistakes being made, the same rises and falls in civilization even as more and more historians documented them and their patterns. Knowing made no difference. The world moved in a rhythm that humanity was too foolish to deny.
That ended today.
Rei stared at the sky and, with resignation, imagined it as it would have been if things had not ended at the time they had. The skies would darken steadily with clouds filled more and more with smoke that would never dissipate all the way. Temperatures would grow hotter and hotter. Piercing sunbeams would blind people below, but the air would scorch no matter how much sun there was, heat trapped inside by an ever-thicker blanket of cloud cover. People would be driven further from the skies, down into the darkness, crowding in slums without room for them. Environmental control would be built for those with the means to afford it.
And that would go on even further. People would start getting sick. People would start dying. It would be too late to change anything by then. Humanity would collapse under its own weight. The planet, scarred and ruined by their influence, would be left lifeless and bleak.
But the magical thing about the future was that it wasn't certain.
Rei imagined a branch - a branch in which a bold collective of people demanded mandatory climate control. A section of the world might listen to their demands, but it's too late to stop the scorching of the earth, they would find, and instead they would build countermeasures. Perhaps encasing their cities within glass, shielding them from a climate they cannot control and focusing instead only on one that they can. Perhaps building extensive underground bunkers made to be livable. These branches coexist in a full universe; Rei imagined them both, pulled towards them both.
She imagined more things, too. She imagined a world in which humans learned to encode themselves as artificial intelligence, and instead learned to live within a cyberspace of their own making, while over centuries and millenia the world around them might heal without their constant influence. She imagined that humans chose to forsake their mother world, swearing never to repeat their mistakes, and forged out into the stars to find a new home - or perhaps even chose to simply live in orbit, scavenging the planet below for parts to continue to expand their spacebound empire.
She wanted to create these worlds. She wanted to watch them grow and progress. Nudge them, ever so gently, to a more peaceful future. She wanted humanity to flourish, to find happiness, to learn and improve and advance as a species. Maybe someday they could all be trusted with the knowledge she possessed now. Maybe someday humans would forge outside the boundaries of existence.
That started with these futures arrayed before her, and many more besides, and she pulled towards them with her mind as hard as she could, demanding reality reshape itself to suit her.
The sky began to change contort and change color. She smiled faintly at it.
You will become the future, she whispered.
The thirtieth-floor atrium has been abandoned for many weeks now. Its smooth paneled floor is cold and Phobos doesn't especially like walking on it. Parias cannot manifest here - not exactly; they will be too visible. But the atrium opens up into a mid-level skyroad; with her ability to cling to walls Phobos circles underneath the road, and cautiously materializes underneath it.
Enshrouded within her own darkness, painfully and frightfully aware of how exposed she is, Phobos works quickly to locate Parias, and Parias swiftly takes their own place, aware of the urgency; as soon as Parias has materialized, Phobos returns to her smaller spiders-only form, and regards her handiwork cautiously. Parias now appears upside-down in the windows of the floor just beneath the Atrium. It is a place that Phobos can remember well enough to call back to later, and the windows themselves serve as barrier and threshold behind which Parias is trapped, as they prefer. Parias gives her a silent thumbs up, and Phobos takes that as her cue to leave. She has to hurry; something strange is happening, and with all three of the outsiders present now, the world's stability surely will collapse before too long.
Passing through another rift in the remnant's weakening space, she returns to the garage, which is just as empty as she remembers. She materializes inside of it; it's large and comfortable, certainly large enough that on one side she can replace a cavern wall with an opening into Gwen's server room. The world strains under the weight of her demand, but Aplistia's screens cheer with delight as Phobos succeeds regardless.
She turns her attention to Parias. She will replace the opposite cavern wall with the windows beneath the Atrium, and they'll have all joined together.
But reality stretches and strains to make this happen - and yet it cannot. It violates the laws of continuity too severely. All at once, something breaks.
Without warning the sky splits open with a horrible screech; the stasis barrier is utterly gone, replaced suddenly and irrevocably with total blackness. There is no source of light into the remnant - it glows with its own light somehow, but that light is fading rapidly.
For a moment, Rei is so seized with shock and horror that she can't move. The world is gone. There is no mistaking it now; this is not the universe she came from. This is a broken scrap of time that will quickly disintegrate into nothingness. Her breath is taken away, her heart pounds in her chest, mortified by what has happened. By what she has caused.
But she can't afford to get cold feet now. Not now, of all times.
When she demands to return to the meeting place, reality - what's left of it - parts readily for her like a lightweight curtain. She steps onto the skyroad, the lights both above and below flickering ominously, though Rei can't remember now whether they were on or off before the - well, the collapse, she supposes. Naomi and Eliza are there, though Rei also can't tell if she beat them there or not. Time and causality are already breaking down. It's happening so much faster than she expected.
"Rei," Naomi is saying, her face ashen, hugging herself. "Rei, something - something weird happened when - god, I don't even know how to describe any of this, but..."
"You were trying to materialize the past," Rei interrupts, holding her shoulder in hopes of calming her. Naomi nods, her eyes growing wide with realization. "Did you succeed?"
"Maybe," Naomi breathes. "Maybe that's what it was?"
"Rei," Eliza warns, "you have to go now." Rei already knows, and she is already gone.
Naomi's room is on the forty-second floor, but when she enters it, she is greeted with a bizarre scene; a family she does not recognize is eating dinner around the dining table, the windows displaying a dazzling sunset beyond that clearly is not possible. Nothing is moving, and there is no sound even as Rei walks through the scene with a sense of morbid wonder. The TV is on, but Rei can't tell what's on it; it definitely isn't static, there are colors and shapes, but she can't make them out. There's a dog pacing about between the kids' chairs. Rei can't tell how many kids there are either. Why? Why are the details so unclear?
She thinks further to the past. The apartment is unfurnished. Further. The floor isn't there; there is only a frame of plywood. Rei wonders with a start what she is standing on - she immediately plummets, panicking at first but quickly thinking only ever further into the past as she falls through story after story of the building's unfinished frame; now it's merely a foundation, now it's paved and then unpaved earth. She quickly rights herself and crashes through the roof of someone's house, only two stories tall, and when she touches the ground it's bare and untamed, a barnyard far in the distance. She isn't hurt, and this time, she doesn't bother to ask herself why not.
Further, MUCH further into the past now. The grass is gone and there is only barren rock and a dark, stormy sky. She turns full circle as the sky whirls by overhead in what must be reverse, as the stone crumbles into the sea and she walks above the waves as casual as can be. She is an observer; she is not truly here, watching a video tape rewind while safe behind the screen, if only for the moment. She will soon break through that screen and touch what lies beyond, but for now, she is safe as the planet reverts to a ball of molten rock and iron, recedes into collapsing gases that spread outward into a disc, and then further outward until no shape is discernable at all. The star around which her world once revolved is gone, or rather, it has not been born yet. Further. Further. The galaxy recedes behind her, all stars in the faint distance converging on a single point in her vision. Further back. All the way back.
Everything is dark except for a single point of blinding, blazing light, just in front of her. She reaches out and touches it.
Suddenly Parias' materialization joins them in the garage, but there are only a few precious moments - no more than a minute or two - which Phobos spends expressing her relief, and Aplistia spends calling them to order. Then the shape of the world changes entirely.
Phobos' garage is no longer barren or empty. It is no longer a garage. It is a hangar. She knows this even though she obscures it nature with her materialization. Parias' skyscraper windows are clean and fresh and sharply reflective. Aplistia's servers neatly line towering walls on racks the size of library shelves.
"Wait, what happened?" Parias asks, their voices wild and shocked. "Something changed just now, didn't it?"
Yes, Phobos gasps, everything's different! What happened!?
"That was very fast," Aplistia observes, speaking now through a tiny hologram - a very small projection rising from a console display, but with conceptual perception, Parias and Phobos can of course see her very clearly. She still is wearing Yomi's form like a mask. Her arms are folded and her expression is both troubled and excited; she smiles as she recognizes the others are waiting for her to speak, to share her understanding with them, and she says cheerfully: "The world has changed in nature. Don't you feel it? A new Curator has been selected."
Where once there had been a skyroad made of laminate glass and steel, Naomi and Eliza now stand on grass. They can't remember the last time they stood on grass, and as they take in their new surroundings and are first struck by the massive gnarled trees on either side of them, they don't know if they've ever seen plant life so vibrant and free before. They aren't sure what changed or how they appeared here. They weren't conscious of any sort of 'movement'. They're just... here now.
But the strangeness of their situation only grows as they stare out into the abyss that is now before them; Eliza turns first to look behind, and sees that they stand on a jutting balcony attached to a skyscraper. Looking to either side she can make out the edges of the building at a great distance, but that suggests that the building is... very bizarrely wide, and as she looks up she cannot make out where the tower ends. She's dizzy, stumbling back as she tries to take in the magnitude of the structure and absolutely cannot. Clouds swirl around the tower at a playful distance far overhead - as though taunting her to try to guess at its true height, gleefully refusing to obscure it.
"What the fuck," Eliza whispers hoarsely. "What the fuck."
"You're telling me," says Naomi, but Naomi's tentatively approaching the balcony's edge and staring out ahead of them rather than above. Another skyscraper crosses her vision, though she would have to guess that it was many miles away; its "width" she can see clearly, though she has no idea how wide it is - but it stretches infinitely to either side, its "height" just as unknowable.
But Naomi is not focused on the skyscraper, because there is a great abyss of clouds and sky between her and them, and scattered amongst the clouds and littering her vision are chunks of other buildings floating in nothingness; though their architecture is ornate, marble and steel flowing together with extravagant vertical landscaping as though they were intended to hang in open air, they are partially in ruin and hang at strange angles relative to one another.
Space tears open at the courtyard's center, a bubble of darkness forming and then receding in the blink of an eye with a faint but unmistakeable sound of air ripping between points; as Eliza and Naomi both turn towards the sound, hovering a foot or two above the grass in front of them is Rei - a wild grin bursting on her face, eyes glittering playfully as her hair flutters in a strange phantom wind. She has one hand held aloft, and circling it is a strange pulsing black circle that distorts the air around it - a black hole, but tiny, no larger than a baseball.
"What is that?" Eliza gasps, pointing. "That - is that - ?!"
"It's the Spark," Rei says gleefully, giggling, unable to contain herself. "It's the Spark! I got it! This is it, this is the Seed!"
She gestures around grandly, grinning as she takes in the chaos in the sky before them, as she too stares at the height of the building they are standing on, no less stymied by it than Eliza. She's confused and in awe, certainly, but she is not afraid. She's not even nervous anymore.
For the first time in her life she feels like she's finally home.
There is a chair at the center of the shaft. A woman with hair darker than any shadow sits in it.
She does not rise from the chair. She sighs heavily as she arrives.
Phobos knows instinctively that this is Aplistia's vault, but it isn't the same shape as before. It has changed dramatically now, shaped like a great stone hall with tall windows facing out into starry indistinct blackness, Yomi's chair positioned at the room's end with lush red carpet leading from its great doors to her. Above the doors are Aplistia's screens, facing down into the chair; outside the windows on either side is Parias, watching, unreadable as always.
Yomi smiles at the change, looking around slowly. Phobos becomes aware that she is standing on, and among, piles upon piles of gold coins that surround the throne and line the carpet's sides. In fact, she is hard to distinguish from the coins themselves. She understands why, and it's a little flattering. "This is quite a change just for me," Yomi says softly.
YOU ARE THE GUEST OF HONOR TODAY, Aplistia replies. The mood is heavy. The enthusiasm from before is gone. THIS IS IT, THEN? THE END OF YOUR CONSCIOUSNESS.
"For now," Yomi agrees. "You figured it out, then."
"You told us to skip forward a year," Parias intones. Their voices are clearly audible even from outside. "Here we are. It seemed a safe assumption that this would be when we act."
Phobos realizes with a start that Yomi does not know that she was being watched. It's a hard realization to stomach; there are many things that she watched in horrified silence with the others, and now wishes to seek answers for. But it probably is not wise to tell Yomi that just then.
"Yes," Yomi hums, leaning back. "This is the end. Are you prepared to hear your side of the plan? I haven't long before Rei wakes me up."
Aplistia's screens blaze with confidence. I AM. Parias nods faintly. Phobos is silent, but she is ready. Aplistia understands, and her screens change to reflect this: WE ARE ALL PREPARED. GO ON.
"Firstly," Yomi explains, "Phobos must infiltrate the boundary by similar means to last time. Perhaps she can do so even more subtly than before. Then, she will need to assist Aplistia and Parias in entering the remnant with her. Your existences combined will exert enough pressure on the remnant that it will destabilize, and Rei knows what to do once that happens." She pauses to take another breath. "It's best if you are not seen by anyone; as you've noticed, they're fairly hostile to outsiders and likely will continue to be for some time. By remaining within the boundary when the remnant ends, you will be included during its reconstruction, but you will have greater freedom to traverse the Seed than should normally be possible."
ONCE THE REMNANT ENDS AND EXISTENCE REFORMS, WON'T NEW TIMELINES BEGIN TO FORM AS WELL? Aplistia seems troubled - or... excited? It's hard to tell. It almost seems like she's trying to withhold whatever she is feeling. The thrumming beneath Phobos' feet, the ambient sound and feeling of Aplistia's emotions, is distant and inconsistent. IF THERE EXISTS A PATH TO SUCCEED, ONE OF THE TIMELINES WILL LEAD THERE...
"A Seed can only form a limited set of timelines," Yomi breathes. "Ideally you will be able to guide one of them to success. You can potentially claim my power from Rei in the failed timelines, once she has invoked it. That should allow you to enter the successful timeline more safely, and be carried forward into existence from there."
Wh- what? Phobos skitters out of her hiding places for a moment. I'm sorry, I don't...
"I don't understand either," Parias agrees as Phobos trails off. "There should be only one of whatever Rei is taking, isn't there? Even if each timeline has its own version, once the Seed resolves..."
Y- Yeah! Phobos decides that this probably is the best way to describe her initial worry. It was definitely something to do with there being only one of Yomi's mysterious power source.
I BELIEVE I LOOSELY UNDERSTAND, Aplistia says. I CAN EXPLAIN IT TO THE OTHERS. Phobos looks to Parias, and finds them looking back at her; they exchange a silent understanding, a willingness to trust Aplistia, and their attention returns to Yomi.
"That's good," Yomi sighs, closing her eyes again. "I shouldn't stay much longer, and you shouldn't delay for too long. Thank you for helping us, everyone - I'm sure Rei will perform her role excellently, with your guidance."
WE'LL TAKE GOOD CARE OF HER, Aplistia promises.
We'll take good care of your world too! Phobos adds. Thank you!
Parias is silent.
Yomi's shadows angle inward, obscuring her. She is gone shortly.
In Yomi's place forms a strange immaterial shape, quickly organizing - patterns of light like a hologram that appear to depict Yomi's form on the throne. But she quickly stands from its gilded seat and bows, hair flaring out behind her; she is adorned in many gold and jewelled trinkets, her eyes glittering bright gold rather than Yomi's violet.
"All right!" the figure says, in a booming and confident voice that Phobos couldn't mistake even though she's technically never heard it before - only read it. "Yomi is gone, and we are left to our own devices without monitoring at long last. This will be the inaugural Outsider Guardian Strategy Meeting!"
Oh! Phobos skitters out from her many hiding places in the coin pile, covering the coins in her dark mass; she is a little disappointed, thinking about it, to be obscuring Aplistia's wealth - but Aplistia does not seem to mind, looking in a full circle at Phobos' gathered spiders with an expression of obvious approval. She looks outside as well, and sees Parias form a thumbs-up, one of the only expressions of emotion that Parias can clearly use given their condition. Um, I guess we are all here!
"I didn't realize you could change your form so much," Parias observes lowly. Aplistia grins into the window.
"I have withheld the full weight of my imagination to avoid pressuring you!" Aplistia announces grandly. "But now, it is time for us to work together, and I won't spare any expense in making this the best experience it can be. I'm sure you can learn to better adjust your manifestations, too! But there's no need to do so right now." She turns back to the room's center, closing her eyes, folding her arms with dramatic flair. "Now then! First order of business: has anyone changed their mind about working with Yomi? Speak now, because once this begins, I will see it through to its end!"
"I am..." Parias hesitates. "We are nervous about the ambiguity surrounding parts of Yomi's plan," they say carefully. "But if nothing else, we wish to help the humans within the remnant."
"Yes, I agree," Aplistia sighs, nodding and bowing her head. "Four noble souls and a gaggle of vagabonds and ruffians, against the unimaginable terrors of non-existence... it's difficult to imagine a more daunting task. If not for our presence I would suspect their chances to be close to zero, in fact."
That's awful, Phobos whispers. Just because of other outsiders interfering...?
"A universe is a chronostable system," Aplistia declares sharply. "It defends and heals itself naturally from interference! Paradoxes are erased, inconsistencies are discarded, continuity and causality are neatly maintained! But a Seed isn't mature enough for such things. Very little separates it from just an especially big Outsider. It would be easy to tamper with its causality, or to even breach timelines by mistake, to say nothing about the possibility of outside foul play."
"But we can use that instability to our advantage," Aplistia continues proudly, grinning. "We can carry knowledge and memory backwards, and possibly change events that we have already witnessed, causing them never to happen in the first place. Through manipulation such as this, we can practically guarantee Rei's success!"
"That is a very brute force approach," Parias observes lowly.
"Well, perhaps we refrain from using it too bluntly until it proves necessary." Aplistia shrugs. "But I suspect it will be, eventually. However, we've strayed away from my original question; I for one will help the humans because I cherish them and their struggle, and I wish to cherish their world, too. Parias, you will help them - I suppose out of your sense of penance?"
"Yes," Parias agrees quietly. "I apologise, but until we understand better our crime and its punishment, we cannot join you within the bounds of existence. We must remain out here."
"Doubtful we will find any details about that here," Aplistia murmurs, stroking her chin. "In that case, we may have to make that mystery a secondary objective of ours, before we join in with Rei in the final timeline."
"That seems dangerous," Parias says defensively. "You would risk losing sight of the universe and being unable to return to it."
"Life is meaningless without risk," Aplistia says easily, as though not even thinking about it. "Well! That brings us to you, Phobos."
I agree with both of you, Phobos says, softly but firmly. I want them all to succeed and to be happy in the new world. And I want to take shelter with them, too. It would be nice to have a real existence.
"I couldn't say it better myself," Aplistia cheers. "Alright! Then I will propose the following course of action. We will follow Yomi's plan until the remnant destabilizes; at that point in time, we will reconvene, by joining together our materializations. It may be difficult for Parias and I to traverse existence normally without being noticed, but Phobos can move relatively easily; at worst, Phobos' materialization can join ours together fairly easily, I think, as long as all three of us can go unnoticed."
"I am sorry to put that burden on you, Phobos," Parias says softly.
I can do it, Phobos replies. I might be nervous about it, but I'm sure I can do it.
"Excellent!" Aplistia beams. "We'll determine what to do next after that point. Remember, for your own safety, please take care not to be noticed - especially you, Phobos!" Phobos attempts to nod; her spiders all kind of jump together, but it seems a suitable answer, and Aplistia seems pleased by it, so good enough. "I think I will continue to use electronic manifestations as much as I can," she continues, folding her arms again. "It will be somewhat easier to monitor things that way, and easier to conceal my existence, as well. So, Phobos, a good computer would be ideal for me!"
"We prefer to manifest at the edge of things," Parias adds. "But if the edge of that thing is too large, we will be very noticeable... a hidden place with a clear boundary or threshold would be safest for us."
Okay! Phobos thinks she already knows where to go. I'm going to go now, then! I'll see you both very soon!
"Godspeed!" Aplistia cheers. Phobos cannot see, but she thinks Parias might be smiling, just a little bit. "Admit it!" Aplistia adds, grinning to the windows. "This is fun!"
"A little," Parias agrees. "Go on, Phobos. Be safe."
I will!
Phobos thinks again of the boundary. She is crawling along its edges in full force. She thinks again of the weakness where she entered before, the doors that the other outsider was trying to force open. They're not there anymore, but she recognizes the opening space, and imagines that there must be some hole into it.
She is now crawling through an unknowable number of tiny caves, each no bigger than a very small mole. They twist and turn but generally move in the same direction. But Phobos is not satisfied. She imagines that they are pipes. Rock turns to copper; she scurries through them ever faster now that they are uniform and evenly sized. Her feet are small and she makes no sounds as she advances. She knows where she is.
There is a tear in one of the pipes. Cautiously, she focuses her perception through it. She sees the main access catwalk. She sees the elevator doors, behind which the car will never return. And opposite it, she sees the door into Gwen's office.
She steels herself. Here goes. She imagines the space beneath that door, and slips inside. But Gwen is not there. Gwen is busy. Everyone is busy. The world is ending.
